Maybe the most shocking sequence in The White Lotus Season 3 so far shouldn’t have shocked us at all. I’m talking, of course, about how The White Lotus Season 3 Episode 6 “Denials” revealed that brothers Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan Ratliff (Sam Nivola) did way more than kiss on Chloe’s (Charlotte Le Bon) yacht during the Full-Moon Party. The HBO show confirmed that the drugged up Ratliff siblings wound up basically having a threeway together with the Quebecois model-turned-escort. While Lochlan was losing his virginity to Chloe, he began touching his brother, pulling Saxon into the unholy union.
Now, there are plenty of reasons why White Lotus fans should have been anticipating this incestuous tryst from the start of Season 3. Not only did the brothers already share an overly sexual relationship, with Lochlan watching his own nude brother masturbate with interest, but this is also part of creator/writer/director Mike White‘s tried and true storytelling pattern. Every season of The White Lotus to date has followed the same trajectory. A group of privileged Americans descend upon a gorgeous resort to exploit the locals and confront their demons. Someone dies terribly by the end. The dialogue is cutting. The costumes are gorgeous. The cast is packed with mega-talented stars. Oh, and White ends the second act of each season with someone stumbling upon an improper sex act, always between two men.
In Season 1, it was Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) and Shane (Jake Lacy) walking in on Armond (Murray Bartlett) helping himself to employee Dillon (Lukas Gage). In Season 2, Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) discovers that Portia’s (Haley Lu Richardson) love interest Jack (Leo Woodall) is sleeping with his “uncle” Quentin (Tom Hollander). Now, it’s Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Chloe seeing just how twisted the relationship between the Ratliff brothers is.
White has framed these acts as scandalous or shameful not because they are homoerotic, but because they transgress other boundaries. Armond was high on the job and taking advantage of his authority to seduce an employee (who then turned the power dynamic back on him). Jack is supposedly Quentin’s nephew, but actually clearly a sex worker hired by the wealthy conman. Saxon and Lochlan are literally brothers.
What might be most shocking about the Saxon/Lochlan hookup is how comparatively tame it was.
When DECIDER spoke with White Lotus star Patrick Schwarzenegger, he insisted that Mike White purposely directed the sex scene to be “ambiguous.”
“Why did it happen? Was it the drugs? Was it not? Was it the relationships leading up to it? Was it that this power shift? All these different things,” Schwarzenegger said. “I think Mike White wrote it in that specific way to have that conversation at home and to leave it up to the audiences to interpret it how they how they want.”
Ambiguity is something else that shouldn’t feel new or surprising to White Lotus fans. After all, White has left other sexual hookups — like a potential affair between Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and Ethan (Will Sharpe) — up to the audience’s imagination. What we’re supposed to glean from Saxon and Lochlan’s hookup is that something sexual occurred between the two brothers, one that upends their power dynamics and pushes against their assumed moral code.
The Ratliff family’s storyline in The White Lotus Season 3 has been about the dissolution of dynastic wealth, power, and all the confidence that comes with its trappings. While Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) contemplates killing his wife and himself to avoid the pain of public shame and poverty, sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) is turning to Buddhism to fill the void that all of her designer duds can’t cover up. Saxon has roared into the season defining himself in terms of sex, money, and power. It would be inevitable that Mike White would rip that first, most important, sign of success away from the character.
Again, the brothers’ incest was essentially inevitable.
What’s interesting now is to trace the fallout of the latter two transgressive sex scenes from past seasons of The White Lotus. Fans will remember that Shane eventually stabbed Armond and that Quentin and Tanya had their own grim ends.
If Saxon and Lochlan’s hookup serves a similar structural role in this season of The White Lotus, does that mean that one of them is the dead body that floats by Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) in the show’s cold open? Are Chloe or Chelsea doomed to be caught in the crosshairs of the impending shooting? Or is this yet another one of Mike White’s elegantly drawn red herrings?
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