When The White Lotus first aired on TV in 2021, it arrived with little fanfare or expectation. Made during the pandemic, it was set in a high-end hotel resort in Hawaii – all the better to keep the cast and crew in a secure bubble. Yet its portrait of emotionally stunted, odiously spoiled guests, as seen through the eyes of the desk clerks, waiters and beauticians who served them, was a massive word-of-mouth hit. Now, four years later, you can’t move for satires about the rich and dreadful. From Triangle of Sadness to Saltburn to Anora, the “eat the rich” narrative has become a trope, and an increasingly tired one at that.
All of which means the third series of The White Lotus, which launched last month, needed something spicy up its sleeve to stay ahead of the game and justify its continued existence. After all, outré set pieces and grotesquery have become the genre’s calling card (you may recall the mass vomiting in Triangle of Sadness, or the bathwater incident in Saltburn). Here (spoiler incoming) the extra spice turns out to be incest. Too much? Perhaps – or perhaps we’re simply inured to such shock tactics.
In the latest episode, teenage naif Lochlan (Sam Nivola) and his twentysomething gym bro brother, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), go to a full moon party and kiss each other in a drunken dare. Ick, you think, but no lasting harm. But then Saxon wakes up with the mother of all hangovers, and another scene from the night before floats into view: a hand pleasuring him beneath a bedsheet that belongs not to the woman he planned to seduce but to his little brother.
When incest crops up in popular fiction, it is customary to call it the last taboo. But given the sheer number of storytellers deploying it as a subplot, it’s one that sure gets a lot of airtime. Think of the sibling sex in Climax, the 2018 picture by filmmaker and habitual boundary crosser Gaspar Noe. Or Game of Thrones and its offshoot House of the Dragon, in which sex within families is normalised and an entire dynasty – the Targaryens – is built on inbreeding to keep the bloodlines pure. A slightly different case is Ryan Murphy’s true-crime series Monsters: The Lyle and Eriki Menéndez Story in which the titular siblings kiss and take a shower together. There the incest was controversial mainly because there is no evidence that the real-life brothers had had a sexual relationship; Murphy seemed to be throwing it in to zhuzh up a story that already contained the double murder of their parents. Plenty of other series have gone down the incest path: True Detective, Taboo, the rebooted Gossip Girl, even Channel 4’s now-defunct soap Brookside.
In The White Lotus, there have been warning signs of the transgressions to come, via Saxon’s unsettling actions and asides. In the opening episode, he called his sister “pretty hot” and speculated about her virginity. Later we saw him watching porn on his iPad in front of Lochlan before heading off to the bathroom to masturbate, though not before giving his brother an eyeful of his naked backside. Which is to say the incest storyline has been trailed since the beginning, the hope perhaps being that it would sustain the tension for the first half of the series.
If that was the plan, it didn’t quite work out. Of all The White Lotus seasons, this one has been the most sluggish, disjointed and hard to love. Part of that is its familiarity. We know writer-director Mike White’s schtick too well now: a corpse at the start, beautiful sunsets, unhappy workers, guests with literal and metaphorical baggage making culturally insensitive gaffes (see Parker Posey’s Victoria, wife of Jason Isaac’s financier-in-meltdown, thinking she was holidaying in Taiwan, not Thailand). The White Lotus often has a cynic in its midst who this time around is Piper, sister of Lochlan and Saxon, who disparages the resort as “a Disneyland for rich bohemians from Malibu in their Lululemon yoga pants” for the benefit of those asleep in the stalls.
Another common theme in all three seasons of The White Lotus is the repression of its characters: the CEOs trying to keep a lid on their stress; the serving classes resisting the urge to tell guests where to shove it. In the past, there was fun to be had waiting to see who would blow a gasket first. Who can forget Armond, Murray Bartlett’s hotel manager, dramatically losing it in season one and emptying his bowels in a guest’s suitcase? Or Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya shouting, “The gays are trying to murder me.” But that’s the problem with this series – there’s no levity. Having two brothers make out may have provided a jolt, but laughter? Not so much.
We’ve yet to see whether the series will interrogate the “why” of the brothers’ impulses, or if a further plot twist will throw a different light on their activities. In any case, the storyline has perhaps already served its purpose by getting social media – and, yes, newspaper columnists – talking about it. But if incest really is the last taboo and Mike White has, in a sense, done his worst, then where can The White Lotus go from here?
