What do the wealthy actually want? Some billionaires have been startlingly transparent about their intent to shape the systems that govern American life. Some celebrities just need uncomplicated adoration from the masses. In recent years, several prestige shows have examined the psychology of a different, less visible category of the ultrarich. They walk down the street without bodyguards; they splurge on fancy tasting menus; they attend parties full of people with the same social breeding and balance sheets.
But when they interact with those outside their world, their hidden desires and values are inevitably revealed. On The Undoing, the murder of a working-class mother whose child attends a fancy Upper East Side private school exposes the double life of a respected local physician. On Big Little Lies, a close-knit group of rich California moms—and their breezy social norms—is subjected to the judgment of an outsider. And The White Lotus, another HBO series, has poked and prodded at the wealthy guests of luxury resorts scattered around the world, showing how the casual exploitation of others is central to their vision of leisure. Rich and poor characters alike behave badly on the show—but only the former expect to get away with their sins, and usually do.
Season 3 of Mike White’s anthology series, which premieres on Sunday, follows a motley crew of vacationers at a Southeast Asian outpost of the titular hotel. As in previous seasons, guests of the White Lotus land themselves in all manner of compromising situations when they allow their base impulses—the need for sex, or chemical indulgence—to overtake them. But the shift to Thailand also introduces a new avenue for the show’s character studies. While in Asia, some of the guests end up contemplating the role of spirituality and organized religion in their life—and bristling at Buddhist teachings that seemingly run counter to their most ego-driven convictions. The selfish tourists are trapped, as one newly sober expat describes it, on a “never-ending carousel of lust and suffering,” and those unwilling to wrestle with their discomfort may never jump off.
The most obvious conflict of principles emerges among the Ratliff family, who come to the resort because Piper (played by Sarah Catherine Hook), the college-aged daughter, wants to interview a local monk. The Ratliffs don’t spend much time together on a regular basis, it seems, and their vacation becomes an exercise in attempting to reconcile each family member’s competing priorities. Father Tim (Jason Isaacs) is cautiously permissive about his bookish daughter’s interest in Buddhism; mother Victoria (Parker Posey), seems bewildered; her brash older brother mocks it outright. “Buddhism is for people that wanna suppress in life,” Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) says to his younger brother, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), on the Ratliffs’ first night in Thailand. “They’re afraid—don’t get attached; don’t have desires; don’t even try. Just sit there in a lotus position with a thumb up your ass.”
To Saxon, the point of life is getting what you want—a worldview without room for avarice isn’t one he respects. That’s a fairly standard outlook for a White Lotus character, and Saxon’s experience seems to graph neatly onto the show’s established patterns: Each season features a rich, conventionally attractive white man who expects the world (or the closest available woman) to bend to his whims. What makes The White Lotus often satisfying to watch is how the show challenges these characters, however briefly, to confront the assumptions they’ve built their life on. It’s not just that they’re attached to their material objects or social status; many of them have never even thought about what their comfort demands of other people. For some characters, imagining a different way of living means being forced to see how insecure they are about their looks or how flimsy their friendships have become; for others, it’s much more existential. These journeys are more complex than a simple tale of rich people getting their comeuppance in the tropics.
Some of what gives The White Lotus its charge is the show’s insistence on pushing its characters into thorny erotic terrain. Season 3 slowly upends Saxon’s understanding of himself, as the easily attained passions he’s always taken for granted—professional success, attention from women—cede ground to unspeakable, unacknowledged yearnings. The White Lotus has often portrayed sex as an exchange of power, and Saxon’s storyline shows the haunting aftereffect of unnamed desires. Later in the series, a different character regales a former friend with memories from an era in his life when he discovered an appetite for role-play. Considered alongside Saxon’s journey, these scenes underscore how inextricable sex is from the characters’ sense of self—and how their identity is attached to invisible hierarchies. Without others affirming their superiority, be it in the bedroom or in the boardroom, they wind up adrift.
Part of why the White Lotus characters are pushed toward cataclysmic (if also fleeting) personal revelations is how the series traps them in contained, unfamiliar settings. Every season of The White Lotus opens with the killing of a character whose identity is only later revealed. The hotel guests are sometimes too self-absorbed to notice, but this season amps up the terrors lurking around every corner in the week leading to the mysterious death. The music is eerier, and the environment seems more foreboding. Even the animals pose a threat—a number of the season’s most suspenseful moments involve patrons either running away from, or getting overly friendly with, the local wildlife. And yet, most of the peril that the rich guests have encountered thus far is of their own making.
There’s only so much catharsis that a show about the ultrarich can offer. The White Lotus may be a show about wealthy people behaving reprehensibly, but it still exults in depicting their luxurious lifestyles, at a time when average Americans have been warned to prepare for economic hardship ahead. When one character says that having access to a yacht is worth the risk of being killed, her blithe assessment doesn’t land as a shocking provocation; the camera seems to be in love with the boat too. The characters are not wholly irredeemable, and some do arrive through meditation and self-reflection at meaningful answers about their compulsions, even as others remain unwilling to consider such questions about their motivations (and how their actions affect other people). But no matter how many internal crises they face, they usually end up sailing off into the sunset.
