Remember, even if you read just a bit of this, please hit the heart button below. Re-stacks and comments are super sweet too! I keep everything free here, and paid subscribers help me do that, so if you can chip in a little or buy me a coffee (buttons below) it helps so much!

Spoilers ahead. Like many of you, I love White Lotus and season three is my favorite of all three seasons. Mike White, who I just learned wrote for Dawson’s Creek and Freaks and Geeks (that tracks!) and created the gone-too-soon, Enlightened, about self-help and spiritualism run amok, brings his gay sensibility to American wealth like no one else. It’s fitting in this time Trump 2.0 and the grifting of the American people, that this show would speak to so many of us.

I can imagine the Ratliff family voting for Trump, especially Victoria. When Victoria, (Parker Posey) delights in her daughter Piper’s disgust over her one night stay in the monastery she planned to live in for a year—the food is vegetarian, but not like, good vegetarian, there’s no air conditioning, and the mattress is stained with the failed devotions of hundreds of Pipers—I can hear the ghosts of the Gilded Age robber barons clanking their chains with delight. Isn’t it fitting that Carrie Coon (Laurie) plays the wife of one such robber baron in The Gilded Age? She’s as ruthless in that show as she is sweet and sad in this one.

Our newest robber barons—the Trumps, the Musks, the Bezos, and the Zukerbergs would love what Posey’s Victoria has to say about wealth. As Piper sobs her guilty rich white lady tears, and her financially ruined father looks on with murderous disgust, Victoria opines:

We’re lucky, it’s true. No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have. Even the old kings and queens. The least we can do is enjoy it. If we don’t, it’s offensive. It’s an offense to all of the billions of people who can only dream that one day they could live like we do.

Posey in all of her drugged out beauty flits in an out of these moments of hilarious, privileged, white disgust throughout the show, but here she’s at peak Adam Smith. Gone are the rich’s obligation to charity and service that families like the Kennedys were taught was their purpose in life, and wow does it suck that we’ve got the anti-vaccine, heroin addict, conspiracy theorist Kennedy as our Secretary of Health and Human Services. Then again, why am I writing about the Kennedy men? Oh right, the job of the wealthy is to enjoy their wealth. It’s offensive to us poors to do otherwise.

Mike White’s brilliant decision to inject an MFM turned incestuous MMF threesome into season three is even more apt. Doesn’t it always seem like the Trump sons are dating shockingly similar versions of their sister and why does Trump talk about Ivanka like she’s some hot piece of ass he’d like to take out for a rape, I mean, date?

For those of us Gen X viewers who read V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic series as teens with equal parts horror and titillation, the plot fits. When Lochlan explains to Saxon that he gave him a hand job because he’s a people pleaser and he didn’t want Saxon to feel left out, he’s covering for a lifetime of broken sexual boundaries between siblings made possible by the parents, particularly Victoria’s refusal to do anything but laugh at their sexual transgressions with each other.

Okay, I’ve skeeved myself out.

White Lotus season three is also about rich people rubbing up against Buddhist philosophies and for the most part rejecting them. There’s Sam Rockwell’s brilliant monologue about falling apart in Thailand, questioning his own gender, and wondering if “maybe, what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls.”

What it would mean for Frank to become an Asian girl is anybody’s guess. For Frank, a white straight man, does it mean being malleable, fuckable, a true bottom? Does he want to be a sex worker, someone who uses her body to make a living? Or maybe he wants to transition?

There’s a snake eating its tail, ouroborosian idea of gender in Frank’s monologue—it’s not a fixed binary, but rather a circle, full of endless movement, and yet also kind of a trick because we can’t seem to ever quite escape it, at least not in Trump’s MAGA mind, where we are to obsess about gender forever.

When Rick and Chelsea visit a snake show, and in a fit of something, Rick lets all of the snakes free, we feel that same dangerous and intoxicating desire to be free of one’s constructed self. White Lotus asks us how we justify our basest instincts—jealousy, revenge, incest, murder, and blackmail—in order to feel free.

A snake bites Chelsea, a fan favorite, and arguably the most cosmic and perhaps Buddhist of any white person on the show. Chelsea is both a cliche of that hard partying British astrology girlie and a true believer. She won me over in the end, and I was truly sad to see her die because of her “amor fati” or I’d say, co-dependence with Rick.

I had NO IDEA that Jim Hollinger, Sritala’s wealthy American husband, would turn out to be Rick’s father. Historically, I’m not a good surprise twist guesser, but my daughter who is, said she was completely surprised too.

One big miss this season is White’s Thai women characters. There’s Mook, Giatok’s striving love interest, who is only interested in dating Giatok if he’s promoted and shows her he’s a man with ambition. There’s the narcissistic former actress and singer, turned wealthy hotel owner, Sritala, who in the season finale screams over and over at Giatok to shoot Rick. His reward is to become her driver, and win Mook. There are also the nameless sex workers who populate Frank and Rick’s wild night of partying in Bankok.

Iris (Yi Youn) Kim has a great Substack about this, “The White Lotus S3 Has an Asian Girl Problem.” Kim is much smarter than I am about White and Asian representation. I definitely wanted more for Mook. She could have become a complex character, with her own desires and dislikes, separate from a marriage plot. White did such a great job with the sex workers, Mia and Lucia, in season two—they pretty much run the villa and are the engine for many plot points, that I’d hoped he’d do the same for the sex workers in this season.

When Mook’s motorbike breaks down in the first episode and she flags a ride from Giatok, I remember thinking, Oh she’s going to be my favorite character. White kind of fails at the downstairs parts this season, aside from Giatok and Valentin. I’d also love to know more about Fabian, played by the German actor, Christian Friedel, whose last role was the concentration camp commander in, wait for it, The Zone of Interest.

I will say as a novelist, who is white and has written characters of color and tried to juggle multiple story lines, backstories, and plot twists, IT’S HARD TO GET EVERYTHING AND EVERYBODY RIGHT. Not giving Mike White a pass on anything, but I’ve never written a three season television hit under the demands of a studio system.

I’d sure like to try! If you’re reading this and you’re that producer who almost gave me a shot with my novel, The Not Wives, mommy is still here, and she’s ready to give it a whirl.

Last, but not least my favorite characters. Laurie and Belinda. Belinda comes to us fresh from season one, having been fucked over by Tanya, whose blithe offer to help her start her own spa gets lost when she falls for the murderous Gary/Greg. Belinda, is the only Black woman on the show, and the only Black person in paradise until she spots a Black family at the White Lotus and gives them a relieved nod. When she recognizes Greg for the murderer he is, she has a tough decision. Will she keep quiet, rat him out, or blackmail him?

Zion, Belinda’s son, shows up to pitch a deal to Greg that would make Jerry Maguire proud. I was delighted and horrified, gagged I guess (Belinda is too) by Zion’s invocation of Langston Hughes’ poem “What happens to a dream deferred?” to describe his mother’s long lost dream of opening a spa. Here’s the entire poem:

What Happens to a Dream Deferred?/ Does it dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?/ Or fester like a sore—/ and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat?/ Or crust and sugar over—/ like a syrupy sweet?/ Maybe it just sags/ like a heavy load. Or does it explode?”

Which is it for Belinda? When she gets the money (and wow does she), her spa dream vanishes into the muggy air of the resort. Echoing what Tanya did to her, she leaves behind Pornchai and their dream of opening a spa together. The look on his face is beyond bummed.

Buy Me a Coffee

There is so much rot and poison in this season of White Lotus, and though I’m happy for Belinda I worry about what happens to her character’s heart and sense of self when/if she’s implicated in the cover up of Tanya’s murder. Hughes, White, and so many other writers who tangle with this subject matter want us to consider how the pursuit of the American Dream is a rotted, sugar crusted, heavy load to bear.

No wonder I nearly gagged watching Timothy pull the poisonous seeds out of the fruit of the pong pong tree.

The moral center of the show shifts from Belinda to Laurie, who spends the week trying to keep up with her childhood best friends, only to end up hooking up with a Russian who asks for ten thousand dollars the minute after she comes. We’ve all been there.

Laurie cries at the beginning and end of the season, bookending us in catharsis. Here’s what she has to say in the finale:

That’s funny because if I’m being honest, all week I’ve just been so sad. I just feel like my expectations were too high or I just feel like as you get older, you know you have to justify your life and your choices and when I’m with you guys it’s just so like transparents what my choices were and my mistakes. I have no belief system. I mean I’ve had a lot of them. Work was my religion for forever, but I definitely lost my belief there. And then I tried love and that was just a painful religion made everything worse, and for me being a mother, that didn’t save me either, but I had this epiphany today. I don’t need religion or god to give my life meaning because time gives it meaning. We started this life together. We’re going through it apart but we’re still together and I look at you guys and it feels meaningful and I can’t explain it but even when we’re just sitting around the pool talking about whatever inane shit, it feels very fucking deep. I’m glad you have a beautiful face and I’m glad that you have a beautiful life, but I’m just happy to be at the table.

As a single mom who has certainly made her fair share of mistakes and has no belief system other than kindness, art making, and friendship, Laurie’s monologue resonated with me. I’m happy when I get to be a the table too, and perhaps the passage of time together is for many of us, what makes meaning out of our lives.

Like all great T.V. shows and movies, White Lotus is a continual asking of questions. Who gets a seat at the table is the most fitting one for a democracy rapidly sliding into oligarchy.

I haven’t written an ESSAY/ESSAY like this in a while, and it’s very much a secondish draft, so I hope you’ll forgive the rough spots.

As always, enjoy the typos!

xoxo

Carley

Leave a comment