She meets up with DominateDaddy at a shady hotel, where he's revealed to be Cal Jacobs, Nate's dad. In season one of Euphoria, we watch Jules try her hand at online dating, and she matches with a man who goes by the online alias DominateDaddy. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.What's on Cal Jacobs's DVD, and How Does Nate Find It? After decades of stories in which queer desire has occupied the margins - among secondary characters, always an exception to the rule - Euphoria not only centers it as a vehicle of near limitless possibility, it also forces us to consider the damage that’s been born of its denial all these years. Euphoria doesn’t just deliver a bracing and penetrative look at the evolving ecosystem in which kids do so today it flips the script to interrogate the rules that have governed the system all along. Both men are time bombs ticking closer and closer to self-destruction, a negation that Euphoria considers the inverse of the regenerative and freely expressed love between Rue and Jules.įighting with one’s parents and sexual discovery have always been hallmarks of teenage life, on screen and off. Overflowing and with nowhere to go, Cal’s rage sits back behind closed doors while Nate pounds his into the floor. The finale’s father-son wrestling match, which seems to begin as an almost-kiss, brings these dynamics to a crescendo. These feelings drive his violent behavior toward Maddy, shunning her too-revealing outfit before grabbing her by the throat at the carnival, and again wringing her neck when she wonders if he might be attracted to men since he can’t get hard in bed. Nate shows clear disgust with queer attraction, both his father’s and likley his own, as evidenced by the dick pics Maddy discovers on his phone and his potentially genuine fascination with Jules. The Jacobs men share a rage rooted in self-hate, one that clearly demonstrates the correlation between homophobia and misogyny. Rather, it is the bottling up and denial of queer desire, by both Cal and Nate, that leads them to one explosion after another. Not only does the series’ central, heart-pounding romance consider queer love a kind of holy elixir against the world’s troubles, but the denial and repression of such attraction, by both Nate and his father Cal, ignites and fuels a toxic misogyny that blazes a path of destruction through the entire season. The sex may have been rough, and certainly power-imbalanced, but Jules doesn’t consider herself victimized she gets what she wants from many such encounters, too. The fact that he’s committed satutory rape, at least with his hookup with Jules, isn’t framed as the worst of it (except insofar as he’d face legal consequences should word get out). Cal’s desire for young, gender-variant teens - one he locks tight in his home office’s drawer and behind hotel doors, in the form of obsessively-catalogued pornography and clandestine, bone-chilling hookups - catalyzes the conflict that binds Euphoria’s central characters together. But the glimmer in their eyes (and the glitter often surrounding them) prove that theirs is the kind of love Euphoria asks us to consider heaven-sent.Įlsewhere, among the broken relationships of nearly every parent on the series, and especially in the Jacobs’ household, heterosexuality seems far from an ideal pursuit. Their relationship is far from perfect (Jules has never stopped showing interest in other people Rue is likely codependent) and remains altogether undefined. There’s no hiding from friends or family, no shame or embarrassment, no need for anyone to come out about anything. Rue’s sister (Storm Reid) calls it first both of their parents start asking after the special person in their lives without any hint of judgement or questions about sexual orientation. The revelation that their friendship may be blooming into romance is the season’s emotional climax, the culmination of the churning and cacophonous fourth episode following everyone’s exploits at the town fair. While Euphoria divides its attention among an ensemble of characters, presenting each one and their pyschosexual development on their own terms, Rue and Jules are its clear romantic protagonists.
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