'White Lotus' and the Pain of Desire

The third season of Mike White's hit HBO drama understood something about our struggles to dominate our wants, be they sexual or otherwise.

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This weekend, HBO aired the finale third season of White Lotus. From what I’ve read, it’s one that that left many disappointed. What happened to skewering the rich? Why’d we spend six episodes essentially just watching Timothy Ratliff eating lorazepam? Is there anyone here we’re really even supposed to like?

I, for one, was starting to find that 2022-2023 arc of torturing wealthy people found in The Menu, Triangle of Sadness and season one and two of White Lotus to fall a little short. If there’s anything the last three years have proved, it’s that these sorts of narratives provide little more than momentary comic relief. At a certain point, they stop really saying much of anything incisive. Rich people bad. Rich people boring. Rich people stupid. We know! Rich people are bad, stupid, and boring and still live much better lives than the rest of us, even if they end up breaking their neck and drowning as they attempt to jump from yacht to dinghy.

It was time, then, for Mike White to make some of these broader points about the elites while also saying something else. He’d been successful in saying something else in his previous seasons, too — about otherness, race, colonialism, sex work, et cetera while never shying away from how class informs these themes. And, most bravely, he did so without invoking a rigid moral hierarchy or victimization.

In season three, Mike White’s thematic choice struck me as both subtle and simple: the desire for domination and the constant struggles for power we endure with ourselves and others. In many ways this was all once again familiar: these struggles as demonstrated by characters like Greg and Timothy dealt with this in the frame of wealth; Rick’s struggle with Jim Hollinger highlighted colonialism via the Thai real estate narrative; Chloe battles for sexual power of Greg in order for material security. But through this White also explored the struggle for power over our own narratives, between friends who claim to be equals, among siblings, and the inherent inequities of dating and romance — especially in the workplace. Most saliently, though, he emphasized the desire to dominate our own desires. This is one of the defining points of the entire Buddhism element of the season, particularly with regard to Piper, who sees Buddhism and its escape from desire as a relief from her perceived domination by her family and their narcissism.

The peak example of this theme of domination, desire, and the domination of our desires comes from the provocative monologue of Frank, played by Sam Rockwell, in the fifth episode. In conversation with Rick, seemingly unpromoted, Frank explains that he initially moved to Thailand in part because he always “had a thing for Asian girls.” He went through a phase with sleeping with what must have been thousands of Asian women, sometimes multiple a night. Eventually, though, he realized he wasn’t reaching fulfillment. His desire was not quelled. “I started wondering “where am I going with this? Wh- why do I feel this need to fuck all these women? What is desire? The form of this cute Asian girl, why does it have such a grip on me? Because she’s the opposite of me? Is she gonna complete me in some way?” I realized, I could fuck a million women, I’d still never be satisfied. Maybe – maybe what I really want is to BE one of these Asian girls.”

The monologue continues:

Frank: No, really. Really. So one night I took home some girl, turned out to be a ladyboy, which I’d done before, but this time, instead of fucking the ladyboy, the ladyboy fucked ME. And it was kinda magical. And it got outta my head, what I really wanted was to BE one of these Asian girls, getting fucked, by me, and to feel that.

Rick: (long pause) Uh huh.

Frank: So I put out an ad, looking for a white guy, my age, to come over and fuck me. And that guy looked a lot like me. Then I put on some lingerie and perfume, made myself look like one of these girls, and - I thought I looked pretty hot. And then this guy came over and railed the shit outta me. And then I got addicted to that. Some nights three, four guys would come over and rail the shit outta me. Some I even had to pay. And at the same time, I’d hire an Asian girl, that’d just sit there and watch the whole thing. I’d look in her eyes while some guy was fucking me and I’d think, “I am her. And I’m fucking me.”

Rick: (very long pause) Mm hmm.

Frank: Hey, we all have our Achilles heel, man, ya know? Where does it come from? Why are some of us attracted to the opposite form, ya know, and some of us the same? Sex is a poetic act, it’s a metaphor. Metaphor for what? Are we our forms? Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside, too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl?

Rick: …Right. I don’t know.

Frank: I guess I was trying to fuck my way to the answer. And then I realized, I gotta – I gotta stop, the drugs, the girls, the, you know, trying to be a girl. I got into Buddhism, which is all about, you know, spirit versus form, detaching from self, getting off the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering. Being sober isn’t so hard. Being celibate, though, it’s…I still miss that bussy, man.

All of this quickly became both meme-worthy and controversial. On its face, it is just a flatly insane thing to say out loud, nevermind to an old friend you’re catching up with in public for the first time in years. But the controversy, of course, comes from the specific contents of the monologue and its relation to how we look at sex and gender today. The idea that Frank would digest this belief that he wants to “be” an Asian girl as a means of seeing himself get fucked by himself connects to the theory of autogynephilia, an unproven concept that posits that most trans women are in fact just men who have sexualized the idea of being a woman. It positions transness not as a gender identity but as a paraphilia, a fetish.

Much of the LGBTQ+ community has labelled the term pseudoscientific and a slur. Others have asked whether some trans women viewing femininity through the lens of sexual arousal even matters. Trans writer Andrea Long Chu wrote in her essay collection Females, for example, that sissy porn “did make [her] trans” and that “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is.” She won a Pulitzer for it.

There is obviously a narrative of hate that can and often is tied to the concept of autogynephilia, and it is natural that people would be suspicious of Mike White’s use of the concept in the abstract on the show. But what if some men do fetishize the idea of “being” a woman? What if this is something distinct and separate from how we look at transgender topics and issues writ large? What might that mean for our understanding of sex and gender, accordingly?

My interpretation of the scene was not that White was trying to imply that Frank is an autogynephilic trans woman — rather, he is specifically saying that Frank is not trans. The difficulty is that most will conflate autogynephilia and transgenderism, and there is harm in that. Nevertheless, men who receive sexual pleasure at the idea of being a woman and still identify as men do exist. This is again where the theme of dominating our desires returns: for the character of Frank, it isn’t as though he’d find happiness in living his life as a trans woman. That isn’t what he wants. Instead, he wants the opportunity to dominate himself. He wants to have his cake and eat it, too — and also be the cake being had and eaten. He wants to bridge the constant gap that drives all desire: the distance between ourselves and the always unreachable objet petit a, the projection of ourselves onto another that can never be obtained.

Greg’s sexual desires parallel those of Frank: he wants a threesome in order to dominate this vision of his burgeoning sexuality in his childhood and the concept of his father. In this fantasy, he becomes his childhood self and defeats that which emasculates him. He does not literally want to become a child, much in the way Frank does not literally want to become a woman. Jaclyn, similarly, uses sex with Valentin as a means of dominating her friends and her doubts about herself and her young husband. She wants to momentarily become this vision of a younger, hotter, more fun version of herself in her own mind and those of the people around her, even as she refuses to accept the consequences of what this person would do.

With all of these plotlines, Mike White is asking difficult questions. He is doing what I believe art is best intended to do, transgressing our established boundaries in order to divine where these boundaries may move next. And as has happened throughout history, it is possible that the artist’s vision may not be that these boundaries will expand outward. They might even move back in.

But maybe, as we breach these taboos through shows like White Lotus, new boundaries will form instead. Throughout the season, White has further highlighted a tendency shared by both the characters and the viewers alike to control the narrative, to assume the dominant position over it. We’ve wanted to untangle each person’s politics, glean every scene for hints at how the season would end, and read through actors’ interviews for gossip about interpersonal drama behind the scenes.

It is Frank’s monologue, ultimately, that offers a moment of straightforward clarity toward the season’s philosophical arc. That thing which we desire will not bring us the satisfaction we seek. We will never form full control over our desires to deliver us that satisfaction, either. Rick confronting Jim does not heal him. Jaclyn being rich and famous and sexy doesn’t remedy her insecurities. Timothy’s wish to protect his status and protect his family from pain does neither. And with this arc, we can see what comes of the characters’ futures. Only those who accept that there is no resolution, as the monk tells us in the beginning of the finale, or that it is time that brings meaning, as Laurie says to her friends in tears, who are able to resolve some of the pain of desire. It is not about dominating desire. It is about accepting it.