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Euphoria has been pushing the envelope since its opening scenes.
And it makes sense that its writers would feel the need to raise the bar in its third and final season.
But ever since the show returned to HBO for its third and final season last month, many viewers have complained that Sam Levinson and company have been going a little overboard, especially in scenes involving Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie character.
Most of the controversial scenes have involved Sydney creating content for Cassie’s OnlyFans page.
Shots of Sydney dressed like a dog or wearing a diaper prompted allegations of misogyny.
And then there was the now-infamous Fentanyl orgy scene that brought Cassie to a new level of OnlyFans fame.
On Sunday night’s episode, we see the newly estranged wife of Jacob Elordi’s Nate Jacobs enjoying the fruits of her labor but also learning that fame comes with a price.
Now that she has a massive online following, Cassie needs to keep them hooked with increasingly risque content.
The show has her licking her own feet, dropping the r-word, appearing on far-right podcasts (possibly as a nod to Sydney’s recent political controversies), and doing some things that we can’t even describe on this here family-friendly site.
The sequence culminated in Cassie becoming literally larger than life and stomping around a cityscape like Godzilla in expensive lingerie.
In conversations about the Cassie storyline, Levinson has mostly focused on the aesthetics of the scenes and side-stepped that the show is glorifying sex work and degrading Sweeney.
“[Cassie] has got her dog house and her little dog ears and the nose, and that has its own humor,” he recently explained to The Hollywood Reporter, adding:
“But what makes the scene is the fact that her housekeeper is the one filming it. What we wanted to always find is the other layer of absurdity that we’re able to tie into it so that we’re not too inside of her fantasy or illusion. The gag is to jump out, to break the wall.”
Levinson went on to explain that the scenes involving Cassie’s OnlyFans page are meant to offer commentary on the contrast between her real life and the one she presents to her followers.
“Some of these scenes we only lit with these ring lights that she would use. When you’re inside, it’s a beautiful, glowing front light, but then you jump out of it and it’s just a pool of light and everything surrounding it is dark. It’s just gnarly and jarring,” he said.
“We wanted to capture what she’s trying to show the audience and be inside of it. But then also pull back wider and see how depressing it is.”
That’s all well and good — but we can’t help but think that most Euphoria viewers are more interested in the wild content on their screens than they are in what the show has to say about modern influencer culture.
Sydney Sweeney Licks Her Own Feet, Uses the R-Word In Controversial … was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.