“The White Lotus” isn’t about plot. After watching the first and second seasons, you already know how the third is going to play out: things are bound to take a violent turn in the last episode. Hell, they basically start the season by showing you its end. And what’s not spoiled explicitly is fairly easy to deduce with some simple guesswork. (Mike White — the show’s creator, writer and director — has a habit of making his most likeable characters even more likeable by killing them off and transforming them into martyrs).
This fact — i.e. “The White Lotus” puts plot in the passenger seat — has two consequences. The first is that the engine of “The White Lotus” is dramatic irony. When you know that the characters are doomed, and since you glimpsed the season’s tragic end at the get-go, every gun becomes a Chekhov’s gun, every carving knife becomes a Chekhov’s carving knife and every poisonous seed becomes a Chekhov’s poisonous seed.
The second effect is that dialogue, not plot, becomes the focus of “The White Lotus.” In this way, the show works a lot like “The Real Housewives”: It’s much more about how the characters argue than whatever the pretense for their argument actually is.
The negative feedback “The White Lotus” season 3 has received — i.e. it’s too slow and too long, and its plot is poorly done — falls flat for me, because these critics don’t get that it’s not about plot and that it never was. Really, “The White Lotus” is a show about talking, and when it’s judged as such, it’s a masterpiece.
On the one hand, the dialogue is full of feints, fades and fake outs. Kate (a glibly smirking Trump voter who — I think it’s fair to say — most HBO viewers are inclined to distrust) ends up being the only one of her friends with any tact or dignity. Belinda (a long-suffering masseuse from season one) gets rich quick and, in a sudden betrayal of her proletarian past, gleefully pulls the ladder up behind her. Piper (an idealistic undergraduate) abandons her Buddhist convictions at the drop of a hat, while Tim (her materialistic and business-minded father) engages with Buddhist thought more earnestly than she does. At first, Gaitok (a local man employed at the White Lotus resort) serves as a “noble savage” foil to the depraved bourgeoisie guests, but in the end, he turns out to be quite willing to sell out his virtues and values for a girlfriend and a promotion.
On the other hand, the writing glories in stereotypes, tropes and conventions. Saxon is a cardboard cutout of a “finance bro.” Greg is the bald pervert par excellence. Fabian is a parody of effeminate Europeans and is played, funnily enough, by Christian Friedel from “The Zone of Interest.” Victoria is the platonic ideal of a Southern aristocrat and is far and away my favorite character in the season.
Mike White’s love stories also toy with stereotypes. Chelsea (a ditzy British chick) and Rick (her significantly older lover) have the sort of age-gap relationship which people revel in condemning on Twitter, yet their romance evolves into something profoundly beautiful and genuinely redemptive. Saxon (the aforementioned “finance bro”) is — as you’d expect — a total player, and true affection constantly evades him. He eventually starts to find solace in the love of Lochlan (his gentle younger brother), but the relationship winds up turning toward incest.
Further, Thailand proved the perfect setting for a season of “The White Lotus.” For one, it was a chance to meet great Thai actresses like Patravadi Mejudhon (a.k.a. the “Thai Judi Dench”) and Lalisa Manobal of Blackpink fame. It also gave Mike White an excuse to rhapsodize about Buddhism; the monologues he wrote for Laura Dern’s severely neurotic and New Age–obsessed character in “Enlightened” are some of the best bits he’s ever written, and a lot of the dialogue in “The White Lotus” season 3 is imbued with that same magic.
I confess to you, my brothers and sisters, that I thought this season of “The White Lotus” was a triumph. Frankly, I pray the next one has even less plot and even more talking.
