Review: The Poison Protein Shake Inside Us All
Why does moral ambiguity in 'The White Lotus' enthrall me?
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰✰½
Romance: ✰✰✰
Sex: ✰✰✰½
Storytelling: ✰✰✰✰✰
Performance: ✰✰✰✰✰
Yearning: ✰✰✰✰✰
Spoilers below for the finale of The White Lotus Season 3.
Written by Meg Steinfeld-Heim
Whether alive or dead, cosmically changed or in paradisal ignorance, we’ve made it through another week at The White Lotus. The survivors boarded the boat and the plane stowed the body bags. As usual, someone scorned waved goodbye from the shoreline. This season of Mike White’s COVID project was a slower burn than the previous two, but with the biggest episode order yet I was sitting pretty. While others were quick to call the first half of the season boring, I knew we needed to let him cook…and as each body splashed into the decorative moat or collapsed at the hands of a dirty blender in the 90-minute finale, I felt justified.
I’ve loved every season of The White Lotus. For me, my appreciation is founded in more than the killer (wink) combo of murder-mystery-plus-really-vile-rich-people-go-on-vacation. It has much more to do with the perfectly portrayed in-betweenness of the characters. From the moment they step foot into their villas, we witness them make wild choices: jerk off their own brothers, set venomous snakes free, steal weapons, and fail to tell their families that they’re heading to federal prison. We watch them on screen and think—why are they doing this? Can’t they just relax and enjoy being rich and/or beautiful? But, try as they might, vacation is a fresh canvas where your personal problems are not tucked into their usual corners of your day to day life. Everything’s a bit more out in the open. Time to find new coping strategies!
It’s easy for us to think, these people are ridiculous and I would never be like them. But then, like a shiny penny on the sidewalk, something familiar catches your eye: is it a reflection of you? Your mom? Your friend who’s in a decidedly different tax bracket? It only takes a subtle interaction between two characters to reveal a more human side of them than we expected. Our brains think we know what we’re getting—absurd, hateable rich people—and then we have to see a little bit more. Our judgement of them can’t be so black and white.
And don’t forget—The White Lotus is also fun. It’s vacation and lifestyle p*rn. We can’t all be Lochlans (“Yeah, I think I could live without money, Dad” 😀). Some of us are meant to live a comfortable life. This and the outrageous dialogue add so much self-aware humor to the show. The characters that Mike White crafts make me think, the luxury makes me horny, and the shenanigans and snark make me laugh. It’s like a spoonful of sugar to help the character medicine go down. (But I also like the taste of the character medicine.)
When I imagine Mike White working on the story arcs for Season 3, I see every character assigned an X and Y axis. One axis represents the spectrum of their wants and desires; the other, the range and weight of their morals, values and personal traumas. Where on the graph does a character start, and where will they end? Then, like the sick freak1 he is, White adds eight other character graphs to the wall and starts puzzle piecing a week in Thailand together, finding the precise right personalities and core wounds that will play off each other in a funny, fascinating and maybe slightly masochistic way.
No matter how big or unusual their personality, the satire is not in a rich hotel guest’s personal wounds, afflictions, desires, or curiosities. The satire is that, at the White Lotus, those characteristics will always result in them making the most extreme choice. But the wounds, afflictions, desires and curiosities themselves…those are all things we can understand. That is the uncomfortable reality we all sit with when we watch White Lotus.
The toxic force of the triangulation at play between Jaclyn, Laurie and Kate is like a phoenix rising from the ashes of my 7th grade friend group. They have known each other since they were kids and, as we see throughout the season, have push-pulled the power dynamics between them through 30-something years of friendship. When Laurie was divorcing her shitty husband or struggling at work, Jaclyn and Kate were supportive. But, privately–and to each other–they felt just a little bit better about themselves. At least it’s not me. When Kate reveals at dinner that her husband voted for Trump and that her politics might be…swinging a bit righter these days, Jaclyn and Laurie’s shock over this casual conservatism brings them briefly together. And while it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, because she’s so sweet (and paid for everyone’s trip to Thailand), Jaclyn is self-centered and obsessed with acting as if being hot and famous is a burden. Laurie and Kate can admit to each other that she’s always been like that. It’s a relief to be understood. And so, two will find common ground at the expense of another. That common ground will then alienate the third, making them feel insecure and rejected. And it’s really hard to be chill about something when you feel insecure and rejected.
The way that these friends were with each other was uncomfortably authentic; I saw glimpses of people I know, situations I’ve been in, and also, ugly parts of myself in the mix. Laurie and her pain is so real. While I may not be able to relate to jumping half naked from my hookup’s window, I intimately understand what it is like to compare yourself to friends and worry that you’ve come up short. Carrie Coon’s monologue in the finale was stunning– and I loved the way that it instantly cut the simmering tension between the three friends. She chooses this moment to show all her cards and be kind despite hurt feelings, halfhearted apologies and the feeling that everything is crumbling around her. Loving your friends like that is beautiful. (Quick: everyone's imperfections out on the table, now.)
This season was more subtle than the previous two and I think that’s refreshing. Don’t get me wrong, I am not tired of the club-worthy title themes and murderous gays. But when we look at the layout of a show from a longevity perspective, variety is good! As it is with boobs, so is it with Mike White’s work: these seasons are sisters, not twins. Pretend that analogy works for three seasons.
While the big machinations churned through (the reveal of Greg/Gary, Belinda’s swing for 5 milly, the incestuous threesome), this season also had a softer side. The tenuous connection between Chelsea and Saxon distinguished him from his Season 1 (Shane) and Season 2 (Cameron) broey counterparts. He’s douchey and impenetrable until he actually starts to listen to what a sensitive, spiritual woman has to say. She challenges him by never caving to his bravado, and someone who seemed so far gone down the path of white frat guy misogyny actually starts to change. They begin to connect, as Chelsea would say, “on a soul level”. When Saxon sees Rick return and have his happy reunion with Chelsea, the loss is written across his face. It got me!!
If I were to harken back to my messy graph analogy, Saxon is a rare example of a value shift. Across all seasons, so many of the characters in The White Lotus don’t change. A vacation’s power “to heal” is a false idol; ultimately, it is rare that a one week trip to a beautiful beach halfway across the world will cause any significant personal growth. Season 3’s themes of life and death honor the prevalent spirituality of Thailand, while also making space for characters to experience personal growth. This is another departure from previous seasons that expands the world for me. I enjoyed seeing Saxon’s repulsive man-shell soften just a bit. On a surface level, so many of the characters in The White Lotus are ridiculous. But the questions they face and choices they make clash with all the same forces at play in your own heart and mind. Deep rooted pain, burning curiosities, grief and unfulfilled dreams, questions you may never get answered.
As Gaitok kneeled on the walkway—taking aim at a hobbling Rick, with a dying Chelsea in his arms—and hesitated to shoot, I said out loud, “I don’t know what I want to happen!” And that’s what I’m getting at here. I didn’t want Gaitok to kill someone, because Gaitok clearly didn’t want to kill someone. But I didn’t want Rick to be in so much pain or fly off the handle and start this Hateful Eight remake either. I wanted Chelsea to be okay, and to have the forever she wanted so badly.
If I were to be simplistic, I might say something about how I feel that queer people are forced to sit with and witness themselves to a greater extent than people who are cis and straight and can move through society with less scrutiny. And that might be a take I’ve expressed before in this newsletter. It might be something I tend to express about queer creatives I really admire. And that might be a blind spot of mine. But I have faults and preferences and biases that affect what I do and say, and how people see and feel about me. In short, I am human, and that’s why I’m so excited to announce that I will be joining the cast of The White Lotus Season 4.
All episodes of The White Lotus Season 3 are streaming now on Max.
We all know I’m obsessed
Can we talk about how we should all be teaching our sons to clean the freaking blender before using it?