Summary
Euphoria Season 3 is a little more coherent in “America My Dream”, but the lingering question remains whether Levinson knows he’s making a satire or believes himself to be unveiling some revelatory truth.
The key question that will likely define the short-term future of Euphoria is whether Sam Levinson is attempting to satirise the facile horniness of the American Dream, or if he truly believes that the most anyone can aspire to these days is sucking on a pacifier while dressed as an adult baby. As of Season 3 thus far, the jury’s still out. The premiere of HBO’s confusing mega-hit felt like a disconnected montage of storylines that no longer had anything to do with one another. Episode 2, “America My Dream”, is a bit more coherent, allowing various narrative strands to get caught up in the tugging black hole gravity of others, but it also wheels out the very fundamental idea of sex selling as if it’s some revelatory thesis. Which, you know, is a bit naïve.
I’d like to believe there’s a point to all this, that Levinson is taking us somewhere unexpected. Early signs aren’t promising, though. The willingness to depict our basest fantasies in full-throated prestige gloss might be a statement, but it might just as easily be cross-promotion for Sydney Sweeney’s lingerie line; a way to cultivate social media furore because there isn’t really a plot anymore. Time will tell. In the meantime, there’s business to be done, and everyone, in one way or another, is for sale.
Maddy’s Making Her Way
Outside of a mention, the premiere didn’t spare much time for Maddy, so it’s admittedly refreshing to see her take centre stage in the opening of “America My Dream”. Her supposedly glamorous career as a talent manager turns out to have been a bit of a ruse, though. With help from Rue’s bitingly cynical narration, we get a little summarized version of how that came to be, with Maddy propositioning her potential new boss at a diner – a lot like Billy Magnussen in The Audacity – mostly by reassuring her that she’s not the entitled victim HR nightmare that kids these days tend to be.
Maddy got the job, was waylaid by the pandemic, and established a side hustle “managing” a dopey hottie named Kaitlyn, which is to say strongly encouraging her to sell her increasingly naked body on social media. This is a decent money spinner until she makes the mistake of crossing the personal and professional streams, introducing Kaitlyn to her agency’s client, Dylan Reed, which leads to her having to let Kaitlyn and her commission go lest she be fired. What’s a girl to do?
The irony is that Kaitlyn ended up being much more successful than Maddy, cashing in on the new ability of OnlyFans influencers to leap the transom into the mainstream. Maddy was ahead of the curve, but missed her opportunity. So, when she receives a random DM from a newly softcore Cassie, she sees an opportunity. Cassie pretends she’s reaching out to apologise for stealing Nate, but is really looking for a manager; Maddy doesn’t care about Nate, and is looking for another Kaitlyn. It’s a match made in heaven, or at least one kind of afterlife or another.
Rue Is “California Sober”
Rue’s position in this story is increasingly that she exists outside of it; she’s the only character who can see the forest for the trees. It is, after all, her narration that exposes the double standards and hypocrisies; she has the all-seeing eye that can fill in plot information for the audience’s benefit, even if it’s by sharing details that she shouldn’t be privy to. But that doesn’t mean she’s immune to those things. As she frames it later, she’s currently “California sober”, which is to say not sober at all, but not so strung out that she’s useless. So, when she’s banging strippers and shipping them off to rehab, she doesn’t have the desperation of her addiction to fall back on as an excuse.
God seems to have occupied this space in Rue’s self-justifying arsenal. She’s still telling herself that God introduced her and Alamo, and kept her alive during his apple stunt, so she’s framing her new position as a fixer at the Silver Slipper, one of his roadside strip joints, as some kind of divine providence. It’s the kind of thing an addict would do, but Euphoria Season 3 is playing a bit too loose with Rue’s addiction to be taken especially seriously as a commentary on it. The best scene of Episode 2 is a flashback where Rue, at the end of her rope, calls her mother and tearfully begs to be allowed back home as the lights go out behind her. Her narration tells us she hasn’t really been sober since, but she’s significantly more functional than this for the remainder of the episode. I don’t love how Levinson is trying to have his cake and eat it here.
Still, Rue’s morality is arguably more interesting when it isn’t being filtered through the lens of desperation. There’s a particularly grim subplot in “America My Dream” that involves Angel, one of the Silver Slipper’s dancers, who becomes increasingly sceptical of Alamo’s explanation that her friend, Tish (the one who OD’d in the premiere), ran off with some guy. Rue eventually tells her the truth, but Angel spirals into addiction and despair, and it becomes Rue’s job to transport her to a rehab facility. It’s as obvious to Rue as it is to the audience that she’s really dumping Angel, not at a rehab but at some graveyard for Alamo’s girls who have become surplus to requirements. Is that God’s plan, too?
Alexa Demie in Euphoria Season 3 | Image via WarnerMedia
Jules Is Back
After not appearing at all in the premiere, Jules is briefly back this week, both in flashback and present-day form. Rue recounts having visited her while she was in art school, but notes that their relationship wasn’t the same since too much had happened between them. In the interim, Jules became a “sugar baby”, which is a nice way of saying a high-class escort, and she’s currently living in a swanky apartment on her married boyfriend’s dime.
Towards the end of the episode, Rue reveals herself to Jules out of nowhere, and despite Jules saying outright that she can’t just suddenly reappear and expect things to go back to how they were, she also invites Rue to join her in the bath. The contradictions are deliberate; the messages intentionally mixed. But the underlying argument is cogent enough. Whatever people might claim, they can’t resist their simplest impulses. The pleasures of the flesh are too potent.
Cal Is Also Back
It’s probably not a coincidence that Jules has reappeared at exactly the same time that Nate’s father, Cal, has also turned up. They don’t interact – they’re many miles apart, as it happens – but given their history, they’re two sides of the same coin. Cal is the hedonist who used Jules as a way to explore his own obsessive pursuit of pleasure; Jules has turned the urges of people like that into a lucrative career. The common denominator is sex, as it always is.
Nate’s viewpoint is more simplistic. He sees his father as an addict in denial. He can’t entertain Cal’s claim that having sex with men doesn’t necessarily make him gay, or at least not just gay; he has boiled his father’s entire pathology down to his being in the closet. Perhaps this is why Nate seems to be struggling more than everyone else. It’s very heavily implied that the business he inherited from his father isn’t doing all that well, outward appearances notwithstanding, and he can’t keep a lid on Cassie’s OnlyFans. The control he so needs is slipping through his fingers because he’s out of step with modernity. In many ways, Cassie has the right idea; she’s just too stupid to realise it.
Enter Maddy. Maddy recognises that Cassie is so desperate for attention that she’ll debase herself in virtually any way to get it. Her defence of OnlyFans not exclusively being a marketplace for sex is undercut by the fact that all of her content is revealing, but she believes her own nonsense, where Maddy hears it and sees dollar signs. Even though Cassie agrees to delete her account so that Nate will pay for the wedding flower arrangement that he definitely can’t afford, there’s no point closing the stable doors after the horse has already bolted. She has become the prized pig – an animal with some degree of significance in this episode; Laurie refers to Alamo as one, and he later has a giant one snuck into her house as revenge for the barb – that Maddy can take to market. Cassie just doesn’t know it yet.
