Emmy award winner Zendaya. Sorry, I just had to type it out because I still can’t believe it is real. It is perhaps the only good thing to happen in 2020. I don’t need to recap all the terrible things that have happened this year — remember Murder Hornets? This year, there has been so much darkness that it was euphoric when Zendaya won an Emmy on September 20th.
The week’s newsletter is going to look a little bit different. Typically I focus exclusively on one movie. Instead, I am looking at Euphoria — famously not a movie — and Assassination Nation, both created by Sam Levinson. Euphoria is head and shoulders better, but I find the world he created in both to be similar enough to talk about in tandem. Plus, this is my best excuse to talk about Zendaya for a while, so I have to take it.
I am going to try to condense 10 hours of content into what I typically do with two hours of content, so I can’t recap all of Euphoria. However, if you need a refresher, there is this exit survey from The Ringer that covers most of the major plot points of season one. By the time this comes out, the first of two special episodes will have aired, but I am not including it here.
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but has Sam Levinson ever met a teenager? It isn’t like it feels super disconnected from reality. It doesn’t have “how do you do fellow kids?” energy; it is just that I have never met a high schooler who consistently acts the way they do in Euphoria and Assassination Nation. Partying to that degree in college is one thing, but he really has like 17-year-olds out here living life with the most reckless abandon I’ve ever seen. That being said, the party scenes in Euphoria are among the best I have ever seen, and I’ve been chasing that high watching every party scene since.
The world that Levinson created in Euphoria revolves so much around the characters instead of one central plot. I don’t want to say the whole thing would fall apart without Zendaya as Rue, but she carries everything really well, and it would be a very different show without her unique perspective. On the flip side of that, it feels like every character is crucial for the show’s fabric. The big ones like Jules and Nate are obvious, but the supporting characters like Fezco, Kat, Maddy, Lexi, Cassie, and McKay, really tie the show together nicely.
I love how each character feels like they could fit in a BuzzFeed quiz. They are all well-written, with many layers and a lot of nuances. I think who you identify with most says a lot about your personality. I definitely identify most with Lexi. Maude Apatow is so great in this show, a very underrated performance. Lexi is accepting of her friends wildin’ out at times without any judgment. She is there when her friend, who just got out of rehab, needs a clean urine sample. Lexi is there to protect her sister when her boyfriend comes looking for her, and she is with another guy. Most importantly, she is wearing a Bob Ross costume to a Halloween party. We all need a Lexi in our lives.
I also feel a strong connection with Rue for some reason. The way she lives life so passionately and being so captivated about Jules felt relatable. She is one of the best-written characters I’ve seen on TV in a long time. The scene of her begging for drugs from Fez was outstanding — and clinched her Emmy, in my opinion. She is such an easy character to root for, even if her actions are sometimes not what you want. You just feel so much empathy for her and want her to get clean, both for herself and her family.
Watching her relationship with Jules unfold felt relatable for some reason. She dove headfirst into that relationship, and Jules could do no harm in her eyes. She was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, not shying away from people she wanted to spend time with.
Meanwhile, Jules was just trying to live her life and not have to be perceived as the reason why Rue was sober. That aspect of the relationship dragged on her quite a bit and made the ending not quite as shocking the second time I watched through it.
Now feels like the right spot to acknowledge how much I appreciate HBO casting a trans woman to play a trans woman. It is unbelievably obvious, but so many shows and movies continue to miss the mark. I will talk more about it later, but Sam Levinson also got this right in Assassination Nation by casting Hari Nef as Bex. On-screen representation is so important and having people like Hunter Schafer, Hari Nef, and Elliot Page is essential for the Trans community. I look forward to seeing the representation expand as we move forward. I am so glad HBO cast Schafer for the part, and she does a tremendous job as Jules.
I wish I had more room to talk about the remaining characters, but I think I only have room for a quick rundown. Fez is too pure for this world, and he is the best. Kat’s storyline was the wildest, but I liked how she progressed. Maddy was very toxic at the beginning, and I’m glad she improved as it went on. Cassie’s background open added the most of all of them; I look forward to seeing her arc in season two. Nate Jacobs is the absolute worst. I don’t think there’s anyone out here defending him, but I will fight anyone who is. Nate Jacobs, please go to therapy. I agree with Allison Herman of the Ringer when she said the closeted jock stereotype is lazy and played out. Not every homophobe is secretly gay, and I wish we would progress past that idea as a society.
The music in this show might be the best in anything I have ever seen. I know I praised Into The Spider-Verse last week, but the range this show has is remarkable. The Fly Me To The Moon sequence was impeccable, as was the Same Girl scene. Both of those highlight why Zendaya won her Emmy. The cinematography in the Cassie ice skating scene is breathtaking. There are so many more fantastic drops to choose from that I will just include the whole playlist. I didn’t catch that they hinted at the final song of the season one finale throughout the season.
The highlight of the whole season is Zendaya, a bay area native, saying “That’s Oakland baby” in Blow the Whistle. I pray that wasn’t scripted.
The central plot of Assassination Nation is that nearly the whole town gets hacked, and four girls, in particular, get the community’s wrath. On the rewatch, it did not hold up as well. Euphoria is one of the top two shows I’ve watched in 2020 — The Queen’s Gambit being the other — and Assassination Nation, unsurprisingly, does not live up to those lofty expectations. On its own, however, it is an entertaining movie that works better as a political text about toxic masculinity and sexism in this country than it does as a companion with Euphoria.
Still, there are quite a few similarities between it and Euphoria. The main character, played by Odessa Young, narrates it in the same way Zendaya does in Euphoria. I already mentioned the casting of Hari Nef, but that is a good thing that deserves to be celebrated. Speaking of trans actors and The Queen’s Gambit, that show cast Rebecca Root to play Miss Lonsdale. They made no big deal about her gender, and she was just another character. I can’t wait for the day where that is the norm. The music drops in both are similar, as is the text on the screen when messaging with people. Colman Domingo and Maude Apatow are in both. The scene of Apatow hitting Bella Thorne with a baseball bat is the purest form of cinema I have seen this year.
While it wasn’t quite to the standard of Euphoria, Assassination Nation felt like a Sam Levinson project. It might be too early in his career to know what exactly a Sam Levinson project feels like, but I don’t see it this way. I think 10 hours of content is plenty of time to get an idea of a director early in their career, at least at the stage they are currently in. Between Frances Ha and Mistress America, I got a good sense of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig. I could say the same about Eliza Hittman and Céline Sciamma in their first three features.
Next up for Sam Levinson, not counting the second Euphoria special on January 24th, is one of my most anticipated movies of 2021 with Malcolm & Marie. It is about a director who comes home with his girlfriend after his movie’s premiere awaiting critics’ responses, and the couple’s relationship is tested in the process. Did I mention that the couple is John David Washington and Zendaya? Gosh, it sounds tailor-made for me, and I can’t wait to watch it on February 5th on Netflix. I can already promise that it will be a newsletter at some point in 2021. Fingers crossed, I can say Emmy and Oscar award winner Zendaya by the end of April.
Next week I am going to look at Mean Girls. It is available to rent through YouTube or Prime Video for $2.99.