Instances of Crypto-Transgression #1: 'Euphoria'

Adam Lehrer finds the encrypted transgression within Sam Levinson's smash HBO teen drama series

Not only does crypto-transgression allow the artist to elide the censorious fervor of digital capitalism, it produces its own formal singularities. It creates an aesthetic of suggestive provocation; a troubling matrix of symbols to be decoded.

When I first conceptualized “cryptographic transgressive art” or “crypto-transgression” in early 2021 for my theory fictional essay “Crypto-Transgression: A Primer”, published recently in Amphetamine Sulphate’s Human Rights anthology, I did so thinking primarily about visual art. Since then, however, I’ve been detecting crypto-transgressions in cultural products from across the spectrum. Film. Literature. Television. Music. Crypto-transgression is everywhere, and with it comes a radical shift in artistic production that is so subtle that only the truest of heads are seeing it. In this new column series, I will document various instances of crypto-transgression in recent art works and pop culture works alike, further elaborating upon this aesthetic theory and explaining its necessity for eroding the propaganda mechanisms of the culture industries writ large.

On paper, everything about Euphoria is awful. It counts almost every 2010s cultural trapping amongst its characteristics: an over-hyped mulatta starlet in its lead, the one out of a million trannies who happens to be vaguely attractive, the slack jawed, tall and strikingly handsome white boy as the villain, and various depictions of what can only be described as “trauma porn” make the series sound like a boilerplate Gen-Z affirmative action answer to Skins. Critics complained about the show’s writing and pacing while giving rave reviews to Zendaya’s lead performance as Rue, meaning there was an implicit coercion in the show’s branding: because this show has a diverse cast full of POCs and transgender teens, you must find something to enjoy in it. And yet, I did find something to enjoy in it. If I’m being totally honest, I found Euphoria to be nothing short of fucking addictive.

Despite those noted misgivings, I watched the entire first season. It was a strange experience; annoyed by the pandering to the liberal agenda but thrilled by its Bret Ellis-esque explosively erotic depictions of youthful sexuality (“A hot blonde with huge tits?” I thought to myself, “Are they even allowed to show this anymore?), I found myself compelled to watch without understanding what exactly it was that kept drawing me back. Showrunner Sam Levinson struck me as a clunky dialog writer and narrative crafter, but he had a vision. The colors. The movement. The incredible soundtrack, all produced by the British artist Labrinth but spliced together with singular needle drop choices of pop songs by artists ranging from INXS to Echo and the Bunnymen to Rihanna. This show gave me a feeling – I found myself enveloped in a melancholic nostalgia, haunted by memories of my youth. The chills of the Cape Cod air, the extreme emotional highs and lows, the romantic and erotic longings, the black outs and the dangerous drug experiences. Watching Euphoria evoked a whiff of this powerful sensation  in me, as if the intoxication experienced by the characters in the series becomes shared with its audience. The show’s strange corporeality, its potent vibes, countermanded my intellectual misgivings with its content and branding.

Something shifted in Euphoria in its second season. It was rawer. Darker. Its aesthetic maximalism and heady, youthful atmosphere incorporated a shade of brutality. Critics complained even more about the extremity of its provocations, almost as if Levinson managed to wed the aesthetic of a legacy of shows that includes Beverly Hills 90210 and the aforementioned Skins with the sado-modernist film artistry of directors like Lars Von Trier and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. “Euphoria has always been in danger of allowing style to triumph over substance,” writes Rebecca Nicholson in an extremely negative review for The Guardian: “Euphoria is unrelentingly explicit this time around, as if it took one look at its former self and thought: no, not shocking enough, try this.”

Rebecca is right: if you were watching Euphoria for its flattering of your progressive sensibilities, Levinson’s update of the series in its second season might feel like nothing short of cruelty inflicted upon you, a violent assault on the senses. Most gloriously, the auteur’s commitment to style FIRST is what makes the show standout against the masses of pop culture content. Every frame of the series is a considered visual image, and many of those images are as unforgettable as Diane Arbus photographs or Gustav Moreau paintings; they burn into your memories like a ritualistic branding. Furthermore, Levinson made a few specific creative choices in the second season, each of which brought me closer to understanding what it was in the series that had so completely captivated me.

First, it was the reality with which Rue’s relapse into opioid addiction was presented. I felt physically ill realizing how close Rue’s drug addiction was to mine – in Rue’s mind, she is a perfectly functional drug addict deftly balancing pharmacological bliss with duties of friendship and family, unaware the extent to which she’s become a living demon with limitless capacity for the destruction of the lives of those she loves. Levinson might not be a showrunner matching the elegant narrative structuring sophistications of David Chase, Vince Gilligan or Matthew Weiner, but he’s telling the truth. A recovering drug addict himself, he’s telling his truth. And if Picasso is right, if “art is a lie that tells the truth,” then Levinson IS undeniably an artist.

Next, was the empathetic backstory given to Cal in the third episode of the season. A lesser showrunner, a cowardly libtard of a showrunner, would have succumbed to the socially inculcated temptation to make Cal (and Nate, for that matter), who is first seen in the series fucking and filming the underage tranny Jules and whose perversions, kinks and double life devastated his young son and resulted in Nate’s pathological cruelty and fractured sexual identity, a purely antagonistic force in the series. I mean: a rich, handsome white man who lecherously seduces young girls, boys and trannies? It would have been so easy to make Cal a stand-in for the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and other powerful perverts that True Anon and other dirtbag leftists tend to make central in their narrow visions of what constitutes real evil. 

But, not Levinson. Instead, Cal — played spectacularly by the mostly previously unknown Eric Dane — is given nothing short of a dreamy, beautiful and erotic background sequence that is, plainly, the most purely cinematic series of images placed in a television show in 2022. In what is an aesthetic departure away from the show’s unrelentingly cold and brutal depiction of sexuality and towards a warm, erotic and tender beauty, the rich WHITE man and self-avowed “tranny chasing, chauvinist, faggot pig” isn’t vilified, but humanized. Levinson takes us back to his blissful teenage years, where Cal was a star athlete and pathologically close to his best friend and teammate, Derek. While Cal isn’t totally homosexual and enjoys fucking his future wife Martha, it’s made clear that he and Derek share an unspoken sexual attraction towards one another. The sequence is as breezy, intoxicating and tender as the best cinematic coming of age, summer-set, nostalgic tales of youth ever made: Dazed and Confused, American Graffiti and others among them. It forces you to recall those early, teenage memories of drug haze and lust that are always cloaked in an aura of melancholy, loss and regret. The sequence made me feel old. It’s homoerotic without any of the LGBT signaling that networks typically require shows to make to delve into such explicit content. “It gets away with it because there’s no judgment,” says Bret Easton Ellis about the sequence on his podcast. “No ideology. No morality. It is what it is. Sex. Teenage sex, presented boldly without apologies.” 

The final moments of the sequence are amongst the most powerful images put to television. Cal and Derek get drunk, go to a gay bar, dance, and share their first kiss. The vigor and renewal that Cal experiences as his lust is requited, however, is almost instantly stamped out when he wakes up the next morning and gets a call from his girlfriend Martha, whom we now know as his wife, and she tells him she is pregnant. While never excused for the heinousness of his actions in the present, Cal is understood and, to a degree, made human. Even if less extreme than the dichotomy that Cal is subsumed in, we implicitly understand the conflict between our ambitions to be decent, to love our families and to do right by those who love us against our desires, lusts, and bottomless sexual impulses. That same episode ends with the adult Cal losing his grip. After getting kicked out of the bar where he and Derek first kissed, a shitfaced Cal returns home and breaks down. What follows is nothing short of an epic, six minute, bravura monologue delivered by Dane in what will be remembered as a singular acting moment of his career in which Cal breaks down, says “fuck it,” and confesses his transgressions to his family: “I’m an animal and I fuck who I want!” Levinson’s choice to make Cal heartbreakingly amoral as opposed to one-dimensionally immoral is amongst the most courageous decisions made by a creator in a recent work of pop culture. 

My Euphoria epiphany was a trifecta and its tipping point was the introduction of the character of Laurie, a casually chilling, suburban drug dealer played by the comedian Martha Kelly, in the beginning of season two after Rue’s wigger drug dealer Fezco (Angus Cloud) murders his supplier Mouse and needs to make business right with her. At first, Laurie seems like a dangerous but mostly professional dealer who will protect her business but not be excessively murderous. In perhaps the worst of Rue’s many awful, opiated decisions, the young woman makes a deal with Laurie for $10,000 of drugs fronted to her so long as she makes the money back with interest. The exchange between Laurie and Rue is subtle but ominous; as the audience we already know the hell that Rue is checking herself into because we understand how out of control she’s become.

To set this scene, I’ll admit that I consumed a very powerful cannabis gummy before watching the fifth episode of the second season. It made me paranoid and emotional. Narrowing the show’s scope, the episode focuses on Rue after her trans girlfriend Jules reveals to her mother the extent of her relapse into heroin and fentanyl use. The whole arc is entertaining but brutal, delirious and frenzied, as Rue spends the entire episode destroying what remained of her friendships and familial connections. Nothing, however, prepared me for the sado-modernism of the scene in which Rue, in a state of full dope withdrawal, heads to Laurie’s house to explain her situation: Rue’s mother, not understanding the severity of the trouble that her daughter is in, has flushed Laurie’s entire stash down the toilet before Rue has sold a single gram of smack or a tab of fentanyl. 

In a dialogue exchange saturated in menace, implicit violence, and hair-raising cruelty, Laurie fully removes her thin mask of sanity. After Rue tells her that she doesn’t have the money, Laurie says, calm as a cucumber, “I don’t get angry, ever.” My heart began palpitating as I started to understand what Laurie was doing here. Martha Kelly is totally believable in her blank expression, emphasizing Laurie as a woman long hallowed out and vanquished of her humanity at the hands of her extreme drug addiction. She tells Rue the tale of her spiral into OxyContin addiction, documenting the way that it slowly replaced her need for all familial connection, losing her husband and children in the process. “You know, if I was going through withdrawal, I would do anything. It's one of the good parts about being a woman,” says Laurie without a glint of aggression. “Even if you don't have money, you still have something people want.” The subtext of the sequence is perfectly communicated by the strength of Kelly’s performance and the unflinching bravery of Levinson’s writing and directing. Without ever being said explicitly, we understand that Rue’s inability to pay Laurie back was the dealer’s best case scenario in her mind: she now has a young, addicted, pretty sex slave that she can pimp out and make every cent back with heaps of interest.

My heart throbbed through my chest watching this sequence, with the overpowered cannabis taking effect in my central nervous system skyrocketing my emotional sensitivity, and what followed Rue and Laurie’s conversation triggered (and no, I don’t use that word lightly) me in a way that only the greatest sequences of auteur-driven sado-modernism ever have: the forced fecal consumption in Pasolini’s SALO, the sunburn abuse in Fassbinder’s Martha, the nine-minute rape sequence in Nóe’s Irreversible, and the self-cliterectomy in Von Trier’s Antichrist among them. Yes: this is both the level of depravity and greatness that Levinson achieved in this sequence. Laurie, taking advantage of Rue’s withdrawal sickened state, spikes her vein with morphine, whispering tender reassurances into her ear as she prepares to make this young woman a slave. A bravura piece of bleak artistic cruelty, totally absent ideology or moral justification, this was the scene that finally made me realize that this show is much more than the sum of its parts. I’m not ashamed to admit it: I nearly had a panic attack watching it. Incapable of suppressing my own memories of opiate addiction, the weakness and vulnerability that I experienced when hopelessly in need of chemical release, evoked tears in me. I had to turn it off. It pierced my self-protective mechanisms and forced me to come face to face with the reality of human cruelty. It told the truth, god damn it! Euphoria is a work of art, cloaked in the signifiers of contemporary popular entertainment.

“How the hell is the show getting away with this?” I found myself asking no one in particular.  And furthermore, how the fuck was this show getting such a massive budget and an even larger audience rewarding it for its efforts? The answer to my question lurks within my conceptual premise: Euphoria is a work of cryptographic transgressive art masquerading as a woke, HBO-approved teen drama series.

Euphoria generates a fair amount of controversy in the media, but it’s the kind of one-dimensional, banal and utterly mainstream controversy that you’d expect a media this week and broken to succumb to. Conservative outlets were appalled by the level of sex and teenage nudity and, predictably, asked that this show be taken off the air (the ghost of Jesse Helms, indeed). Feminist critics like Minka Kelly, on the other hand, were also appalled by the nudity. One wonders if they are mad about nudity in general or if they are mad that Sydney Sweeney, the first gorgeous and massive titted blonde to get naked on television in god knows how long (another symptom of the show’s slick, culturally knowing transgressive quality) is often the one getting naked, making these losers feel bad about their ugly, overfed and under-exercised physiques.

What is totally absent from the controversy and discourse surrounding the show are the qualities that I’ve now spent 2000 words describing: the depths of its brutality, its refusal of ideology, its often startling stylistic beauty, and its joyous betraying of its own audience. The opening paragraph of Andre Bréton’s Nadja posits the surrealist phenomenology that one’s existence is always reliant upon the existence of a complex “other,” a shadow that defines that which is being shadowed. 

“Casting me, while still living, in the role of a ghost,” writes Bréton. “Evidently alluding to the fact to be who I am I must have ceased to be what I might be.”

Sam Levinson has deftly created a work of art that functions in a dual manner. By using the cultural signifiers of its mostly progressive millennial and Gen-Z audience — the proverbial people of color, the trannies, the fat girl using OnlyFans to explore her sexual identity, and so on — he conceals Euphoria’s infinitely more rich and provocative ghost. The ghost, the show’s beauty, its brutality, its utter lack of ideological agenda or pandering, could not exist without that which it haunts. This is its crypto-transgressive quality. In “Crypto-Transgression: A Primer”, I postulated that crypto-transgression is a provocation or transgressive idea so subtle that it refuses to be absorbed into the propaganda logic of liberal mainstream culture. But Euphoria can’t be absorbed by liberal culture because it already IS liberal mainstream culture. It crypto-transgresses in plain sight, a virus that infects the libtardery of the masses with hallucinatory contagions that unlock newfound freedom in the brains of those already open to and searching for such transgressive sentiment. The mindless masses latch onto the show’s public identity fueling its production and expanding budgets so that Levinson can communicate its ghost, its crypto-transgressive quality, to those that can subliminally detect such subtle provocations. It is a mighty achievement. Levinson haunts his pop culture hit with the ghosts of something more avant-garde and infinitely darker. Hail, Levinson: hail to the rise of a crypto-transgressive television auteur!

Illustrations
1. Zendaya as Rue in Euphoria
2. Sydney Sweeney as Cassie in Euphoria
3. Hunter Schaefer as Jules in Euphoria
4. Diane Arbus “Prostitute with a kneeling client, NYC”
5. Elias Kacavas as Young Cal and Henry Eikenberry as Derek in Euphoria
6. Eric Dane as Cal in Euphoria
7. Martha Kelly as Laurie in Euphoria
8. Margit Carstensen in Fassbinder’s Martha
9. Jacon Elordi as Nate and Alexa Demie as Maddy in Euphoria