By Haoran Xia
Published on: DeepFocus
December 29, 2021
Time freezes on New Year’s Eve. Inside the house, noise churns restlessly as provocative hip-hop seeps into every corner of the party. Alcohol, cigarettes, weed—the essential offerings of the last night of the year—are scattered across the room. Between boys and girls, unrestrained flirtation and countless exchanged glances seem to anxiously await the final, heart-pounding “ten seconds.” In that instant, the world contracts. All emotions and sensations are compressed into this single space. Warm yellow lights trail behind everyone’s feelings, focusing on each tangled, chaotic, and bewildered relationship, and on sexualities drifting freely without fixed direction.
In the second season of Euphoria, unlike the cold purples of the first, the palette gradually warms up. The visuals are bathed in retro, film-grain hues, as if lending each character a fragile glimmer of hope, allowing them—if only momentarily—to forget their fractured realities while immersed in fleeting pleasure. But can reality truly be forgotten so easily? Rue still lives atop drugs and lies; Jules feels threatened by Elliot, who is inexplicably drawn into her and Rue’s orbit, cautiously testing whether their love is real or merely a fragile bubble, or perhaps just a fleeting fantasy inside her own mind. Cassie recklessly falls in love with Nate, pushing past her own moral boundaries, turning her back on Maddy while engaging in one dangerous romantic game after another with him. Kat, having finally found confidence and what appears to be perfect love, begins involuntarily to doubt love and faith in the real world. And Lexie—the gifted observer who sees life as cinema—cannot escape the surrounding frenzy and loss either, and is forced to step into this Generation Z lost paradise.
When Euphoria premiered in the summer of 2019, its theme was unmistakably clear: it set out to examine contemporary teenagers’ relationships with sexuality, drugs, love, and a series of other issues. Before its release, expectations were modest. Teen dramas were already oversaturated, with truly strong works few and far between, their narratives often circling uninspired love triangles and endless adolescent complaining. Moreover, many believed that topics such as drugs or sexual identity were too marginal to represent the experiences of the broader teenage population. Yet after its debut, Euphoria quickly became one of the most discussed series of the year, rising to the status of a global Gen Z cultural touchstone. That summer, scrolling through Weibo, Twitter, or any other platform, one would repeatedly encounter teenagers proclaiming, “Oh my God, I am Rue.” That same summer, Euphoria’s soundtrack looped endlessly on young people’s music apps, each song’s distinct rhythm and mood summoning memories of the characters’ stories and anticipation for their futures. How, then, did these seemingly unreachable, troubled teenagers become reflections of ourselves?
At the beginning of each episode of Euphoria, the director typically devotes around ten minutes to presenting a character’s “origin story”—why they have become who they are. Within these ten minutes—where editing is fastest, musical styles most diverse, and time leaps most aggressively—we follow Rue’s flat yet weary narration through multiple temporal tunnels, entering each character’s past to excavate secrets and inner monologues buried deep within, and to understand who they are in the present. “I always knew that a character’s past was the most important thing to show,” creator Sam Levinson once said in an interview. Levinson is not a director or writer content with merely depicting the present state of his characters; he finds the past more compelling, more worthy of contemplation. The details submerged by time—the fragments and residues—are like the cells within our bodies, collectively constituting who we are today.
For this reason, Levinson created these standalone “ten minutes,” distinct from other teen dramas. Whether it is Rue beginning drug use after her father’s death, Nate growing up under patriarchal dominance and violent discipline, Cassie living under the shadow of being reduced to her appearance, or, most recently, the poignant and heartbreaking love story between Nate’s father Cal and his high school sweetheart and friend Derek, every character’s past feels intimately connected to our present. Every breath they take, every action they perform, points back to a simple truth: my past defines who I am now; everything I do originates from everything that has surrounded me since birth. Thus, even if I am a troubled teenager, the root of my problems does not lie solely with me, but with the succession of fortune and misfortune, love and lovelessness, pain and joy, others’ sins and my own conscious awareness that have shaped my life.
Beyond this, each character in Euphoria carries a different yet resonant set of struggles—single-parent households, patriarchal upbringing, school bullying, body anxiety, media manipulation. These layered crimes and punishments pull us back into our own private, hollow zones of darkness. Because of these ten minutes, we feel the weight and value of the past embedded in each character’s story, instinctively stitching their fragmented memories to our own, producing resonance within our minds and allowing us to more clearly map our personal histories and growth trajectories. When the ten minutes end, we return to the present; the story continues, and we—the viewers outside the screen—remain half suspended in memory, half watching everything unfold within this lost paradise.
Setting aside their resonant pasts, all the characters in Euphoria exist in a state of fluid uncertainty—their lives, personalities, and sexualities constantly in motion. Every word they speak carries infinite possibility. Their surfaces and interiors mirror one another: as their inner worlds are shrouded in mist, their outward selves are veiled as well. As Chungking Express reminds us, people “might like canned pineapple today, but fall in love with something else tomorrow.” This fundamental unpredictability of human beings is embedded in every character in Euphoria, propelling them—and us—into new territories after we come to know their pasts, writing further secrets while generating new unknowns.
Levinson, who excels at capturing intimacy, has said, “I don’t want my characters to be puppets, or to blindly follow the writer’s instructions. I want them to be alive, to have lives and thoughts of their own.” In his other recent work, Malcolm & Marie, he explores this philosophy through a single night of conversation and conflict between a young couple returning home from a party. The film examines how two people deeply in love can unravel and reconcile within the span of hours—how emotional chemistry forms, accelerates, collapses, and reignites. Entirely driven by dialogue, emotions attach themselves to consciousness; the sparks between “him” and “her” repeatedly either destroy or resurrect their relationship. Like the Before trilogy, like Bergman’s explorations of love, their romance hovers above consciousness, revived, extinguished, and reborn through verbal combat and moments of profound tenderness.
This same approach is transposed into Euphoria. The camera roams freely through the characters’ consciousness—overhead shots suffocating, low angles imposing pressure—handheld sequences paired with 1980s rock music sketching the hormones and romance unique to being seventeen. Each shot, matched with its own soundtrack, feels imbued with singular meaning, capturing the emotional state, inner monologue, and mental drift of the character in that precise second. This fluidity is equally visible in costume and makeup. In season one, Jules wears long pink hair, miniskirts, cream lace stockings, and eye shadow saturated in purples and blues. By season two, she cuts her hair short like Kurt Cobain’s, adopts a tougher, more androgynous style with leather elements, signaling her willingness to embrace the masculine aspects of herself rather than conceal them, emerging as a trans woman whose sexuality is no longer defined by erasure.
Fluidity, then, becomes another keyword for Euphoria. Its portrayal of multifaceted personalities and the shifting nature of marginalized identities forms a poetic articulation of contemporary Gen Z youth. In reality, young people raised in the age of streaming observe the changing structures of the world and build sanctuaries within their own spaces. They do not require praise or condemnation, nor do they need anyone to delineate black from white. What they seek is a moment of quiet that belongs solely to them—a space within their sanctuaries to grasp the core of life’s moving parts, and from there, to become someone new.
They yearn for freedom and remain fiercely devoted to the self. This may be judged as selfish or dismissed by mainstream values, but if they do not, like Rue, Jules, Kat, Cassie, and others, repeatedly break through encirclements, experience alternative possibilities of existence, make mistakes that appear absurd to others, and fully inhabit their own pain and joy, how else can they define themselves within this mediocre yet chaotic adult world? “Remember this feeling,” as the tagline of Euphoria’s second season urges. Remember it—no matter what.
作者：夏浩然
发表于：深焦DeepFocus
二零二一 十二月二十九日
时间停滞在新年前夜。屋子内喧闹不安，富有刺激性的嘻哈乐渗透进派对的每个角落。酒精、香烟、大麻、这些新年前夕的必备品，纷纷散落在屋子内的各个角落，少男少女之间那肆意的暧昧和无数个眉来眼去，似乎焦急地等待着最后那令人心跳加速的“10秒钟”。这一瞬间，世界变小，所有的情绪和感觉被浓缩进这间屋子里，那一束束暖黄色灯光跟在每个人的情绪后面，聚焦在每一段复杂、混乱又迷惘的感情和任意流动的性向上。
在第二季《亢奋》里，不同于第一季的冷紫色，剧集主色调逐渐变暖，整体画面充满复古、拥有胶片质感的暖色调，似乎给每一位角色增添了一丝希望，让他们在享受欢乐的分秒间短暂忘却支离破碎的现实，可现实真的如此轻易被忘掉吗？茹仍活在毒品和谎言之上；朱尔斯被莫名卷进她和茹之间的艾略特感到威胁，小心试探她和茹的爱是否只是泡沫，或者她脑海里的片刻幻想；凯西，肆无忌惮地爱上了奈特，挑战自己爱情底线的同时，背对麦迪，与奈特玩着一个又一个危险的恋爱游戏；凯特在终于找到完美的爱情和自信后，不由自主开始怀疑现实中的爱与信；而莱克西，这位看待生活如电影的才女，也被周遭的狂欢与失落影响，被迫加入这场Z时代的失乐园。
当《亢奋》在2019年夏天开播时，它的主题非常明确 – 这是一部关于剖析当代青少年与性向，毒品，爱情和其他问题的关系的剧集，在它开播之前，许多观众并没有对它给予太高期望，因为青少年剧集泛滥，好的作品屈指可数，他们的故事线往往徘徊于乏善可陈的三角恋关系和毫无休止的少年牢骚之间，同样，也因为这些问题并不拥有共性，毒品或者性向这类比较边缘化的主题并不能代表主流青少年的问题。但在开播之后，《亢奋》一跃成为当年讨论度最高的剧集之一，并成为全球Z时代青少年的影视宠儿。那个夏天，打开微博、推特或者其它网站，你会发现许多青少年都在说“天呐，我就是茹”的言论，同样，也是在那个夏天，《亢奋》的歌单被无限次循环播放在各个青少年的音乐软件上，他们跟着每一首歌独特的韵律和风格，回想每一个角色的故事并期待他们的未来。那么，究竟为何，这群遥不可及的问题少年，成为了我们自己？
在《亢奋》的每一集开头，导演通常会用大概10分钟的时间介绍每个角色的“成长故事”，即每个角色为什么会成为现在的他们。而往往是在这镜头切换最快，音乐类别选择最广和时间进度最快的10分钟内，我们跟随茹那平淡却又颓废的旁白，穿越一个又一个时间隧道，进入每个角色的过去，挖掘那些深藏在他们内心深处，无人知晓的秘密和独白，感受当下的他们。“我一直都知道每个角色的过去，才是最值得展现的”，剧集主创山姆·莱文森在一次采访中说到，山姆不是一个只愿停留于体现角色当下状态的导演/编剧，相比当下，他觉得个体的过去更吸引人，或者更值得玩味，因为被时间淹没的细枝末节和点点滴滴，如同我们身体内的每一个细胞，成就了当下的每一个我们。
也正是这个缘由，山姆创造了独立于其他青少年剧集的“十分钟”。而无论是茹年幼时因父亲身亡而开始吸毒，奈特从小在父权至上和暴力教育的环境中长大，凯西因外表漂亮而活在“标签化”的阴影下，还是在上周，奈特的父亲—卡尔高中时与他的初恋/好友德里克那动人贴切却又令人心碎的爱情故事，每一个角色的过去都似乎与我们的现在紧密关联，他们的一呼一吸，或者每个举动所牵引的背后原因，都表明着，我的过去定义了当下的我，我现在的所作所为都来自于我从出生起的一切周遭，所以虽然我是一名问题少年，但所有问题的罪魁祸首并不是我，而是发生在我生命里接二连三的幸与不幸，爱与不爱，痛苦与欢乐，他人的罪孽和本我的可知。
不仅如此，《亢奋》里的角色各自拥有不同，却同时能产生回音的问题——单亲家庭，父权教育，校园欺凌，身材焦虑，媒体诱导，这些罪与罚层层递进，不禁把我们带回各自私人的，空洞的黑暗时空里。也正因为这十分钟，我们从每一位角色故事中体会到过去的宝贵和内核，情不自禁地，相对应地与每位角色的碎片记忆里拼贴，在自我的脑海里产生共鸣，更清晰地画出属于我们自己的过去地图，找到属于自己的成长轨迹。十分钟结束后，我们回到现实，角色的故事继续上演，处于电影外的我们，一半仍停留在记忆里，另一半观赏着发生在这失乐园里的一切。
抛开他们那令人产生共鸣的过去，《亢奋》里所有角色的生命，性格，性向都是流动未知的，他们的一言一语充满了无限可能，每个人的表面与他们的内心相辅相成，内心被蒙上一层薄雾的同时，表面也笼罩着一层面纱，也就像《重庆森林》里说的那样——人们“可能今天还喜欢吃凤梨罐头，但明天就爱上其他东西了”，这种人本身的不可猜测性被附属在《亢奋》里的每位角色上，让他们，和我们在知晓他们的过去后，快速发展进另一个空间里，书写更多秘密的同时，创造更多未知。
擅长捕捉亲密关系的山姆曾说道：“我不希望我的角色是一个木偶人，或者完全听从编剧的指令，我希望他们是活生生的人，他们可以拥有自己的生活和自己的想法”，在他去年的另一部作品里——《马尔科姆与玛丽》，他通过捕捉一对年轻夫妇参加晚宴后回家的对话与争吵，向我们展现了他对亲密关系或者爱情的理解，即在一夜的时间内，两个彼此深爱的人如何分崩离析，但又如何和好如故，两人之间微妙的情感化学反应究竟如何产生，加速，终结，而又再复燃。《马尔科姆与玛丽》全程跟随对话进行，情感附着在意识里，他与她之间的意识火花一次次激烈或者毁灭他们两人的感情，好比《爱在》系列，也好比伯格曼的爱情作品，两人的爱情腾空于意识之上，在无数次唇枪舌战或者深情对话中复苏、消灭、又再发生。
相同的刻画手法被山姆移花接木至《亢奋》里。镜头毫无规则地穿梭在他们的意识之中，俯视渗透着窒息，仰视传递着压力，无数次手持配上80年代的摇滚乐勾勒出17岁唯有的荷尔蒙和浪漫，再加上每个镜头独有的配乐，仿佛每一帧都充满了它独有的意义，体现当下那一秒，那一帧，那个角色的内心戏和他的所想所思。更多的流动也能体现在妆容上，第一季的朱尔斯留着粉红色长发，穿着迷你裙和乳白色的蕾丝袜，眼影永远是饱和度超高的紫色或蓝色，而到了第二季，朱尔斯剪了库尔特·柯本似的短发，穿衣风格更加硬朗和中性，有了更多皮革元素，表示着她更愿意接受自己曾经男性的一面，而不是遮掩所有男性特点，成为了一名性感的跨性别人。
所以，流动则成为了《亢奋》的另一个代言词。它对多重性格的描绘，以及少数边缘群体流动特点的刻画，成为了展现当下Z时代年轻人最好的诗歌。回到现实，成长于流媒体一代的年轻人们，观察现实世界中的变化规律，在自我空间里搭建神殿，他们不需要别人的赞美或指责，也不需要任何人点明黑与白，他们需要的只是片刻属于他们自己的谧静，在他们的神殿里抓住生命中流动物件的内核，再成为新的自己。
他们向往自由，热爱自我，这或许会被主流群体看作自私，被不认可，但如果他们不像茹，朱尔斯，凯特或者凯西或者那样去一次次突破重围，体验生命的其他可能，犯在他人眼里荒诞可笑的错，感受发生在自己身上的疼痛与喜乐，那么，他们又如何在这平庸又混乱的成人世界里，定义自己呢？“记住这份感受”，正如《亢奋》第二季宣传语，请一定记住这份感受。