Euphoria’s Nate Jacobs at first seems like he has it all: a beautiful girlfriend, the spot as the quarterback on the football team, a comfortable home, popularity at school – so you’d think he’d be a pretty happy guy. But a happy guy Nate Jacobs most certainly is not. He’s a dangerous and spiteful presence, his anger and intensity fusing to form something much darker than your run of the mill teen meanness.
“I don’t want your apology. I just want revenge.”
So why is Nate so miserable – and so prone to taking his misery out on everyone else? Let’s take a deeper look at Nate’s story to analyze what’s really going on behind all of that anger – and what the true takeaway of his story really is.
Hypermasculinity
One of the first things that becomes clear about Nate is his dedication to hypermasculinity. He isn’t happy to just be a tough guy, he has to be the strongest and most powerful person in any room. At 6 foot 5, it’s not hard for him to come across as a major presence, but he also always makes sure to turn things up a notch so that his presence is unavoidable. His life isn’t focused around his own wants or interests, but solely on attaining all of the things that he believes will signal his complete mastery over masculinity: the perfect body, excelling at sports, a hot girlfriend, etc. But he didn’t come to this focus all on his own, it was forced upon him by his father, Cal.
“His dad, Cal, was obsessive. His mom always said that’s who he got it from.”
Cal was disappointed in his older son for being too free, too artistic, but could see a toughness and darkness in Nate that he could exploit and use to mold him into his own idea of what a man ‘should’ be. Cal had centered his own life around suppressing his true self through creating a tough outward shell of over-the-top masculinity, and this crushing of his inner self caused him to hurt others as an outlet to deal with the hurt he was causing himself. As he continued to mold his son in his own image, Nate began to take on that trait as well.
Nate not only feels like he can’t open about any of his own feelings – he’s learned to repress them so much that he’s often not even sure what he’s really feeling. This impacts every aspect of his life, including his ability to form relationships and his understanding of his own sexuality (which we’ll go into in a moment.) By the time we meet him on the show, he’s reached a point where the only way he’s able to deal with his feelings is to lash out at those around him. He’s violent and aggressive in every meaning of the words: he attacks people physically and verbally, and even sexually – one of the very first things we learn about him was that he tried to assault Rue at a dance. Because he only sees the world as an area, he’s always looking for a fight – he can’t see any way to connect with the people around him outside of trying to dominate them.
Inability to form connections
This lack of ability to form connections means that he is essentially alone. He might have a lot of people in his orbit, but he doesn’t have anyone that knows the real him, anyone that he can really open up to. And even when he does manage to find people who do care about him, he makes them regret it. He might be able to play the role of a loving, caring guy for a while, but he can’t keep his darker nature at bay forever and so eventually things start to fall apart as the real Nate begins to seep out. Because of his focus on domination, most of the time showing he ‘cares’ is really just him being overtly aggressive and framing it as love.
Because Nate is so closed off and hard to read, everyone around him comes to be more interested in the idea of him that they’ve projected onto him. This allows them to imagine him as someone different and better than the angry, abrasive guy that he actually is, and so when he does lash out they can tell themselves that that’s not the real him. His teammates (much like his father) want to imagine him as the cool, capable leader. His family want to pretend he’s well adjusted even though he obviously isn’t. Maddy, for a time, wanted to hold onto the idea that he would be the dashing, strong other half in her dream power couple. It’s very hard for her to shake the hold of this idea of what he could be, what she wants him to be, and accept who he truly is (but thankfully, she eventually does.) Cassie’s conception of Nate is essentially completely divorced from reality. She imagines that being with him will allow her to have that perfect, unbreakable love that she’s always been searching for, that she feels will complete her. But in reality, he hides her away, treats her like garbage, and has zero concern for her or her feelings.
The only time Nate is able to form anything resembling a real connection with another person is when he’s able to completely hide himself. When he connects with Jules on a dating app, he’s pretending to be someone else. Under the cover of anonymity, he’s able to reveal things about himself and his feelings that he would never share with anyone in real life. But, of course, the darkness is never too far away – when he finally reveals who he really is to Jules, he becomes upset at her for being mad about his deception and decides to blackmail her. She, rightfully, keeps her distance from him from there on (though she does have a hard time fully letting go of the idea of that person she was chatting with that she liked so much.) Nate continues to have Jules on his mind, too, and – while it certainly doesn’t negate all of the pain and suffering he caused – does try to do one act of kindness for her.
“What, did you become a good person?” “No, no, absolutely not.” “I came here with a box cutter in my sleeve. That’s how little I trust you.”
Not loyal to anyone but himself
In addition to all of his lying and lashing out, a big reason that Nate can’t connect with anyone else is because he isn’t loyal to anyone but himself. While someone like Maddy is always willing to stand up for and be there for her friends, Nate is only ever interested in himself. He only really cares about other people insofar as he can use them for his own gain, or to boost his own ego. He was raised with an ‘it’s you against the world’ mentality, and so constantly operates under the assumption that everyone else is out to get him.
“No one in this world will ever root for you. They’ll see what I see and they’ll despise you for it. Sometimes you’ll know and sometimes you won’t, but the farther you go, the sharper their blade. Just don’t ever give them an opening.”
He can’t let anyone in because he feels like he has to build up walls to keep anyone from getting too close – because if they get close, then they might be able to really hurt him. And so because he is only ever looking out for number one, he has no problem hurting everyone else on his path to whatever he wants. He blackmails Jules, nearly kills the guy that Maddy hooked up with (and then blackmails him, too,) abuses Maddy, sneaks around with Cassie while trying to get with Maddy, manipulates Cassie and treats her like garbage even when they are officially together… the list goes on and on. In his effort to build himself into a pillar of masculinity, he has made sure that he is always standing alone.
Unable to explore his sexuality
A big question about Nate, even within the world of the show, is about his sexuality. Because of the hypermasculine (and homophobic) environment he was raised in, he never had the chance to really explore his own sexuality. He is vehemently against any kind of male connection or contact – but this begins to come across (even to him) as him trying to avoid a deeper truth.
“He loved the crowds, the cheers, the feeling of winning, but he hated being in the locker room.”
He seems to date and sleep with girls because it’s what’s expected of him, rather than out of any real desire – and he’s constantly trying to reaffirm to himself that he is not interested in anything even remotely masculine.
“He hated girls who sat like boys, talked like boys, acted like boys, but there was nothing on planet Earth he hated more than body hair.” But, in spite of all of this, an interest in men clearly still remains to some degree. Because he found his father’s video stash so early in life, he wonders if his feelings are really his own, or just molded by the acts he saw his father doing. But because he sees being gay as something that would be entirely unmasculine – and therefore something he could never be – he continues to reject the idea. When Maddy finds salacious images of men on his phone, and tries to be understanding and get him to open up and be honest about himself, he freaks out and shuts her down.
The assumption that Nate hiding his inner queerness is the singular reason that he’s so angry and dangerous falls into the Closeted Homophobe Trope, which has a lot of issues – many of which we unpacked in this video. But his feelings around his sexuality are one more part of himself that he feels he needs to hide and repress in his desire to feel like he has total control over his life.
Obsession with always being in control
Nate feels driven to be in control of every situation in his life at all times – he can’t handle the idea of something not going the way he wants, or someone not doing what he wants them to do. He spends so much of his mental effort on trying to repress and control and cage his inner self, that he feels like he should also have that kind of control over everything else, too. He thinks that if he can just use everyone like pawns in his own game of chess, then he can bend reality from being the way it actually is into what he wants it to be. And anytime that doesn’t work, he blows up.
“Keep your mouth shut. Don’t try to ruin my life, and I won’t have to ruin yours.”
We can see this in every facet of his life, from his intense exercise and nutrition regimen, to the way he treats his ‘friends’, to his very specific ideas about how women “should be”.
His obsession with control really rears its head in his relationships. He likes Maddy when he feels like she’s under his thumb, living her life to impress him – but whenever she stands up for herself as her own person, he becomes irate. Because Maddy does have a sense of self outside of him, she eventually is able to leave him for good – but even then, he makes sure to break his way into her life just to scar her one last time, because his favorite thing about being with Maddy was feeling like he had power over such a powerful person. His relationship with Cassie is at first just what he wants – she’s willing to change literally everything about herself to make him happy, to be hidden away, to do whatever he says. But when his treatment starts to crack even her resolve, and he starts to feel like he’s losing control over her, he freaks out. He believes that in every relationship he’s in, power should only flow one way: to him.
One reason he’s so drawn to Jules is because she seems to represent a level of personal freedom and control over one’s own life and person that he can’t even fathom. She’s working to live the life she wants on her own terms. Things certainly don’t always go her way, but instead of trying to force everything around her to bend to her will, she works on building herself into the person she wants to be and going out and finding the people and places and situations that make her feel fulfilled. Nate goes in the opposite direction, closing himself off more and more from the world around him in an effort to feel like he’s still able to exert control over himself – it never makes him happy, but he’s too afraid to try to live any other way.
CONCLUSION
Nate Jacobs is very clearly not a good guy, and the show taking time to dig into his villainy and unpack what’s going on underneath the surface gives us an opportunity to analyze him on a deeper level. We can better see what’s driving him to behave the way he does, and why so many other characters seem to be pulled in by him even though he’s so obviously bad. Projections can be powerful – whether they’re ones you’re foisting onto someone else, or ones you’re burying yourself within. If we do ever get that post-high school season of Euphoria, we might finally get to see Nate learn from his mistakes and change, but… we’re not holding out hope.
“Do me a favor, just don’t take your anger out on me.” “Why would I be angry at you?” “‘Cause you’re an angry guy.”