05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘White Lotus' Has an Old-School View of Relationships
The hotly anticipated final episode of the third season of HBO's hit 'White Lotus' airs Sunday. The show has earned a reputation for revealing the sordid emotional lives of the 1 percent, the types who regularly vacation at five-star-resorts like the White Lotus on fabulous Thai islands.
No matter who on the lavish grounds is sacrificed tomorrow night for our entertainment, I predict that if all of the couples literally survive, their relationships will probably survive, too. And the traumatic events they endure will only bring them closer, no matter how much they've previously lied to each other and themselves.
In many ways, married couples and nuclear families are the two pillars of society that the show's director and creator, Mike White, doesn't want to blow up.
In spite of the more provocative, sexually transgressive plotlines Mr. White has explored — this season's Ratliff brothers' incestuous three-way comes to mind — ultimately, the show has its own old-school view of marriage: 'Til death do us part.
If the pop cultural vogue in relationships emphasizes radical honesty, and talking through feelings in a therapeutic environment, in all three seasons of the show, marriage is about loyalty, strategic deception, and keeping up appearances. This is true even as the characters individually dabble in new age wellness practices like meditation that are meant to get at deeper truths and self-knowledge.
The show has a satisfying honesty about the role money plays in marital cohesion, even as we like to pretend that modern marriage is built on love, fidelity and compatibility. As the historian Stephanie Coontz explained in her sweeping 2005 book 'Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,' for millennia, marriage for the upper crust was not about affection, it was a financial and political arrangement meant to consolidate power. 'The marriages of the rich and famous in the ancient and medieval worlds can be told as political thrillers, corporate mergers, military epics and occasionally even murder mysteries.'
Sounds a lot like this TV show.
In the first season, which takes place in Hawaii, Nicole and Mark Mossbacher are the best example of this kind of relationship. Mark has in the past been unfaithful to Nicole, who is a top executive at a tech company, and he's definitely conflicted about the fact that she is far more successful than he is. When another guest, the confused newlywed Rachel, learns that Mark has been married for 22 years, she asks him, 'What's your guys secret, how do you guys keep the spark alive?' and he responds: 'The spark? Oh that's not alive. That died. I mean, love may be alive. But the spark? Pfft.'
The Mossbachers continue to squabble until they are violently robbed, and Mark physically defends Nicole. The end of the series shows them to be emotionally closer than before they arrived at the resort; Mark is fetching Nicole fresh kiwi at breakfast and Nicole is beaming at him. Rachel, who had previously been upset to discover that she is a 'trophy wife,' decides to stay with her incredibly rich and petulant new husband Shane.
But the 'White Lotus' theory of relationships is perhaps most clearly expressed by Daphne Sullivan, one of the main characters in Season 2. She is a beautiful, contented mother of two married to a cocky finance guy named Cameron. They traveled to Italy with Ethan, Cameron's old college roommate who just sold his start-up for a lot of money, and Harper, Ethan's sharp-tongued lawyer wife, who doesn't come from wealth and is suspicious of the entire enterprise.
In the first episodes, Daphne appears to be floating happily on her good fortune. But as the season progresses, we see slight cracks in her serene expression, making it clear that she knows that her husband is unfaithful (all credit goes to the actress, Meghann Fahy, who perfectly telegraphs Daphne's discomfort, and quick calculation, without saying a word).
Instead of raging at Cameron, she spends his money on a side trip to an extravagant villa, and it's suggested that she cheats on him right back. 'We never really know what goes on in people's minds, or what they do, right? You spend every second with somebody, and there's still this part that's a mystery,' Daphne says to her husband's friend Ethan, when he reveals that Harper might have had a dalliance with Cameron. 'You don't have to know everything to love someone. A little mystery? It's kinda sexy,' Daphne tells Ethan, and adds, 'I think you just — you just — do whatever you have to do not to feel like a victim of life.'
After this speech, Daphne leads Ethan, down a beach into a cove, and though we don't see what happens, their interaction eventually leads to relationship happiness for both Cameron and Daphne and Ethan and Harper. For Ethan and Harper, cheating, or the mere idea of cheating, reinvigorates their previously sexless marriage. In the final scene of the season, at the airport, both couples are blissful and entwined.
In the current season, there is a lot of frank discussion of the role of money in relationships, as there are many older, balding wealthy men who are at the White Lotus with their young, hot girlfriends. Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey), a booze-and-pills addled, married Southern lady, accosts one of these girlfriends at a party. 'You're such a darling girl. You're young. You're beautiful. Why are you with this middle-aged weirdo? Does he have a lot of money?' Victoria asks. The girlfriend's face drops. 'You can't ask that,' she retorts. Victoria's response: 'Come to North Carolina. I could introduce you to some respectable men. They would eat you up.'
What makes this scene so funny is not just Posey's sodden delivery, it's the fact that she doesn't understand that she's offering the same compromise — a rich man in exchange for a woman's youth and beauty — in a more 'respectable' package.
What might change my prediction about couples staying together in the last episode? Loss of money and status. No one in previous seasons has had their place in the financial firmament threatened.
If Victoria finally discovers that her husband, Timothy, is on the brink of losing everything because of his financial crimes, I don't know what she'd be capable of. As she admitted earlier in the season, if they lost everything, Victoria doesn't think she'd want to live. 'I just don't think at this age I'm meant to live an uncomfortable life. I don't have the will.'
For Victoria, and many of the other couples on 'White Lotus,' it's not in sickness and in health, it's in sickness and in wealth.
End Notes
