A fun thing about making Freudian moves in your criticism is that it lets you look sort of sophisticated and literary when you’re being reductive and, arguably, unfair. The ad hominem focus of your interpretation abuses the artist and subtracts from aesthetic culture, and yet, if you’re any good, the famous archetypes and metaphors in which you express that interpretation might add a little back to aesthetic culture, though they still leave the artist fairly abused. But sometimes it’s okay to abuse the artist. Sometimes the artist is asking for it. Sometimes the artist, even while contributing a few things to aesthetic culture, is also committing a bit of Freudian abuse himself.
In Episode One of Season One of The White Lotus, the show’s creator, Mike White, doesn’t merely begin a sort of Freudian torment of several of his central characters over the show’s three seasons. He basically invites you to conclude that’s what he’s doing. In an introductory scene, an affluent father at a Maui resort displays his hairy testicles and the wrinkled underside of his penis for his wife — and the viewer at home — to examine up close. The father, Mark (Steve Zahn), is convinced there’s sickness in his reproductive organ. And having just met his children — a sneering dead-eyed daughter and a malfunctioning bug-eyed son — the viewer is inclined to believe him.
This scene shows a big reason why The White Lotus has become such a huge sensation, its tendency to treat a good number of its characters with ruthless and sometimes mocking disapproval. People really love to hate fictional characters, especially when they’re fed ample reasons to engage in this hating, and in Season Three, whose finale just aired, Mike White gives us his most hateable character yet — Saxon, son of embattled finance boss Timothy Ratliff. Then, after creating this hate-object, White visited upon him the most sick-making humiliations. Audiences loved it. I quite enjoy the show myself, but the schematic and predictable and overt way in which Mike White orchestrates his viewers’ responses to characters like Saxon, rouses them to hate as he hates, makes The White Lotus just slightly less than a first-rate creation.
Season One is set on the dry South Shore of Maui, and most of the action takes place within the beachy confines of the titular resort. It isn’t all that much to look at. Season Two is set in Sicily, which its wealthy characters actually explore and, for this reason, the season functions much better as marketing matter for luxury travel. In Season Three, set in Thailand, White has unlocked a powerful feature of his tropical setting — how gorgeous and intoxicating it is when filmed at night. The show totally skirts the cliché of danger lurking in the tropical dark. The Thailand nights of Season Three are fecund and inviting, and they’re filmed with such immersive lushness they sometimes feel more like VR than TV.
White has said he initially envisioned The White Lotus as political critique, an examination of “the ethics of vacationing in other people’s realities”. Season One rides this idea pretty hard, its ethnic Hawaiian characters functioning mainly as noble natives and totemic victims for guilty liberal viewers. White dropped this ethics-of-vacation conceit for Season Two, it seems. He clearly relishes Sicily’s rocky landscape and ancient cities, and his Sicilian characters, having grown their own agendas, are much more interesting than the sad Hawaiian Others of Season One. Season Three is almost straight vacation porn.
Season Three is also where we meet White’s character archetypes in their most extreme form. The foundational figure is Saxon’s father Timothy (Jason Isaacs), whose hopes for a calm tropical vacation are destroyed when a shady deal from his past comes back to the surface. He’s obviously stressed about his legal jeopardy, but it’s his threatened status as a father that most tortures him, because he’s idolised within his family as a great patriarch, especially by Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the oldest of his three children, and by his dopey and unseeing wife Victoria (Parker Posey).
Timothy Ratliff is the fourth archetypal father in The White Lotus, each a fallen man with dark secrets and dubious judgment — or the fifth if you count the one who doesn’t appear but functions as a plot device. In Season One it was Mark who, along with a pair of unhealthy testicles, carries around the shame of having cheated on his tech executive wife Nicole (Connie Britton). Mark, unmanned by his alpha wife, is also a moron. He betrays Nicole further by confessing his infidelity to their unhappy teenaged son. He does this, he says, because he wants to be open, unlike his father, a closeted gay man who died of AIDS when Mark was a young boy.
Season Two had Hollywood mogul Dominic (Michael Imperioli), who, while feigning atonement for his many sins against his wife, commits even more marital sins on his Sicily vacation. Season Two also had Dominic’s father, Bert (F. Murray Abraham), a lecherous widow who accompanies his son and grandson on their luxurious trip, and who was Dominic’s early model for both infidelity and lying to yourself about infidelity.
It’s hard not to view White’s creation of these characters as expressing a sort of Oedipal reflex, each season a father (or two) being ritually reduced, exposed as a moral fraud. This is where, in a roughly Freudian mode, I have to get reductive. I resist ad hominem criticism as a rule, but declining to note the show’s parallels with White’s own life is beyond my powers of discretion. What I’m saying is, it must have been psychologically formative for this future auteur of prestige television to learn that his father, a well-known figure in the highest levels of evangelical Christianity in America, was secretly gay, and to suffer the undoing of his family in the wake of this revelation. It’s heartening to know that White’s relationship with his father survived this bombshell being dropped on their family, and on the father’s lucrative career as a ghostwriter for famous televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Still, it doesn’t seem mysterious how the idea of the fallen father might have embedded itself deep in Mike White’s mind as a dramatic model to return to again and again, and again.
“It’s hard not to view White’s creation of these characters as expressing a sort of Oedipal reflex.”
There’s nothing artistically wrong with White’s repeated destruction of this father figure. Indeed, he keeps getting better at it. Timothy Ratliff, the doomed Southern moneyman of Season Three, is the greatest of these ruined fathers, a subtle and beautiful creation, which is due in part to White’s intimate understanding of him and in part to his astonishing portrayal by Jason Isaacs. Timothy somehow grows more expressive and sympathetic even as he begins to contemplate fatal violence in his desperation, and even as the Lorazepam he steals from his wife sends him ever closer to catatonia. And, beautifully, the most jarring and searching moments in Timothy’s descent happen with the living darkness draped around him. These are powerfully vivid and memorable television scenes.
If there’s an artistic problem in White’s vaguely Freudian scheming, it is not with the chaotic unmaking of the fathers but with his orderly painting of the sons. There are two types of sons in The White Lotus, those who admire their father and follow in his path — that is, those who fail to share White’s view of their fathers as quasi-Oedipal targets begging for destruction. And there are those who recoil in their fathers’ presence and reject their influence. These latter spend the luxurious week depicted in a White Lotus season gaining critical distance from their fathers and moving away from their families. The former are monstrous. The latter are exemplary.
In Season One, the exemplary son is Quinn (Fred Hechinger), the awkward younger child of testicle-sick Mark. Banished from the family suite by his cruel sister, Quinn spends his nights on the beach, where, every morning, he wakes to see a crew of muscular Hawaiians putting in their outrigger canoe for a traditional paddle. One morning the Hawaiians invite Quinn to grab an oar and take the empty seat in their canoe. He glides off into the ocean with them and is set free from his ugly life at once. From that moment he knows: he must get away from his idiot father, his poisonous family.
In Season Two there’s pretty much one son, Albie, and he’s exemplary. Albie’s a recent graduate of Stanford, and so he’s both smart enough to know his father cheats on his mother and enlightened enough to know this makes him an irredeemable scumbag, and for much of the week he makes his father sizzle in this knowledge. Like Quinn in Season One, Albie is awkward and insecure, and the grace note he’s given at the end of the season consists of him being — instead of a slick seducer like his father — romantically yearning and tentative and, yes, respectful of women.
In Season Three the exemplary son, Saxon’s younger brother Lochlan (Sam Nivola), has a co-conspirator in his older sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook). The two of them are drawn to the groovy asceticism of Buddhist meditation, which appears as a sane and ethical alternative to the sexual weirdness and stupefying materialism of life in their family. Like Quinn in Season One, they’ve discovered the authentic spiritual essence of the place they are visiting, and, like Quinn, they don’t want to go home. Through this act of staying in Thailand, of not going home, they might redeem themselves from their degraded condition as children of Timothy and Victoria Ratliff.
The monster sons are as tidy in their similarities as are the exemplary sons. Season One’s monster son is Shane (Jake Lacy), who’s honeymooning in Maui with his new wife Rachel (Alexandra Daddario). Shane’s wacky and grating mother (Molly Shannon) invades his honeymoon — and he exhibits his maternally stunted sexuality in welcoming her — but his wealthy father never appears. Still, it’s clear that Shane, just like Saxon in Season Three, is unambivalent about his daddy. Like Saxon he works for and with his father and, we can assume, reveres him completely. He’s treading his father’s path to an unexamined life of extreme wealth and braying privilege when, if he were any good, he’d be plotting his father’s downfall, or at least eyeing a hygienic escape from his diseased family.
Shane is not as psychologically icky a figure as Saxon is, but he is more comprehensively an asshole, if that’s possible. In certain obvious ways he’s White’s prototype for Saxon, a test version, an early attempt. He is, in other words, an extremely crude piece of characterisation. Like Saxon, Shane is made to suffer for the pleasure of his many haters out in TV land, but his suffering is that of hotel slapstick — he’s given the wrong room and thus launched into battle with the hotel’s stealthily vengeful manager Armond (Murray Barlett).
Shane is straightforwardly obnoxious. Saxon is straightforwardly obnoxious too, but he’s also off-putting in dozens of subtler and more visceral ways. His person, in all its dimensions, offends you at the level of appetite — the lifting nasal tones of his voice; the way his lips retract from his teeth and his nostrils flex like he’s smelling crap when he flashes his smile; the smug incomprehension he’s always expressing with this smile; his goading frankness towards his little brother about porn and masturbation; his sexual sizing-up of his little sister; his oily frat-guy methods of flirting; his deafening use of a blender; his toadying careerism. I’m tempted to go on. It’s everything about him, is what I’m saying. Indeed, Saxon has more revolting characteristics than most people have characteristics.
White fashions a punishment for Saxon that’s as appallingly deep and total as his personal grossness, or it should be. In a TV scene for the ages, he and Lochlan take an unnamed hallucinogen with fetching Chloe and Chelsea, two likeable gold-diggers — and, in the erotic and psychedelic frenzy that ensues, they end up sexually entangled with each other. The viewer is duly sickened and saddened, and you’d think the combination of incest and accidental gayness would make straight Saxon’s head explode. But when Chloe and Chelsea fill out the incestuous picture for him the next day — he says he doesn’t remember — his disquiet is real enough but also strangely controlled. He’s roughly as appalled as he’d be if his frat-bros told him that he’d hooked up with a fat chick when he was blacked out. He gets over it way, way, way faster than I would.
White seems to be telling the viewer not only that occasional acts of gayness are par for the course for straights like Saxon — which is par for the course from a bisexual TV writer who went to Wesleyan — but that this incest stuff is no big deal either. Families are weird like that. Families are sick like that. Wasn’t a hookup with his cute little brother already on Saxon’s agenda, given the nakedness and wank-talk he assailed him with in Episode One? Didn’t Lochlan seem to smile through these taboo moments as if sheepishly enjoying them?
I sound a little disapproving, and I am, a little, but the moral and sexual extremity and the deadpan lack of judgement from the person who staged it take Saxon to some welcome and unexpected places. In a season with many great scenes, one of the best builds on this prior one, where Chloe and Chelsea tell him he hooked up with his little brother. In the later scene, in the second-last episode, Chloe tries to convince Saxon to participate in an Oedipal sexual fantasy that is at once comically on-the-nose in its Freudian details and surreally mind-bending and involuted in what it means for Saxon. The fantasy comes from Chloe’s rich and jealous older boyfriend Gary and involves a sort of threesome with Chloe, Saxon and then Gary, who wants to replay his formative memories of seeing his parents having sex and secretly desiring to take his father’s place in bed with his mother. (In his habitual jealousy, Gary thinks, he’s always returning to this primal scene of father-son rivalry.)
Saxon is being asked to play the sexual role of Gary’s father, to be the one who starts out with the mother but then is Oedipally replaced by the son. “It would be like he’s winning his mother back from his father,” Chloe says of Gary. But in asking Saxon to play the role of the father in this fantasy, she’s also, perforce, asking him to play the role of his father, with Gary taking his role as the rightful usurper, the son who wants to replace the father. It’s hard to untangle this with any confidence, but when Saxon rejects this proposal it seems like a moment of personal growth. Until now, he’s identified totally and somewhat pathetically with his father Timothy, but here, given a chance to deepen that identification, to be his father in sexual play with a former fashion model, he emphatically declines. You might call it an ambiguous, backhanded act of Oedipal aggression, Saxon’s refusal to play the paternal object of such aggression, his refusal to take the fall for his father.
“White fashions a punishment for Saxon that’s as appallingly deep and total as his personal grossness, or it should be.”
Timothy really is in for a fall, which Saxon has just begun to realise. He’s facing the prospect of losing his father to prison and losing his job at his father’s firm, which means that he’s also facing the heavier prospect of becoming himself — but he also seems, for the first time, like he’s up to the challenge. Saxon seems to be dealing with his daddy issues.
Unlike his prototype, Shane, from Season One, the much ickier Saxon is actually growing and changing in these later episodes, under the particular influence of childlike Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), the Manchester girl with the uncontainable front teeth and the impossibly big and lovely brown eyes. Her understated scenes with Saxon, in which she seems to be giving him gentle introductory lessons in how to be a person, are genuinely touching.
These changes in Saxon’s character are a strange development so deep into the season. On one hand, they offer a potent sentimental release for the viewer. Watching a despicable person become vaguely human and likeable arrives as a welcome note. On the other hand, this change in someone who’s been so central as a focus of loathing, and so heavy with archetypal meaning, is a little disorienting. What, then, could bring The White Lotus to its dramatic conclusion once Saxon punctured the Oedipal tension, once this frat bro got over his daddy issues? Who was going to be the shooter of those bullets that tore through the jungle vegetation at the beginning of Episode One?
Well, it turns out that Mike White had secretly introduced a third type of son in Season Three, and this son had been seething with his own Oedipal hatred for the entire season. But, much like the original Oedipus, this character didn’t know that his murderous inclinations were Oedipal. He didn’t know the guy he had to kill was his dad. And, when he found out, he was as surprised as the rest of us. That would be a strange experience, to discover at this climactic moment that you’re not even the metaphor. You’re the referent of the metaphor. You’re not “Oedipal”. You’re Oedipus.
For the viewer, this climax is both surprising and kind of reassuring. Season Three of The White Lotus ended with a startling plot twist, but this plot twist reinforced the dominant theme of all three White Lotus seasons so emphatically it was as if it wasn’t even a twist. We didn’t foresee it, and yet once it happened it felt necessary. You might say it felt like fate.
But this feeling of necessity also points to the show’s persistent weakness. When a season ends, you’re left with the sense that Mike White thinks he’s just given you a lesson. He’s just told you a few really important things. You look back and realise he’s just led all those characters through their sufferings so that you’ll come away from his latest eight episodes with the proper thoughts in your head. These thoughts are of course his thoughts — thoughts about families and, especially, about fathers and sons.
And, for all the moral chaos that The White Lotus puts before us, these thoughts are extremely conventional. Described as “post-woke”, this latest season is refreshingly light on progressive messaging, at least compared with previous ones. (With its oppressed Hawaiians and righteous university girls, and a final resolution taken straight from the Department of Whiteness Studies, Season One sometimes felt like a sideshow act at a George Floyd die-in.) Season Three even breaks an iron taboo of trans discourse in a riotous scene featuring the great Sam Rockwell. But the show’s supposedly transgressive critique of families and fathers is as familiar as a Grimms’ Fairy Tale at this point. For many generations already, artists and writers have been leading the upper-class struggle against these buzz-killing symbols of stability and authority, of the intolerable notion that people from even the recent past might be useful guides through the present. According to these creators of culture, we dumb parents need to take our bearings from the younger generation. We need to stop and ask ourselves: What would our children have us do? How would a teenage girl improve the words we use?
These ideas are not very profound or original. Indeed, they’re literally childish. On their own, they’re barely worthy of discussing anymore. Still, it might be worthwhile to ask Mike White, perhaps in the manner of a psychoanalyst, how he came to find them so convincing.
