‘Euphoria’: the controversial teen TV drama loved by Gaspar Noé
You know you’ve firmly earned your crown as one of arthouse cinema’s most controversial figures when you cause 20 people to faint and several hundred to walk out at the Cannes Film Festival screening of your new movie. For Gaspar Noé, this was all in a day’s work, and Irréversible remains one of the most shocking movies ever shown at the festival, cementing his status as a cinematic provocateur.
The Argentinian-born auteur made his first feature, I Stand Alone, in 1998, which spared audiences nothing. Incest, abuse and violence were some of the themes that defined Noé’s debut, a sign of where his divisive filmography was heading. Irréversible was made a few years later, which garnered significant controversy for its extreme violence and even a ten-minute-long rape scene. The movie remains highly debated to this day, reflecting the director’s polarising nature.
With movies such as Love, Climax and Lux Æterna, Noé has never shied away from testing his audience as much as possible. Whether that be through lengthy scenes featuring uncomfortable dialogue, hardcore sex, strobing lights or pounding electronic music (often provided by Daft Punk’s Thomas Banglater), his films are hardly casual Sunday night viewing.
Noé forces us to confront the violent realities of the everyday, never sugarcoating the fact that our society is defined by pure chaos, pain, brutality and excess. The filmmaker cites movies such as Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, a transgressive indictment of capitalism and totalitarianism, as a major influence, and you can feel its impact running through the veins of his work.
He also loves visually striking movies such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the giallo horrors of Dario Argento and Mario Bava, which have inspired his aesthetically-driven approach. When sitting down to watch a Noé movie, one should expect bright colours and dramatic neon lighting, both of which help to immerse us in an overstimulating and anarchic world.
Thus, we can hardly be surprised that Noé once shared his love for the popular HBO teen show Euphoria – a visually impressive foray into the lives of troubled teens dealing with addiction, sexuality, relationships and identity. While Euphoria isn’t exactly as transgressive and intense as a Noé movie, it wouldn’t be outlandish to suggest that the show took some watered-down inspiration from Noé’s cinematic world.
Talking to RTL, he revealed, “Over the last ten years, I’ve only seen two TV shows.” However, when he “kept being told, ‘You have to watch Euphoria, it’s something that you will love,’” he sourced the DVD boxset because he’s “not subscribed to any of the platforms”. He instantly fell in love with the Sam Levinson-created show, adding, “I watched all 18 episodes in the span of a weekend. I absolutely adored it.”
The show features Zendaya as Rue, a teenager dealing with the loss of her father and a severe drug addiction. As the character makes her way through her final years of high school, we also follow her other friends and classmates through many traumatic and shocking events. From abusive relationships to underage sex work, the show is frank in its depiction of adolescence, resulting in equal amounts of praise and controversy.
Euphoria remains one of the most explosive television shows to emerge in the past decade, with some people accusing the show of objectifying certain female characters and becoming too graphically violent by its second season. It has also been criticised – in the same vein as shows such as Skins – for romanticising the issues being depicted, such as drug abuse. It seems as though Noé didn’t have a problem with the show’s heavily aestheticised approach, however, and we expect he’ll be picking up a copy of season three when it is finally released.
