There are few sentences which fill me with more dread in modern media than 'Executive Producer: Sam Levinson'. It's not to say all of his stuff is terrible. I like Euphoria, even with its more erratic episodes and progressively looser themes, and my movie of the year in 2022 was X. But many of Levinson's projects are framed by sex, violence, and sexual violence - Euphoria and X are no exception, but they at least weave these proclivities into the main story. His latest show, The Idol, is instead a sick exercise in pushing the boundaries as far as he can.
Th🦩e Idol was created with Reza Fahim and Abel Tesfaye, the latter of whom is better known as The Weeknd and who stars in the show. Levinson and Tesfaye have been described by HBO as “sick and twisted minds” (in a positive way) in the marketing materials, but the studio might be starting to regret how prophetic those words were. The show is already allegedly way behind schedule, with insiders noting it was due to premiere in October, and still has no release date. The reason for that is likely the reshoots Levinson is insisting on to ensure🍰 his most disgusting ideas make the final cut.
Amy Seimetz was initially directing but left last April, leading Levinson to step in and reshoot. The problem, according to Tesfaye, is that the show had too much of a “female perspective". The project was almost finished, and . In particular, two scenes have been a sticking point for Levinson. Seimetz originally cut them, but Levison intends to double down. In the first, Tesfaye slams Lily-Rose Depp's (the protagonist) face into a wall until she bleeds, which she enjoys, giving Tesfaye an erection. In another, Depp inserts an egg into her vagina, and asks Tesfaye to rape her if she breaks it.
These are clearly an evolution of the controversies in Euphoria. It feels as if Levinson struck gold with Euphoria, casting three relative unknowns in Sydney Sweeney, Hunter Schafer, and Jacob Elordi, as well as a superstar in Zendaya right before she caught fire. The show's first season was praised for its acting, but criticised for the rough sex scenes with Sweeney, and Schafer's storyline where she sells anal sex to older men. In the second season, rather than give its brightest stars a greater platform to shine, key storylines were almost entirely abandoned in favour of more sex and more violence. Levinson has so far courted controversies with the most extreme scenes he feels he can get away with, and with each new project, has pushed it further - with The Idol, he has finally gone too far.
Levinson's career began when he directed Operation: Endgame and Another Happy Day in 2010 and 2011. Both were minor movies with casts more stacked than they deserved to be, possibly owing to Levinson's father Barry, who is best known for Good Morning Vietnam, The Natural, Rain Man (which he won an Oscar for), and most recently, Dopesick. Levinson is a nepo baby, and that might have aided his desire to push the envelope in search of identity or consequences. After that, Levinson took six years off from showbiz, returning to write the TV movie Wizard of Lies, which was directed by his father. He then directed Assassination Nation, a cult hit but box office bomb which showcased a lot of what Levinson was about - it was hyperviolent, oversexed, and starred teenagers.
The plot revolved around four girls, one of whom was transgender, being hunted by the local town because they are suspected of leaking everyone's phone messages, which reveal, you guessed it,) highly salacious sexual secrets. There's also an extremely violent scene where a teenage cheerleader has her skull caved in by another teenage girl wielding a baseball bat. After Assassination Nation came Euphoria, and he has never looked back.
Away from Euphoria and The Idol, which have been heavily controversial in ways I've already mentioned, all of Levinson's projects have a hint of this need to push things beyond. His directorial feature follow-up to Assassination Nation was Malcolm & Marie, which featured a cisgender director going on a strange monologue about how he doesn't deserve to be judged for using the male gaze and gratuitous female nudity because ‘what if he were transgender’, as well as two different scenes involving Zendaya urinating, plus gratuitous nude shots of her. There's also an episode of Euphoria where a significant chunk of the plot is dedicated to Zendaya using the toilet, and while those scenes are plot driven owing to her drug addiction and aim to show the gritty reality of the lengths she will go to, it’s still odd that his key muse, over a decade younger than him, has been given so many scenes involving her urinating.
After this he wrote Deep Water, a middling erotic thriller all about a woman repeatedly cuckolding her husband in more and more obvious and humiliating ways, enticing him into violence. It’s most famous for a scene where Ana de Armas gives Ben Affleck a blowjob while he's driving, which sees her pause to pick a pubic hair from her teeth before continuing.
Boundary pushing is not necessarily a negative. Repeated consolidation of media platforms into fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger conglomerates have made today a very risk-averse environment. For all Euphoria's flaws, I remember watching the first episode and seeing Jules in Rue's arms, asleep in her underwear, and seeing prominent bulge in her lace panties framed without sensationalisation. As a trans woman, I never expected to see that in popular media.
Art should push boundaries. But if it's not in pursuit of any statement or challenge to the status quo, only (and The Idol's seems to be) an attempt to check what he can get away with, and we've finally reached the limit where all of Levinson's tastes and tropes have combined into the most noxious and exploitative bile yet.