“I just like innocent young guys. When they see you naked they shake, and you can see their little hearts beating inside their chests.”
“I got in my head that what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls, getting fucked by me, and to feel that.”
“But just so you know, I’m just, I’m, this is consent, it, that is, it, do you guys do that here? We just started. So there’s, ahem, I’m a-okay with, it’s like, it’s whatever! It’s whatever you, whatever is, whatever’s clever.”
Okay, so not everyone on The White Lotus is equally capable of expressing desire. Poor Belinda stammers like a total goofball in her attempt to seduce her colleague Pornchai after he scoots an intruding lizard out of her room, and all she’s after is plain old consenting-adult heterosexual penis-in-vagina sex. She’s not confessing to someone she just met two days ago that she likes fucking teenagers, or that she went on a years-long Hellraiser-style take-all-comers binge of sexual depravity that had him dissociating, questioning the nature of the self, and finally getting sober and celibate and following the Buddha. Compared to Chloe, the sex worker who tells her new bestie Chelsea she wants to have sex with “the little magician,” high school senior Lochlan Ratliff; or compared to Rick’s friend, Frank (a fucking magnificent Sam Rockwell), who tells of years spent first immersing himself in sex with “Asian girls” of every description, then a similar time spent trying to “become” one by hiring them to watch as middle-aged men also hired for the purpose fuck him? Belinda is not asking for much.
But The White Lotus sure is. In the same episode where both Frank and Piper Ratfliff talk at length about their decision to adopt a religion that views desire itself as humanity’s great antagonist, writer-director Mike White digs deeper into desire than he ever has before. He dips his hands in it up to the wrists, like he’s emptying out a pumpkin’s guts to make a jack o’ lantern. The episode that results is as haunting and garish as any Halloween display.
The episode’s exploration of lust goes beyond the three examples above — beyond Chloe’s at least semi-taboo (he seems to be of legal age) attraction to Lochlan, beyond Frank’s exhausting journey of sexual self-discovery, beyond Belinda just wanting to get it on with her handsome and kind-hearted coworker. You see it in Gaitok, who uses his desire to watch Mook dance as an excuse when hotel manager Fabian interrupts his real quest, to recover his purloined gun from Tim Ratliff. But it’s barely an excuse: Gaitok spends as much time looking at Mook (she’s Lisa from Blackpink, it’s understandable) as he does looking at the man who stole a lethal weapon for him, risking both his job and others’ lives.
You see it in Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate, as they spend the night clubbing and skinny dipping with their yoga instructor Valentin and his shifty but charismatic hometown buddies, Aleksei (Julian Kostov) and Vlad (Yuri Kolokolnikov). Boy, do you ever see it! Their entire storyline is a bass-pounding mass of wet and undulating bodies, heavily lubricated by vodka and intergenerational horniness. When Laurie, two decades older than these men and a power player (albeit a thwarted one) in the corporate world, follows the ne’er-do-wells’ example and strips in the pool, it’s erotic not just because it’s Carrie Coon naked, but because it’s Laurie’s announcement of her desire. Even if nothing happens that night, she’s open to the possibility, and that opening is where the heat comes from.
Unfortunately for Laurie, she’s friends with Jaclyn. Kate bows out of most of the debauchery, first urging her friends to call it a night when the Russians’ girlfriends storm up to the table and cause a scene, then wearing her pajamas poolside as Laurie doffs her top and Jaclyn strides in dressed like a Vogue shoot. For a while at least, this seems like the high point of Jaclyn’s evening, as she soon dozes off in a chaise longue. But after calling it a night while cheekily encouraging Laurie to really go for it with the guys next time, she’s the recipient of an obviously pre-planned visit by Valentin. We watch her face as he strips for her, seeing her almost swoon with lust at the sight of first his chiseled body, then his presumably erect penis. It’s exciting to see a middle-aged woman’s sexual arousal treated as serious and sexually arousing in and of itself.
And you definitely see desire in Saxon Ratfliff. Insistent on making his night with Lochlan, Chloe, and Chelsea a magical one, he breaks his usual no-drugs-except-booze-and-supplements policy and rolls with the rest of the crew. He’s enraptured by the lights, the sounds, the fireworks, the literal fire of the evening. He and Lochie go for a swim off the yacht when they return from the island where they partied the night away. Finally, Chloe begins instigating a foursome, consenting to kiss Chelsea primarily so she can demand the same of the Ratliff brothers. Thus the brotherly incest everyone’s suspected was coming since the premiere finally arrives, as Charlotte Le Bon and Aimee Lou Wood cheer it on. It’s not TV, it’s HBO!
It’s magnificent, is what it is. Much of it is bathed in red and green light, as is the ladies’ night back on the mainland. As such, it fits right into one of my favorite microgenres: the New Lurid. These are stories that use saturated colors (especially red), explicit sexuality, outbursts of disturbing violence, and an unhealthy fixation on propagating the tangled family line, all as a way of satirizing and excoriating the wealthy. Think of it as Saltburn-core. The brazenly sexual vibe, the vivid colors, the incest, and — in a separate storyline that’s intercut with the rest as if providing commentary — Victoria Ratliff’s wildly bigoted and reactionary response to Piper’s desire to throw away her heritage to seriously study Buddhism — nearly all the ingredients are in place.
But there’s a gun that doesn’t go off, and it’s, well, the guns that don’t go off. Rick’s friend gives him a gun at Rick’s request, but Rick is too busy being dumbfounded by his pal’s tale of erotic transfiguration to do much with it just yet. Tim refuses to return his stolen gun, but is prevented from using it on himself — while wearing a Duke t-shirt, one of the most mean-spirited and hilarious gags in this show’s history — by Victoria, who unwittingly interrupts him just as he’s mustered the strength to pull the trigger. Of course we know bullets will fly by the end of the season, but so far they’re still chambered.
My admiration for this show, on the other hand, is ricocheting all over the room. What a fuckin’ feast this episode is: sleazy, scary, riveting, written in a way that takes real risks in exposing the filmmaker’s understanding of what desire is and what it can do, with that magnificent monologue as the centerpiece and incest as a closer.
Every cast member on the show, I mean every man jack, kills it this episode; every single one has a line reading or a facial expression or an overall affect that you could point to as the highlight of the hour. Like, how do you rank Leslie Bibb’s conservative Christian awkwardness as Kate against Christian Friedel’s Sgt. Schulz “I know nothing” response to Belinda breaking the news that the hotel’s frequent customer, Gary, is a wife-killer? How do you weigh Natasha Rothwell’s wink-wink nudge-nudge comedic chops during that scene against Schwarzenegger’s absurd bravado when Saxon declares that he doesn’t do drugs because he is a drug? Which is more compelling, Carrie Coon’s clumsy, drunken form of desire or Sam Rockwell’s sober, clear-eyed, Dante-esque journey through it? Are you more fascinated by Parker Posey’s droopy-faced performance of Victoria’s pure Southern conservative cultural anxiety (Charles Manson, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Buddhists, and the Catholic Church are all held up as equally cultish and evil, which maybe they are but not for the reasons she thinks; Thailand and Taiwan are the same place, also), or by Tayme Thapthimthong’s portrayal of Gaitok, a man who can’t seem to decide if he’s Tony Leung in In the Mood for Love or Tony Leung in Lust, Caution?
Just on an aesthetic level, what do you prefer: the Nicholas Winding Refn colors with which Chloe and Chelsea and the Ratliff brothers are drenched, or the incredible scenic shots of the glowing buildings on the hillside or the luminous nighttime streets of Bangkok? And what do you make of an episode this centered on how getting what we want doesn’t necessarily give us what we need ending with a suicidal white-collar criminal, begging his culturally Christian God to tell him what to do next?
I wonder who does the shooting in the end, sure. But these are the questions in my mind right now, and they’re the kind of questions you’ll be pondering long after you find out whodunit. They’re the kind of questions that come only from great television.
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.
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