Why does season 3 of “Euphoria” tip so much into obscene one-upmanship?

Warning, this article contains spoilers.

To say that Sam Levinson was expected to turn the corner after the disaster of the series The Idol (2023) is an understatement. Since the start of the broadcast of the third season ofEuphoriacriticism is raining down on new episodes considered vulgar, misogynistic, even pornographic. Are such returns justified?

After the broadcast of the first two episodes of the last season ofEuphoria (2019-), a majority of negative reviews focused on the passages featuring the character of Cassie (Sydney Sweeney). Fearing that her future husband’s salary would not be enough to pay the cost of their wedding, the young woman decided to supplement the household’s income by posting sexy content on TikTok, then by creating an OnlyFans account. Cassie first poses dressed as a dog, with fake tail and plastic bones in her mouth. In the second episode, she appears dressed as a baby in a very suggestive position.

Reading certain comments on social networks, such images appeared obscene in the etymological sense, of the order of what should be kept out (ob) of the scene (scene) and bear witness to the fact that the series has become the showcase for Sam Levinson’s fantasies, to which it gives substance according to a visual rhetoric of male gauze. Precisely, the obscene is what interests a showrunner who thinks of his fiction according to a logic of “enscenity”. This neologism, coined by the theorist of porn studies Linda Williams, refers to the way in which, within a given culture, “organs, actions, bodies and pleasures” which, until certain pivotal periods, “are designated as obscene and kept literally off stage” end up investing the representations.

The first two seasons were thus based on an expansion of the showable in a teen drama and offered a fascinating reflection on the new forms of “encenity” of contemporary adolescent sexuality by questioning in particular pornographic mimicry in the practices of young people. The series also offered a reflection on the attention economy. The second season thus concluded with a double episode based on a mise en abyme device: the character of Lexi (Maude Apatow) staged, in a play, everything that the real viewer had seen since the beginning of a series, which insisted through this device on the quantity of “encenity” necessary, in particular from the point of view of the staging of sexuality, to retain the public.

In his work HBO and porn (Presses universitaire François-Rabelais, 2018), the specialist in television series Benjamin Campion postulates that one of the specificities of many series produced by HBO consists of “telling stories through sex”. However, Euphoria Does it tell today anything other than the ego of its creator who is content to release, with this new season, a bigger attention bomb in a saturated television serial market, sacrificing more to provocation than to reflection?

Desecrating the body of the star

The viewer has, as in the field of online pornography, seen everything. We must therefore subscribe to a logic of one-upmanship which involves, in these new episodes, a clear tendency to mistreat the characters and perhaps the actors and actresses who play them and are now global stars: Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi and Hunter Schafer.

To be convinced of Sam Levinson’s obsession with the star’s soiled body, we must remember the beginning of the mini-series The Idol (2023). Pop star Jocelyn’s (Lily-Rose Depp) management seeks to protect her from what has already gone viral: a photo of her face covered in semen that leaked online. According to Levinsonian logic, dialogue is not enough and we must sacrifice to a visual form of explicitness, pornographic because of the order of this “frenzy of the visible” highlighted by Linda Williams in her work Hard Core. The famous photo is thus exhibited to a spectator who does not only see Jocelyn, but also Lily-Rose Depp.

Nothing so frontal in this third season ofEuphoriabut this is precisely what ensures its perversity. A journalist from So Film, Marine Bohin, clearly showed in a publication on her Instagram account how the scene of absorption of fentanyl balloons by Rue and her partner Faye (Chloe Cherry) in the first episode mimes, by the gestures of the actresses -lubrication of the balloons, insertion of several fingers at the bottom of their throats – as much as by its visual and sound grammar -very close-ups on the faces covered in drool, regurgitation reflex – a deep throat scene typical of mainstream pornography that the first season questioned and of which this one embraces the codes.

Sam Levinson also tries to bring to life in his series what some Internet users are likely to fantasize and then realize through deepfakes and content generated by artificial intelligence (AI): pornographic images of global stars. The multiple scenes showing Cassie’s content on OnlyFans in the fifth episode go in this direction.

A regressive season

This is the main paradox of this season: Euphoria is no longer a teen dramabut never has the series been so childish, or even regressive. Gas, urine, excrement and vomit are thus widely represented and no character is spared: Faye emits loud and smelly farts in the car that Rue drives when leaving Mexico and ends up under her on her return (ep. 1); Nate throws up before his wedding (ep. 3); Lexi has to pick up the droppings of her boss’s dog when Cassie hesitates to bottle her farts in perfume bottles to meet the demands of her fans (ep. 5).

Beyond the scatological vein, the creator adopts the attitude of a perverted child who takes pleasure in damaging his toys all the more as they are expensive. He also tears some of them to pieces, Nate having his little finger cut off (ep. 5) after having already lost a little toe in a third episode which began with the mummification scene of Jules, wrapped in plastic film by his sugar daddy. Marine Bohin discusses the torture porn to characterize the genre towards which the season, which begins as a western, evolves.

If Sam Levinson looks towards the horror genre, he also reinvents Euphoria as a response to the contemporary feminization of body horror. The scene in which Cassie becomes giant at the start of the fifth episode can thus be read as a sexist parody of the end of the lesbian horror romance Love Lies Bleeding (2024), by British filmmaker Rose Glass.

(No) pity for “Euphoria”?

On the promotional poster for the season, we can read the following teaser: “May God Have Mercy” (“May God have mercy”). If it concerns in the first degree Rue who listens to the Bible in her car, it is difficult not to also read in the second degree the fantasy of omnipotence of Sam Levinson who believes it is possible to make his characters, his cast and his audience suffer everything, who no longer knows how far to push the cursor of what we could call his “egobscenity” and to whom the HBO executives obviously do not know how to say no. In such circumstances, perhaps the viewer must become a blasphemer and continue the critical tearing apart of a series that has become difficult to love.