It’s the scene—the one people will remember after Season 3 of The White Lotus ends on Sunday, when another floating body is identified and the pop culture hive mind checks out of its favorite demented five-star resort. Charlotte Le Bon’s Chloe—Audrey Hepburn with Samantha Jones’s libido and a tart French accent—is straddling Saxon Ratliff, the douche du jour played by Patrick Schwarzenegger, on a yacht borrowed from her creepy older boyfriend, Gary (White Lotus staple Jon Gries). Then, in blurry, bawdy flashbacks, Chloe moves on to Lochlan Ratliff (Sam Nivola), the cutie, Chalamet-coded little brother in the Tombolo shirt. While Saxon lays beside them, watching in a drunken, drug-induced stupor, his brother—Lochlan, noooo!—reaches over and begins to stroke him.
The scene stunned me, both because of the incest—perhaps the only White Lotus theory not floated on TikTok—and the way writer-director-creator Mike White subverted the expected sexual dynamics. Most onscreen threesomes, from Wild Things on, cater to the male gaze with two game women. But White’s world embraces the lesser-seen male-male-female ménage à trois (although, to be clear, Chloe never compels Lochlan to sexually touch his brother). Also, after Chloe and her vacation bestie, Chelsea (the endearing Aimee Lou Wood), playfully kiss in front of the Ratliffs—predictable—the women urge the guys to do the same. Less predictable!
The morning after reverses yet more roles: While the brothers, especially the once-unflappable Saxon, reel with shame, Chloe is essentially unbothered, perching cat-like above the deck to recap with Chelsea. Asked if she hooked up with Saxon or Lochlan, she blithely says no: “I hooked up with both of them.”
This is the enduring allure of The White Lotus: It woos viewers with lush, Bachelor-fantasy date settings and a classic murder mystery, then shanks us with commentary on privilege and power (I haven’t felt entirely comfortable at a resort since Season 1). In the contemplative latest season, White gives his female characters an uncommon level of sexual agency, which they use and abuse at will—much like, you know, men. Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) cheats on her husband with Valentin (Arnas Fedaravičius), the hotel staffer she’d been pushing on her divorced “bestie” Laurie (Carrie Coons), though Jaclyn’s particular marital arrangement is nebulous. Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) beds her sweet colleague Porchai (Dom Hetrakul), who suggests the very next day that they open a spa together—eliciting a kind, vaguely pitying smile from her that seems to say: Bless his heart.
And Chloe trumps even Saxon as the show’s most virile animal, wearing her sexual potency as confidently as her Easter egg-pink Jacquemus resort wear. She sets her sights on Lochlan, telling Chelsea that “innocent young guys” are one of her kinks. “When they see you naked, they shake, and you can see their little hearts beating inside their chests,” she coos. While it may lack the intricacy of Frank’s (Sam Rockwell) monologue about his fetishes in Episode 5, here is a woman speaking her still-taboo desire (sex with an 18-year-old high schooler) out loud. More than one White Lotus guest laments the prevalence of young women dating wealthy older men at various stages of baldness, but Chloe owns the fact that women, too, can lust after younger partners as a matter of type. She calls Lochlan her “little magician,” but maybe this is White’s sleight of hand—suggesting that she isn’t so different from Gary after all. It might not be pretty, but it feels like parity: allowing female characters to be stupid with want; to be as messy and human and calculated as any man.
White is equally experimental with the guys of Thailand, engaging in a season-long exploration of masculinity and machismo. Sensitive security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) expresses his adoration for Mook (Lalisa Manobal) from the start, but she waffles, evidently hoping he’ll gnash his teeth, cock his gun, and tap into the “natural” aggressive instincts of a muay thai fighter. Gaitok is the type of man—tender, thoughtful—that modern women are supposed to want, and yet he’s losing. As for the pure-hearted Lochlan, Saxon relentlessly sexualizes his beta brother, from masturbating in front of him to appointing himself his wing man. Like Gaitok, Lochlan is shamed for not being tougher, but by the time Lochlan gets “laid,” Saxon has succeeded in creating a monster.
Yet the mask of alpha manhood isn’t serving Saxon any better. Being objectified by Chloe sends him spiraling; when she tries to recruit him to sleep with her while Greg watches, he refuses, his lewd advice to Lochlan (“Most people don’t know what they want and a lot of them… they just want to be used”) growing more hollow by the day.
How The White Lotus will settle things (or not) with so many sexually potent women, to say nothing of the flailing men, remains to be seen. Will Chloe survive and thrive like last season’s Sicilian sex workers, who triumphed in the kind of eat-the-rich ending I wanted for Anora’s Ani—or is a woman this carnally confident simply doomed? No matter: Whether one of them ends up dead or not, the women of Season 3 have already lived.
