Image: “The White Lotus” Season 3 Poster via IMDb
WARNING: This article contains spoilers for “The White Lotus”
After two and a half Emmy-nominated seasons, it’s safe to say that Mike White has successfully dethroned Ryan Murphy as the king of prestige queer insanity on television. Whether it’s full-on anilingus, Jennifer Coolidge slamming glasses of chardonnay or an army of prosthetic penises, HBO’s campy class-satire-turned-murder-mystery has carved itself into modern queer iconography in more ways than one. Its newest season, now with only two episodes to go, takes the darkness of the bourgeoisie to depths it hasn’t sunk to before, which is saying a lot for a show that kicks off each season with a floating corpse. Set at the Thailand location of the lavish White Lotus resort chain, the new season focuses on three main groups of wealthy guests: a trio of middle-aged girlfriends who constantly whisper behind each others’ backs, a haunted older man and his unhappy (and much younger) fiancé and the millionaire Ratliff family of North Carolina. The Ratliff family is led by slimy finance-man patriarch Timothy, who comes to Thailand with his Lorazepam-popping wife Victoria to help his daughter Piper complete her college thesis project on Buddhism. While Timothy’s financial secrets are sure to come back and bite the family later on, the real dirty laundry of the family comes in the form of Piper’s brothers: “Alpha male” Saxon and his younger, shyer, polar opposite Lochlan.
Saxon and Lochlan provide the brunt of the dramatic tension of this season. For most of the first episode, Saxon merely makes crass, immature jokes or comments you’d typically expect to hear coming out of the mouth of a guy in a polo who works for his father’s company. But towards the end, when he and his brother are alone in their shared room, he begins questioning him about his pornography and masturbation habits, with the scene ending as Saxon exits to “relieve” his tension — giving his little brother an eyeful of his naked body as he slowly walks to the bathroom and leaves the door open for an uncomfortable amount of time. This moment shocked viewers, planting some pretty obvious seeds of future incestuous shenanigans as Lochlan stares at his brother’s body, but it also took advantage of the moment to show off “The White Lotus”’s revolutionary way of tackling cinematic heteronormativity.
“The White Lotus” is unique in being an ensemble piece, lined with as many beautiful female stars as beautiful male ones, that features more male than female nudity. In the moments of female nudity, the scene is often very quick, with the camera angled to the side or from a distance rather than a leering, head-on view of their bodies. For its male cast, however, nude scenes almost always come from a head-on angle, and the camera takes its time to make sure viewers have gotten an eyeful before closing the scene. White, creator of the series and writer-director of every single episode thus far, is openly bisexual, and the influence his queerness has had on his work is evident (after all, Coolidge’s Tanya and Parker Posey’s Victoria are too powerful of a diva combination to come from a heterosexual mind), but that influence shines the most through how he’s handling the strange and fascinating dynamic between Saxon and Lochlan.
Saxon and Lochlan are two sides of White’s running commentary on toxic masculinity throughout the show. On Saxon’s side, you have performative masculinity: the men who guzzle protein, view women as prey and listen to podcasts about how pasteurizing milk turns you gay. The opposite, but equally as insidious, side is the “nice guy”: Lochlan, quiet and unassuming on the surface, but when given the opportunity behaves no different from Saxon as he desperately tries to fit into what he thinks a man “should” be. At the end of Episode 5, we watch as the brothers party on a boat with girls from the resort they’ve picked up in hopes of getting laid, and after ingesting a few substances the brothers finally cross the line beyond leering and lock lips with each other.
Though it has obviously attracted controversy, White is performing a balancing act with this storyline and is continuing to nail it as each line is crossed. It’s a takedown of toxic masculinity in multiple forms. For one, it humiliates the kinds of men Saxon and Lochlan’s characters are meant to represent, showing how toxic men are so obsessed with sex as a competition and gender affirmation that they’ll kiss their own brother to get a girl into bed. It also points a finger at the wealthy, showing exactly what kind of depravity the privileged get up to when they go on vacation in search of the rush of the party. But most importantly, it juxtaposes provocative homoeroticism with a disturbing situation, something the show has done in the previous two seasons as well (albeit swapping incest for drug addiction and debt), to confront its viewers about how we treat gender and sexuality on screen. After all, “The White Lotus” is on HBO, which only a few years ago housed one of the most popular shows of all time, the incest-plagued “Game of Thrones.” Incest as an example of upper-class rot is not a new frontier for the network, which leaves an unanswerable question: are audiences upset because the two characters kissing are brothers, or because the two actors kissing are both male? Either way, the scene succeeds in what it was meant to do: provoke.
“The White Lotus” has been hit by accusations of trying to “normalize” the behavior it depicts. However, in watching recent media that explores similar topics, such as the widely-criticized Murphy miniseries “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” the difference in tone is clear: “The White Lotus” is an indictment of its characters and the privilege they represent. Critics can accuse showrunner White of sensationalism, but to say the show agrees with what it’s showing you would be to miss its point entirely. Just as each season begins with a rotting corpse floating in the tranquil waters of its titular luxury resorts, “The White Lotus” is meant to leave you with one lasting message: the prettiest flowers are often the most poisonous.
Elijah Fischer is a third-year Media and Culture major. AF997636@wcupa.edu