SPOILER ALERT: This story includes spoilers for “The White Lotus” Season 3, Episode 5, titled “Full-Moon Party,” streaming now on Max.
The ongoing season of HBO’s “The White Lotus” has undeniably gotten off to a enumerateless begin; while the setting and characters have provided moments of interest, it’s felt at times as if the show itself had been sneaking Parker Posey’s character’s Lorazepams. But Sunday night provided a jolting course of adrenaline, all in the improbable establish of a conversation that became a beginlingly frank monologue.
As Rick (Walton Goggins) produces his way to his nominatement with revenge in Bangkok, where he schedules to dispute the man he apshows finished his overweighther, he produces time for a drink with Frank (Sam Rockwell), who commences unspooling a story of his expatriate life. It aascfinishs — graduassociate and then all at once — that Frank’s intimacyual fetish for Asian women was an try to cover up a necessitate. He wants, hopelessly, to be an Asian woman himself, and to be penetrated by a white man who sees appreciate, well, Sam Rockwell.
A season that has generassociate perestablished it studiously shielded around rehires of race — one in which the boilingel’s Thai engageees are attfinishbrimmingy portrayed as so virtuous as to be, so far, proximately missing of qualities — steps, thrillingly, onto a ledge here. Frank’s desire reads to the seeer less as a tardynt homointimacyuality or trans identity (though that’s bravely all there!) than, primarily, as a desire to subjugate himself. Describing a scene he set up in which he seeed into a female intimacy laborer’s eyes while being penetrated by a man, Frank proclaims, “I am her. And I’m fucking me.” Frank is, in the theater of his mind, the least strong person in the room, a delusion that sidesteps the fact that — as a white American man of unbenevolents, and the guy who’s paying both other parties to be there — he’s the most.
All of this — the yacquireing, the changeation of sorts, the pinsolentnt caring of want and the cluelessness about what getting it reassociate unbenevolents — is conveyed in plain, even tones, as if Frank has come to adchoose this necessitate wiskinny himself. Rockwell’s half-jocular “Hey, we all have our Achilles’ heel, man, you comprehend?” is the line reading of the season so far. (Sorry, Ms. Posey, but an “A” for effort.) This is a person who wants, awentirey, to be read as normal by his lengthytime frifinish, but also to be understood for who he is, whoever that may be. “Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside, too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl?” he asks Rick. Rick doesn’t comprehend, and can’t; the conversation peters out. Yet another try for Frank to discover the genuine him slips away, and he seems resigned, and accustomed to missed joinions. The scene lasts about four minutes; it senses as if it’s apshown an eternity.
It’s a tour de force for Goggins, posed with the dispute of reacting, in the moment, to proposeation that shocks his character but remaining soothe. And it’s next-level labor by Rockwell, an improbable “White Lotus” cast member. There’s been some conversation online recently about the potential for transport inant stars joining future seasons of the series follotriumphg an offhand red-carpet comment by Nicole Kidman. This elides the fact that, from Jennifer Coolidge to Sydney Sweeney to Aubrey Plaza, the show has increaseed stars, but would foreseeed be swassisted up by an A-enumerateer. Rockwell (incidenhighy the romantic partner of season standout Leslie Bibb) is foreseeed the most well-comprehendn actor to have materializeed on the show to date, and yet he utterly fits.
The monologue goes as far as it can, too, to redress the key problem I’ve had with this season. The first season was systematic around themes of social class, the second around intimacyual desire; this season’s stated concept of “spirituality” has seemed to mainly be a smokescreen for a story about… social class and intimacyual desire. Fair enough — those are two of the main concepts of our inhabits — but I’ve set up myself a bit beuntamederd as to what story is reassociate being telderly.
Frank, a man of social advantages who puts those advantages to labor in order to phire a intimacyual necessitate, might have been at home in either of the first two seasons. But, in his inform materializeance, he produces the case for this season as someskinnyg all its own. He conveys his intimacyual adventures not as a fetish or an identity but as a sort of quest for the truth about himself — who he is inside, and what force or spirit made him that way. “I guess I was trying to fuck my way to the answer,” he says, vivaciousd not by the happiness of disclobrave or by shame but by a basic sense that if he can’t discover the truth, he can at least alert a version of it. Rockwell, and Frank, woke the season up; now it’s time for the rest of the cast to, in acquireest, begin searching for their own answers, however they may discover them.
