Junk Drawer - Euphoria S2E1: It's a new year, playboy.
This week: Euphoria's back in session.
Euphoria Season 2 Episode 1: "Trying to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door"
Spoilers ahead for all aired episodes of Euphoria, as well as all series of Twin Peaks (some of which is like 30 years old so to call them spoilers is... generous.)
HBO Max’s Euphoria, a cobbled-together remake of an Israeli teen show interpolated with a fictionalized version of showrunner Sam Levinson’s own struggles with addiction, set in a southern California high school populated by mid-twenties influencers cosplaying as teens, came back on January 9th. This follows a nearly three-year hiatus only punctuated by two specials, aired in late 2020 and early 2021, respectively. In the years since we've visited these characters, Euphoria has become an aesthetic unto itself, and star Zendaya has risen to astronomical heights, receiving her first Emmy—and becoming the youngest to do so—for her portrayal of Rue.
In the cold open, voiced over as usual by Rue, we’re primed for a chaotic episode that begins to establish a moral code around violence within the show’s universe.
Angus Cloud’s Fezco, the freckle-faced white boy of 2019, made a play for 2021’s title in this episode by teaching the show’s Big Bad a lesson Fez learned early on from his grandma: sometimes violence is the answer. The Big Bad in question, Jacob Elordi’s Nate, has had an ass-kicking coming since Euphoria’s very first episode, so to witness its payoff in the first episode of the second season was both gratifying and worrying. If Nate’s getting what’s coming to him so soon, that means we’re stuck with the aftermath of his ass-kicking—and inevitably, his retribution.
As Joanna Robinson and Nora Princiotti at The Ringer observed in their recap of the episode, Nate relishes in chaos and violence, and only ever one-ups those who attempt to penalize him. But the moment of watching Nate get beat delivers a moment of shock and awe earned enough to set the season off. In processing this violence and chaos—hardly a new development within Euphoria’s universe, but often instead directed at its marginalized characters, especially its women—I was reminded of another show set in high school around a tragic heroine with an ancillary crime subplot: Twin Peaks.
Euphoria brings forth the legacy of Twin Peaks in putting the scale and emotional heft of teenage pathos on the grand philosophical scale of human right and wrong. This was most obviously teased during the standalone episodes with Rue and Jules from last winter, where Jules struggles with her gender identity outside of the male gaze, while Rue's doubt in the existence of a higher power conflicts with the religion at the core of recovery programs like Narcotics Anonymous and ultimately pushes her into her relapse.
Again like Twin Peaks, whose broader narrative could be interpreted as how sexual violence creates a trauma so severe within communities it can rupture all reason and humanity, Euphoria is preoccupied with issues of sexual violence and how easily it becomes the primary currency for young people. Twin Peaks visually expresses this through surrealism, which its characters experience as a certain unnamable undercurrent associated with the town itself, cast as good and evil; in Euphoria, the show's commitment to surrealism plays out partially through Rue as an unreliable narrator, partially through its commitment to depicting teenagers with actors who look like adults, and elsewhere through its visual language of violence.
Nate, along with his father, is an active arbiter in the show's presentation of violence; in this episode alone, Nate acts out his need to externalize harm at Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and McKay (Algee Smith), not to mention his side-swipes at Fez left over from their previous season beef. Nate is an allegorical figure of supreme whiteness, maleness, and evilness, reminiscent of the villains of Twin Peaks: The Return, disturbingly murderous men gleefully terrorizing the women, youth, elderly, and marginalized of the show’s bucolic Pacific Northwest setting.
In her 2021 book On Violence and On Violence Against Women, philosopher Jacqueline Rose writes of the “power of fiction to denaturalize and surprise about violence and who is entitled to use it.” I’d argue this is why seeing Nate get gorily beaten by Fezco and bizarrely carried off screen by the same people he was just terrorizing is so gratifying. It seemed like a nod to both a Brechtian absurdity in the confusion dominating the scene and its setting, and Bakhtin's theater of the grotesque, as Nate's face bloodies and bruises under Fez's relentless fists. It's an necessary repositioning of who is capable of receiving violence. We watched the teenage avatars in the first season of Euphoria suffer through sex work exploitation, a sloppily-handled abortion storyline, blackmail, and physical abuse, and Nate touches in nearly all of these tendrils of violence. The show’s moral universe allows us to see Nate beaten back as a necessary counter to the threat Nate serves to the show as a whole.
The primacy of Fez, and consequently Nate, in this first episode makes it easy to forget that Rue and her relationship with Jules will continue to be the show’s heart, but there are hints throughout the episode that indicate which way the season’s arc may lead. Fezco and Lexi (Maude Apatow) casually discuss morality and faith on the couch before Fez begins ass-kicking, with Lexi troubling Fez’s inherited understanding of his own responsibility in an addict’s death, as the addict's source. Lexi and Fez’s dialogue situates us in the scale of the questions that the season will grapple with.
I diverge in thinking from The Ringer’s Robinson and Princiotti, who firstly express concern that the writers want viewers to empathize with Nate, and secondly that we should fear what new depths Rue’s addiction—and likability—may take. I do not think Nate is meant to be empathetic, though I do think the show has taken pains to demonstrate him as human. I see Nate as similar to Twin Peaks’s BOB, a stand-in for all human evil, a menacing source of chaos. Questions circling social media following the episode wondered if Nate’s antagonizing of McKay was meant to be queer-coded. I kind of think it doesn’t matter. His point was to intimidate and threaten McKay and Cassie. (A quick thread from Nylah Burton on this.)
The constant reaching to consider Nate in terms of whether or not we can feel for him is a fundamental misunderstanding of the character’s role. In our current media environment where corporations are obsessed with all media serving as bizarre puppetry, where we’re supposed to see ourselves in all characters, and therefore no one is truly bad, it’s tempting to want Nate to be a complicated character.
But let’s consider what Jacob Elordi has said about Nate. In an interview with W Magazine earlier this year, Elordi described Nate as “an emotional terrorist, a narcissist, a sociopath, a freak.” For everyone hoping for a more complicated bad boy, I’ll toss out another adage: when someone shows you who they are, believe them! Perhaps I’ll be wrong about this. But I was a high schooler, and I knew high school boys who ticked all those boxes, who sexually harassed or assaulted myself and my classmates, who prioritized feeling power over others over all things. Like it or not, there are men in the world who seek to terrorize those around them. Those men start as boys.
To the point about Rue’s addiction causing pain and suffering across her universe, it’s simply unacceptable to consider one’s value based on their addiction. We can criticize Rue’s intense myopia on herself, her failures and disappointments—she, too, is human. But in a story with Nate, Rue is no villain. There's a yawning gap between heroes and villains, where most of us fit in, and that's where we can find Rue. She’s only flawed, even if dangerously so.
This episode has no problem showing Rue’s failings, as she risks her life no less than twice in its hour run time—once during Fez’s drug meeting during the show’s first third, and again by her own hand (and the needle it held). If anything, I hope the show means to trouble our understanding of how good any of us can really be in the face of our systems-level demons, and our inherent worthiness regardless. As Zendaya has suggested to the press, Rue is meant to serve as Levinson's stand-in, and we know how his story ended up, so I'm not so sure that Rue is in for an unhappy ending.
It's just everything we have to sit through to get there that's the problem. Here's hoping for fewer penises.
Loose ends
If you're looking for a linear write-up of the show, Kyndall Cunningham is recapping it weekly over at The Daily Beast! This line made me choke: "Cassie is lying down in a tub that fortunately is half a mile away from the toilet in this giant bathroom."
There is a whole essay to be written about the sexualization of Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie. Sweeney cracked a good-natured joke on her Instagram Story about the whole thing, but it raises for the millionth time the question of why two thirty-something men (one of whom is Drake) are at the helm of this show that wants to focus on young women. My last issue of Junk Drawer was actually about teen shows and sex, and it touched on my criticisms of Euphoria; I'm sure future essays will return to this.
Others have said it first and better, but Maddy being too much of a narcissist to catch Cassie in the bathroom was iconic.
I saw a sea of complaints about the music choices. I certainly went to parties in the early-mid-2010s where “Blow The Whistle” was being played, to recall an iconic season 1 scene of Rue. Do you guys not remember being teenagers?? I spent years thinking that anything that was from an older era was automatically ten times better. Hipsterism hasn’t left us yet, guys. (My near-16-year-old sister still thinks they discovered Arctic Monkeys.)
In my research for this piece, I reread this Hollywood Reporter story on Euphoria's ~scandalousness~ with this perfect contribution from an HBO exec who later ate their words:
Adds HBO programming president Casey Bloys: “We’re not trying to put out a Gossip Girl.“
Final bits and bobs
It looks like I'm going to be doing a weekly response to Euphoria. I'll be doing this for as long as it feels entertaining and enjoyable! If you're an editor interested in publishing this on your website, and paying me for that, there are lots of ways to get in touch with me!
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