In between the high drama and extreme situations that these often-numbed-out kids found their way into—rough sex, vicious girl fights, armed drug deals, operatically hellish withdrawals—there were interludes of quiet and introspection. And even though “Euphoria” was never a show that dealt with characters’ psychology that deeply or consistently, it had some moments of real feeling. (Rue’s struggle with addiction and the pain it causes her family made for some of the first two seasons’ most moving scenes, perhaps thanks to Levinson’s own experience as a teen drug addict who has managed to achieve sobriety.) Visually, too, “Euphoria” had something of the lava lamp about it, all shadows and sparkle and swirling, glinting lights. The show’s suburban teen environment was less “The O.C.” and more “Carrie”—a space of trippy, oozing, horror-fantasy—and the much-talked-about makeup looks of its girl protagonists added to this impression. Dripping glitter, shimmering adhesive crystals, dramatic slashes of eyeliner and smudges of eyeshadow—there was a playful, shifting experimentalism here, to signal the young characters’ changeability and ingenuity. (When I interviewed the show’s head makeup artist, Doniella Davy, back in 2019, she told me that the looks she devised for the show were about “unbridled self-expression.”)
Season 3 transports us five years after the events of the second season, to a new stage in our protagonists’ lives. Rue and the gang are now adults in their early twenties, and, as she deadpans at the top of the first episode, “A lot of people ask what I’ve been up to since high school. Honestly? Nothing good.” Indeed. So-called real life has now begun, the characters have hardened with it, and the series, too, feels as if it’s clicked into its final, hardened form: a thrilling, disturbing horror show, delivered with a sneer and a smile, and portraying a world where money is the only thing worth caring about.
Rue has been unable to repay the extraordinarily large sum of money that she owes the suburban drug boss Laurie (Martha Kelly), and so she begins working for her as a mule, travelling down to Mexico, where she swallows gumball-size balloons of fentanyl, helped down the gullet with a hefty squeeze of K-Y Jelly, and shat out into a sieve once back in Cali. Cassie and Nate, meanwhile, are engaged to be married, living in what Rue describes as a “right-wing suburban bubble.” Like Rue, Nate is in debt, owing money to shady figures who have sunk funds into the construction business he took over from his pervy father, Cal. (Eric Dane, who, in another tragic loss, recently died of A.L.S.) Now, he’s focussed on the development of Sun Settlers, “the premier end-of-life transition facility in California.” (It’s a clutch financial opportunity, Nate explains to a prospective investor, because “a boomer dies every fifteen seconds.”) Cassie is trying to become social-media famous, suggestively flashing her all-American assets online in a variety of fetishy costumes (a puppy dog, a pacifier-sucking baby). Her aim is to make enough money to afford the fifty-thousand-dollar wedding floral arrangements that Nate is reluctant to cough up the dough for. (When pressed to sign off on Cassie’s racy new career, Nate reluctantly agrees, making her promise that she won’t show “those”—her boobs—and her “pretty face at the same time,” a vow she almost immediately breaks.)
Jules, meanwhile, has become a sugar baby, dropping out of art school to live a life of brittle luxury in a downtown L.A. penthouse, paid for by a wealthy plastic surgeon, who is enamored of her “poreless” skin—the result, he presumes, of her transitioning before 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 company who sees opportunities in the growing market of OnlyFans starlets. “We can imply nudity,” she reassures one model 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 other words, can be sold—or can sell oneself—for parts. The body is not a source of strength or pleasure or play but a site from which to grab as much power as one can and hold on to it for dear life. (To use the characters’ beauty looks as an indicator again, the overdefined porn-star lips and power-bitch winged eyeliner the characters wear in the most recent episodes are hardly about self-expression, but about something else entirely: As Doniella Davy told Harper’s Bazaar earlier this month, “The motives for the character’s use of makeup in season three are to largely make money.”)
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