Anton Chekhov vs. Mike White
Should more guns go off in the White Lotus?
In a letter to A.S. Gruzinsky, Russian Playwrite and Author, Anton Checkov famously said “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”
Mike White, the writer and director of White Lotus begins each season of with a death. We don’t know who dies, but we know they do. Then, of course, we spend the following episodes getting to know a cast of mostly rich, mostly self-consumed characters, predicting who will die.
My cinephile friend, Blake Newson pointed out that in season 3, in particular, there are many guns that are introduced, loaded, and then instantly unloaded.
Rick Hatchett (Walter Goggins) gets high, goes to a snake fight, lets all the snakes loose, and one of them bites his girlfriend, only for everything to be okay. He’s stressed about something, and he clearly came to Thailand to take care of business. When he meets reoccuring character Gary / Greg Hunt (Jon Gries), the man involved with Tanya’s death from the season before, it’s clear the two have equally sketchy business. Perhaps their stories are connected?
Then you include Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) and his scandal, and you wonder if somehow the three men will be of some use or conflict to each other. Maybe one will be able to help the other! Of course, their stories never intertwine that way. However, in his growing anxiety and realization that his family cannot live without money, Timothy considers killing himself and his family in a variety of ways throughout the season. Finally, in the final episode, the blender that we have seen all season aides Timothy in concocting a deadly smoothie. He puts the seeds of a poisonous fruit (introduced to us in the pilot and then beat over our head in the finale) into this suicide drink.
Before the moment of truth, Timothy asks his youngest son, Lochlan (Sam Nivola) the one family member that hasn’t declared he can’t live without money, if he thinks he could.
“Yeah, I think I could,” his son says. “Yeah, I think you could too.” In that moment, Timothy decides to spare his youngest. In a poetic climax, the audience watches in horror as Timothy gives his family a funeral speech and they begin to drink. In this moment, it seems a story that had been tightening all season (the families inability to live without money) was reaching its earned conclusion. Instead, at the last second, Timothy smacks the smoothie out of his son Saxon’s hand, and saves them all. And yet, the loaded gun (blender with poisonous seed) is still on the counter when everyone goes to bed.
To everyone’s dismay, we watch as the youngest son wakes up, and pours himself a protein shake with the remnants of last nights deadly concoction, and water with protein powder (gross). We watch a drawn out montage as the innocent one meets death. Or so we think. Moments later, he is brought back to life. Then, the family leaves the island and Timothy tells them all that things are about to change, but that they’re going to be okay.
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The gun that went off in the beginning of the season doesn’t effect them at all. They have no mention of it. Even though we see Timothy with the gun all season, and even though we see him wound tighter and tighter as the show goes on, the resolution to his story is peace.
As I try to decide whether this is a clever subversion of my expectations or a let-down, I am frustrated by the “resolution” of the other story lines.
Saxon, the oldest boy in the family, and arguably the biggest asshole in the season is asked to sleep with the girlfriend of Gary / Greg Hunt, the villain of the series. Could this be the moment we finally see his true colors on screen? Does he kill Saxon? Is this the moment that begins to tighten story lines together? Of course, we never get answers because it doesn’t happen.
The three long-time friends that were growing increasingly bitter toward each other? They have ammo against each other. Instead of using Jaclyn’s (Michelle Monaghan) affair against her for leverage, recent divorcée Laurie (Carrie Coon) gives an emotional monologue and the three make up (for now). They were flirting and sleeping with criminals that held up the hotel in the first half of the season, and that reveal did little for the story. In fact, they had nothing to do with the death at the end.
So who died? Rick & Chelsea, right after she tells him “if something bad happens to you, it happens to me,” and after begging him not to do something stupid. Why in the world did Rick Hatchet go back to the hotel owned by the man he threatened? His motivation to go find the man that killed his father felt so contrived, I was sure he was lying to Chelsae. So he flies to Bankok, decided not to kill the man that killed his father, but holds a gun to his face and tips him backwards. Then, he goes back to the man’s hotel and stays another night there, only to run into the man, and then kill him? Only after the man is dead do we realize that he was Rick’s father all along. Sigh.
This season, Mike White pulled the punches that would have felt earned and shocking, and the punches that were supposed to feel earned and shocking, felt cheap. Somehow, in the season with the most deaths, I feel less invested in this world then ever.
Maybe not every gun you load and dangle in front of us has to go off, but at the end of that 90 minute finale, too many of those rich Americans went home without the climax we were promised.
Here’s to season 4 and the resolutions and tragedies to come. A word to the White running the White Lotus: next time a gun goes off, show more of the characters we invest a season into reacting to it. How does it effect them?
We watch the show because we want to see their lives changed. We want to see the three friends brought closer because of the gunshot. We want to see the rich family react to the news of their recent poverty.
When you cut to almost everyone safe on a boat, on their way home, unaffected by the violence, it’s disappointing. We’d like to see the people we’re spending time with actually react to the gunshots, especially when we invest ten hours leading up to a gun we’ve been told will go off.
