Caution: this newsletter comprises primary spoilers for the finishing of White Lotus season 3.
“Is this a bit ‘You killed my father, prepare to die,’ kind of?” asks Chelsea, the horoscope-obsessed Brit performed with attraction via Aimee Lou Wooden in season 3 of The White Lotus.
Chelsea is also considering of The Princess Bride (1987), however we’re firmly in Hamlet territory. Her spouse Rick (Walton Goggins) quickly units off to avenge his father’s loss of life and kicks off a series of violence that ends, inevitably, in blood and tragedy.
Mike White’s luxury-hotel-meets-moral-decline drama, The White Lotus, has at all times toyed with intellectual references. Season two gave us Madame Butterfly meets commedia dell’arte (a style of early Italian theatre replete with rich enthusiasts, grasping previous males, duplicitous servants and glamorous courtesans).
Season 3 shifts the surroundings to Thailand. There, the display’s satire of super-wealth is framed thru now not best the lens of Buddhism, but additionally thru lots of Sheakeapre’s nice tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear.
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Input Rick, our sullen Hamlet. He’s been raised on a sad fairy story. As a kid, his mom instructed him that his saintly father was once murdered via a corrupt Thailand-based hotel-owner, Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn). Rick insists this robbery of a father or mother is the foundation of his struggling. However like Hamlet, he can’t act – now not to start with.
When he after all does pull the cause, the effects are devastating. Jim’s spouse, Sritlana (Lek Patravadi), finds the twist. Jim was once his actual father, an oedipal second that was once unsurprising in a season so obsessive about incest.
Within the resulting swirl of gunfire, Chelsea is killed. Rick, cradling her frame in a Lear-like pietà, is shot via the noble but spiritually doomed safety guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong). The 2 enthusiasts’ our bodies waft within the lily-strewn waters in an overt modern day remake of Sir John Everett Millais’s portray, Ophelia (every other personality from Hamlet).
Timothy Ratliff channels Hamlet’s existential torment.
Warner Bros
But it’s Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), now not Rick, who maximum obviously channels Hamlet’s existential torment. Dealing with publicity for monetary fraud, Timothy contemplates suicide or even taking his circle of relatives with him.
Like Hamlet, although, he hesitates. Now not out of pity, however uncertainty. What comes after loss of life? Hamlet requested the similar:
However that the dread of one thing after loss of life,
The undiscover’d nation from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the need
And makes us slightly endure the ones ills we’ve got
Than fly to others that we all know now not of?
Existence is struggling. Hamlet and the Buddha knew that smartly. So why can we post with it? To are living or die? To behave or wait? At a Buddhist monastery, Timothy seeks solutions to those questions.
The senior monk tells him: loss of life isn’t an break out, however a go back. Like a droplet returning to the ocean, “Death is a happy return, like coming home.” Ache is inescapable; it will have to be confronted. Timothy, and Hamlet, combat to simply accept that.
The inevitability of greed
Season 3 of The White Lotus can have touched on Hamlet’s issues of suicide, revenge and destiny (its finale is called Amor Fati, which interprets as love of 1’s destiny), however its trademark assault at the inevitability of greed was once thrown into sharp aid this season due to its gentle engagement with Buddhism.
Timothy speaks with the monk.
The senior monk tells Timothy in his gently damaged English, “Everyone run from pain towards the pleasure, but when they get there only to find more pain. You cannot outrun pain.” This season, even our ethical compasses, Gaitok, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), run from ache to excitement – in opposition to energy, intercourse, convenience and cash over enlightenment.
Gaitok places his morals apart to kill Rick in order that he would possibly get a promotion and win the center of Mook (Lalisa Manobal). Piper makes a decision towards a yr on the monastery after realising she wishes the comforts of wealth greater than she realised. And Belinda? She can have uncovered the killer of Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge’s cherished personality from seasons one and two). As an alternative, she takes a US$5 million payout and sails away smiling.
As she departs, Billy Preston’s buoyant music Not anything from Not anything performs. It’s the similar word Rick uttered previous within the season: “Nothing comes from nothing, right?” He’s already empty, he can’t be stored. At the floor, it’s a throwaway line. Nevertheless it holds weight – philosophical, religious and Shakespearean.
Buddhism teaches anatta, the doctrine of no-self. It’s the concept unencumber comes thru relinquishing ego, embracing nothingness. Since we’re necessarily not anything, all that ever can come from us is not anything: the industry and strife and frustration of existence is in truth empty froth at the floor of a deep nothingness. And Shakespeare knew the risks of bewilderment that “nothing”.
Belinda is going again on her plans to start out a industry with Pornchai as soon as she receives the cash.
“Nothing comes from nothing” is a favoured maxim of King Lear. After asking the primary two of his 3 daughters to precise profusely their love for him, he rewards them with land and wealth. Turning to his 3rd daughter, Cordelia, he asks, “What can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak,” to which she responds:
Cordelia: Not anything, my lord.
Lear: Not anything?
Cordelia: Not anything.
Lear: Not anything will come of not anything. Talk once more.
If Cordelia offers Lear “nothing,” he’s going to give her “nothing” in go back – no dowry, no inheritance, no kingdom. This exposes how Lear has come to put a transactional worth on love. In his thoughts, affection will have to be spoken, quantified and rewarded with land and tool. He’s not able, or unwilling, to recognise the ethical value of Cordelia’s fair, restrained love as it provides no rapid gratification or political software.
At this early level of the play, Lear, like The White Lotus’s spiritually bankrupt denizens, falsely clings to worldly worth, now not seeing it as mere phantasm. Belinda’s religious financial institution, alternatively, was once complete. But within the season’s finale, the repetition of “nothing comes from nothing” after Belinda’s moral one-eighty hints at how fateful her selection actually is.
In a single second, she trades enlightenment and true (if restrained) happiness for the nothingness of wealth. At first of each The White Lotus and King Lear, “nothing”, whether or not it way loss of life, poverty, or solitude, is a danger. By means of the tip, it’s all that is still.
