NoI hadn’t even bet a single euro on the possibility of being able to watch all three seasons of the show in full Award-winning Netflix series Euphoriawhich has now reached its epilogue. How could the story of a group of high school students from the remote province of California have fascinated me?
Then I told myself that, if I had become a fan of Stranger Thingswhich tells the dystopian adventures of a gang of beardless kidscatapulted into an imaginary corner of Indiana, I had already overcome the generational and cultural factors.
And so, bypassing the difficulty in settling in, typical of the first two episodes, I discovered that the added value of this experience, for me, would have been precisely that of measure the distance between my generation X and that of the teenagers led by the protagonist Rue, played by the iconic Zendaya.
Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
It is not possible, and it would not even be right, to take away from you the pleasure of going through the 28 episodes that make up the work. But I want to entertain you on the common thread that links characters and stories: a profound discomfort that children resolve by systematically choosing the most painful, dangerous, distressing and often illegal solution.
Hunter Schafer and Zendaya in a scene from “Euphoria.” (photo Eddy Chen-HBO / LaPresse)
Euphoria it’s like an inverted fairy tale: a Pinocchio in which the protagonists follow Candlewick and the Cat and the Fox, in the absence of Blue Fairies and Talking Crickets. So they end up in the jaws of a whale which is eaten by another whale and then another. In the sense that the wrong paths, once taken, lead into a deep whirlpool that swallows everything, including their innocence.
Thus in the third and final series, when the girls have grown up, their friendship, put to the test by individual events, is not enough to redeem them. In conclusion, the meaning of a series aimed at young teenagers, and so devoid of prospects, communicates the idea of a generation that experiences the world we are leaving them as a tunnel from which they cannot see the exitbut which must be furnished, adapting to the darkness and the sense of death that constantly passes through it.
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Antonella Baccaro’s articles on I Woman and on Corriere della Sera.