Euphoria S2E4: “You Who Cannot See, Think of Those Who Can”

The following contains spoilers for Euphoria S2E4, “You Who Cannot See, Think of Those Who Can” (written and directed by Sam Levinson)

---

I had a philosophy professor who was a Nietzsche scholar. She wrote a book about how the way you interpret Nietzsche is more of a mirror on yourself than anything. I am tempted to make a similar claim about Euphoria, but I don’t know that I can quite cash it out.

What I do know is that I can’t quite decide to what extent this show can’t decide what it wants to be, and to what extent it has to do with my mood when I watch each episode. There is certainly something of the former, as last year’s specials were deep and powerful reflections on the human condition, while other episodes are caught up in melodrama to the point of feeling like gossip. But there is certainly something of the latter as well, as I find myself waffling between dispositions towards the show.

I have encountered some moralism in the world about how Euphoria presents the youth, and to the extent that this falls into some idea of it exerting a corruptive influence by glamorizing bad behavior, I find the thought not just off-base but woefully boring. Too boring to engage with, honestly.

Yet what I can’t help at times is a different kind of moral point of view, one that leads me to assess the behavior of the characters through an ethical lens, and thereby to despair for the state of humanity. That’s not a lot of fun either.

Do people enjoy watching Euphoria? It seems clear that they do, but something about that almost feels wrong to me, and looking at reactions on Twitter I’m struck by the sense that almost everyone is imputing their values into the show more than reading the text of it.

It says something about you who you identify with on Euphoria, and how. Do you think that Nate (Jacob Elordi) is in any way redeemable? Is Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) in the right, or hysterical, or somewhere in between? Should Kat (Barbie Ferreira) be happy with Ethan (Austin Abrams)? Does Cal (Eric Dane) assert his freedom at the end of S2E4 or simply throw an idiotic fit?

And what happens if you withhold judgment and approach all of these characters with as much empathy as you can muster? That’s what I try to do, and yet I find it leading me to a desire to distance myself from absolutely everyone in this story. And don’t get me wrong, I relate to them. I simply wish that I didn’t.

Euphoria is, contrary to its name, incredibly bleak. At its best it gets at a real existential problem with regard to the meaningfulness of life (or lack thereof), which is there in S2E4 in the simple exchange between Kat and Maddy (Alexa Demie), for example. There is a difference between what you think you should want and what you actually want, but you can’t know what you actually want. It’s a problem.

We each grapple with that problem daily, even if we do so by ignoring it. We might take drugs like Rue (Zendaya), or define ourselves through others like Cassie. We might imagine ourselves as authors or seek an imagined freedom outside the confines of our established family.

One way or another, what Euphoria presents us with primarily are people destroying their lives, all in search of a romantic fullness but sucked into nihilism insofar as nothingness offers a simulacrum of it. And that fullness is not possible. You can get what you think you want and be unsatisfied. How do you know what you actually want? You can’t.

S2E4 offers the payoff for the scenes last week of Cal in his youth, and his relationship with Derek (Henry Eikenberry). This week we get to see him spiraling out. He drinks and drives, goes back to the bar he went to with Derek that night decades ago, drinks some more, dances with a guy he imagines is Derek but then tries to wrestle him…and gets kicked out as the bartender tells him he told him not to wrestle anyone ten times. We didn’t see this happen ten times. To what extent are we riding along in Cal’s mind?

That could be asked more generally with regard to Euphoria—how much does the perspective of this or that character color what we see? Usually it’s Rue, but her narration is largely absent from S2E4. It seems to me that this is because she spends the episode so thoroughly zonked out of her gourd that she can barely muster conscious thought. But I have no line on her apparently omniscient narration in the opening scenes of every episode but this one.

She does narrate the opening scene of “You Who Cannot See, Think of Those Who Can” as Jules (Hunter Schafer) goes down on her, but it’s from her own perspective, and it’s striking to note the extent to which she does think this is amazing even if she’s too high to feel much of anything. It’s amazing as an idea. She loves Jules so much she runs the notion of their relationship through every possible fantasy: they are the characters in Ghost, Titanic, Brokeback Mountain…and Jules is a classical work of art, or at one point a radiantly smiling Frida Kahlo.

Euphoria is so stylized and so visually beautiful that one can almost be distracted from its darkness. Almost. Because there’s still the scene in the car where Rue tells Jules she can’t stand her, and the pain in Jules’s eyes, redoubled by Elliot (Dominic Fike) confessing that he’s been lying to her. And there’s still the scene where Cassie vomits in the hot tub in reaction to things Nate has said to Maddy, and her loneliness dancing with herself. Her despair.

How is it that I also found myself thinking through all of this that Euphoria is perhaps very funny? Maybe the right way to view it is as a deeply dark kind of humor, playing on the edge of the abyss. That’s certainly there when Cal rants at his family towards the end of the hour with his dick hanging out of his pants.

Is he off to greener pastures? Is he right to shake off the bonds of his family, or to tell his son that he views his existence as his biggest regret in life? I don’t know, but it’s hilarious.

To turn to Rue’s struggles with the same frame of mind is far darker, however, and I’m not sure I can manage it. She’s got a suitcase full of drugs from a woman who threatened to sell her into sex slavery if she didn’t get her compensation (and made sure to reiterate that she was not kidding), and yet we haven’t seen her make any attempt to start selling the drugs, only to use them rapaciously.

Towards the end of S2E4, we see Rue in a church, as if in a vision. She hugs Labrinth, who has been singing but then turns into her father. One might easily imagine her dying in this scene, and I suppose we don’t know for sure that she didn’t as the episode ends, or have much of any evidence of her continued existence beyond the expectations of watching TV.

Those are strong, however, and the closing montage of “You Who Cannot See, Think of Those Who Can” seems to indicate more a string of characters in peril than anything. The biggest questions hang over Rue and Fezco (Angus Cloud). We don’t really know what is going on with either. She may have overdosed or just passed out. He is clearly facing a threat, but it’s hard to infer the details from the scene where Custer (Tyler Chase) shows up to warn him. I’m sure it will become clearer next week.

Jules learns from Elliot towards the end of S2E4 that Rue has not been sober for some time, and I am glad Euphoria addressed this finally because I was starting to wonder if Jules had just decided she was OK with Rue’s wanton drug use (which would have been rather out of character). It is hard to believe that Jules couldn’t see that Rue has been high very often throughout the course of the season. I’m tempted to say always.

I saw a thousand variations on a meme mocking this on Sunday night after the episode aired, and they are all perfectly fair to be honest. The only way to account for Jules’s ignorance is through a kind of willful denial, but it’s not entirely unrealistic.

She wanted to believe that Rue was clean again now, because they’re reconciled. As problematic as it would be for her sobriety to hang on her beloved, Jules had decided to accept that role. Being apart was simply too painful.

So she deluded herself.

Euphoria is full of delusions, but if it’s meaningful, it is insofar as it questions whether there is any concrete reality to come crashing down to. Maybe there is no bedrock. Perhaps it’s fantasy all the way down, and when one crashes it is into an abyss with no bottom.