‘Supersex’ Episode 2 Recap: Tune In, Turned On, Drop Out

Can you lose yourself when you find yourself? Can you live your dream without living in a dreamworld? Can freedom be slavery? With his childhood and its painful formative incidents behind him, Rocco Tano (played as a young man by Saul Nanni) has moved on to Paris, literal and metaphorical miles away from the provincial life he knew. His brother, mentor, and idol Tommaso is by his side. But he’s soon to discover that the energy inside him, once tapped, can’t be stopped up again. It will determine the course of his life, its power greater than that of money, friendship, family, ambition, fear, and love combined. So is he taking control, or losing it?

Supersex Episode 2 (“The Flesh”) traces Rocco’s early time in Paris, under the tutelage of his mobbed-up brother. Tommaso gets Rocco a good job at the restaurant that a Corsican outfit uses to launder their money, and lets him stay at the apartment he shares with Lucia (now played by Jasmine Trinca), who’s still his girlfriend.

But Tommaso’s got weird ideas about how to show his brother a good time, many of which involve quasi- or not-so-quasi-incestuous sexual incidents. Most notably, he treats the pair of them to blowjobs side by side in Pigalle, the city’s red light district, during which he caresses Rocco’s face and moans “Oh, brother” and kisses his head when he cums. You start to think it might be nice if Rocco were to have an important sexual experience that didn’t directly involve his immediate family at some point. 

When he does, it’s in the form of Sylvie (Jade Pedri), the younger sister of one of Tommaso’s French connections. Their initial romance is both sexy and sweet — the scene where Rocco sucks on Sylvie’s finger in church, hoo boy. But when the time comes for him to make love for the first time, it’s a disaster. The size of his penis makes intercourse difficult — indeed, it’s the reason he hasn’t had it yet. Frustrated, he ignores Sylvie’s words of gentle encouragement, flips her over, fucks her roughly, and orgasms quickly, all the while ignoring her obvious discomfort. 

After that, the relationship is effectively over, but his sex drive kicks into high gear. He begins fucking everything that moves except Sylvie, whom he almost appears to resent for the unpleasantness of his first time. Instead, he drifts into the world of an underground sex club, and that’s where he feels he truly belongs.

In this environment — of the perverts, for the perverts, by the perverts — he finds the freedom and happiness he’d always dreamed of but never achieved. It’s his childhood dream of Supersex come true, a world of nothing but flesh and lust and pleasure. He doesn’t say it, the show doesn’t say it, but it’s also a world with no Tanos in it — not even Tommaso, whom he learns with dismay has been pimping Lucia out in Pigalle. The painful childhood memories of poverty, abuse, his family’s dysfunction, the death of his brother Claudio: They all disappear there. “Peace,” says his voiceover, “is an explosion, a scream, an orgy.”

Tommaso’s not feeling it. Whatever his own weird sexual proclivities are, wearing a leash and licking women’s boots aren’t among them. That’s not fucking, that’s getting fucked, and that’s a no-no.

Not to Rocco it isn’t, though. To Rocco, the magic of all of this is that there is no difference between the two. It’s all one big continuity of flesh, and he wants to experience every inch there is — cis or trans, top or bottom. Going with that flow feels blissful. Of course it does: He’s no longer fighting agains the current raging inside him. He just has no way of knowing how far that current will take him, and to what end.

For now, at least, it seems to be taking him somewhere healthier than where his brother wants him to go. Skipping out on a cryptic but definitely illegal and most likely violent “job” in Marseille with Tommaso and his connection, he instead returns to the club. There, he discovers he’s taking part in an impromptu live audition for some of the most prominent names in porn, Gabriel Pontello (Johann Dionnet), aka Supersex himself. It’s in that moment that literally transforms into his adult self, the future Rocco Siffredi — the self-image he’s been calling Supersex ever since he found that magazine. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a television show dig this deeply into the annihilatory power of sex, into its ability to make you forget not just the troubles of the day but troubles at all, its ability to make you feel like you’re everywhere and nowhere all at once. (In fact I may never have seen it tackled this directly by a show; this territory tends to be reserved for feature-length erotic bummers like In the Realm of the Senses or Last Tango in Paris.) The Supersex persona is liberating for Rocco because it’s his way of not being himself anymore, not even being a person anymore. He’s a force, an entity, an energy animating a penis with a vestigial human attached to it. 

There is, or can be, a form of self-actualization to be found in erasing yourself. It’s just that the frequent framing scenes from 2004, where Rocco appears to be contemplating suicide and is reunited with a Tommaso who may be a hallucination, indicate a real loss of self, one that the power of sex can no longer offset. The current has carried him too far.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.