Jules, like Schafer, is trans, a fact that the show underlines only to explore Jules’s compulsion for risky sex with strangers and her dependency on being desired. More loaded, and more intoxicating, is Rue’s friendship with Jules (Hunter Schafer), whom she meets at a party after Jules has publicly slashed her own arm with a knife. She makes even the show’s most outrageous moments, like Rue taking a hit of fentanyl off the knife of a cartoonish drug dealer with face tattoos, land.Įuphoria also finds its heart in Rue’s relationships with others, like her guilty bond with her younger sister, Gia (Storm Reid), who discovered Rue when she was overdosing and idolizes her. In the first episode, as she describes in the voice-over the first time she got high enough to quiet everything inside her, the camera stays on Zendaya’s face the whole while as her features relax and contort. Shuffling through the school corridors in skater shorts with a hoodie pulled over her head, Rue’s a truculent waif with impossible charm. What defines Zendaya’s performance is her ability to quickly shift modes, communicating both Rue’s cynical, hardened edges-in one scene, she gives an old-fashioned slide tutorial on the art of the dick pic-and her vulnerability. In a montage of lightning-fast cuts, Euphoria details the realities Rue grew up with: the aftermath of 9/11 obscene DMs from strangers active-shooter trainings at school ubiquitous, hard-core, violent pornography. Her addiction, she explains, began with a panoply of different diagnoses including ADHD and OCD, and with medication that left her feeling numb even as it failed to alleviate her semipermanent state of panic. Rue narrates the show, starting with her traumatic birth (forced through “the cruel cervix of my mother, Leslie”), and then documenting the summer she first gets out of rehab.
The protagonist in Euphoria is Rue, a 17-year-old addict played spectacularly by the former Disney Channel star Zendaya-a casting decision that practically ensures the show’s audience will skew younger than the typical HBO viewer. But it’s also the kind of drama so relentlessly provocative-images of erect penises crop up with the persistence and frequency of weeds in springtime-that it prompts a question: Who is this supposed to be for? In its best moments, it’s a thoughtful, openhearted story about teenagers trying to navigate life as the first fully-online generation, test subjects in an unfettered landscape of dick pics, adult predators, and synthetic hallucinogens. Euphoria, too, is not so much an all-encompassing portrait of a generation than a work based on the writer Sam Levinson’s specific experiences of addiction, anxiety, and recovery. Kids was mired in the predilections and obsessions of Korine and the director/photographer Larry Clark.
Euphoria rue heroin full#
Less Than Zero, it transpired, was less an accurate picture of Gen X dysfunction than it was a book inspired by Ellis himself, with his Bennington College mystique, his “ suitcase full of drugs,” and his father’s $40 million property commissions. Each work sparked its own kind of moral panic, accompanied by a clamor of voices urging audiences to heed the alarming truth of How Young People Live Now. The 2000s had Skins, Jamie Brittain’s entertainingly disaffected British import about pill-popping, bed-hopping high schoolers. The ’90s had Kids, Harmony Korine’s bleakly disaffected portrayal of teenage skater kids sharing drugs and HIV. The 1980s had Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, a coolly disaffected portrait of life in Los Angeles that featured heroin, rape, snuff films, and a 12-year-old sex slave.
If every generation gets the brittle, nihilist, painfully “real,” sexually joyless cultural rendering it deserves, then the good news for Generation Z is that Euphoria shows signs of progress.
0 kommentar(er)
