Cassie’s crazy walk in Euphoria features all of LA’s architecture and the end of its myth

“Cassie was becoming huge,” says Rue, the protagonist played by Zendaya in Euphoria, the HBO teen drama in its highly anticipated third season, as Sydney Sweeney grows at an incredible speed until she breaks through her bedroom ceiling and becomes taller than all the towers in Los Angeles.

Followers of her OnlyFans page have reached 50,000, and now Cassie—a character director Sam Levinson built by blending the Maga movement, suburban life in the United States, trad wives, and online pornography—has finally become famous and can set out to conquer LA.

The scene is incredible: Sweeney makes her way through the traffic and skyscrapers of Downtown LA, the city’s financial center, then climbs the mountain of the Hollywood Sign. Meanwhile, she destroys police cars, scares passersby, and spies on a follower through an administrative office window while he masturbates to a photo of her. But above all, she demolishes some of the most symbolic architecture of the City of Angels. It looks like an apocalyptic version of Buildings and Bikinis, the Instagram page that showcases semi-naked female bodies in front of American skyscraper skylines.

The reference to Godzilla is explicit—and stated by Levinson himself—who, to film the sequence, had a massive physical model of Los Angeles built over a year by the series' miniatures team as an homage to old Japanese and Hollywood monster movies. The set consisted of mobile modular blocks, with miniature buildings, trees, streetlights, and even helicopters built to scale with the actress's body, thus almost completely avoiding CGI and achieving the physical effect of old disaster movies. 

However, if the Japanese Godzilla destroyed the Tokyo of post-war reconstruction—its modern infrastructure, the Tokyo Tower, the symbols of the economic boom—and was born from the nuclear anxiety of post-war Japan, Euphoria’s Cassie-zilla instead denounces the crisis of great Hollywood cinema and its city. The end of the Los Angeles myth.

The architectures destroyed by Cassie are indeed all, in their own way, symbols of a Los Angeles that no longer exists: the Hollywood sign, the Downtown skyscrapers, the boulevards named after old movie stars, and the historic theaters of the Broadway Theater District. It is precisely against the Orpheum, the movie palace opened in 1926 and which has become a living archive of Hollywood imagery over time, that Cassie throws a police helicopter that had arrived to help, tossing it with her blonde ponytail. 

It is clear: through Cassie’s evolution—from child skating prodigy to trad wife to online erotic creator—Levinson is criticizing, not without a certain misogyny, the new forms of algorithmic fame and digital pornography that are replacing the classic star system. And this is, ultimately, the theme running through the entire, much-criticized third season of Euphoria. But there is more: while Cassie destroys cinema and celebrity as we knew them, Levinson is also paying them tribute. And he does so in the city that, more than any other, lives on the myth of simulation and continuous exposure.

This is not a new idea. Back in 1990, Mike Davis described in City of Quartz a Los Angeles where cinema, set design, and real life completely coincide. For Davis, LA was a permanent set, a city stuck in the continuous representation of itself, while Downtown was primarily a simulation of wealth made of skyscrapers that were often empty and never truly lived in. Beneath the glamorous surface, however, lay a fragile city marked by fires, riots, and inequality.

Perhaps it took Euphoria to bring Mike Davis into pop imagery. Or perhaps not, because the events that have swept through the American city in recent years seem to speak for themselves: from the fires in the Pacific Palisades, which hit its most iconic architecture, to the progressive disappearance of the palm trees that built the cinematic landscape of LA as we know it, to the Hollywood screenwriters who went on strike for 148 days in 2023 with economic damage said to have exceeded 6 billion dollars. 

Ultimately, it is not just the buildings of Los Angeles that are collapsing, but the cinematic backdrop through which the city has told its story for a century. And Euphoria has understood this well.