EUPHORIA is a conservative show, telling us parents should stay together and take care of their children, opioid drugs are bad, being an involved parent is good, parents who don’t watch out for their children are doing their children a disservice, dads are a positive influence. Talking out your feelings is good, repressing them is bad. Self-obsessed narcissism is everywhere, to the point no one bothers fighting it (bad). Too much TV and too little parenting creates problems, which is a funny message from a TV show. Women need to be protected from men, an idea nineteenth century Christians would have strongly endorsed.
Doing sex work is bad or at a minimum undesirable, better to work in the real economy. Parents should work hard at their jobs so their kids don’t have to do sex work or sell drugs. Sexting is bad, as is pr0n. Geting off your phone is good. The teens have lots and lots of feelings, but they are unable to form proper intimate relationships with each other, mirroring in this their parents’s inability to form intimate relationships with them. The drama revolves around taking or not taking drugs, and being able to form or not form successful relationships with another human being. That’s it. The most radical act possible for any character on this show isn’t MDMA or sex, it’s a committed relationship, and most of what they do instead of committed relationships is what Gen Z internet writers call “cope.” Radicalism today is the conservatism of yesterday. Drugs and sex are easy, the substitutes for substance. Don’t trust most of what’s written about this show, because the writing is mostly garbage. Critics denounced THE JOKER for its conservative subtext (just text?), few seem to have done the same with EUPHORIA.
The show is hugely high style, colors! camera work! look at us, we fancy. Style > substance, we believe in narrow field of view, lots of bokeh, it’s very moody. The actors and acting are good, the casting is good. But! OMG! The kids, they are doing the sex! And the drugs! Can you believe it??? Neither can I, except that in every generation there is worry about the youth and their erotic ways, not least in the way they offer erotic temptations to those somewhat older than them. How bad they are, for being tempting. Very, very bad, Very, very naughty. Wicked, naughty, evil. Now, the youth can record themselves doing the sex in HD, how scary, OMG. Were the old days better? EUPHORIA invites that kind of reading… in the old days, when mom and dad stayed together and the HD, self-filmed sex wasn’t feasible, let alone sharing the self-filmed sex with others. Pot + LSD > heroin + phenyl-2-propanone (P2P) meth. In mom & dad’s days, the obesity epidemic hadn’t happened yet, either.
If mom and dad stayed together, the kids wouldn’t be so hyper- and pansexual. If dad were present or functional, the women wouldn’t be performing cope through sex, and the young men would be more restrained by positive masculine role models at home. The gender divide in EUPHORIA is stark, the males become predatory and the females act out victimization, because of the lack of positive male figures, AKA “dad.” I could read this in thesis form in THE WALL STREET JORNAL editorial page.
I don’t care about high school football and football is boring… the show can sometimes be boring, however pretty, but then there are cuts, jumps in time, etc. Every time football stuff appears, I want to quit watching. Taken as a whole I enjoyed it while also feeling that it’s not for me.
The parties are more fun and better lit than parties I went to, until I was an adult. Consensual non-monogamy and emotional intelligence would solve some of the characters’s problems in EUPHORIA.
Every time the super hot girl, her name is I think Cassie in the show, appears, EUPHORIA gets more interesting… hot girls are more exciting, sorry, and HBO knows this too (sorry, sorry, it’s true, I know you don’t want it to be). She doesn’t seem built to be monogamous. In episode seven the voiceover says, “By the time she was out of college she figured 99% of the population would have leaked nudes anyway,” echoing a theory you might’ve heard around here. People who don’t have real problems, will manufacture them. People love drama. Everyone reads PARADISE LOST, no one reads PARADISE REGAINED (“snooze fest,” as one contemporary critic called it).
Articles about how the teens aren’t dating or having sex, aren’t getting their drivers licenses, and are less mature than they used to be, keep appearing in the media, and I don’t know what to make of them, or if they’re accurate… in EUPHORIA, they’re taking lots of risks, having lots of sex. Testosterone rates are supposedly dropping, and more people are fat and lethargic than ever, but the show is contrary to all those trends / supposed trends.
I think I like the movie TRAFFIC better, it being more about systems, but, I mean, if you want a broody show about the teens and the sex, EUPHORIA will do, I guess. REQUIEM FOR A DREAM covers “opioids are bad.” KIDS by Larry Clark covers “OMG, the kids and their sex.” Chad Kultgen’s books from the ’00s, like THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE and especially MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN, are EUPHORIA in text form, but no one reads any more so they don’t count. Kultgen can also be more explicit because he’s working in text, and text is like what happens in the dark, it doesn’t count. Ignore EUPHORIA’s shock value, pay attention to its subliminal message, “The nuclear family is good.” In THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and ZOOLANDER, its sequel, the subliminal message is “kill.” In EUPHORIA, remember, “Nuclear family == good. Commit. Commit to your partner. Do it for yourself, do it for the kids.”
Sultry but dimly lit, because in the dark it doesn’t count. Get it? Like one youth chronicler said, of my peers, “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous / Here we are now, entertain us.” Back then the kids weren’t all right either. 