Seeds planted six weeks ago burst into full bloom on last night’s episode of The White Lotus. We’d been subjected to many weird, discomforting conversations about sex, virility, and masturbation, between the awful and boastful Saxon Ratliff and his younger, more timid brother Lochlan (played by Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola, respectively). Last week, that manifested in the form of a brief kiss. Now, the incestuous skin-on-skin contact that had been winked at finally happened.
You watched it, and you’ll never forget it, but here’s a reminder of exactly what went down: Saxon and Lochlan were hanging out with Aimee Lou Wood’s northern charmer Chelsea and Chloe, the flirtatious, bored-of-her-man queen played by Charlotte Le Bon on Greg/Gary’s yacht after the full moon party. There was drinking and there were drugs. Fun party games swiftly led to shared kisses, before Lochlan and Saxon had their own passionate saliva exchange too. After Chelsea tapped out for the night, the remaining three got down to business, and as Chloe and Lochlan had sex, Lochlan reached over to, in short, finish his brother off.
The day after, we get two delayed reactions. Chloe is the only one lucid enough to remember what happened. Saxon puts the pieces together throughout the day, repulsed to the point of puking. Lochlan realizes what happened while trying to meditate, arriving at a shellshocked conclusion. This moment––paired with Sam Rockwell’s strange and surreal monologue from the prior episode––opens a pandora’s box for the series. After several episodes of meandering mood-setting, it puts into place the series’ modus operandi: these characters have secrets that would change everything, but they cannot control if and when they’ll simmer to the surface.
For decades, the contentious, incestuous kink has been dominated by the perspectives of drooling men, dreaming of what it would be like to have sex with female siblings, or a mother and daughter. But The White Lotus seems less interested in serving that stereotype,, subverting it into something that’s making tabloid news terrified and straight men disgusted. As one X post quoted by The Sun newspaper put it: “‘Switching off – this is SICK’.”
Pushing the puritans to the limit, Mike White’s insane storyline feels like the dirtiest thing to happen on cable TV in a while. Not that it’s even new by HBO’s standards—they’ve built merchandise empires and themed attractions off the back of the familial-fuck-filled Game of Thrones franchise. On the first season of House of the Dragon, uncle and niece Daemon and Rhaenyra had two children together, in a plot line that had some “rooting for incest like it’s a basketball team.”
“There’s a method to what Mike White is doing here: A brotherly handjob loaded with the weight of family expectations”
But perhaps what’s really rubbing people up the wrong way in The White Lotus is two things: his is not a fantasy epic we can easily detach ourselves from and the incest is stacked with another, albeit less contentious taboo: homosexuality.
Reactionary right wingers, even the softer more center-leaning ones, have become obsessed with ideologies: the idea that sexual attraction (and gender, for that matter) are things that can be imprinted upon somebody for some higher power’s own means. Here we have two seemingly heterosexual brothers who’ve expressed no interest in men––never mind each other––in bed with one another, having sex with the same woman, and then exploring each other’s bodies. In many ways (and I say this as a gay guy), it feels like the product of a gay male fantasy; a showrunner exercising his own impulses on screen. But White is too smart for that. There’s a method to what he’s doing here. A brotherly handjob loaded with the weight of family expectations, and the maelstrom of masculine ideals that neither Saxon or Lochlan seem to have summed up within themselves.
But the joke’s on those folks who’ve described the show as sick already. Heck, there’s two episodes left. Maybe the incestuous homosexual jerk-off is only the beginning.