April 30, 2025
Re: "THE WHITE LOTUS, 'Désir Mimétique,' and Violence"
In December 2022, not long after wrapping up the second season of The White Lotus, filmmaker Mike White was already looking ahead to the third iteration of his popular anthology TV series. Freed from the constraints of providing new storylines for a recurring cast, White has sought to build each season of The White Lotus around a key theme. The third season, he predicted, would engage eternal questions. As White put it:
The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex. I think the third season would be maybe a satirical and funny look at death and Eastern religion and spirituality. It feels like it could be a rich tapestry to do another round at White Lotus.
After a number of delays, not to mention a lengthy production schedule (the season was filmed from February to August 2024, largely on the island of Ko Samui in the Gulf of Thailand), The White Lotus returned to HBO on February 16, 2025. Reviews have been generally favorable, though there have been rumblings that Season 3 has been “slower” and less plot-driven than its predecessors. Do these gripes have to do with White’s desire to explore religion?
Caryn James of the BBC suggests that White has struggled to translate the show’s basic premise—the tragicomic disintegration of Western élites while vacationing at some of the world’s most exotic and luxurious resorts—to an Eastern context. As James puts it, “With so many possibilities, it's disappointing that the show doesn't use its setting well. It just cuts away to a shot of a monkey or a statue of a monkey now and then.” That the abundance of monkey symbolism in Season 3 is a nod to the Buddhist concept of the “monkey mind” (心猿) does not seem to register with James. Nevertheless, her critique indicates a wider problem. Centering a series of episodes on Buddhist teaching and spiritual imagery may just be more religion than most people expect, much less want.
At the same time, however, Inkoo Kang of The New Yorker argues that the season hasn’t been religious enough. As she puts it:
It isn’t just the characters who seem a bit lost in Thailand; White does, too. The showrunner has spoken of his interest in exploring spirituality tourism…. But the first six episodes of the season’s eight—the portion allotted for review—scarcely touch on Eastern religion, framing Piper’s interest therein predominantly as a threat to her mother, Victoria (Parker Posey), and her way of life. (The Ratliff matriarch, whose favorite pastimes are popping lorazepam and obsessively assessing the “decency” of those around her, tells her daughter that she can’t be a Buddhist: “Honey, you’re not from China.”) The only other theological commentary we get is from Victoria’s obnoxious firstborn, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), who declares that Buddhism is for cowards. “They’re afraid,” he says, summing up his view of their credo as “Don’t get attached, don’t have desires, don’t even try.”
In this sense, Kang views Season 3 of The White Lotus as a missed opportunity. White gives the viewer a panoply of characters who display an “urgent need of the Buddha’s teachings.” And yet, rather present them with solutions, White defaults to a “Boschian vision of nudity and woe.” In The White Lotus, there is no nirvana (निर्वाण), just damnation.
Both James and Kang raise provocative points, but it’s notable that White himself provides a third option. In a recent podcast interview (linked below), White discloses that he has “dabbled in Buddhism,” and he considers it a “fascinating belief system.” At the same time, however, he admits that Buddhism is not the driving force behind the third season of The White Lotus. The show is meant to “tell every story.” That is to say, White’s goal as a writer is to “be every person” and “to explore each point of view,” so as to understand and to “live all these different lives.” With these comments in mind, The White Lotus is revealed to be a vehicle for sifting through perspectives and bringing Weltanschauungen into conflict. Its principal truth, ostensibly, is that there is no Truth. The world of The White Lotus is a world of colliding desires and wills.
This aspect of White’s vision is apparent in several storylines in Season 3. There is the trio of siblings—scions of the affluent Ratliff family—who arrive in Thailand at cross purposes. Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has grown tired of her family’s superficiality and therefore wants to spend a year in a Buddhist monastery. On the other hand, her brother Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger, who excels in a complex role), is a Duke grad and wannabe playboy who stands to inherit the family business. Caught in between Piper and Saxon is the youngest child Lochlan (Sam Nivola), a high-school senior who is torn about which sibling to follow.
Other guests at The White Lotus resort in Thailand include a trio of old friends—Kate (Leslie Bibb), a conservative socialite from Texas; Laurie (Carrie Coon), a lawyer from New York City; and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), a popular TV actress. Their vacation is an attempt to reconnect after significant time apart, but instead they find themselves sizing each other up. Kate and Jaclyn gossip about Laurie’s messy home life, while Jaclyn and Laurie mock Kate’s MAGA-adjacent values. Finally, when Jaclyn sleeps with a “hot” and significantly younger White Lotus employee, Kate and Laurie whisper that her life has been defined by the male gaze. Each woman wants respect, even admiration, but it seems that one must always be hurt in the process.
Still, it’s not just white Westerners who are locked into competitive relationships. Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) is a security guard at The White Lotus. A devout Buddhist, Gaitok thinks of his work as protective, not violent. However, his romantic affection for longtime friend and fellow employee Mook (K-pop megastar Lalisa Manobal) presents a challenge to his religious ideals. Mook prefers men who are strong and willing to take risks; she praises the flinty bodyguards who protect the owners of The White Lotus. Hence, in an attempt to impress her, Gaitok undertakes weapons training and secures a gun. If Mook is to be won, he reasons, someone will have to bleed.
These are just a few of the narratives that White deftly weaves into Season 3 of The White Lotus. In each case, we see competing worldviews and, in turn, the inevitability of violence. It is hardly an accident, after all, that all three seasons of The White Lotus have started with a dead body. The show does not just feature characters who happen to die; it is literally about death or, even more to the point, about exploring the reasons behind interpersonal violence. In Season 1, a pampered real estate agent beleaguers an anxiety-laden hotel manager, ultimately leading to the latter’s termination and accidental death. Both men are seeking respect, but only one prevails. In Season 2, a group of conspirators seek to deprive a wealthy heiress of her fortune and, indeed, of her life. All but one ends up dead. Finally, in Season 3, the intersecting tensions among the guests at The White Lotus culminate in a shower of bullets and a pile of corpses—a fitting ending to a final episode entitled “Amor Fati” or “love of fate.”
Simply put, White’s métier is consistent: he is a tragedian. In “exploring each point of view,” The White Lotus seems to terminate in a single one—that earthly life is destined for conflict, violence, and death.
In this regard, the series can be fruitfully put in conversation with the thought of French literary critic and philosopher René Girard (1923-2015). Despite a multifaceted and distinguished academic career, including a lengthy stint at Stanford University, Girard’s legacy is often associated with the concept of “mimetic theory.” The starting point of this idea is that violence is a latent potentiality in human life. As the Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942) once put it, “Human nature is as capable of cannibalism as it is of the Critique of Pure Reason.” The origins of human violence are, naturally, complex. There is a biological component that can be traced back to conspecific violence between primates. But most anthropologists, including Girard, insist that violence cannot be reduced to abnormalities in, say, the neuroendocrine systems of the body. There is, in short, a socio-relational component to violence as well.
In his early works on novelists such as Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81) and Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Girard uncovers violence as both a core theme in world literature and as an outcome what he calls “mimetic desire” (désir mimétique). Yet, starting with Violence and the Sacred (La violence et le sacré, 1972), he begins to focus on mimetic desire as a sociological phenomenon as such. Typically, social scientists view violence as something that happens on accident—in other words, as an unfortunate byproduct of alterable economic, political, psychological, and societal conditions. On this understanding, a person who turns to crime is generally driven by, say, poverty or insufficient access to biochemical drugs. But Girard takes a different approach. For him, at the root of violence lies a phenomenon that is endemic to all human interactions: people imitate one another, and, through imitation, they come to desire the same things. This is mimetic desire. It is present among rich and poor, East and West, conservative and liberal, religious and atheist, and any other abstract groupings devised by theorists. The shared desire of scarce goods is thus one reason for human criminality. Not everyone, after all, can have a house in the Hamptons or play shortstop for the Dodgers or have an endowed professorship at Harvard. As competition intensifies, so does the likelihood of violence in one form or another. And yet, for Girard, scarcity as such is not the problem. Inasmuch as scarcity emerges downstream of intersubjective rivalry, the underlying cause must ultimately be addressed. For that reason, the defusion of mimetic desire is essential to eliminating violence.
In a notable point of overlap with Season 3 of The White Lotus, Girard indicates that religion is a key way that human beings have sought to keep mimetic violence at bay. In attempting to overcome the crisis of mimetic conflict, religion resorts to what Girard calls “substitute violence,” which is often performed in and through ritual. In its most ancient forms, this performance involved the blood sacrifice of animals or even of other persons. Citing Girard himself, the Austrian ethicist and theologian Wolfgang Palaver sums it up like this:
These “religions of violence” were “always in search of peace.” These religions “were a first path toward God” and “the practice of sacrifices was a way of keeping violence to a level that God didn’t desire, but that he tolerated.”
Thus primitive religious life was caught in a paradox: in order to eradicate violence, it had to commit violence. On this perspective, it was expedient that one (the scapegoat or, in Girard’s parlance, le bouc émissaire) should die so that many might have peace. In this way, religion helped manage violence. But could it ever do away with it for good?
In the world according to Mike White, the answer would seem to be “no.” While, as noted, The White Lotus does not unpack Buddhist teaching in any depth, it is clear that Buddhism is being presented as alternative to le désir mimétique that runs rampant among the resort’s wealthy vacationers. The practitioner of Buddhism must learn to sacrifice his self (𑀅𑀦𑀢𑁆𑀢𑀸 in Pali) rather than to hurt others. And yet, as Season 3 of The White Lotus unfolds, this option does not appear enticing. In one of the most ironic (and captivating) scenes of the season, Piper realizes that “dying to self” is not a viable option for her:
In the aftermath of this conversation, Piper’s father Timothy—a disgraced and suicidal business executive, played with drug-addled despair by veteran actor Jason Isaacs—seriously considers murdering his family. They are, he concludes, hopelessly compromised. From violence they have come, and to violence they shall return. Religion is of no use to them. If they will not choose to die, they must be forced to die. Sooner or later, this is the way of the world.
As mentioned, in the season finale, The White Lotus resort becomes a killing field. Its mimetic crises can no longer be held in check, and people are sacrificed in the process. Hence, wittingly or not, White suggests that a religionless society neither can nor will escape its savage destiny. The “monkey mind,” often associated with anxiety and capriciousness, turns out to be perilously transmissible—a point that, notably, has found corroboration in the study of primates.
Still, there is one more Girardian twist at the end. Famously, if also controversially, Girard insisted that the imitation of Christ is the ultimate cure for mimetic desire. If humanity’s religious sensibility begins with the deification of violence, it is perfected by Christianity’s insistence that God himself is nonviolent. As Palaver explains, “Girard opposed the violent and immediate sacred of pre-Axial myths to the holy as the imitation of the kenotic Christ. The immediacy of mythic violence is opposed to the mediation provided through the imitation of Christ.” The Christian Beatitudes and the nonviolent repetition of Christ’s own self-emptying in the performance of the Mass endure as a refusal of le désir mimétique and an assent to what Girard terms “the detached generosity of God.”
Is it an accident, then, that The White Lotus’ third season closes with Tim Ratliff pondering a kind of Christian conversion? Maybe, maybe not. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly significant that, as Tim and his family leave the resort, he repents of his suicidal and murderous ideations. Yes, his future is uncertain—he will likely wind up in jail due to financial crime—but death is no longer a way out, no longer a way to appease the gods of mimetic desire. As we take leave of Tim’s character, who is lost in quiet contemplation on the ferry departing The White Lotus, it is notable that the Christmas carol "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming" can be heard.
Earlier in Season 3, Tim recalls this hymn from his childhood. Yet, after passing through a weeklong hell of his own making, Tim’s thoughts return to the hymn in a moment of Girardian insight and hope. As the song’s fourth stanza declares:
True man, yet very God,
From Sin and death now save us,
And share our every load.