What White Lotus tells us about Western spiritual malaise and the so-called elite

HBO’s hit series White Lotus is a gem among many duds in the modern entertainment landscape. At the heart of its satirical and mystery-driven reverse whodunit premise is a success owing to the striking cultural commentary it delivers—especially on society’s elite. Only the richest of the rich can access the White Lotus’s luxurious spa and wellness center—only the powerful, the bold, and the beautiful.

White Lotus does what few apolitical pieces of art still manage: it holds a mirror up to the culture in a specific moment, invoking its spirit and gracefully embodying it, while still managing to maintain enough distance. So much of popular culture today suffers from a particular ideological bent, rendering it unwatchable.

The show’s got it all: a stellar cast of brilliant actors, a quirky and cooky soundtrack, and—most importantly—genuine, believable characters. They are the kinds of people you’ve met if you’ve been abroad and lived outside of the internet. Not cardboard cutouts, but actual “successful” people navigating the maze and malaise that is the modern world.

They are, of course, Westerners. Americans, Aussies, Kiwis, Canadians, Brits—they’re all there. These are sometimes contrasted with the locals, but events that transpire don’t paint Westerners in an ill light; they simply reveal the truth about our spiritual decay.

The Anthology series covers a different luxurious resort in each season: first in Hawaii, then in Sicily, and most recently in Thailand, or Koh Samui to be precise.1

Strikingly, each season delightfully follows the elite and wealthy who might attend such retreats. These resorts have everything: wellness mentors, personalized regimens, digital detox bags, villas, ocean views—the full curated expression of tasteful Western luxury. The very pinnacle of tasteful capitalistic consumption. A kind of decadence that only the elite can enjoy.

It’d be depressing if it weren’t so funny. Because even though we live in times of political polarization, ideological crusades, and the unrelenting culture war, the show manages to flirt with each of the zeitgeist’s component pieces, never committing to a side. Moments of cultural listlessness emerge, usually through outright hedonism, but the core of the show is about the characters.

And boy, are the characters a unique lot.

One of the standout favourites is Armond, the Aussie hotel manager in season one. His comic and tragic descent gives us a perfect window into the dynamic between staff and guests at the White Lotus. Early on, he explains the elite’s pathology:

‘You have to treat these people like sensitive children. They always say it’s about the money, but it’s not. It’s not even about the room. They just need to feel seen. They wanna be the only child. The special, chosen baby child of the hotel. And we are their mean mummies…’

Naturally, Armond ends up going off the deep end when he recovers a backpack filled with drugs in the resort’s lost and found. The two young women who it belongs to, played by Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O’Grady, furiously hunt to retrieve it, lest their trip be ruined (how could it ever be bearable without drugs?), but Armond is happy to conceal it from them.

Without spoiling the plot, I’ll just say that Armond ends up defecating in the suitcase of a particularly belligerent guest. And honestly, given the full context, you almost find yourself cheering for him.

I know it’s unseemly, but… what kind of Elite Human Capital™ has their mother book the accommodation for his honeymoon?

And it just gets worse. No one is spared—arrogant girl bosses, annoying wellness gurus, affluent middle aged white women, finance and tech bros, porn-brained men—no one. Art imitates life, as it should in competent fiction.

The emotional dysfunction on display is both endearing and horrifying. It paints a portrait of degraded individualism, narcissism, and spiritual rot. These characters are listless, broken, and purposeless. Their lives revolve around novelty and indulgence, and they are marked by a spiritual malaise that grips the West across all dividing lines.

In season three, set in Thailand, we see wanton licentiousness on full display. Anyone who’s been to “the Land of Smiles” knows the drill: whether it’s drug-addled, partying youngsters or yoga girls preaching spiritual nonsense while engaging in all manner of debauchery, Thailand’s got it all.

Enter the Ratliff family. Patriarch Timothy learns by phone that his empire is collapsing due his own greedy decisions. Facing jail time back home in the U.S., he pretends to engage in a “digital detox” while quietly contemplating suicide and murder. Jason Isaacs plays the role masterfully.

His wife, Victoria—played with delicious snobbery by Parker Posey—is oblivious. When Tim floats a hypothetical about losing everything, she fails the test completely. With her delectable southern drawl she perfectly embodies the pampered, faded trophy wife.

Perhaps predictably, Tim imagines killing her before killing himself. Charming.

But the dysfunction and degeneracy doesn’t stop there. Next, Tim’s two sons, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger, yes, that Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola), get wild at Koh Phangan’s famous Full Moon Party. As for the party itself? The show depicts it perfectly—I’ve been to the party myself multiple times and it does not miss a beat. Shot on location, it captures the chaos of it all beautifully.

The party starts off innocently enough, with all involved taking what is presumably ecstasy. They dance and revel in the multicolored splendor that captures the party’s spirit, and they share deep and meaningful conversations.

But then, the night takes a dark turn when the brothers share an incestuous kiss to please the objects of their affection, French Canadian Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). When Saxon awakens he remembers the night’s grim conclusion—Chelsea rejected him and he watched while younger brother Lachlan went to town on Chloe, jacking him off while he did so.

Needless to say, he is both mortified and disgusted. Understandably.

Later, when he’s confronted by Chelsea—the nicer, hippy-dippy, somewhat wholesome girl—he lies. Her nonchalant, “I’m not judging” response echoes today’s moral ambivalence. Whether it’s sexual libertinism or atrophied values, White Lotus doesn’t moralize. It just… shows.

But the most depraved story? That belongs to Frank, played fantastically by Sam Rockwell.

When his old friend Rick arrives in Bangkok looking for a favour—to secure him a pistol and help his quest for revenge—the two go out for dinner, and Rick is surprised to learn his old party buddy is now declared sober and committed to Buddhism. When Rick asks what led him to this decision, he gets more than he bargained for.

This might be the most disturbing monologue ever screened on television. Rick’s reactions are priceless, too.

Below is a screenplay-style transcription of the scene in case the video gets taken down (it is owned by HBO, after all). Skip this section if you’d rather watch the video (I’d recommend you do).

Cut to establishing shot in a Bangkok bar.

Frank (played by Sam Rockwell): You know, I moved here because uh… I moved here because, well, you know, I had to leave the States. But I picked Thailand because I always had a thing for Asian girls. You know. And when I got here I was like a kid in a candy store; if you’ve got money, no attachments, nothing to do, I started partying—it got wild. I was picking up girls every night. Always different ones. Petite ones, chubby ones, older ones, and sometimes older ladies at night. I was out of control. I became insatiable. And you know… after about… a thousand nights like that you start to lose it. I started wondering “Where am I going with this… why do I feel this need to fuck all these women? What is desire? The form of this cute Asian girl, why does it have such a grip on me?” (…) I realized I could fuck a million women and I’d still never be satisfied. Maybe… maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls.”

Pause and cut to Rick’s face. Brow furrows, a joking grin beginning to take form.

Rick: ‘Really…?’

Frank: ‘You know?’

Rick: ‘Not… not, really.’

Frank: ‘No, really.’

Pregnant pause. Silence draws out a smidgen.

‘So, one night I took home some girl, turned out to be a ladyboy—which I’d done before—but this time, instead of fucking the ladyboy, the ladyboy fucked me.’

Cut to Rick’s face, a grim expression followed by a flaccid, reticent nod.

Frank: ‘And it was kind of magical. And I got it in my head what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls… getting fucked by me. And to feel that.

Cut to Rick’s wide-eyed expression, mouth agape.

Rick: ‘Uh-huh.’

‘So I put out an ad looking for a white guy, my age, to come over and fuck me. Found a guy who looked a lot like me. Then I put on some lingerie and perfume, made myself look like one of these girls. I thought I looked pretty hot. And then the guy came over and railed the shit out of me. And then I got addicted to that—some nights three, four guys would come over and rail the shit out of me. Some I even had to pay. And at the same time, I’d hire an Asian girl to just sit there and watch the whole thing. I’d look in her eyes while some guy was fucking me and I’d think “I am her, and I’m fucking me.”

Cut to Rick, frozen then slightly taken aback. A subtle shaking of the shoulders. Again, a reluctant nod.

Rick: ‘Mmm-hmm.’

Frank: ‘Hey, we all have our Achilles heel, man – you know. Where does it come from? Why are some of us attracted to the opposite form and some of us the same? Sex is a poetic act. It’s a metaphor—a metaphor for what? Are we our forms? Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside, too? Or, inside, could I be an Asian girl?’

A moment of pause before Rick, still mouth agape, eyes wide, speaks.

Rick: ‘Right…’ he breathes, head shaking slightly, eyes widening further, ‘I don’t know.’

Frank: ‘Guess I was tryin’ to fuck my way to the answer. (…) And then I realized I gotta stop—the drugs, the girls, the y’know, trying to be a girl… I got into Buddhism which is all about… you know, spirit versus form, detaching from self, getting off the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering. Being sober ain’t so bad. Being celibate, though, that’s… I still miss that pussy, man.’

Political actors of various persuasions have already overanalyzed the monologue, and perhaps unsurprisingly, one says that it exposes a dark truth about men and “passport bros.”

The thing is, it really doesn’t. This is vast overreach. There are countless swathes of men and women of the Western persuasion who are dysfunctional, deracinated, deluded, and disillusioned in all kinds of ways, but the monologue represents a sick anomaly from an “elite” class of men who make the pursuit of pleasure, power, and money their north star—that is why it has resonance. As creator and writer of the show, Mike White, put it: [the show is about]… “attractive people in beautiful places doing sexy, dirty shit.”

Frank isn’t a critique of men. He’s a critique of decadent men who descend into spiritual degeneracy in pursuit of meaning they can never obtain. This distinction is crucial to understanding the show’s critique.

And listen, I’ve been to Thailand. I lived there for over a year. I’ve met these people. They’re not mythical. They’re very real, and White Lotus nails them.

White himself understands this. As The New Yorker noted, White owns property in Kauai. He’s aware of his privilege (wealth, not skin). He even admits it:

“I can make fun of Mark Zuckerberg—but I am also that person.”

His work is self-aware, nuanced, and sharp; he writes alone—without a writers’ room—because he doesn’t want his vision diluted by ideological scrutiny.

“I don’t want a writers’ room… I don’t have time to mentor anybody, and I don’t really want to be scrutinized that way.”

Indeed, White has much criticism for his own (he is a gay white man himself). In season two, he continues the story of Tanya McQuoid, an impossibly vapid and insufferable aging woman played by Jennifer Coolidge.2 She’s rich, naive, and clingy. By the end of the season, she finds herself in a very dangerous predicament, moving among what White describes as “evil gays.”

Some might say this is “injecting his politics into the art”, but I disagree. White is a 90s liberal writer trying to survive in a post-woke media environment. As any who write fiction professionally in a space which requires collaboration will know, you work with the Overton Window when this is your job. You do this because you love your job and wish to continue doing it.

He plays his part dutifully in the interviews he’s done, paying lip service to all the classic woke “concerns” as the New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh recognizes. Though Sanneh does try to spin it in a more palatable fashion for the magazine’s readership:

White’s approach means that he is often creating dialogue for characters who do not resemble him, in contravention of the idea that demographic authenticity is a necessary ingredient in a great script. But the opportunity to transgress boundaries of identity is one of his favorite parts of writing; many of his most celebrated characters, after all, are women. “It’s a pleasure to try to get inside someone’s head,” he says.

Of course “demographic authenticity” (what a phrase!) isn’t needed for a great script. Most great books and scripts were written solo. And his scripts are genius: they capture the reality of Elite Human Capital—a Western elite class who, while depicted in a show that is most certainly satire, resemble the worst kinds of people that are so prevalent in today’s West.

As Andrew Breitbart’s immortal quote goes, “Politics is downstream of culture.”

The right may be ascendant in American politics for the time being, but the culture still floats in liberal waters. Religiosity is down, nihilism is rampant, and hedonism reigns. The pursuit of “experience”, the ultimate personification of culture focused on the self3, has become perennial and, ironically, the individual reels as a result. We have shed our religious and spiritual roots at the cost of understanding who we are. The family—the core institution of Western strength—has been sidelined for an unserious culture that cares about unserious things.

The Westerner is unmoored from a higher purpose and does not know what to seek beyond money, power, and wealth—he is the final apotheosis of the Faustian bargain. He is Nietzsche’s Last Man.

This is the reality of Elite Human Capital. Western elites do not adhere to anything that resembles timeless principles. They do not care about the future in any sense beyond what they can accumulate and control.

It is no surprise, then, that so many have been rattled and upset by the changes implemented by the dreaded Orange Man. Any shifting of the status quo is to be met with vitriol. By now, this is par for the course.

White Lotus may be fictional satire, but its cultural commentary about elite Westerners hits strikingly close to home. The characters are not real, but the themes are.

There are no easy answers and solutions to this state of affairs. An optimist might hope for a spiritual resurgence—a bottom-up reclamation of values. A pessimist might shrug and declare, “We’re done.” I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle.

As a father, I have to believe that things can change. I have to believe that even in satire, even among the grotesque and absurd, there’s a seed of hope.

There has to be.

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