White Lotus visitors pay for simulacra. Photo: HBO
When the Covid lockdown started, five years ago, many in the laptop classes leaned into the glorious social dislocation. They embraced Zoom. They took in home deliveries and forgot to care about the carbon footprint. And they pretended to stay connected to other people by all watching the same TV programmes. By the time Boris Johnson’s “Freedom Day” arrived, many didn’t notice. They were still stuck indoors, laughing at a new HBO comedy set in a Hawaii hotel.
In this respect, at least, I was a class traitor: I didn’t much like The White Lotus. Despite some deft observations, it wore its moralising too heavily and seemed a little hackneyed: rich white people behaving like monsters once again, blind to the ways in which they were instrumentalising underpaid ethnic servants. Or maybe it was just too close to the bone — what else was lockdown for the better-off among us but a kind of holiday from real life, being waited upon by harried immigrants? Either way, in my work life there were already lots of white people telling me about the problematic toxicity of other white people, and I felt in no mood to be hectored on my nights off.
Five years on, those days are well behind us. The wave of white-on-white verbal knife crime seems to be in abeyance too, though the delivery drivers are still around. White Lotus 2, a sex farce set in a Sicilian hotel, has been and gone, and the third series is onscreen. Now five episodes in, creator Mike White has dropped both the cruder farcical elements and the facile takeaways, and given us something more subtle and intriguing. And his vacation reading in between shows seems to have included a lot of Michel Houellebecq.
The most obvious connection between White Lotus 3 and France’s famous post-liberal Cassandra figure is Platform, his satirical take on Western tourism of various toxic kinds. Like the novel, the series focuses on the holiday industry in Thailand, and both stories contain a gun attack on cowering guests at a luxury resort. There are lots of other suggestive references: bald, pot-bellied men wanly predating on cheerful, young Thai women; parodically docile, beatifically smiling hotel workers, throwing the miserable moral dissolution of visiting tourists into even starker relief; the tourist world merging with a criminal one at the edges; and even a lubricious Québécois prostitute who is quite possibly a tribute to Platform’s most memorably sex-positive character, Valerie, mown down by Islamic terrorists at the end of the book.
As in Houellebecq’s world, having destroyed nearly every form of unsought association with other people, rich visitors nominally in search of “wellness” at the White Lotus pay for simulacra: paid massages instead of loving caresses; fake religion through reiki, yoga, and dabbling in Buddhism; a veneer of sociability managed by drinking constantly and swallowing pills. But equally, there is little overt judgement, and the consumer in search of entertainment gets to vicariously enjoy the fruits of hyperliberalism as well as its poisons. In Platform, readers can get cheap thrills from the prolonged descriptions of transactional sex. In White Lotus 3, endorphins are similarly stimulated by all the lingering shots of luxurious interiors and glittering beaches. When the action shifts to more poverty-stricken locations, the pain of transition is visceral.
And of course, as on holiday, the greatest pleasure is eavesdropping on other people’s dysfunctional relationships. One particularly delicious dramatic grouping involves three “close” female friends on a trip of a lifetime, nimbly shifting patterns of allegiance and attack depending on whoever has just left the room. But the most compelling parallel storylines involve a rich Southern family called the Ratliffs, and a very Houllebecqian couple: Rick, a seedy, ageing drifter, and Chelsea, the upbeat, young, hippy girlfriend from whom Rick is constantly trying to escape.
So far in the series, each of these subplots has produced a dramatic moment much discussed on social media (I therefore disclaim any responsibility for the spoilers). In the first, there is an incestuous kiss between two male members of the Ratliff family. In the second, we witness a monologue from a friend of Rick’s about autogynephilia. In their own way these scenes suggest that, once social dislocation gets a grip for good, basic human urges for love and connection are bound to run anarchically amok.
The proximate cause of the incestuous kiss between the teenage Ratliff boys is drugs and the excitement of a Thai festival, at which they are getting high along with Chelsea and the Québécois sexpot. The distal cause, however, is that the family patriarch has decided they should all put their phones away and connect properly with each other on holiday. (Even more hilariously, this is just an excuse — he’s really trying to avoid his family seeing some shameful news about him on the internet.) Shorn of the usual crutches of internet porn and scrolling, the bored older brother makes it his mission to get his younger sibling laid, feeding him protein shakes to buff up his puny body and render him more attractive to women. All the unexpected mental attention backfires, and the younger brother starts lusting after his newfound mentor instead — all in all, a terrifying warning for any parent considering reducing their offspring’s screentime.
The conversation about autogynephilia, meanwhile, happens at a Bangkok bar. Rick has met up with an old friend from back home, who explains to him he is now off the booze after a midlife crisis. In Thailand with “money, no attachments, and nothing to do”, he claims to have become “insatiable” for “Asian girls”. “After about a thousand nights like that, I started wondering, where am I going with this? Why do I feel the need to fuck all these women? What is desire? … Maybe … maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls… you know?” Rick doesn’t. The friend specifies: “I got it into my head that what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls, getting fucked … by me, and to feel that”. Adventures wearing lingerie and perfume followed, as did being “railed” by guys that looked a bit like him. “Then I got addicted to that … and at the same time I’d hire an Asian girl to just sit there and watch the whole thing, and I’d look in her eyes while some guy was fucking me, and I’d think ‘I am her, and I’m fucking me’.”
In recent years, some of us have become more familiar with the narcissistic spiral that is a man becoming aroused at the idea of himself as a woman, and especially since it often requires the nearby presence of actual women as props to keep the fantasy going. But rarely have we seen the libidinal hall of mirrors described so boldly and accurately on camera; and nor perhaps the yearning for spiritual transformation around which it skirts, so to speak. “Sex is a poetic act, it’s a metaphor … am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl?” the friend asks. Eventually, he says, he gave up on such deep metaphysical questions and “got into Buddhism” instead.
Writing Platform in 2001, and describing scenes of Islamic terrorism in tourist spots known for hedonism, Houellebecq foresaw a hyperliberal future and yet few believed him. The Bali bombings happened only a year later. Watching White Lotus 3, you sometimes also get a disturbing premonition of imminent, barely suspected social hazards lurking under present habits and especially those supercharged during lockdown: adolescents with “no attachments and nothing to do”, left to their own devices, quite literally; an increasingly warped cultural sensibility that reduces whole people to collections of breasts, genitals, and protein-amped biceps; and the dilution of intra-familial bonds, until people living in the same house barely know what love is supposed to look like anymore.
Traditionally when on holiday, you get a chance to step out of the quotidian and see things more clearly — or so the platitude goes. The characters in White Lotus 3 tend to suggest otherwise. Still, we viewers in the real world can keep our eyes open to the unfolding effects of hyperliberalism, though it remains unclear whether we can do anything other than helplessly watch.
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SubscribeRockwell’s soliloquy is straight out of the (full-on fetishist transvestite & autogynephile writer) Andrea Long Chu playbook on women being just a “hole to be fucked” and what fun it is to imagine yourself to be one. It’s grotesque, it’s delusional, it’s intellectually dishonest & it’s an insult to women.
I lasted two episodes into the first season, but my lack of interest was probably informed by the people who were recommending it not being the people whose recommendations I value.
It sounds like something Satan’s tools would create. I cannot watch modern Hollywood output – it is repulsive.
This kind of stuff is obviously just degenerate depravity – but disguises its self as edgy drama. All the streaming, all the movies – they are just like the classic thing of a disturbing replica painting of ‘The Last Supper’, only with a couple flies on the table, of maybe one has 2 left feet under the table, spilled food maybe, a rat in the corner….. all the way up to the Olympics opening of a trans last supper….
I loath this stuff, this way the modern system injects wickedness into everything. Check out stories on what is in school libraries now days, what horrors are to be seen on every phone or search – the depths of obscenity. It is all there intentionally, to destroy humanity, to desensitize us so then we may be made evil as our guards have been let go.
I respect your choice of the word “intentionally”.
From school libraries to Hollywood, it’s intentional obscenity and dehumanization. It will fail in time: spiritually sterile and dead societies become physically sterile and dead societies.
The goal then is to make a stand with others who seek life and joy and righteousness, and to build communities and families – mini-civilizations – with that sort of people, the people who want to live and create a better future.
That’s hard to do in most of the West… but fairly doable in Latin America and parts of the United States.
I would not be surprised that such a lifestyle is more viable in Thailand, than in France or the United Kingdom.
“ From school libraries to Hollywood, it’s intentional obscenity and dehumanization. It will fail in time: spiritually sterile and dead societies become physically sterile and dead societies.
The goal then is to make a stand with others who seek life and joy and righteousness, and to build communities and families – mini-civilizations – with that sort of people, the people who want to live and create a better future.”
Wow, Alvin. Well said.
I suspect all you guys would love this ‘liberal depravity’ to be the result of a shadowy conspiracy of elites and WEF types.
Ever consider it’s just (some aspects) of human nature getting free expression and even validation from others who share some of the same nature?
Humans can be very icky occasionally. Ever heard of Gilles de Rais or the Marquis de Sade?
Dear me , we seem to have come a long way from The Sound Of Music.
Spot on ! But unlike Ms.Stock I am thoroughly enjoying the ride. I am eagerly awaiting Episode 6 as I have eagerly awaited all episodes. Each episode and each season has kept me riveted. And each season seems to be a parody of the previous season. Thai beauties and hedonism in the tropics are a reminder that there isn’t much in the way of intellectual culture in these vacation spots. All of the intellect is spent on how to remain anonymous and plotting the next criminal enterprise. It makes for great fiction. Even Hawaii where the first season was filmed relied heavily on natural beauty. Thailand is known for its sex tourism but where is the culture ? The dancing is nice but still eye candy. There is an artificiality, kind of like Dubai and the Burj Khalifa. And once you’ve sat on a camel and eaten grilled meat while watching a belly dancer and a whirling dervish, you’ve seen it all. It only takes 2-3 days. The Italy setting was better. That was season two. There was a large sprinkling of kindness that ran through season two which matches location. And it provides great cover for the finally – an extreme coalescence of evil, violence, and desperation. Even the “Italian” classic The Godfather can’t compete.
If you’ve done any group traveling you know that friendships (and crime) can become quickly personal and very intense because everyone goes their own way after one or two weeks. The vacation motif is infinite in its possibilities. The Love Boat is so dated !
Its creator, Mike White, takes a mostly cynical and hyper class-conscious view of human nature. But I agree it is darkely compelling. I thought there was more pathos in the first season, focusing less on what is contemptible and more on what’s desperate and sad. In contrast to the third season anyway, which is really grim, anxious, and menacing in tone. The second season just seemed pretty empty and boring, until the cartoonish Greek tragedy of a final episode.
The usual stellar clarity.
Though really it’s the meta stuff that is now of greatest interest in our era’s great epistemic disruption. (How cool to be alive in one of these rare historical moments; how cool it must be to be a philosopher just now, too. Kind of like being an epidemiologist, half a decade ago, only with higher stakes).
The premier of season 3 of White Lotus attracted 2.4 million viewers on HBO. Given that the current global population is say 8.062 billion (2023), that is 0.02976% of Human Beings currently living in our tribe. So (by my calcuations) if you gathered together a Council of Humanity consisting of 3,359 diverse, fully-representative members of our tribe, to discuss issues of urgent common relevance – global heating, biosphere degradation, imminent resource warfare, pandemic escalation, nuclear holocaust, and so on – one single person at the Council water cooler would be able to talk about the show between workshops and plenary sessions.
That’s the truly poignant ‘blind spot’ of our ‘Age of Narcissism’, right there. It’s not the appalling – and purely media/arts/journalism projected, implausible – fake-humans and fake-human plots that these tedious posh people’s bread & circuses shove down our gullets. It’s the meta self-delusion of the entire narcissistic cohort that gives them to us: media-arts-journalism content self-obsessives, talking about media-arts-journalism content self-obsessives who make media-arts-journalism content about media-arts-journalism content self-obsessives who talk about media-arts-journalism content self-obsessives who make media-arts-journalism content about…
All the while still desperately convincing themselves – by dint solely of their (lingering but rapidly fragmenting) epistemic over-amplification, reach and volume – that the rest of us a) see their own relentlessly self-flattering reflected image as they do; b) see their own relentlessly self-flattering reflected image at all; and c) would even bother to look closely at their own relentlessly self-flattering reflected image if they hijacked us on the road alongside their streamy feed and shoved our faces right next to theirs, ie a few inches from their own self-loving streamy broadcast.
It’s worth remembering that Narcissus withered himself to death not because he was obsessed with his own deluded self-image, as such. It was because he never realised that the thing he was obsessed with was not simply a deluded self-image (an affliction that doesn’t seem to be withering the world’s Trumps etc away).
It was a deluded self-image that…no-one else except him gave a toss about. Meanwhile in other (real) news, over 8 billion Human Beings have never heard of White Lotus, and never ever ever ever ever will.
Yes, it is cool to be alive right now, at this inflection point in humanity.
Referencing your numbers, whilst it may be true to point up the infinitessimally small cohort for whom White Lotus might be a topic of discussion, isn’t it also fair to point out that the potential proportion of our world population who might get to hear about it is greater than ever, due to the internet/social media?
The implications of that alone far outweigh concerns over how few might actually watch it. Should it become referenced in meme-like fashion, its cultural import could take on a life of its own. This article, brilliantly written as usual, would lend itself to such a thing happening.
That may be so in the briefest, shallowest, most ephemeral way. But its ‘cultural import’…can never be more than its own intrinsically temporary impermanence. I think it’s impossible now for anything carried by any kind of ‘mass media’ to have any lasting impact on anything beyond the circular limits its own self-satisfied and self-referential prison-of-irony. A ‘meme-like fashion’? But by definition a ‘meme-like fashion’ is a void; a meme is a piece of throwaway cultural filler. Its ‘fashion’ is to be a signifier, signifying…nothing. An epistemic Macguffin. A circus act.
Six months ago the circus act was…what, Baby Reindeer? Six months before that…Succession? Or…three months? Three months hence it’ll be…something else (doesn’t matter what). WL will have…withered, its stream barren…we’ll have memed fashionably on to the Next Posh Circus.
My view (after two decades writing online) is that mass media as an epistemic framework is…dead. Just…dead. Over. Nulled; self-nulled. Suicide-by-universal-instant democratic self-publishing (eventually we’ll 8 billion streamy content creators, each with a streamy audience of…one: ourselves. The ‘mass media’ corpse is still twitching and the kinds of people who think WL matters (and who read opinion columns in newspapers and comment on sites like this one – hi, narcissistic self – and congratulate ourselves on our open, pluralist, democratic sensibilities) are still gamely pretending otherwise. But mass media in all its forms (including online ones) became a redundant absurdity way back when, at the very least, social media technology broke the fourth wall in the reverse direction. And probably, since the first ambushed vox pop target on the street told the live camera crew to ‘bloody well piss off, I don’t trust you TV parasites one bit’.
There is – can be – no such framework as ‘mass media’ now. We are all now crowding our way into the TV, film and radio studios – hitherto the impregnable McLuhanite pulpit-citadels – and discovering that this ‘content’ business has been a trick of banal technology and solipsistic arrogance, all along. We know how the trick is done, now. We know how White Lotus is made. We could make it ourselves. We all do, daily. And write newspaper columns, and do radio shows, and make art, and produce…content.
So no-one except the people lying beside its streaming stream gazing lovingly at their own image in it gives a rats’ about any ‘deep artistic meaning’ or ‘universal wisdom’ (they imagine is) projected by a White Lotus. For the obvious and simple reason that we can all project our own meaning now, so why would we invest/piddle our limited discretionary time/energy passively away on someone else’s? If we do look at WL – if we are one of that paltry 2.4 million – then…why, really? Because we are creative and aesthetic lemmings, is why. We’re lumpen-posh morons. We’re the cretinously over-educated. We’re drugged by irony into stupefied gullibility. White Lotus viewers are natural-born Metropolitan Good Germans. Who watch what they’re told to watch, by other MGGs. Out of habit. Passive lazy inertia. Because the thing they’re told to watch is…there. It’s blinking, it’s flashing, it’s sticking its groin in their face, it’s there, it won’t shut uo, it’s ready made, it’s there, it’s there, it’s…there. You don’t have to do anything, certainly not about the real world beyond its dreamy stream..
A posh person’s bread n’ circus.
PS: I know I’m long-winded. Pretentious, too. Poor Bored Writer – the lass is going to shit bricks.
Thank you for that. Before reading it I thought KS was in a league of her own as far as writing pretentious bs is concerned. Are you by any chance related?
Chortle.
Come on, bored writer. You call that an internet chat thread burn? You can do a bit better than that, shorely?! Get a bit properly nasty at least, if being funny is beyond your scrivvy talent.
Bored p***y, more like.
Before now, the only White Lotus I had ever heard of was the secret society in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
This led to considerable confusion on my part as I began reading this article..
This summation has convinced me that I am definitely not the target audience, so probably for the best. It sounds awful.
“rich white people behaving like monsters”
Pretty much sums up Hollywood television and movie productions since about 1968.
Hollywood can’t create anything close to Houellebecqian. It would be interesting if one of the writers at UnHerd examined Hollywood’s role in post-war European perceptions of the United States and, perhaps even better, whether there was any kind of thought or strategy behind it. Was it the Hollywoodian Age, perhaps?
Lots of interest here but still in the dark about this ‘hyperliberalism.
I’ve never watched “White Lotus”. Thanks to Prof. Stock I must get “Platform” for a read. Looking at America presently the lotuses may about to be eaten. Would that not be but a treat. All those nepo and family funded young men and women clogging up business class on Far Eastern flights will be but a memory.
Still remember finishing ‘Platform’ in Melbourne one night, then waking up to the Bali Bombing next morning.
MH was very on-pulse, in his time.
Last book? Unreadable, sadly.
Don’t see Houellebecq at all in American TV. He’s not really a shadow in French cinema either.
The overall reason is that these film industry types are utopians who dream of an ideal future for expressive liberalism (part of which is a celebration of fetish, as correctly noted).
MH has always presented a dystopian vision of liberal Europe, from the personal tragedies of the 60s generation in “Atomised” to the Islamic takeover of France.
Half of “Plateforme” takes place in France where the hero is presented as an update of the nihilist narrator in Camus’ “L’etranger”. Then his first trip to Thailand takes the form of an alienated observation of Western hedonism and a nascent love story with one of the other guests on the package tour to Phuket.
This is both social critique and romanticism, done with self-depreceatingly humour as regards the middle-aged white male whom postmodernity has passed by. When the love affair takes off then we read about his reinvigorated sex life with the younger woman who turns out to be a spy from the tourist industry and their subsequent interest in a new type of package drawing on sex tourism.
Yet this story development presented in quite a chipper way, congratulating itself on this decadent innovation which sticks a finger up at Anglo Puritanism. It’s very French in celebrating the positivity of libertinism rather than a guilty discussion of trans fetishism by a couple of Californian liberalis.
Yes, there is tragedy at the end but that is figured as a reference to the growing influence of Islam in Asian countries experiencing an excess of Western tourism. Nothing so political in a gloopy, uneven US series like “The White Lotus”- you are better revisiting the land politics presented in “Yellowstone”.
White Lotus takes religion seriously, it seems. The episode under discussion ends with the American patriarch praying to God, asking what to do, having sacrificed his childhood faith as an altar boy on the altar of Mammon, and now reaping the results.
The classic John Ford solution here would be:
Redemption.
But at the cost of his own life.
Can’t wait.
I realise it’s a crime, and probably a sin too, but the mere mention of Houllebecq’s name makes me shudder. He may be brilliant, but it seems to me he’s also thoroughly pretentious, as befits a hero of the French literary and philosophical left.
Yep, the guy’s a creep.
Writers, quite simply, shouldn’t watch serial dramas. If they’re forced to, in order to please family members while visiting, they on no account should write about what they saw.
“Netflix? What … is that?”
I hold this truth to be self-evident.
Well yes.
However I think I’ll stick to the repeats of ‘Love for Lydia’ on TPTV.
Hyper-liberalism seems to have an infinite capacity to co-opt and redirect that which threatens to subvert it: religion, patriotism, traditionalism. This is how we end up with populism, a nostalgic promise of better times while accelerating towards dystopia. Brexit, Boris, Farage, Trump all create an illusion of change while ramping up financialization.
“… whether we can do anything other than helplessly watch.”
Well we could just not turn it on to begin with and just watch something else, or nothing. I think we do well to recall that theatre is life, film is art, television is furniture.
And music is next to godliness.
A good essay. The call to a return to religion has never been more sonorous! Mike White has a Christian moral premise at the heart of his satire—following a great tradition.
White Lotus Series 2 was better than White Lotus Series 1.Given each series has almost a complete new set of characters expected Series 3 to struggle to be that good but am engrossed in it.Regard Houllebeck as overrated.Lawrence Osborne does that world weary male loner better but because he does not have the Islamophobic angle has not achieved the same success
I know we have descended into nihilism and depravity. Do the details matter?
Prof Stock doing the work so that we don’t have to.
I’ve never been happier being normal.
Wow! Makes me want to see it. Tremendous review.
In this series, it sounds like Western Civ and Westerners got another drubbing…Makes it easier to say goodbye to Western Civ I suppose.
It’s a shame that so much of our watched entertainment is about people who are filthy, stinking rich. Whether for comedy or pathos, they’re ridiculous; too easy, oddly predictable.
From the description in this article, this drama sounds depressing, sordid and utterly grim. Why on earth is it so popular?
Thank God I gave up on Western drama many years ago.
Is it White Lotus decreeing that yoga and reiki are ‘fake religion’ or Kathleen Stock? Either way, I practise both and they’re not a religion for me or other practitioners I know. I’d say that trash like White Lotus is the opium of hyperliberalism.
I think she’s criticizing the approach of some dabbling tourists, and also doing so from an agnostic-atheistic perspective. I suppose you’d acknowledge that for many, yoga is connected to something its practitioners consider spiritual, if not outright religious. It is intertwined with Hinduism and Buddhism in various ways. Some claim that Buddhism is philosophy not a religion, but I don’t quite agree. It’s both, in my eclectic Westerner’s eyes.
This sad and sick program reminds me of all the hyper violent movies that purport to be statements “against violence” — by pretending to deplore sociopathic behaviors, we give ourselves permission to enjoy them.
It is a crock of shit to call this liberalism. Prince Andrew was in it up to his eye balls, our current president grabs p***y and Matt Getz sooner or later should be incarcerated for his behaviors.
Secondly, you obviously just spent a bunch of time watching this fusillade of
BS and it caused such a dither that you spent a bunch more time spewing a 1000 words of contempt. Far better all of us just to stream something else.
Well said C.F.
“Helplessly watch”? I couldn’t take more than one and a half episodes of it. I seriously wonder what really motivates those who remain watching. Nothing commendable I’m pretty sure.
Absolutely no idea of the point of this piece.
I think it might be recreational sex is immoral.
Isn’t KS of Sc*tch origin?*Therefore case explained.
* Brechin or Montrose.