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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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/
