SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “The White Lotus” Season 3, Episode 5, titled “Full-Moon Party,” streaming now on Max.
The ongoing season of HBO’s “The White Lotus” has undeniably gotten off to a slow start; while the setting and characters have provided moments of interest, it’s felt at times as if the show itself had been sneaking Parker Posey’s character’s Lorazepams. But Sunday night provided a jolting course of adrenaline, all in the unlikely form of a conversation that became a startlingly frank monologue.
As Rick (Walton Goggins) makes his way to his appointment with revenge in Bangkok, where he plans to confront the man he believes killed his father, he makes time for a drink with Frank (Sam Rockwell), who begins unspooling a story of his expatriate life. It emerges — gradually and then all at once — that Frank’s sexual fetish for Asian women was an attempt to cover up a need. He wants, desperately, to be an Asian woman himself, and to be penetrated by a white man who looks like, well, Sam Rockwell.
A season that has generally played it studiously safe around issues of race — one in which the hotel’s Thai employees are carefully portrayed as so virtuous as to be, so far, nearly absent of qualities — steps, thrillingly, onto a ledge here. Frank’s desire reads to the viewer less as a latent homosexuality or trans identity (though that’s certainly all there!) than, primarily, as a desire to subjugate himself. Describing a scene he set up in which he looked into a female sex worker’s eyes while being penetrated by a man, Frank declares, “I am her. And I’m fucking me.” Frank is, in the theater of his mind, the least powerful person in the room, a delusion that sidesteps the fact that — as a white American man of means, and the guy who’s paying both other parties to be there — he’s the most.
All of this — the yearning, the transformation of sorts, the careful understanding of want and the cluelessness about what getting it really means — is conveyed in plain, even tones, as if Frank has come to accept this need within himself. Rockwell’s half-jocular “Hey, we all have our Achilles’ heel, man, you know?” is the line reading of the season so far. (Sorry, Ms. Posey, but an “A” for effort.) This is a person who wants, badly, to be read as normal by his longtime friend, but also to be understood for who he is, whoever that may be. “Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside, too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl?” he asks Rick. Rick doesn’t know, and can’t; the conversation peters out. Yet another attempt for Frank to find the real him slips away, and he seems resigned, and accustomed to missed connections. The scene lasts about four minutes; it feels as if it’s taken an eternity.
It’s a tour de force for Goggins, posed with the challenge of reacting, in the moment, to information that shocks his character but remaining calm. And it’s next-level work by Rockwell, an unlikely “White Lotus” cast member. There’s been some conversation online recently about the potential for major stars joining future seasons of the series following an offhand red-carpet comment by Nicole Kidman. This elides the reality that, from Jennifer Coolidge to Sydney Sweeney to Aubrey Plaza, the show has boosted stars, but would likely be swallowed up by an A-lister. Rockwell (incidentally the romantic partner of season standout Leslie Bibb) is likely the most famous actor to have appeared on the show to date, and yet he utterly fits.
The monologue goes as far as it can, too, to redress the key problem I’ve had with this season. The first season was organized around themes of social class, the second around sexual desire; this season’s stated concept of “spirituality” has seemed to mainly be a smokescreen for a story about… social class and sexual desire. Fair enough — those are two of the main concepts of our lives — but I’ve found myself a bit confused as to what story is really being told.
Frank, a man of social advantages who puts those advantages to work in order to satisfy a sexual need, might have been at home in either of the first two seasons. But, in his brief appearance, he makes the case for this season as something all its own. He conveys his sexual adventures not as a fetish or an identity but as a sort of quest for the truth about himself — who he is inside, and what force or spirit made him that way. “I guess I was trying to fuck my way to the answer,” he says, animated not by the joy of disclosure or by shame but by a simple sense that if he can’t find the truth, he can at least tell a version of it. Rockwell, and Frank, woke the season up; now it’s time for the rest of the cast to, in earnest, start searching for their own answers, however they may find them.
