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Monday, 5 August 2019

Euphoria's season finale is structural chaos

Image: Euphoria (HBO)

TV Reviews

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Those big school dances that are supposed to be a night to remember and the height of teenage fun and fantasy, in actuality, are pretty terrible. Euphoria doesn’t let its characters have very much fun at the dance that anchors its season finale at all (maybe Cassie and Lexi are the only ones genuinely enjoying themselves, and that probably has to do with the fact that they’re just sitting and watching everyone else). But the show almost leans too hard into its teen angst and turmoil here. In fact, it’s downright solipsistic. And much like the start of the series, this finale is just trying so hard to be dark and disturbing that it often does so at the expense of character development and telling a compelling story.

Euphoria’s season finale has the least amount of narration of any other episode of the show. Rue’s omniscient observations still come up from time to time, but for the most part, this finale doesn’t lean as much on the device, which helps make the story feel more present and alive. But Euphoria is still more obsessed with its own bells and whistles than it is with the actual storytelling. Even the montage of everyone getting ready for the dance is lengthy and pretty but not necessarily satisfying. And the voiceover of Rue’s mom’s letter on top doesn’t fit...at all.

Disconnect is a recurring problem in the season finale, which is the most disjointed the series has felt. I have my qualms with Rue’s voiceover, but at least it provides a clear throughline. The finale is a jumbled mess. It weaves between the dance in the present and flashbacks to the character’s weeks leading up to it. Nate and Maddy have another fight, break up, and Nate wins a football game. Cassie gets an abortion. Jules tells Rue about hooking up with Anna. These are all fine snapshots that bring the characters’ arcs to a head, but the episode jumps between present and past indiscriminately and without any sense of rhythm.

It’s especially confusing that a show so concerned with aesthetics and art housey direction can’t seem to find its rhythm or make sense of its own structure. Euphoria experiments with form, seen especially in the final sequence—a gorgeous but ultimately hollow choreographed number that turns Rue’s relapse into a twisted ballet—but sometimes that experimentation is erratic and indulgent. Sam Levinson’s direction has an eye, but it lacks skin. There’s no connective tissue outside of the stylization itself. And it isn’t enough to really hold a story together and make it feel lived in. The finale is visually immersive but too chaotic in its narrative for anything to stick.

And the finale tries so hard to wrap up so many storylines that it never really reaches a satisfying conclusion for any of them. Sure, not everything comes to a conclusion, but the finale does split time between pretty much every character so that it’s hard to really settle into any one of their arcs. Cassie’s abortion is almost like an afterthought, another instance of Euphoria merely trying to be provocative instead of actually saying anything. The figure skating sequence is another gorgeous but empty thing, and the way it’s spliced between other scenes that, again, don’t really thematically connect to it detracts from the impact.

Euphoria hasn’t been a complete misfire, and the finale, while structurally perplexing and leaving a lot to be desired, does include some of the show’s strengths. For starters, the performances—especially from the younger cast members—are superb. There’s some seriously impressive young talent at the heart of this show. In particular, Zendaya and Hunter Schafer so powerfully capture all the pinpricks and punches of Rue and Jules complicated romance and friendship. They’re soft and sweet with each other, but there’s also an underlying sadness.

The finale does touch on some of the more compelling recurring themes of the series, too. Teen love is one hell of a drug, and Euphoria is a razor’s edge in the way it explores that. Jules admits to Rue that she loves Anna but loves her, too, and it’s easy to believe both are true because Jules does feel so much all the time. Kat decides to plunge into love, too, although Kat’s presence in the finale feels a bit like an afterthought, too, and I don’t totally buy her sudden change of character, even if it does thankfully bring a dose of sweetness to the dance.

Maddy and Nate are still wrapped up in their toxic relationship, although the note they end on in this finale is hard to interpret, because it doesn’t really commit to one outcome or the other for them. Nate’s function in the episode in general is one of the hardest things to pin down. Nate has been one of the show’s Big Bads all season, but he’s often presented as a victim in the finale. Of course, complicating bad characters by showing the reasons why they’re bad can make for compelling storytelling, but here it’s not like Nate is suddenly becoming a more nuanced and interesting character. It feels too forced and underdeveloped. The finale drops a lot of the plot and character work it has been doing in favor of this experimental, fragmented form.

Just like much of this series has felt like a bunch of adults asking “did you KNOW that Gen Z teens do SO MUCH WILD STUFF?,” the finale often screams its themes. Being a teenager sucks. Love hurts. The theatrics and emotions of Euphoria are supersized. But the show simultaneously takes itself so seriously and sometimes gets lost in its own grandeur.

Stray observations

I hope to see Hunter Schafer in a million more things. I find this cast incredible across the board, but she’s such a standout.
Parents really do a number on their kids in this show, causing intentional and unintentional harm that really shapes them. That’s been another one of the series’ compelling themes, but the finale doesn’t deliver as hard there.
I have a feeling that final sequence is going to be a polarizing love/hate situation for folks, and I just don’t think it worked! A lot of this show is pretty to look at, but at the end of the day what it is it actually doing?
With a few exceptions—like Jules and Rue’s relationship—the characters on this show often just can’t seem to see beyond themselves, and maybe that’s slightly believable teen behavior, but it seems so extreme here and makes it hard to get invested in their stories.
I love Fez, but his storyline here also feels like its wedged into an already overcrowded episode.

Sunday, 4 August 2019

Donald Trump Wants This More Than Anything

Photo: Victoria Jones- WPA Pool (Getty Images)

Donald Trump’s taste is difficult to describe. You know it when you see it, but that’s not quite the same thing as knowing what it is. If you’re looking at a tufted velvet settee that looks like one of Michael Jackson’s bedazzled military-style blazers from the Dangerous tour, you are looking at Some Trump Stuff. If you see a big stone sculpture of a lion that is both indoors and near a golf club’s pro shop, you are seeing it. Something that looks like a heraldic coat of arms but then when you look closer it turns out there are golf clubs in there? That’s some Trump shit you’ve got there, buddy.

But also: What? Why does that couch have fringe-adorned epaulets? Why is there carpeting in the bathroom? Why is there a carving station with a heat lamp and a damp roast and a man in a toque set up next to what appears to be a marble replica of Rome’s Trevi Fountain, and also why is there an oil painting of Donald Trump himself peering rakishly over a croquet mallet hanging nearby? Obviously that is all just Some Trump Shit, and the stuff that the man himself likes and thinks is cool. But no one else would do any of this, so where did all this come from?

Photo: Jeff Gilbert (WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Trump’s current state visit to the United Kingdom does only a little bit to answer these questions, which to be fair may be unanswerable. One of the most inexplicably stubborn fallacies about Trump, both among his political opponents and the broader community that’s just interested in rubbernecking at his blowzy public feuds, is the idea that Trump does things for a reason. There is no evidence of this.

It’s unquestionably true that Trump wants things. He wants to be noticed, on television if possible, and he wants to appear impressive when he is noticed. He does not want anyone to seem to have more money than he does. He wants a big beautiful piece of the most amazing chocolate cake you ever saw. All of these things he wants very much. But he is accustomed to demanding these things and then either receiving them (the biggest slice of cake, the television appearances) or believing that he has (the respect of other people). All of this goonish entitlement would be kind of darkly funny if Trump were not also president, but that is not the world we live in. It is not clear even today how much Trump wanted to be president, although he also clearly did not want to lose the election he somehow wound up in. It’s always seemed more accurate to say that he’d prefer to be a king, or some other less readily beheadable royal.

Photo: Toby Melville (AP)

The decorative colonnades and gratuitous reflecting pools and endless gaudy sconces, the all-upholstered-everything interiors that somehow still offer no comfortable place to sit, all those overstuffed corridors connecting gilded banquet chambers to other grand and uninhabitable spaces, the sheer stuffy tackiness of his various pretenses—if there’s any sort of precedent for the grandiose style that Trump prefers, it’s royalty. It would be inaccurate to say that Trump seemed at home during his various ceremonial visits to Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, because he only really ever seems comfortable when he is making what he imagines is a stern face behind a large desk or driving a little golf cart around. This visit involved a lot of walking around observing ceremonial things and standing still while being photographed, and neither walking nor standing are particular strong suits of the president’s.

Photo: Chris Jackson (Getty Images)

But to the extent that Trump has ever seemed happy or even content during his time as president, it has been in ceremonial moments like this that match his florid self-conception—arriving at fancy engagements by limousine, shaking various rich people’s hands and saying “terrific, good luck, enjoy it,” getting up and Making A Few Remarks before staff in formalwear bring him two big scoops of vanilla ice cream in a bowl of the finest bone china. Trump brought not just some of the usual aides and his wife along on this trip, but all of his adult children as well. There’s a photo of them standing at the entrance to a long corridor in Buckingham Palace, all in their avant-garde Trump stances—Donald Jr. appears to be astride a very small horse, Eric wobbling atop some kind of malfunctioning hoverboard—and fancy clothes before going into a state dinner with Britain’s royal family. The words “No Photography” appear on a sign that is otherwise obscured by Tiffany Trump’s head.

Given that he’s not paying for it, it’s no real surprise that Trump would bring a bunch of people with him on a trip like this; both Trump policy aide and aspiring genocidaire Stephen Miller and Christopher Ruddy, CEO of the elderly-skewing Trump juche website Newsmax, were also at that state dinner for some reason. The stuff with the kids feels different, though, because Trump’s weird pretensions of royalty go beyond his inexcusable and otherwise inexplicable tastes. “He wants Ivanka, Tiffany, Eric and Donald Junior to hold a ‘next generation’ meeting with Princes William and Harry,” the Murdoch-owned tabloid The Sun reported after an interview with Trump. “The President said: ‘I think my children will be meeting them. It would be nice.’”

Photo: Victoria Jones (WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Although it’s been honored more in theory than in practice, the United States does not technically do hereditary “next generations” in our politics. Or, more accurately, this is the sort of thing that everyone makes a big deal out of saying immediately before electing or not-electing people to office who have the same last names as people who have been elected to similar offices before. But these goofy and unconcealed ambitions of royalty fit Trump better than he knows, if not in the ways he likely imagines they do.

It’s true that he seems at home in these cavernous rooms dripping in dreary oil paintings and lit by chandeliers, because he has lived his life amid just that sort of claustrophobic grandiosity. He’s cultivated it not so much because he likes it—what does Trump really like?—but because it’s what he believes he deserves. He has never really seemed to have any idea what the rest of the world was like, or much interest in knowing it. He has never really seemed to care about other people beyond what he can extract from them, and at this stage in his broader occlusion and hardening that will not change. But in these gaudy rooms, surrounded by other rich people with nothing much to say and no real inclination to listen, Trump is at least at home.

Photo: Tolga Akmen (WPA Pool/Getty Images)

This is true when he’s in the United States, too; he is happy, if he’s ever happy, when there are other rich people around to give him compliments and tell him how rich he looks and how well he’s doing. This is his class, but they are not really his people. Even with the servile dermatologists and thrice-divorced yacht ghouls and buttery finance lordlings that crowd his social orbit and pay to belong to Trump’s clubs, there are still some latent traces of dirt under their fingernails—these people have to work to make the money to pay those dues, even if that work amounts to a few moments of strained patter during a Botox injection or taking long lunch meetings while underlings hide other rich people’s money from taxation. They’re rich, in many cases entirely richer than any ethical society would permit, but they’re not where Trump imagines himself to be. They’re not where he sees the Next Generation of his legacy.

In the narrow and technical sense, America does not have royalty. The country is still too young, and still kind of passively invested in opposition to the idea. But look at Trump squinting and scowling and plodding around in his cummerbund; look at his kids leering and jutting in their fancy clothes. And then look at the royals, made feeble and translucent and uncanny after generations of fixation on the same sort of bullshit—The Best Genes and Good Stock and The Right Families—that Trump has always offered as explanation for his amazing and unprecedented success. No one in those rooms does anything, really. None of them have to do anything. Their whole lives are about having what they have, and being admired for it.

There is no place in the world where Donald Trump would really feel at home but this. He believes that he belongs with all these rich people in some cold and crowded room with the whole boiling world shut away outside, each shaking the other’s hands, everyone saying what a pleasure it is, what an unbelievable pleasure and honor it is, to be in such wonderful company.