The Stories That TV Tells About Online Sex Work
Much of the emotional potency of the show’s début season came from Levinson’s canny, perhaps even prescient, channelling of Zoomer doomerism. Multiple story lines channelled the anxiety that the internet may be uniquely bad for teen-age girls, who hooked up with suspect men, got catfished, and had their nudes leaked. Even a relatively positive plotline, in which a heavier girl named Kat (Barbie Ferreira) found a measure of sexual approval online that she couldn’t get from her peers at school by briefly dabbling in financial domination, was, at least from a parental perspective, horrifying.
In Season 3, such perils are compounded by the economic malaise affecting Gen Z-ers in their twenties. Even Rue’s childhood friend Lexi (Maude Apatow), who appears to be the only main character to emerge from the time jump with a college degree, has no one’s idea of a good life, spending nearly all her waking hours fetching lunches and coffees as a showrunner’s apprentice. (She also doesn’t think much of Rue’s aborted side gig as a rideshare driver, an occupation that she believes will be extinct when self-driving cars take over the roads.) Meanwhile, Maddy’s long hours, as a lowly paid assistant to a Hollywood talent manager, seem no less brutal—and at least Lexi is spared the humiliation of cleaning up after clients’ dogs. The closest Maddy comes to success is a brief stint as the “career architect” of a fledgling OnlyFans model—a role her boss makes her quit for its closeness to the “porno people.” Despite the overripeness of Levinson’s approach to sex work, it’s a natural convergence point between the show’s wariness about technology and its gig-economy pessimism.
But, on “Euphoria,” porn and prostitution are still in their digital gold-rush era. Levinson has traded in the girlie neon that was the first season’s visual signature—and that the artist Petra Collins has claimed that she contributed to the series, without acknowledgment—for a super-saturated Western motif. (Between the increased violence and the hyper-stylized borrowings from old movies, this season has a very Tarantino vibe; it feels like a copy of a copy.) The snakes and cowboy hats are mostly found at the strip club where Rue works, but OnlyFans, the show implies, is the real Wild West. Lexi’s Hollywood, by contrast, is a hermetic and hierarchical system; the show’s treatment of sex work is most interesting when it suggests that the entertainment industry’s snooty exclusion of the OnlyFans crowd is a sign of its timidity and its self-regard. “Euphoria” itself employs a former porn actress, Chloe Cherry, who brings a distinctive look and an often amusing naïveté to her portrayal of the balloon-lipped Faye, a drug mule turned moll.
But the show’s implicit and explicit denunciations of the stigma attached to sex work are blunted by its simultaneous embrace of hoary tropes about the profession. Levinson traces Cassie’s OnlyFans journey in detail, but the character’s increased screen time is not accompanied by greater insight into her psychology. Cassie exemplifies pretty much every generic insult one might imagine about women who take their clothes off for money: she’s materialistic, lacking in values, and, as Rue puts it, “so desperate for attention she’s willing to humiliate herself.” Cassie goes on podcasts to promote her OnlyFans account, declaring that men are society’s real victims and that Democrats are “retarded,” but it’s utterly unclear what she actually believes, or how she feels about espousing those talking points. Over and over, Levinson squanders opportunities for humanization or interiority in favor of provocation. One gets the sense that he is less interested in telling a story about a character’s journey into adulthood than he is in using her—and Sweeney’s conservative-coded celebrity—as a vehicle for rage bait.
It could certainly be argued that “Euphoria” isn’t the place to find well-rounded depictions of anything. Still, what strengths it once had have dwindled, leaving mere spectacles of shock and ew, such as the gross-out shots of Rue and Faye swallowing golf-ball-size bags of fentanyl before crossing the border—made even more nauseating when you know that the prop bags Zendaya and Cherry put in their mouths were actually lubricated with K-Y Jelly—or the pornographic montage showing Cassie on all fours, dressed as a dog, lapping water from a bowl on the floor. The earlier seasons at least had the structure of a coming-of-age narrative to support story lines that might have seemed sensationalistic; now the characters’ wayward attempts at self-empowerment through sex curdle into simplistic morality tales, which portend impending punishments of bloody harm and never-ending debt. The bids for timeliness hardly matter; we’ve heard this story before.
