Checking in at The White Lotus

Spoilers for episode 301 

Since 2021 The White Lotus has become one of the jewels in HBO’s post-Game of Thrones crown. Created by Mike White, who also writes and directs all episodes, The White Lotus explores the world of luxury tourism, examining the impact of wealth, class, and race on stunning locales across the globe. It’s a show about terrible people and the working class who serve them with a smile, with a side of murder mystery as each season opens with A Body; the person’s demise is what we unravel throughout the season. Season three premiered this week and takes us to Thailand and a beachfront resort where rich people once again terrorize the perfectly nice service staff. 

(Also, I wrote about hoping The White Lotus would get into a comedy Emmy fight with The Bear and Hacks, but a very kind publicist reminded me that The White Lotus competes in the drama category. The White Lotus can get into an Emmy fight with Severance and Slow Horses, instead.)

As we have come to expect from The White Lotus, the series is impeccably crafted and cast. This season brings us a mostly new ensemble including Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Christian Friedel, Leslie Bibb, Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Aimee Lou Wood, Lalisa Manobal, Tayme Thapthimthong, Dom Hetrakul, Sam Nivola, Sarah Catherine Hook, and Patrick Schwarzenegger, as well as Natasha Rothwell and Jon Gries (surprise!) returning from previous seasons. We will be talking about these actors and the cadre of phenomenal performances they’re giving—especially Natasha Rothwell—but right now, I just want to talk about the immediately bone-chilling performance from Patrick Schwarzenegger.

We’ve met a lot of people throughout The White Lotus who are varying degrees of greedy, obnoxious, spoiled, deceitful, even lethal. Within seconds of meeting him, Saxon Ratliff (Schwarzenegger), eldest son of the dynastic Southern Ratliff family, is all of these things, with a side serving of sexually upsetting in some undefinable way. Is he repressed? Is he aggressive? Saxon’s hangup isn’t clear, but that he has a sexual hangup IS, and the man only seems more menacing for it. Never has a character seemed so immediately threatening as Saxon Ratliff, not even season one’s murderous motherboy, Shane Patton (Jake Lacy). Shane just seemed spoiled and rude and whiny. Saxon, however, seems ready to murder at the drop of someone’s pants. 

Patrick Schwarzenegger is, obviously, the son of Arnold (and Maria Shriver). But beyond his coloring and general giant-ness, he doesn’t really look like his dad. No, it’s another 80s icon he’s channeling in his performance, a choice that highlights Saxon’s generally unhinged quality: Tom Cruise. Schwarzenegger is attacking this performance with same kind of aggressively outgoing but chillingly empty energy Christian Bale once channeled into Patrick Bateman (Bale attributed his inspiration to Cruise). Saxon is a finance bro, a boy-man who worships his father and tortures his younger siblings and “loves work” and resents being taken to a luxury resort for a week of sun and sand and no phones. Basically, he’s a huge tool and nobody likes him. 

Schwarzenegger’s performance is impressive from moment one, not least because he’s got that empty-eyed Tom Cruise smile and manic energy down pat. But it’s also how you can see Saxon’s seams so clearly, this is a person held together by spit and capitalism. He has every advantage in life but he’s a wet asshole, a representation of the worst of wealth worship and finance culture. Middle sibling Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) is at least on a spiritual journey that suggests she’s on the precipice of rejecting what her family represents—much like Quinn Mossbacher in season one, though it’s interesting these privileged white kids need brown people to show them the way to a spiritually satisfying life. And then there is youngest sibling Lachlan (Sam Nivola), who is literally torn between deciding to attend his mother’s alma mater or his father’s, but who is also spiritually torn between his two older siblings.

And that is what makes the Ratliff siblings so interesting. They’re the embodiment of the spiritual conflict underpinning The White Lotus. The paths of wealth and spirituality are inherently incompatible, one kills the other. You cannot walk both paths in a meaningful way, at best you can co-opt the appearance of spirituality amidst a wealthy life, such as the three girlfriends played by Leslie Bibb, Michelle Monaghan, and Carrie Coon. But to genuinely embrace a spiritual life, you must reject wealth. Piper is spiritually curious, Saxon is defiantly spiritually closed off. Lachlan stands between them, undecided.

The White Lotus always has a unifying visual theme, and this season it is the three wise monkeys commonly depicted in East Asian lore, with one covering its eyes, one its ears, and one its mouth. In Japan, they are Mizaru, Kikazaru, Iwazaru, or “see not, hear not, speak not”. Our introduction to the Ratliff siblings frames them in this context.

Of course, Saxon, who is completely divorced from himself both physically and spiritually, is “see not”. The man willfully ignores everything and anything that doesn’t fit his worldview, most especially the revulsion of women. Meanwhile, Piper tunes out her family, and Lachlan waffles, a noncommittal prince. 

As we proceed through the season, keep an eye on the monkeys, both the real watchers in the trees, and the artistic depictions of monkeys included throughout the episodes, particularly which monkey shows up around key events, Mizaru, Kikazaru, or Iwazaru. It matters what people ignore, what they choose not to say. And keep an eye on Saxon. In The White Lotus, the people who deserve to die most never do, so he’s probably not The Body, but the potential for him to ruin lives is high. Very high.