Euphoria

All That Glitters is Grief

To watch *Euphoria* is to submit to a sensory assault, a fever dream where the boundaries between teenage angst and genuine existential horror blur into a single, neon-soaked vibration. Created by Sam Levinson and adapted from an Israeli series of the same name, the show is less a traditional high school drama and more a hallucinogenic study of a generation hyper-aware of its own performance. It does not merely depict the lives of American teenagers; it visualizes their internal panic attacks, projecting their most private neuroses onto a screen the size of the world.



The visual language of *Euphoria*, crafted by Levinson and cinematographer Marcell Rév, is its most distinct character. This is a world where "emotional realism" supersedes objective reality. The camera is rarely static; it prowls, spins, and floats through parties and bedrooms with a predatory grace. Consider the carnival sequence in Season 1, a masterclass of staging that feels less like a narrative beat and more like a descent into the underworld. The camera tracks characters through a labyrinth of rides and games, weaving together disparate storylines—Maddy’s combativeness, Jules’s fear, Rue’s detachment—into a single, suffocating tapestry. The lighting, bathed in tungsten golds and bruised purples, suggests a perpetual twilight, a time of day where consequences feel distant until they are suddenly, violently immediate.



However, if the visuals provide the sedative allure, the performance of Zendaya as Rue Bennett provides the painful awakening. Rue is our guide, an unreliable narrator who speaks from beyond the grave of her own sobriety. She is a character of profound contradictions: deeply empathetic yet terrifyingly selfish, seeking oblivion while documenting every minute detail of her friends' lives. Levinson uses Rue’s narration not just to explain the plot, but to expose the lies addicts tell themselves. When she creates elaborate fantasies or omits crucial lapses in her sobriety, the show forces the audience to become detectives of her grief. We are constantly asking: Is this what happened, or is this just how it felt to be high?

The show has faced accusations of glamorizing the destructive behaviors it chronicles—the drug abuse, the sexual violence, the toxic masculinity embodied by the terrifyingly hollow Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi). But this criticism misses the show's fundamental tragedy. The beauty of *Euphoria* is not an endorsement; it is a trap. The glitter makeup and the designer aesthetics act as armor for children who are woefully unequipped to handle the adult traumas inflicted upon them. The "glamour" is the tragedy. It highlights the disparity between how these young people present themselves on social media—perfect, curated, invincible—and the crushing loneliness that waits for them when the phone screen goes dark.



Ultimately, *Euphoria* is a portrait of anxiety in the digital age. It captures the specific feeling of being young when the world feels like it is ending, both globally and personally. It is a show about the desperate, often destructive attempts to feel something real in an environment that feels increasingly synthetic. While its narrative ambition sometimes threatens to collapse under the weight of its own style, the emotional core remains bruisingly effective. It suggests that behind every curated image and every chemically induced high, there is a frightened child just trying to survive the night.