In between the excessive drama and excessive conditions that these often-numbed-out youngsters discovered their manner into—tough intercourse, vicious woman fights, armed drug offers, operatically hellish withdrawals—there have been interludes of quiet and introspection. And regardless that “Euphoria” was by no means a present that handled characters’ psychology that deeply or persistently, it had some moments of actual feeling. (Rue’s wrestle with dependancy and the ache it causes her household made for a number of the first two seasons’ most transferring scenes, maybe due to Levinson’s personal expertise as a teen drug addict who has managed to attain sobriety.) Visually, too, “Euphoria” had one thing of the lava lamp about it, all shadows and sparkle and swirling, glinting lights. The present’s suburban teen setting was much less “The O.C.” and extra “Carrie”—an area of trippy, oozing, horror-fantasy—and the much-talked-about make-up appears to be like of its woman protagonists added to this impression. Dripping glitter, shimmering adhesive crystals, dramatic slashes of eyeliner and smudges of eyeshadow—there was a playful, shifting experimentalism right here, to sign the younger characters’ changeability and ingenuity. (When I interviewed the present’s head make-up artist, Doniella Davy, again in 2019, she advised me that the appears to be like she devised for the present have been about “unbridled self-expression.”)
Season 3 transports us 5 years after the occasions of the second season, to a brand new stage in our protagonists’ lives. Rue and the gang are actually adults of their early twenties, and, as she deadpans on the prime of the primary episode, “A lot of people ask what I’ve been up to since high school. Honestly? Nothing good.” Indeed. So-called actual life has now begun, the characters have hardened with it, and the collection, too, feels as if it’s clicked into its last, hardened kind: an exhilarating, disturbing horror present, delivered with a sneer and a smile, and portraying a world the place cash is the one factor value caring about.
Rue has been unable to repay the terribly giant sum of cash that she owes the suburban drug boss Laurie (Martha Kelly), and so she begins working for her as a mule, travelling right down to Mexico, the place she swallows gumball-size balloons of fentanyl, helped down the gullet with a hefty squeeze of Okay-Y Jelly, and shat out right into a sieve as soon as again in Cali. Cassie and Nate, in the meantime, are engaged to be married, dwelling in what Rue describes as a “right-wing suburban bubble.” Like Rue, Nate is in debt, owing cash to shady figures who’ve sunk funds into the development enterprise he took over from his pervy father, Cal. (Eric Dane, who, in one other tragic loss, lately died of A.L.S.) Now, he’s focussed on the event of Sun Settlers, “the premier end-of-life transition facility in California.” (It’s a clutch monetary alternative, Nate explains to a potential investor, as a result of “a boomer dies every fifteen seconds.”) Cassie is attempting to turn into social-media well-known, suggestively flashing her all-American belongings on-line in a wide range of fetishy costumes (a pet canine, a pacifier-sucking child). Her goal is to make sufficient cash to afford the fifty-thousand-dollar wedding ceremony floral preparations that Nate is reluctant to cough up the dough for. (When pressed to log off on Cassie’s racy new profession, Nate reluctantly agrees, making her promise that she received’t present “those”—her boobs—and her “pretty face at the same time,” a vow she nearly instantly breaks.)
Jules, in the meantime, has turn into a sugar child, dropping out of artwork college to reside a lifetime of brittle luxurious in a downtown L.A. penthouse, paid for by a rich plastic surgeon, who’s enamored of her “poreless” pores and skin—the outcome, he presumes, of her transitioning earlier than puberty—and who tells her that her breasts are “near-perfect.” (When she questions the hedge, he clarifies that “anything can be improved.”) And Maddy is an assistant at a talent-management firm who sees alternatives within the rising market of OnlyFans starlets. “We can imply nudity,” she reassures one mannequin who’s reluctant to go full porn. “Sideboob, underboob, camel toe, a little ass cheek, feet. . . . We’ll build it up, a toe at a time.”
Everyone, in different phrases, may be offered—or can promote oneself—for elements. The physique is just not a supply of energy or pleasure or play however a website from which to seize as a lot energy as one can and maintain on to it for pricey life. (To use the characters’ magnificence appears to be like as an indicator once more, the overdefined porn-star lips and power-bitch winged eyeliner the characters put on in the newest episodes are hardly about self-expression, however about one thing else fully: As Doniella Davy advised Harper’s Bazaar earlier this month, “The motives for the character’s use of makeup in season three are to largely make money.”)
