Nudity Versus Objectification: a Sam Levinson Critique
Akanksha Joshi questions how nudity has been portrayed by Sam Levinson, American filmmaker and actor, in his television shows Euphoria and The Idol.
Sam Levinson, the creator of recent television shows Euphoria and The Idol, is infamous for the controversially graphic nude scenes within his work. While one may argue that it is intentional to involve a supposed shock factor, it begs the question of when one should draw the line between nudity and objectification in film.
Euphoria
Sam is more often than not accredited for his work on the Emmy-winning HBO drama series, Euphoria, with its second season becoming a worldwide sensation in 2022, garnering an average of more than 16 million views per episode. Within the show, there is a lot to genuinely appreciate, with the most common praise going to its cinematography style, camera movements, and especially lead actress Zendaya’s performance, who won Emmys for both seasons in 2020 and 2022. However, the shock factor within the show remains up for debate.
“Shock factor” refers to the dramatization of a graphic event to make a viewer feel disturbed or elated. A particular scene in Euphoria (out of many) is an example of this: a montage of over 20 penises in a high school male locker room that supposedly portrays how one of the characters was feeling overwhelmed at that moment.
While the show’s primary focus is on its main character Rue, a recovering teenage drug addict, who was heavily inspired by Levinson's struggles with addiction, it also centers around the lives of teenagers going through the trials and tribulations of adolescence, touching on more serious themes such as domestic abuse, violence and discovering their sexuality. Often, when people talk about the nudity in Euphoria most of the criticism goes to the character of Cassie, portrayed by Sydney Sweeney.
Cassie is one of the main characters on the show. Popular in high school, the embodiment of the beauty standards heralded amongst American women — blonde hair, big blue eyes, big breasts, and a tiny frame — she encapsulates male desire. Her story in the show revolves around wanting love and tackles her relationship with requiring male validation. Her story in itself is quite relatable and has great potential to be showcasing something a lot of people struggle with. This is arguably even portrayed in Season One which focuses on this struggle, as she tended to be a doormat for men to walk all over her. In her previous relationships with men she had been exploited — coercion into taking nudes or filming sex tapes (which would eventually spread around to the whole school) only to abandon her after.
Through flashbacks of her childhood, we are exposed to how this behavioural pattern is a symptom of something deeper. As a child, her father, the person she was the closest to and who dreamt of her being a professional figure skater, left the family. Her yearning for male validation therefore appears to be a desire to recreate that safe space that she once shared with her father. As she grows up, that dream of figure skating also fades away.
In the first season, Cassie gets pregnant, which leads to her and her boyfriend, college student McKay (Algee Smith) breaking up and her aborting the foetus. During her abortion scene, the doctor asks her to close her eyes and think of something nice and we have a montage of her ice skating on the screen. This is a powerful homage to Cassie’s childhood dreams.
Sydney Sweeney said about her character:
“For Cassie, it was like this dream space she got to go to. When she was little, her dad wanted her to be the professional ice skater, and she wanted to be that for him and that dream never came true. So when she went there and she closed her eyes and listen to the music, that’s what she dreamed about: her dreams coming true. It’s symbolizing, in a way, that still has a part of her.”
By the end of Season One, we see as she takes a resolution to be on her own and not dwell on male validation, that there has been some form of character growth. Our perception of her changes from just her sexuality to a more nuanced individual with real dreams. While there are moments we feel bad for her, we see her grow as a person and appreciate her character. While Sydney does have nude scenes this season, I would argue that they are well-integrated into the plot and don’t present her as a sexual object.
Conversely, Season Two shows how Cassie regresses and becomes the embodiment of “hurt people hurt people” as she doesn’t take her Season One resolution well; instead entering into a secret relationship with her best friend’s long-term abusive ex-boyfriend, Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi). She takes on a darker, almost sadistic persona of someone who would do anything they want to be loved, even if it is for a little bit. She ends up losing her friendships and being on a rough edge with her family as well. While her downfall is somewhat poetic, the show’s been criticized for her over-sexualisation in Season Two, especially in scenes that could be labelled unnecessary in progressing the plot. There are so many scenes where a brief make-out session would have conveyed the same message, and showcasing full-blown sex scenes feels repetitive and borderline uncomfortable. In Season Two we are made to view Cassie as a villain, a wounded bird turned predator, and any sense of relatability to her is destroyed.
Is relatability crucial? One could argue that it is realistic to see Cassie regress and behave immorally, almost, as it is human. When there is no sense of relatability to a person, if their entire backstory and sense of relatability are disregarded, we are more likely to objectify them. A character can be perverse and unrelatable, but Cassie’s plot development appears to be disregarded and replaced by sexualisation; it feels like Sam Levinson is commodifying Cassie and her trauma throughout the season. Cassie has so much scope as a character but it all gets disregarded and she is sexualised a lot more.
The Idol
The Idol starring Lily-Rose Depp and Abel Tesfaye, known more popularly by his monicker The Weeknd, was first brought into the media spotlight this summer when The Rolling Stone published an article calling it "Twisted Torture P*rn", and it has only gotten bad press since then. From the Cannes film festival reviews to a 22% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, things haven't been good for the show since its release and a major aspect of the discussions is the creepiness of the nudity involved.
The show's premise itself held potential: it follows the story of Jocelyn, played by Depp, a rising pop star, and presents how the music industry can lead one to ruin. Jocelyn has been through a lot; with her mother passing away and her having a nervous breakdown, causing her to cancel her tour. As a result, her mental health state is not the best at the beginning of the series and she meets Tedros (played by The Weeknd) whose character aims to take advantage of her and introduce her to his cult. By the end of the series, Jocelyn becomes the cult leader and we find out that (spoiler alert!) she is the villain all along. Sounds familiar?
Why of course, this is another classic Sam Levinson move of showing a wounded bird turned predator, except the execution here was terrible so that was the only noticeable thing. It also feels bizarre to present the victim (a young girl in an industry out to profit off her) as the real villain, when there are endless real-life examples of young child stars or idols who were taken advantage of and who spiraled or suffered greatly in recent times — Britney Spears, Amanda Bynes, Lindsay Lohan, Justin Bieber, to name a few. Presenting Jocelyn as the real villain doesn’t seem so much jaw-dropping or shocking; instead, it seems to mock or ridicule the actual vulnerability and experiences that actual victims of the industry experience. This is simply scratching the surface. I have not yet touched on the insanity of the sex scenes within the show.
More than half the show is just bizarre BDSM moments fetishising Jocelyn's sadness. We later find out that Jocelyn’s mother was abusive, and would often physically hurt her with different items including a hairbrush. And how is that information used… in a sex scene involving that very hairbrush of course!
What is more aggravating is that there was SO much potential in a show about stardom pressure! Celebrity breakdowns due to industry pressure are a real issue and I would have loved to watch something similar to how the industry and public pressure ruined so many stars like Britney Spears. In The Idol, we see Jocelyn going through trauma but it’s all just left as threads with loose ends; the only fully fleshed-out scenes are the sex scenes. We don’t get to see her trauma in play other than the sex scenes where we are left to interpret a supposed power dynamic. To make myself clear, having a sex scene in itself poses no issue, it's the fact that everything so interesting about the character is just disposed of, or rather used to fetishise them into this “broken girl who gets abused” trope.
I couldn't stop thinking about how we've seen this pattern in his work before. Be it The Idol or Euphoria, Sam doesn't seem to find an issue in telling stories in this light, and it's funny to see people only now realizing the problem with his nude work from The Idol, which was quite prevalent on Euphoria as well.
There are ways to tell a story by giving a neutral perspective. Other TV shows like Sex Education also focus on teenagers and specifically on them discovering their sexuality, with instances of nudity. However, they tie in well with the story without fetishising or degrading women, and instead empowering them and their stories.
The issue is even more obvious when the actors who play these over-sexualised characters, Sydney Sweeney or Lily-Rose Depp, are even sexualised in real life to a disgusting extent. Sydney Sweeney holds so much potential as an actor, but the majority of roles she is offered now involve her nudity. Her equally serious work which does not involve nudity like Reality, is also very lesser known to the audience. On the other hand, other actors with nude scenes which do not involve fetishising their characters, are not as susceptible to sexualisation outside their role. This begs the question on the ethics behind subjecting these actors themselves to acting in such scenes.
In some of the narrating lines in Euphoria's very first episode, the narrator excuses one of the male characters choking a female character during sex, saying that if you look up the most popular videos on Pornhub, they all involve some sort of violence toward women, and indirectly tells us that the show is an ironic portrayal of how sick the real world is. This may be true; however, again depicting a visual of a man choking a woman on-screen but aestheticised does not seem to critique but rather reinforce such repulsive ideologies. No amount of glitter or supposed irony justifies storytelling with a narrative that portrays women in such a light, even if it is representative of the real world. Levinson is not "ironically" representing what society is but instead feeding into those fetishes. Most people aren't going to tune into Euphoria or The Idol and think of how nasty the world is, but instead are going to watch it for the sexual degradation of women. And honestly, calling it a supposed satirical representation of society should not be an excuse to disguise your fantasies on TV.
Overall, I think Sam Levinson’s take on on-screen nudity, even if it's really for the “shock factor” or simply because sex sells, really makes you question the ethics of filmmaking, filmmakers like him, and the world we live in. I can’t help but think, is nudity really okay at the cost of commodification of those involved?