EUPHORIA, SEASON THREE - EPISODE EIGHT
That scene becomes even more interesting if we read the verse not just as a religious condemnation of idolatry, but as a symbolic image within Rue's journey. The passage her mother shows her is:
"Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of men's hands."
And shortly after, the psalm continues:
"They have mouths, but they speak not:
eyes have they, but they see not..."
"Those who make them are like unto them;
so is every one that trusteth in them."
If we think of Euphoria, the most obvious reading would be: the drug as an idol. Rue places her trust in something created by human hands — chemical substances, pills, syringes, a whole system of production and consumption. Something that promises transcendence, relief, salvation.
But there is a deeper reading.
In the dream, the mother is already dead. Dreams usually condense ideas into symbols. In this context, the verse may not be speaking only about drugs. It may be speaking about the false images that Rue worships.
Throughout the series, Rue frequently treats certain experiences as absolute:
- • the drug;
- • romantic love;
- • escaping the pain;
- • the very narrative she constructs about herself.
All these things are, in a way, "works of human hands." Constructions. They are not ultimate realities.
The psalm insists that idols have eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear.
This dialogues in a striking way with chemical dependency.
The person keeps looking at the world, but stops seeing it.
Keeps hearing others, but stops listening to them.
Keeps living, but part of the experience becomes numb.
There is still a layer that seems especially sad for a dream scene with the mother.
The psalm establishes an opposition between what is alive and what is dead.
The idols seem alive, but they are not.
God is invisible, but alive.
Rue spends the entire series chasing substitutes for life: drugs, fantasies, idealizations. Things that seem alive because they produce emotional intensity, but which ultimately reveal themselves incapable of loving back.
The mother, in the dream, might be pointing precisely to that:
"You are giving your life to something that cannot respond."
It is an idea very close to that observation by Simone Weil that idolatry consists in attributing absolute reality to what does not possess it.
And there is a beautiful literary coincidence here.
There is also the phrase attributed to Breton in season two, episode eight (2022):
"All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name."
Breton sees desire as a compass for something hidden and real.
Psalm 115 asks the inverse question:
"What if you are seeking this unnamable thing in the wrong places?"
Perhaps that is why the scene is so disturbing. The mother is not just warning Rue about drugs. She is asking what she is worshiping. What she expects to save her. And if that which she surrenders to really has life inside it.
Read this way, the passage ceases to be a moral sermon and becomes an existential question — a question that runs through the entire series:
What are we using to fill a hunger that perhaps has a different name than the one we imagine?