Meme Report 6/4
The End of Euphoria
Euphoria
I was right and I was wrong about the finale. I wanted an apocalypse and instead I got a Christ figure. We’ll call it a draw. Of course Fez was our Jesus. I will say it is nice that Sam Levinson got to do a loving tribute to his friend and give him an ending that made the audience think fondly of him one more time. Is television not a kind of Holy Spirit? An otherworldly power that can raise from the dead and keep a moment of happiness suspended in time forever?
I thought the finale was fun. Sam Levinson accomplished the goal of making a movie about something else while the characters from his previous show, Euphoria were also there. It was an interesting challenge that he executed well in the end. In a perfect world does the show about teenage girls end with the middle 30 minutes totally focused on two middle aged men, one of whom we met in season 2 and the other in the current season? No but we do the best we have with what we are given. If season 3 of Euphoria has to be something, a Tarantino rip off is as good as anything else.
Rue did have to die, both narratively and metatextually. There was never going to be a fourth season and to end this long national nightmare, we had to make sure Rue couldn’t come back. She was the heart of the show and Zendaya didn’t want to do it anymore. As for the text of the show itself, I think someone has to pay for all this fun, and sure there were characters who could have been killed off and it would have been impactful, especially if you want your show to end in both a Fentanyl PSA and revenge fueled shootout in a strip club. Kill anyone else and the audience wouldn’t have cared.
I’m more upset about the Jules situation. The character who, at one point, was so important she had a stand alone episode released in the middle of the pandemic, got one minute of screen time in the finale. She was exactly where she started when the season began. I’ve heard rumors and read theories on why that is, but it makes me sad that the solution to whatever rift there may or may not have been was just to give up. Why couldn’t we do more with that fabulous 80s inspired neonoir apartment? I would have preferred a shoehorned exposition scene where everything magically works out for her. Jules reading a letter that she got into some program where she moves away and starts dating someone nice and lives in an even cooler apartment.
Cassie and Maddie get the best ending because they could most seamlessly fit into what the show had become by the time we got to the finale. They could be the pulp heroines Levinson so clearly wanted to be working with instead. Maybe it’s the teenage feminist in me fighting with the film school freshman in him but I find any praise of Cassie’s story to ring a bit hollow. I could see him trying to get away with something and I am never going to let that happen. There’s simply not enough substance there to make me think any attempt at story was not an excuse for yet another only fans sequence.
As for the real ending, the final shot and the last words, I don’t know. I just assume that every portrayal of fundamentalist christians is in some way ironic. The more genuine it feels, the more laced with irony it is. I see it not as an endorsement of Christianity but a total loss of hope in the outside world. After a life of sex, guns, and drugs the best one can hope for is absconding from society with the bible thumpers. To me, that’s a tragedy and not a ringing endorsement of that life.
Ali can give up because he’s seen and done enough. Having enacted his revenge there is nothing for him in greater society now, but what about the daughter with iPhone face? The liberal enlightened HBO audience wants her to escape but what’s out there? Of the lives we’ve been shown who should she model herself after? Certainly not Rue or Cassie or Maddie or Jules or Kitty or Faye or Magic or Angel who all were forced to use their bodies in one way or another to get into or out of a situation. The best she can hope for is Lexi who is safely a virgin at 24, but we know this girl won’t wind up like Lexi.
We’re supposed to feel more sympathy for the girl with iPhone face because beautiful women are more tragic. That’s as much the moral of Euphoria as anything else. We know what the world, specifically the world of the show does to girls with iPhone face and we know what awaits her on the other side of that homestead. But we also know the homestead is evil. Forgive me, but I think a Christian homestead is an understood version of evil to the Euphoria audience. I don’t think the ending is “Christianity Good.” I think you are supposed to see how this would appeal, not to the average person but to someone who has lost everything. It’s also about getting older and that teenagers seek euphoria and it ruins their lives. When all the hooting and hollering is done, we seek boredom and detachment from the rest of the world.
musicfashionfilm
Charli is back with another cover and another meme generator. Social Strategists and late comers will say she’s a genius for meeting the moment but I think she just knows who her fans are and how they use the internet, and not even in a Gen Z way. Pre-brat I would say 99% of Charli xcx fans were gay guys and women with a somewhat academic interest in music, specifically pop music. Where r/indieheads and r/popheads meet. tumblr girls with pale grunge and vintage blogs who were also reblogging Joan Didion’s on self respect in its entirety. These people know how to use photoshop but why not make it a little bit easier on them. She knows they are going to edit the album cover no matter what so why not meet them in the middle and give them a generator? It’s more like an act of codependency than anything else. I do this so you do this so I do this. A dance that plays out the same every time. I don’t like the added step of criticism from outsiders about whether or not she’s a “girls girl” because she picked three men to be on her cover. Eventually those people will stop caring or that marketing strategy will no longer work so they will stop creating AI bots that default to that argument.
Pride
I guess we’re really doing pride online this year huh? I didn’t realize it was time for an on year rather than the 4 consecutive off years we’ve had. It’s like Christmas in that occasionally we lose the thread and we have to remember to Do It Up. I wasn’t expecting this amount of old school pride posting and I guess that’s on me. Perhaps it’s because my involvement in pride activities has moved away from of screenshots of gay jokes in sitcoms written by gen x in an attempt to win over millennials and gen z and towards spending [redacted] dollars on party tickets to see every one i’ve ever met. I thought that was true of everyone but some people need to find community on the internet first. I just wish things could keep up with the times. Pride posting feels stuck in the buzzfeed era and only replicated by a certain kind of nerd. The internet used to be full of different kinds of LGBTQIA nerds who posted in all kinds of different ways. Now it seems to be all the same voice. Living on the internet used to be so much more fun and appealing.
All Expenses Paid
Twitter seems to be the only place an adult can ask another adult an imagination based essay question. Where else is a stranger asking you to defend your choice in an entirely made up scenario? Where else does anyone care? This question is neither special nor offensive but people made memes anyway. Mostly because a question like this (map based) inspires others to make their own version and we get to argue about our favorite question: which place is better? A question with a million arguments and no answer. If nothing else, a way to pass the time.
TikTok
Welcome to my house
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This is complete and utter nonsense but the fun kind. One iteration of fandom is imagining that the people one is a fan of, whether it be female directors, members of a baseball team, or characters on a tv show, are all friends with each other and like to hang out. Additionally, the people that one dislikes for political or personal reasons are disliked by the people one is a fan of. This meme is a very simple illustration of that imagined scenario. “Peak” in the names refers to their skills, ability, and overall quality. We know how we are supposed to feel about these characters before the scenario plays out. We know before Sophia PEAKola responds to Emerald MIDnell’s question how she will answer. This is a meme for bored teenagers burnt out from finals. When they all get out of school, the edits will be good again.
Its SUMMER
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As for the adults, for whom summer comes whenever the hot weather arrives, we have begun to make videos about going outside and drinking on the patio. I love when real life and the internet work in tandem. It works best in the summer when people are more conditioned for childlike fun. People are more willing to participate in a silly trend in the summer when they are already having fun. I hope to see this all summer long.
Drake
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This trend is exactly the same as the one before it except this one involves the clown prince of memes, Drake. While Kendrick Lamar may have won the feud, unfortunately Drake is forever in our hearts. I don’t want to endorse anything he does or stands for but there is something about him we’ll never be able to shake. The power of pop music is that no matter how evil we discover someone to be or how stupid and lame we find them, if we like the music we’ll let them stick around culturally. It helps that almost as long as he’s been famous, Drake has been a bit of a punching bag. If everyone calls you a loser, it becomes a part of the fabric of your celebrity and it stops mattering that you are one. I didn’t think we were done with Drake and in a way I think we never will be. This album so far has permeated the culture less than previous albums, (I found out this weekend it’s actually 3 albums, made up of 42 songs that aren’t hitting) but it’s not 0. We can try to defeat Drake but he has a teflon quality that makes him invincible and he makes music that girls like that sounds good in TikToks.