As the new season of Mike White’s hit HBO drama releases its first episode, Olivia Petter unpacks one of the most interesting relationship dynamics at its core. The moment happens almost instantly. After arriving at the absurdly plush White Lotus hotel in Thailand, Laurie, played by Carrie Coon, begins justifying that she’s “fine” with her room, which is slightly more tucked away than the rooms belonging to her two “long-time, not old” friends, Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan). “You paid, you should get first pick,” adds Laurie, referring to the fact that Jaclyn, a successful TV star, is footing the bill for all three of them.
It’s just a tiny glimmer in the first episode of the third season of HBO’s The White Lotus – but one that’s enough to lay out the hierarchy that’s at play between these women. At the top, of course, is Jaclyn, who is not just rich but famous. Several fellow hotel guests and members of staff recognise her, with the owner, Sritala, treating her like royalty: “We gave you my favourite,” the glamorous boss says of their villa. Jaclyn has also, we later learn, found love with “the man of [her] dreams”, which raises her to an even higher calibre. In the middle, there’s Kate, who later performs an insufferable humble brag about her partner, David, who runs a company that “everyone in Austin knows about”.
“There’s so many times I think someone wants to be my friend because they like me,” she says over a glass of white wine. “But then I realise pretty quickly they have some agenda; they want a donation or a job for their kid or want me to get them on some board.” She concludes that she’s “lucky” and Jaclyn agrees that all of the women are lucky. Laurie, it seems, is less lucky, and subsequently at the bottom of the totem pole. “Everything you do is just so hard!” Jaclyn tells her – it’s later implied that Laurie is a single mother working as a corporate lawyer.
This somewhat satirical verbal crusade unfolds with all of the women comparing their lives to one another, consequently reinforcing the pecking order that defines their relationships. We see it earlier on, too, when they discuss their respective appearances. “Jac, you look amazing,” gushes Kate, prompting the two women to repeatedly tell one another how “amazing” and “incredible” they both look while Laurie opens a bottle of wine. Exchanges like these – and there are many just in the first episode – are characterised by artifice, with praise so hyperbolic that it could only ever be inauthentic. It brings a tacit sense of menace to this friendship dynamic, which seems laced with competition, jealousy, and resentment.
These are tensions that we can expect to continue bubbling throughout the series; the only boiling point in episode one is when Laurie takes herself to bed only to look on at her friends from her own room, where she promptly sobs. The tears will be familiar to most women, too. Or at least any woman who has ever been friends with another woman. We’ve been pitted against one another since birth. It’s a centuries-old tactic designed to keep the patriarchy in order: in the 1500s, women in London were forbidden to gather with one another in fear of what they might say, with husbands ordered to keep their wives at home. Meanwhile, female friendships were demonised during the witch trials, with women caught together accused of sorcery. The messaging has always been the same: women are more powerful when they’re together and therefore society must do everything it can to drive them apart. That’s where internalised misogyny comes in – and it’s the very thing at play between these three women in The White Lotus, who, despite their decade-long bond, can’t help but succumb to social conditioning that forces them to compete against one another.
It’s something I’ve seen play out countless times among my own female friends over the years, occasionally with disastrous consequences. Friends have fallen out after going into business together and subsequently getting caught up in competitive tendencies. Others relentlessly compare themselves to their closest friends, with everything from professional successes and love lives to cheekbone protrusions and wrinkle counts up for discussion. And some are, like The White Lotus trio, simply plagued by a compulsion to excessively compliment one another while secretly seething with envy.
