Season 3, Episode 5: ‘Full-Moon Party’
The HBO publicity department is pretty good at keeping secrets, huh? Last week, the season premiere of “The Righteous Gemstones” featured an unexpected guest star: the 12-time Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper. This week, “The White Lotus” brings in the Oscar-winning actor Sam Rockwell, whose participation in this season had been kept pretty tightly under wraps, right up to the moment he appeared onscreen as Frank, Rick’s old friend in Bangkok.
Rockwell is not this episode’s main character. But he does deliver a knockout monologue that is one of the season’s standout scenes. And his speech would likely be the most talked about “White Lotus” moment this wee, were it not for the rather shocking kiss at the end of the episode.
I will get to the smooching, I promise. But I want to start with Frank, who meets Rick at a nice hotel, bringing with him something Rick needs for when he confronts his father: a heavy bag containing a big gun. We are not told how these two men know each other or why one of them is holding on to an arsenal. But clearly they have a close friendship, which has apparently involved some violent exploits.
This episode is a direct continuation of last week’s, which had several characters heading out to various decadent parties, joining the locals in celebrating the full moon. The “White Lotus” creator and director Mike White does a lot more intercutting between the story lines than usual, creating a feeling that night itself has its own dark, strange momentum as people across Thailand get increasingly intoxicated.
But the episode breaks from that delirium for one long speech from Frank, who has to explain to his old friend why he has embraced Buddhism and given up booze, drugs and sex.
Frank’s story is too raunchy to repeat in fine detail. It involves him interrogating the nature of desire and the role gender identity plays in lust — all of which led to him experimenting with cross-dressing and gay orgies before coming to the conclusion that “sex is a poetic act; it’s a metaphor.” But for what? That remained frustratingly unclear to Frank, which is why he become a Buddhist, detaching himself from the wheel of lust and suffering.
There are two things I love about this speech. First of all, Rockwell absolutely nails it, bringing all of the motor-mouthed wit and offbeat self-possession that defines his best movie roles. (Walton Goggins is terrific, too, as Rick takes in his friend’s picaresque tale with a look halfway between amused surprise and genuine curiosity.) But I also like how this scene — which appears roughly in the middle of the episode — informs what else is happening with the White Lotus’s guests.
Take Piper. At dinner, early in the episode, she finally tells her parents that she intends to “detach,” in that distinctly Buddhist way, by living with the monks for a year. And while Tim, feeling stoned and suicidal (for non-Piper reasons), is largely unfazed by the news, Victoria does not handle Piper’s spiritual affirmations as well as Rick handled Frank’s.
I gather from comments I have seen online that Parker Posey’s performance has been divisive. She has definitely been leaning into the comic possibilities of the role, and unlike Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon and Michelle Monaghan — who have been relying on subtle gestures, inflections and facial expressions — Posey has been very broad, using a cartoonish southern accent and exaggerating Victoria’s heavily medicated, unfiltered reactions to stress.
But Posey’s performance cracks me up. And it appropriately matches the way Victoria is written by White: as someone who takes every hypothetical to the extreme and refuses to accept any difference of opinion. (It may help that I have spent nearly my whole life in the South and have known many Victorias.)
Victoria and Piper have an entertainingly spicy dialogue regarding Buddhism, with mom calling the young people who live at the monastery “a bunch of grungy kids who have no purpose” and insisting to Piper that “You can be interested in this stuff, but you can never really be it.” She also warns Piper that her beloved Buddhist monk might be leading a cult, and when her daughter counters that he wrote a well-regarded book, Victoria shouts: “Charles Manson wrote books! Bill Clinton wrote books! The list goes on! Hillary Clinton wrote five books!” (Again: hilarious.)
The core of Victoria’s concern — beyond her worry that people in her social circle will think she is a bad parent — is that Piper is young and impressionable, and that “In a year, you could end up with a completely different set of values.” This is at the crux of what happens in “The White Lotus” every season. Are these characters at crossroads, making choices that will affect the rest of their lives? Or are they just on vacation, making mistakes they will forget about in a week?
These questions weave through the other two main story lines. One involves the gal pals, whose partying with Valentin and his Russian bros moves from a wild nightclub to their White Lotus villa, where the alcohol keeps flowing and the clothes start coming off. Laurie, the only single lady in the crowd, doffs her top and drunkenly delights the guys with stories about her corporate career and her costly divorce. But she does not sleep with any of them. Instead it is Jaclyn — married and famous — who risks a scandal by hooking up with Valentin.
Meanwhile, Saxon and Lochlan become drunker and drunker with Chelsea and Chloe, getting lost in sensory overload (with the help of some unspecified pills). Early on, the two men and the two women separately game out the evening in private. Saxon reminds Lochlan that life’s pleasures should be seized whenever possible, while Lochlan — echoing both their sister and Frank — asks, “But what if this life is just a test, to see if we can become better people?” Elsewhere, Chloe confides in Chelsea that she has a weakness for inexperienced youngsters like Lochlan because, as she says, “When they see you naked, they shake, and you can see their little hearts beating in their chests.”
White takes a highly subjective approach to filming all of the party scenes in this episode. The lighting is hazier, the music booms, the dialogue fades in and out, and the screen is filled with images of laughing faces and bare skin. We, like the characters, get swept up in the fervor.
It is in this context that Chloe and Chelsea start kissing, almost as a goof. Joining in the spirit of the moment, Saxon and Lochlan start kissing too.
Since Episode 1, this season has teased the possibility of a sexual attraction among the Ratliff siblings. And now a line has been crossed. During Frank’s speech, he talks at length about whether it is possible to push beyond the limits of our identities, our affiliations and our desires. (“Are we our forms?” he asks. “Could I be an Asian girl?”) But surely there is a difference between theorizing about abandoning the boundaries of self and, in the real world, making out with your brother.
The ramifications of that question may be explored next week. Because even though this episode ends with a quiet, peaceful sunrise, a doozy of a morning hangover awaits.
Concierge Service
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Gaitok’s missing gun leads to two tense scenes in this episode. In one, after he uses security camera footage to discover that Tim stole the pistol, Gaitok leaves his station (again) and waits for Tim to go to the bathroom. Once the two are alone, all Gaitok can say is: “I cannot find something. I think you have it.” Tim shrugs him off.
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In the other scene with the gun, Tim keeps it beside him in the wee hours of the morning as he writes a suicide note. He does not pull the trigger this week, thank goodness. Perhaps he will be dissuaded from doing anything drastic by Victoria, who seems to have sensed his troubles and reminds him (however incorrectly): “There’s no reason to be stressed, Tim. You’ve already succeeded in every way.”
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The Mike White touch: When Piper argues to Tim that he and Victoria did not really raise their children to be religious, Tim lapses into a reverie about his days as an altar boy, then softly sings “Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming” to himself.
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Belinda becomes so shaken up by her research into Greg’s possible murder of Tanya — and by the discovery that the strange noises she has been hearing in her room were coming from a huge lizard — that she asks Pornchai to spend the night. In an episode filled with unforgettable images and dialogue, no line made me laugh harder than when Belinda invites Pornchai into her bed, saying: “This is consent, if that is … Do you guys do that here? We just started.”
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