Summary
The White Lotus Season 3 livens up in Episode 5 with a laundry list of debauchery and the most deranged monologue ever committed to film.
Buddhism is snaking through The White Lotus Season 3 like a vein, pumping life-giving thematic resonance through arteries and organs and back again. This means the show’s typical promise of pending doom is a blessing. Buddhists are big on samsara, the concept of life, death, and rebirth, the idea that one’s consciousness departs its earthly vessel and, guided by karma, finds a new one to settle in. In Episode 5, very much part two of the previous hour’s close flirtation with chaos, it occurred to me that perhaps the best thing that could happen to half of these characters is to be murdered and given another crack at things.
“Full-Moon Party” might also be fondly remembered as the one where everyone has sex with each other. There are a ton of hook-ups this week, most of them probably ill-advised. Jaclyn (married!) and Valentin (a hotel employee) is definitely not ideal. Saxon, Lochlan, Chelsea, and Chloe is probably illegal in several parts of the world (plus Chloe is dating a murderer.) Belinda and Pornchai is as emotionally healthy as it all gets, and even then Belinda has essentially enlisted Pornchai as close personal protection because Greg has been asking questions about her and Fabian wrote off her very legitimate concerns about his intentions as “gossip”.
So, here we are. And it brings me great pleasure to note that none of the above constitutes the most deranged stretch of the episode, which belongs to a guest-starring Sam Rockwell delivering what is hands down one of the most demented stories of personal enlightenment ever committed to film. We might as well start there.
Sam Rockwell Delivers the Maddest Monologue Ever Written
Rockwell is playing Frank, an old pal of Rick’s. Rick is meeting Frank to get his hands on a gun – as if there aren’t enough of those floating around the White Lotus at this point – but must have briefly considered shooting himself with it after hearing Frank’s extended monologue about finding religion. It goes a little something like this.
Frank has more money than sense, so he went to Thailand to throw it in the vague direction of Asian girls, with whom he had something of an obsession. Thousands of one-night stands later he discovered that some Asian girls were ladyboys and partook in those too. The gender-blending was revelatory to Frank, who realized not that he might be into men, but that he might be into men in the specific context of imagining himself as an Asian girl being railed by a dude who resembled him.
Because, as established, Frank had an ungodly amount of money, he was in a position to pay dudes to have sex with him while also paying an Asian girl to watch him, dressed as an Asian girl, being used by dudes. In the eyes of that paid Asian girl he could, in a perverse sense, see himself as an Asian girl, but admittedly one that only exists for the use and disregard of a white dude. Or something. Either way, it’s one of the maddest things I’ve ever heard.
Rockwell delivers this with a totally straight face as if there’s a very important lesson Rick should be gleaning from it. Walton Goggins, to his credit, plays Rick as if he’s talking to one of those very drunk people you sometimes meet in a club smoking area, who you suspect might be capable of extreme violence at a moment’s notice. From a Buddhist perspective, I don’t think there’s a word for someone who wants to be reborn as a person who never heard that crazy story. Perhaps there should be.
Piper Ratliff, Buddhist
Sam Rockwell and Walton Goggins in The White Lotus Season 3 | Image via WarnerMedia
Piper wants her rebirth to come sooner rather than later. After teasing it in the previous episode, she finally reveals to her parents that the trip to Thailand has been a con all along, just an excuse to check out the meditation retreat where she plans to live for a year as a fully-fledged Buddhist, despite her mother’s horror that she plans to live in “Taiwan” and insistence that she can’t be a Buddhist because she isn’t from China.
Victoria’s ignorance is funny because it’s so overblown, but it’s also a bit terrifying because it’s rooted in a very common sense of genuine superiority. She has never applied the same logic to herself – asked how she can be a Christian when she isn’t from Jerusalem, she replies that everyone she knows is a Christian, as if that constitutes an answer. She has never had cause to consider that her way isn’t the “right” way. Her biggest fear is that Piper might fundamentally change; that she might realize there’s more to the world than South Carolina, and at no point does she ever consider that this is the entire point of what Piper is doing.
You see a bit of this attitude in Tim, but only briefly. He is, admittedly, losing himself in a haze of prescription pill-induced wooziness – forcing Victoria to go cold turkey in the meantime, which I’m certain won’t end well – and debating using the gun he stole from Gaitok to blow his own head off. But when Gaitok briefly confronts him about the stolen firearm, Tim is just like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Despite the fact that the CCTV footage proves Tim took it, he defaults to rich dude factory settings. The idea of his word not being taken at face value never occurs to him.
Girls’ Night Out Pt 2
The White Lotus Season 3, Episode 5 spares a fair amount of time for Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie, which is interesting because there’s enough alcohol and general debauchery involved for us to finally see who each of them really is, beyond the performative niceties and behind-closed-doors bitching. It isn’t – ironically, given the cast – a very pretty sight.
Of them all, only Kate seems to realize that most of what’s going on doesn’t necessarily constitute wellness. It’s like she can sense doom coming over the horizon; on the Titanic, she’d have spotted the iceberg first. But the ship would still have hit it because everyone else would have been dancing, going topless in the pool, and cheating on their husbands.
Laurie, I feel a bit sorry for. Her version of cutting loose feels like desperation, as if she’s trying to cosplay the life of a more exciting person. It’s Jaclyn who’s the sinister one. Everything she does is calculated, from the loaded looks whenever anyone suggests toning things down to summoning Valentin back to the villa after everyone else has gone to sleep and the party has ended. That isn’t getting caught up in the moment, it’s creating another moment after the previous one has ended.
Charlotte Le Bon, Sam Nivola, and Aimee Lou Wood in The White Lotus Season 3 | Image via WarnerMedia
The Full-Moon Party
The namesake moment of The White Lotus Season 3, Episode 5 is the party attended by Saxon, Lochlan, Chloe, and Chelsea, which looks like fun. But, again, they go way too far with it. And it’s Lochlan, in particular, who seems to be embracing the debauchery.
I must confess that it wasn’t on my bingo card for Saxon to take the morally principled stance, but it happens twice in this episode, once when Lochlan dives headfirst into the wibbly pleasures of narcotics – Saxon does eventually pop a molly, presumably not wanting to be upstaged by his little bro – and again when the gang plays a fumbling teenage kissing game and Lochlan starts putting the moves on him. It’s a weird scene; just a peck and then a slightly longer, more dramatic smooch, but it’s followed by Lochlan having a gleam in his eye that suggests he might be a lot more sinister than any of us necessarily realized.
As for the girls, it’s kind of whatever at this point. Chelsea initially wasn’t keen on Chloe’s half-joking suggestion of a foursome, and while she was more than happy to kiss Chelsea during the game, you can write that off a younger woman being bored to tears by her much older and clearly deeply haunted husband. Same with Chloe – Greg clearly isn’t able to keep up, even though she does voice a concern that he might kill her. She says she thinks he’s capable of it, perhaps half-joking. If only she knew.
