**Euphoria spoilers abound! You’ve been warned!**
When I tell folks that I absolutely love Euphoria, I get one of two responses. The first is, I know, right?! The second is perhaps the one I get most, and that I also understand the best: How can you watch it, isn’t it so intense?
Well, I love emotionally intense dramas, even when they are problematic. But it’s hard to articulate why this show is so appealing despite its particular intensity, and why it all works so well (even when the writing falls flat).
So why is Euphoria intense and anxiety-producing? And why do I, an already anxious and panicked person, enjoy it so much?
To answer that, we have to figure out what this show is even really about. It could be argued that Euphoria is a show about grief, or about drugs, or about Gen Z, but it’s not that simple. Despite my own profound misgivings about the writing this second season (which seemed to have been forgotten in Sam Levinson’s quest to bring back discontinued analog film while also making every single visual painstakingly precious), I think that there’s still plenty to say about it, specifically about Rue’s own anxiety and how it manifests throughout the show.
Because Euphoria is positively steeped in anxiety and panic. And for those who can’t take that kind of intensity, well…that’s kind of the whole point.
So where do I start? The wildly compelling visual style? The laughable implausibility of actual teenage behavior paired with the earnest and sincere explanations of what it’s like to be young today? The wildly inconsistent parenting? Nate’s psychopathy? Cal drunkenly peeing in a circle in his front hall to mark his territory? Zendaya’s award-worthy acting? My personal Super Bowl, Cassie vs Maddie (I’m obviously Team Maddie)? My eternal love for the scene where Fezco and Lexi sing “Stand by Me?”
I could start at the very beginning. The pilot episode begins with Rue’s birth three days after 9/11 and the viewer watches her parents holding their newborn infant while the towers crash over and over again on a TV in their hospital room. That’s a rather nerve-wracking moment in American history to start with, no?
Or we could dive into the fact that Rue also suffers from panic attacks at an early age, depicted as overwhelming feelings of dread and a looming sense of death even as little kid. She finds herself having fits where she’s unable to breathe and her parents try to help her but they struggle to find a way to help her manage these big emotions. The camera becomes unfocused, the visuals around her clouded up. It’s painful to watch, but relatable, especially for those of us who’ve also struggled with panic attacks for as long as we can remember.
Though Rue’s father’s death would amplify her mental health struggles, her spiral into drugs as a teen is not a simple thing to explain aside from a desire to escape the persistent worries that plague her, on top of immense, untapped grief.
She is abundantly clear from the jump that she’s not a reliable narrator. She has no intentions of being honest with herself or anyone else and if you watch the show, you have to be willing to go along with her skewed understanding of herself and others. The big colors and glittery montages juxtaposed with dark, terrifying horror are just a part of that storytelling. If the world has always been on the brink of ending for as long as she’s been alive (think back to being born three days after 9/11), then what is the point of staying sober and living in fear?
What I enjoy most about protagonist Rue as a character (besides Zendaya being intensely fun to watch in any and every role) is that we get to see ecstasy writ large in addition to her anxiety so that we feel the heady pull and weight of both, especially as it related to drugs.
The intense visuals, sound, acting, make-up—all of it reminds of it Jia Tolentino’s writing on drug-induced euphoria and religion in her essay “Ecstasy.” She describes a dreamy night when she drank lean as a teenager, how beautiful and slowed down the world became:
“It was hot out the first time I tasted lean, on a night when everyone was home from school. I drank it with ice, booze, and Sprite, from a big Styrofoam cup. Soon afterward, I was in my friend’s pool, wading through hip-high water. The song “Overnight Celebrity” was playing, and it sounded like it would never end—like it had been slowed to Sunday’s chopped-and-screwed tempo, thick enough to carry me. The water felt like I could hold it. The sky was enormous and velvet. I looked up and saw the stars blanketed by the glow of pollution, and I felt as blessed as I ever did when I was a child.” - Jia Tolentino
It’s not hard to imagine Jia’s scene, in which she blissfully ignores the hold of her family’s oppressive religious views, as parallel to Rue’s when she’s at a house party high on pills. The potency of drugs are a balm for Jia, who grew up in attending a church with extreme views. Rue does the same, popping pills as a balm for her anxiety and grief, only we get to inhabit her high for ourselves in all of its ugly glory.
If we want to understand the fear of getting clean, we have to understand the sublime pull of getting high. A show all about a young person addicted to drugs and the terrifying consequences of her actions would have no pull, no realistic messiness for us to cling to. It would just feel like reading Go Ask Alice but for the TikTok generation.
It’d be much harder to relate to Rue without seeing the dreamy alternate reality infrastructure she’s made for herself. Who among us hasn’t created a daydream at some point to help get us through the shittiest times?
For the most part, we only see what Rue wants us to see—the trippy, surreal, and beautiful pleasures of being young and high, forgetting her worries and fears and sadnesses for fleeting moments. She frolics around at a carnival, at house parties, at winter formal dressed in a suit, while traversing California streets and alleys during a saturated, ethereal twilit bike ride.
Rue’s not the only one navigating intense fears. Every character on Euphoria is either in the midst of a joy-ride or the god-awful come-down of a previous fleeting bit of pleasure. Every character pursues pleasure in a variety of ways to distract them from the difficult fears and truths they must confront, but most of the time they are not very successful. Sometimes the pleasure is drug-induced (Rue), love-induced (Jules), sex-induced (Cassie and Maddie), recognition-induced (Lexi), power-induced (Kat, who was given the shitty end of the disco-stick plot-wise this season).
For these teens, there is always the looming threat that they will never be loved (again), or never know pleasure, power, or the warmth that comes from being seen. In other words, the title Euphoria itself is in reference not just to drugs and getting high, but the emotions that make us feel alive, loved, wanted, and understood.
In order to feel that warmth, Rue’s turns to violently highs that are complemented by dark, dangerous lows. The ecstasy experienced during Rue’s relapses allow her to walk on walls and ceilings, view her girlfriend Jules as an angelic figure on a pedestal, dance and sing in a musical montage. Even when Rue’s sad or lonely on drugs, she’s still crying those Instagram-able glitter tears.
Everything is prettier when there’s a film of pleasure thrown over it, even growing up to face a near-certain apocalypse. In Euphoria, even your sadness has the capacity to become stunning.
Even her name, Rue (short for Ruby, as we learned in a horrifying encounter with drug queen-pin, Lori) hints at destruction—to “rue” something is to feel bitter regret, something she experiences due to the many seismic shifts that erupt in her life, many of which are self-imposed.
Euphoria’s hyper-stylized visual look is meant to amplify the intensity of Rue’s own struggles, from grieving her father to breaking her family and friends’ hearts over and over again. We can’t ever know exactly how much pain Rue is in (or anyone else for that matter), so instead the series tries to show us through color and light, glitter and grunge.
In other words: intensity is the whole point. Just being a boring teenager is an intense experience all its own, so for folks like Rue, drama and high stakes are the norm. What makes Euphoria different is that it channels that intensity into every little bit of its production. This series is not a realistic depiction of anything but the power that big unbridled emotions, particularly anxiety, can have when they are all you’ve ever known.
Folks who are watching Euphoria for a realistic depiction of teens today are missing the point entirely. Same goes for the folks at D.A.R.E. who claim the show glamorizes drug use (which…are we watching the same show? in what world is Rue being forced to ingest fentanyl appealing?).
We can’t see another person’s highs in real life, but we can see what they allow us to see. Sometimes, that looks like rhinestones and mini-skirts, well-lit parties and midnight bike rides.
Other times, anxiety looks like the remnants of glittery tears after a long night of partying at the end of the world or the resigned profile of a mother waiting for her daughter to arrive home safely, when all we can do is sit alone with our emotions as the sun rises yet again. And that’s a kind of quiet, but no less painful, intensity too.