Mike White sensationalizes Seven American Sins.
The madness that has descended upon America is everywhere in HBO’s hit anthology series The White Lotus 3. Its original formula peeks in at the misbehavior of mostly white American characters set loose on vacation spots that allow for the display of modern-day colonialism — first Hawaii, then Italy, and now Thailand.
But this season, showrunner Mike White pinpoints the willful decadence of the Western world, primarily through Yankees: the husband, wife, and 2.5 children of the Ratliff family, three freewheeling feminist matrons, plus a shady white bachelor and a single black mother. Their perilous contact with foreign cultures reveals inner sins and weaknesses.
The White Lotus focus group has one thing in common: American self-hatred. These vulgarians care only about money, status as a means to money, and dirty satisfaction. That’s the key to the show’s popularity and media acclaim. It provides vicarious pleasure to other American self-loathers.
For media hacks and viewers not actually going to the movies, one character’s blatant admission explains the pseudo-sophistication: “This is so on-brand for you, a victim of your own decisions.” The show’s exotic settings are ripe for American neuroses — remote-control access to Club Med (once mocked as “Club Bed”) fantasy trips. This victory tour for an entire nation’s midlife crisis is leftist Hollywood’s revenge on the middle and working class it despises.
Continuing HBO’s fake-movie format, Mike White escalates the prurience he first brought to indie movies (Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl), taking advantage of HBO’s R-rated nudity, profanity, and scandal. White uses sexual transgression to expose rot in the American character. A dull satirist, he fumbles what Todd Solondz and Jared Hess made poignant. But in the age of vacuous content, sketchy White lucks into camp, turning ’90s character actresses Jennifer Coolidge and Parker Posey into gay icons, both good actresses reduced to doing misogynistic drag acts. They emblematize White’s sub–John Waters exhibition of America’s Seven Deadly Sins:
Addiction: Upscale drugs control the touristy mischief of father figure Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), who pilfers his annoying wife’s stash of Lorazepam to hide the private panic he shares with the show’s other white males.
Blasphemy: Posey’s pampered Southern belle, Victoria, is caught briefly praying that her children reject Otherness, while her skepticism about the world outside her bubble (“I just don’t think at this age, I’m meant to live an uncomfortable life. I don’t have the will”) personifies narrow-minded bourgeois selfishness.
Incest: Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola), the Ratliff scions, are the show’s main tease. During a drug-orgy, they engage in mutual sex activity, then are traumatized by guilt (“You’re soulless”) as much as by lingering temptation. It’s the key family-destruction subplot.
Envy: White’s plotting disproportionately favors the white characters while black Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) represents class suspicion and bitterness, a parallel to the barely suppressed contempt of the menial Thais.
Lust: Here’s the key to what drives White’s dramatic mechanism. Three randy, middle-aged white chicks (Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb) seek illicit thrills. Special-guest pervert Frank (Sam Rockwell) showcases a monologue about his autogynephilia. He indulges kathoey (Thailand’s “ladyboy” prostitution culture) minus the honesty of “One Night in Bangkok” from the ’80s Broadway musical Chess, combining White’s exploitation of racism and psychological derangement. Frank confesses: “I was out of control. I became insatiable.”
Racism: Rockwell’s psychosis cagily mixes fetishism with racial pathology — the show’s main point. Rockwell discloses Mike White’s irresponsible porno-gimmick: “Sex is a poetic act. It’s a metaphor.” But panderers used to simply say, “Sex sells.”
Greed: These wealthy Americans are spiritually lost. Coon connects that failing to capitalism: “I have no belief system. Work was my religion forever, but I definitely lost my belief there.” She continues, “I don’t expect religion or God to give my life meaning because time gives it meaning,” followed by Coon’s actressy nod, a Streepian assertion, as if she’d found Truth.
But The White Lotus tells us what Hollywood’s professional class believes is true. Unfortunately, this show’s viral popularity makes it hard for some viewers to realize that HBO and Mike White are unreliable moralizers.
Recaps in the media talk only in terms of storytelling “beats,” not meaning. And conservative pundits, bamboozled by the three white cougars briefly mentioning Trump (“Are we really going to talk about Trump tonight?”), fall for White’s obvious liberal media manipulation. The White Lotus never honestly deals with Millennial American conflicts except to exploit them: “I would just feel a little alienated,” the Trump voter apologizes. But whose condescension is this? Mike White slickly disintegrates American family and friend relations — using flashy prurience but no analysis.
Unlike the examination of American provincialism in William Wyler’s 1936 film of Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth, The White Lotus cheats our confused political and moral principles, even using the tourists’ fascination with Buddhism (“Clear your monkey mind,” advises a monk) to ridicule Christianity. As Rockwell’s dissipated Frank surmises, “Hey, we all got our Achilles’ heel, man. Ya know?”
The White Lotus is nothing more than HBO’s latest assault on American values. Consider HBO’s affirmation by politicians: The Clintons flaunted their connection to The Sopranos, with its heinous gangsterism, just as the Bidens brazened past their connection to White Lotus–style depravity. The progressivism and titillation of The White Lotus go toward the disintegration of American family and national relations. One media shill fawned, “It’s obvious Mike White is also presenting a rather robust case against the American way of life.” But what exactly is the American way of life in 2025?