I can get down with a good ole fashioned cup of black coffee.
No sugar. No cream. No dreams. Just reality unfiltered.
It's the way I write my own stories and the common hawser which binds together the movies and books I revere most.
Requiem For A Dream, Rules of Attraction, The Wrestler, The Boost, The Passenger/Stella Maris, Native Son, Irreversible all reached me in ways that no other pieces of art were able to. The unapologetic realism of a distorted reality designed to be inconvenient for the masses, because it was all the unabashed ugly truth.
In what I believe to be the nucleus of what makes these works so great is their ability to tow the line of grim subject matter without exploiting it for shock value.
Rules of Attraction, for example, was a perfect imagination of what I would refer to as a beautiful car crash. The disillusionment that settles in with all three of the main characters who are caught in the web of a disastrous love triangle. And once enraptured within the webbing, fate feels the need to punish its prey by making the wrapping ever the tighter as time goes on.
Had the stars aligned for Sean, Paul, and Lauren, it would have been a completely different story. Something more akin to 10 Things I Hate About You. But alas, the stars fail to rendezvous and everyone feels their hearts being ripped into shreds and they dissolve into embittered and narcissistic creatures who give their bodies away to intimate partners they don't respect because this is the death of romance, and these are The Rules of Attraction.
In how this correlates to Euphoria is the subject matter itself: An unfiltered look at the unique throes this current generation is enduring, that the preceding is clueless to.
And, admittedly, we don't understand what certain things like gender transitioning, cyber bullying, and active shooter drills are like. Cyber bullying to us was talking shit in an AOL chat room. The only drag queen we knew was Ru Paul and Columbine had just happened during my freshman year of High School. So, I agree, I don't understand what this current generation is going through because it is indeed unique to the times.
Unfortunately, I don't feel as if any of that was addressed in Euphoria.
Which is strange, because in the comments section for YouTube there are heaps of acclaim as to how Euphoria was the first series with some balls to show what life is really like for kids growing up in today's day and age.
All of which I tremendously disagree with.
If anything, I believe this series is a massive disservice to this generation. A slap in the face.
Maybe in "Trainwreck, California, U.S.A." all the Mom's are delirious wino's, oligarch fathers are closeted pedofiles, ten year old kids can load banana clips and deal drugs out of 7-11's, narcaned teens are able to shake off the trauma and shimmy out of emergency wards with a smile on their face, drug queenpins hand over $50,000 worth of product to high schooler's like candy, and there are vape sections at homecoming.
But, to quote the great professor Maurice Phibbs "That is not reality. That, is The Wizard of Oz."
By now I am sure that you are beginning to get the picture of my beef with this series.
I found it extremely difficult to engineer empathy for just about anyone on screen, and everyone of them reminded me a bit of the four main characters from a film called "Drinking Buddies", in which all four people are basically shitty, screw each other over, have unmerited blow ups, and then ask you as the audience to feel bad for them as they stumble and fall into pits they dug for themselves, and the same thing applies here.
If there were any admirable traits in Rue, Jules, Lexi, Nate, Madi, Cassie, or Kat I couldn't find them. They all were incredibly shallow, deceitful, and just plain horrible people. Everyone of which is always walking on a tight-rope of anxiety that has the width of a string of dental floss.
The alcoholic jock is constantly slamming his head into the wall or dehumanizing anyone in his path, the girls cry about a gallon of tears a day, and a nervous breakdown over cyber leakage or infidelity is always lingering just around the bend for everyone of these conniving "teens" who cheat on each other and are either drinking buddies with their parents, or put them through a revolving door of constant hell. You know it's pretty bad when the drug dealer is the neighborhood Solomon and the only character who has any positive attributes.
I can't knock the series for pawning 20-something year old's off as teenagers, or covering up the acne that these kids never seem to suffer from, since, Hollywood has always done that. And the photography, soundtrack, and score really shine at certain parts. But this, combined with footage overkill of Sydney Sweeneys breasts, isn't enough to make up for the demented La La land that the writers expect us as the audience to believe these kids live in to be construed as real.
And, would it have killed the writers to expand their lexicon just a hair?
For instance: If you were to play a drinking game where everyone did a shot every time the word "literally" is used, you would have cirrhosis by the end of the first episode.
Majority of the time I found myself laughing at the utter absurdity in each episode that made Jesse Spano's speed pill meltdown seem like an Emmy winning performance. But, I suppose, when you spend the bulk of your time in a digital universe, maybe this is what you perceive reality to actually be?
Who knows?
Bottom line, today's kids are not that bad. As a matter of fact, they are way better than the little hellions we were at their age, and nowhere near as malicious as was accepted in the 90's. Between the ones I have given rides to via Lyft, pass by at Crocker Park, or lift weights next to at Planet Fitness. All ages, races, and creeds from every social status are not nearly as evil and shallow as they are presented to be in Euphoria.
At least not the ones that I've come across.
Maybe it's about time that we cut them some slack and give them the respect they deserve, rather than exploit their challenges for cheap ratings?
Stars: *1/2
Verdict: Pass
Cousins: Over The Edge, Suburbia, Pump Up The Volume, American Beauty, Boys Don't Cry