I’m also grateful for the incentive to watch this, and have really enjoyed binge-reading the comments in this thread. I’ve been drawn towards a lot of the same talking-points as others here, and have had similarly mixed reactions to the show. Overall, though, I liked it a lot, and can imagine I would get more out of it on a second viewing.
The cultural reference-point I couldn’t stop thinking about during this was Michaela Coel’s
I May Destroy You (2020), which I strongly recommend to anyone who likes
Euphoria. It’s very different in some obvious ways, and these are clues to why I happened to prefer it: it’s more analytical than emotive, trying to make you think more than it makes you feel, which is perhaps a symptom of the characters being 20-somethings rather than 17-year-olds; as a piece of film-making, it’s less flamboyant and more controlled; and it’s a lot funnier, because Coel has an amazing gift for comedy. None of these are meant as criticisms of
Euphoria, by the way – they’re just a measure of the fact that the two shows are doing different things.
They also have a lot in common. When I first saw
I May Destroy You, it felt like discovering something I didn’t know I’d been looking for. Coel is ferociously committed to the task of empathising with
all her characters: she insisted that each actor see the story from their character’s point of view, and clearly wrote the script with this in mind. Given the extreme subject-matter she’s dealing with (primarily rape, but also a range of other issues) the results are genuinely uncomfortable and provocative, and not in a South-Park-ish ‘trying to offend everyone’ kind of a way, but because the show is really attempting to explore multiple perspectives through the medium of drama.
One of the reasons this works so well is that Coel’s intelligence and thoughtfulness (i.e. she’s a genius), and her sensitivity about the issues she explores (worth noting that she dedicated her Bafta award to the show’s intimacy coordinator), mean we are in ‘safe hands’ and can therefore delve into truly unsafe territory. Senseabove expressed it well in
another thread:
senseabove wrote:[The show is] explicitly aware of the edges of contemporary "right" and "wrong," earnestly exploring how they dictate each other, and uncommonly willing to let characters exist entirely between them.
There are even moments when you worry about what the show is saying, and whether you agree with it, and there’s no easy way out of this anxiety because the show isn’t ‘telling’ you anything. Telling the audience what to think or how to feel isn’t necessarily a bad or reductive thing: it’s a necessary part of how most fiction works, and it’s a great pleasure to see it done well. But one of the most impressive things fiction can do is to leave things open, and give the audience the responsibility of figuring them out (or not), while still weaving a compelling and effective narrative.
This is especially impressive when the narrative in question is the kind we get in
I May Destroy You or
Euphoria (or another show the latter explicitly refers to,
The Wire) – that is, one that uses a specific lens as a way of talking about ‘everything’, attempting to encompass more aspects of the human condition than a limited TV series can comfortably hold, to the point where you feel like no stone is being left unturned. If that means sacrificing some coherence and clarity, so much the better.
So anyway, this commitment to empathy and copiousness (qualities that go hand in hand) is what I really liked about
Euphoria, and gave me something like that feeling of ‘thank god someone made a show like this’. The recent conversation about Nate is relevant here: horrifying as he is, I absolutely found myself empathising with him, primarily I think because of the show’s attention to detail. It is over-the-top and the cinematic pyrotechnics are overwhelming at times, but it mostly worked for me because when the camera does settle down and we get a good look at these people’s faces, we see amazingly talented actors giving totally authentic, detailed, nuanced performances.
Spoilers for the whole of Season 1:
When Nate thrashes around on the floor in episode 8, this feels completely earned and convincing, and not in the least bit over-the-top, because we’ve spent the whole series watching Nate do this. It’s there in his eyes and his movements and the angles from which he’s filmed, and you can see all this going on even when he’s at his most cartoonishly evil (e.g. the scenes with Tyler).
To give another example: For the first few episodes, I found Jules frustratingly evasive, and wondered why the show wasn’t letting us get to know her better. Then she has her date with ‘Tyler’, and everything comes into focus – this was the sequence where I really felt the show ‘click’ for me.
You get some of the most beautiful images in the series when Jules is cycling through the orange groves, and then when she arrives in the park, and you feel all the heightened romance and excitement and anticipation she’s feeling. Then that scene between her and Nate is just a simply, effectively staged confrontation. There’s a moment when Nate uses his thumb to wipe away Jules’s tears, and it made me flinch and shudder. I’d been so well trained, by this point, to understand how Nate’s tenderness and sadism are mingled together, that I was watching his every gesture and movement like a hawk, waiting for him to veer back into outright abuse. And the emotional violence of what Nate then does to Jules is the pay-off to this.
The show has been unusually patient in setting both these characters up, and now we feel all those accumulated details weighing on this one moment, so we understand what Nate is doing and what it means to Jules. Staging the scene by the water, making us wonder whether Jules will step back (or be pushed) into it, is a really subtle way of adding just a shade more tension. The impact of seeing Jules left alone in that beautifully lit park, crouching down to process what has happened, is incredible, and again is complemented (and not overwhelmed) by the extravagant film-making.
The scene that follows, where Jules climbs into bed with Rue, was also very moving, although here I felt like the ‘orbiting around the bed’ effect was maybe a bit much. I’d say the same about parts of the carnival sequence, and Halloween party, where the show tries too hard to create a tour-de-force montage tying the different threads together. At the carnival, for instance, it felt a little artificial how we saw everyone making similarly questionable judgments or decisions at the same time, and the music seemed to over-sell the idea of ‘rising tension’ as things came to a head. I guess I found this a bit hackneyed, and a slight betrayal of what I like about the show: the fact, referred to earlier in this thread, that the characters are allowed to be individuals rather than cogs in an intricately constructed machine, and have the space to do unpredictable things. In a sequence like that (or at least some of it) the performances had less space to breathe, and I wished Levinson had taken a simpler, less heavily-scored approach.
Also, just to add to the praise for Zendaya in this thread: moments like her meltdown at Fezco’s door, or the reaction shots during her mother’s speech at the end, are also great examples of what I was talking about above. Take the moment in the church, when her mother gets to the end of her speech, and we see Rue’s left eyelid flicker – the kind of flicker you get when you’re sleep-deprived, but that could also mean a number of other things. I don’t know how an actor can fake something like that without it seeming fake, but it works here. And again, it means so much because it has so many details weighing on it, especially in that particular context. It’s a brilliant choice to show Rue’s mother at her most loving and affectionate (in the speech) and at her ugliest (in the flashback confrontation), and to hold both these moments back until the end of the season, and then just make us watch Rue as she sits there experiencing both moments simultaneously. Also a perfect moment to reveal why she wears that hoodie, making this revelation a rich and meaningful one rather than corny and trite (as it could easily have been).
Finally, I was as fascinated by the narration as Mr S., and it certainly plays into the show’s complex attitude towards empathy and communication. Not only does Rue provide information she has no way of knowing, she also seems to be commenting on the narrative in retrospect, as though from an older, wiser perspective that already knows everything that happened after this.
Perhaps I’m seeing this through my own biased lens, but I wondered if this had something to do with the (relatively underplayed) suggestion that Rue is a little bit neuro-diverse? Although her mother is obviously right that Rue is likable and makes friends easily, this also seems to gloss over the fact that Rue struggles to form deep relationships, or especially to maintain them. A lot of the time she seems worryingly detached from the people and events around her, which we’re clued into from the start by the fact that so many people are surprised she’s still alive (and don’t seem to care very much). And yet, in another sense, Rue seems suited to the role of omniscient narrator, because she has a capacity for observation and empathy – for noticing and understanding certain things, not just in ceiling tiles but also in people – and for reflecting critically on the potentially ‘unreliable’ nature of her own perspective. I don't have OCD or any of the other conditions Rue is said to be diagnosed with, so perhaps this is a mis-reading: but (without falling into the ‘neurodiverse superpower’ cliché) I guess a lot of the above chimes with my own experience of ASD, which added another layer of pathos to Rue’s narration.
