The White Lotus Season 3: How Can You Not Be Romantic About Dying?

OVER ITS THREE SEASONS, The White Lotus has become an American TV franchise that at once satirises the insularity of American affluence and the superiority complex of a social media generation that laps up the satire. Much of the show — its characters, reaction shots, music, monologues, conversations, scandals, twists, weekly episodes — is staged with a sense of the memes, hyper-aware humour and internet buzz it generates. The virality is an inextricable part of the design. It caters to — but also skewers — an average woke viewer’s desire to be seen as well as their disdain towards Western capitalism and anti-intellectualism.

We are invited to laugh at rich and culturally oblivious vacationers dispensing the emptiest thought farts with the self-seriousness of 13-year-old cinephiles. Note, for instance, the gravity of the score almost mocks the levity of Sam Rockwell’s hysterically hollow monologue about his sexual awakening (if one can even call it that). But we are also lured into identifying with a couple of ‘outsiders’ — people who think they’re better than everyone else — in each of the seasons. In Season 1, it’s a Black teenager tagging along on a Hawaiian holiday with the wealthy white family of her best friend; it’s also a freelance culture writer who’s newly married into money. In Season 2, it’s a straight-laced lawyer who cringes at the superficiality of her husband’s friends; it’s also a frumpy young assistant of an eccentric heiress on a Sicilian holiday.

In Season 3, it’s a reserved teen boy in a family full of narcissists, as well as his older sister, a pensive college senior who’s dragged the family to Thailand under the pretext of doing a thesis on Buddhism; it’s also the career-minded New Yorker doing a midlife-crisis-styled girls’ trip with her longtime friends. Once we do identify with these characters and their uppity outlooks, the seasons unfold to reveal that they’re hypocrites and conformists, too. By not dying, these characters co-opt the privilege and double standards of living — they end up belonging to the very tribe they think they are superior to. The message being: we are just like them, keyboard activists and performative warriors who fold at the slightest hint of real-world repercussions.

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But what about the ones who die? The suspense of guessing who the ‘victim’ (and potential Emmy winner) is remains the essence of the White Lotus template. They’re the real outsiders, the tragedies who’re either too marginalised (Season 1) or too naive (Season 2) in a world shaped by moral elasticity. At the heart of the series lies a troubling truth about how survival is the playground of social compliance. Every time a character shows a glimpse of opportunism or sanctimony, they stray away from the Final-Destination-coded imminence (and eminence) of dying. Season 3 is a bit bloated, but it’s perhaps the most poignant in terms of this device. The ‘Whiteness’ of The White Lotus — the titular luxury hotel franchise in different corners of the world — plays a key role.

Usually, American films tend to reduce “foreign”-set plots and people to exotic casualties of the Western gaze: the sepia-toned filters, cultural appropriation, fake accents, and racist stereotypes. The point of The White Lotus is that it reverses the formula and subjects the wealthy Western tourists to the gaze of the country that hosts them. For the employees of the resort and local hospitality industry, these guests are incurious and loaded caricatures whose exotic delusions need to be upheld, served and even exploited. That's why the American characters behave like high-pitched parodies of themselves. That's why the title theme adopts the primal, jungle-like sounds and beats of the place it's based in. That's why the visual transitions feature foliage, animals, skylines, symbolisms, sculptures and oceans. It replicates the limited and simplistic perspective of those who’ve paid a small fortune to spend a week there. Given that Season 3 is set on a picturesque island of Thailand — Asian destinations are notoriously flattened to sex, tropical tans, spirituality and debauchery — this ‘brown’ gaze is even more prominent. It's why the depiction of spirituality is so surface-level: the ignorant and party-crazed tourists get what they expect. The experience is catered to appease their whiteness.

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In this environment, then, it says something that the two guests who die in the finale emerge, against all odds, as the most authentic of the lot. They’re the ones who slowly escape the confines of the gaze and succumb to the whims of their own humanity. The conceit is that Rick (Walter Goggins) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) don’t initially seem that way. They’re everyone’s idea of a shady age-gap couple: Rick is mysterious, uptight and rude to Chelsea, his younger and carefree British girlfriend. Her clinginess annoys him. He looks like he’s tolerating her; she humours him and infantilises his temper. They have no chance in hell.

Worse, this vacation is just a front. He’s in Thailand for a specific reason — to find the millionaire who killed his father and stole his childhood — but he keeps his perilous motives from Chelsea for most of the week. To the eyes of the staff, they’re probably like any of the other White guests there: disingenuous, dysfunctional, obnoxious. When Rick leaves for Bangkok to track down the man, it’s a recipe for disaster; the couple is primed to widen this rift and cheat on each other. In short, everything about them points to the sort of generic Western-ness that throngs this hotel chain.

But despite the distance and Rick’s mental demons, they stay oddly committed to each other. Chelsea pines for him even as she spends a full-moon night on a party boat, around wild and unreliable men. She quietly defies the easy labels and categories reserved for the rest of the guests. Her feelings for Rick are strangely toothy and sincere. All she seeks is reciprocation. For some reason, she keeps believing in him, nearly willing him to improve. Rick, too, finds himself staying faithful to Chelsea amid potential violence, revenge and drug-fuelled orgies. He’s so haunted by his past that, once he addresses it, all he can think of is Chelsea’s unconditional attachment. When he returns, the hug they share is bracingly old-school and romantic — so much so that it moves Saxon, the jockest jock that ever was.

Theirs is a love story that blooms in The White Lotus, a resort teeming with withering loyalties. There are signs of their yin-yang compatibility across the season. In a show where death legitimises the character of those who perish, Chelsea almost dies twice: first during an armed burglary at the hotel gift shop, and then from a cobra bite at a snake show. Ironically, both these incidents make Rick reconsider his role as a soulmate — the prospect of Chelsea’s absence ruffles his feathers more than he anticipates it to. The guilt of hurting her pinches him; it brings them closer. They’re so human that the flesh and blood render them vulnerable.

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Everyone else slinks away into a compromised future. Denial continues to be their coping mechanism. Gaitok, the Thai security guard, basks in the glory of a put-on masculinity. The Ratliff family flirts with death and anonymity only to return to a life of diminished comforts and vacant hope. The eventful girls' trip ends with the three women reuniting out of necessity rather than choice. Belinda, the Hawaiian spa manager on an exchange programme, turns into the very woman that had once let her down — she goes from oppressed to oppressor, convincing herself that she deserves a shot at prosperity by virtue of being Black. Chloe, the self-seeking French-Canadian expat, makes peace with the freaky sexual needs of her older partner. Greg continues to abuse the wealth and memory of his murdered ex-wife. Even Frank drops the pretense in Bangkok and renegades on his vow of sobriety and abstinence.

Only Rick and Chelsea absorb the consequences of flouting the mysticism of their whiteness. In the climactic shootout, unlike the others, they stay true to themselves; there is no facade. Rick dies for finally acting on his trauma, not suppressing it like he used to. Chelsea dies for acting on her instinct to protect Rick from himself. The couple is, in a way, immortalised by their own mortality. Their togetherness is one of the more moving slow-burns of modern television. It’s almost as if the two unlikely lovers are defined by their narrative and socio-cultural dissent. After all, they’re martyred in an age where being genuine might just be the ultimate act of resistance.

The White Lotus season 3 is currently streaming on JioHotstar.