“Is this a bit ‘You killed my father, prepare to die,’ kind of?” asks Chelsea, the horoscope-obsessed Brit played with charm by Aimee Lou Wood in season three of The White Lotus.
Chelsea may be thinking of The Princess Bride (1987), but we’re firmly in Hamlet territory. Her partner Rick (Walton Goggins) soon sets off to avenge his father’s death and kicks off a chain of violence that ends, inevitably, in blood and tragedy.
Mike White’s luxury-hotel-meets-moral-decline drama, The White Lotus, has always toyed with highbrow references. Season two gave us Madame Butterfly meets commedia dell’arte (a genre of early Italian theatre replete with wealthy lovers, greedy old men, duplicitous servants and glamorous courtesans).
Season three shifts the setting to Thailand. There, the show’s satire of super-wealth is framed through not only the lens of Buddhism, but also through many of Shakespeare’s great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear.
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Enter Rick, our sullen Hamlet. He’s been raised on a tragic fairy tale. As a child, his mother told him that his saintly father was murdered by a corrupt Thailand-based hotel-owner, Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn). Rick insists this theft of a parent is the root of his suffering. But like Hamlet, he can’t act – not at first.
When he finally does pull the trigger, the results are devastating. Jim’s wife, Sritlana (Lek Patravadi), reveals the twist. Jim was his real father, an oedipal moment that was unsurprising in a season so obsessed with incest.
In the ensuing swirl of gunfire, Chelsea is killed. Rick, cradling her body in a Lear-like pietà, is shot by the noble yet spiritually doomed security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong). The two lovers’ bodies float in the lily-strewn waters in an overt modern-day remake of Sir John Everett Millais’s painting, Ophelia (another character from Hamlet).
Yet it’s Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), not Rick, who most clearly channels Hamlet’s existential torment. Facing exposure for financial fraud, Timothy contemplates suicide and even taking his family with him.
Like Hamlet, though, he hesitates. Not out of pity, but uncertainty. What comes after death? Hamlet asked the same:
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Life is suffering. Hamlet and the Buddha knew that well. So why do we put up with it? To live or die? To act or wait? At a Buddhist monastery, Timothy seeks answers to these questions.
The senior monk tells him: death is not an escape, but a return. Like a droplet returning to the sea, “Death is a happy return, like coming home.” Pain is inescapable; it must be faced. Timothy, and Hamlet, struggle to accept that.
The inevitability of greed
Season three of The White Lotus may have touched on Hamlet’s considerations of suicide, revenge and fate (its finale is named Amor Fati, which translates as love of one’s fate), but its trademark attack on the inevitability of greed was thrown into sharp relief this season thanks to its light engagement with Buddhism.
The senior monk tells Timothy in his gently broken 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 moral compasses, Gaitok, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), run from pain to pleasure – towards power, sex, comfort and money over enlightenment.
Gaitok puts his morals aside to kill Rick so that he might get a promotion and win the heart of Mook (Lalisa Manobal). Piper decides against a year at the monastery after realising she needs the comforts of wealth more than she realised. And Belinda? She could have exposed the killer of Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge’s beloved character from seasons one and two). Instead, she takes a US$5 million payout and sails away smiling.
As she departs, Billy Preston’s buoyant song Nothing from Nothing plays. It’s the same phrase Rick uttered earlier in the season: “Nothing comes from nothing, right?” He’s already empty, he cannot be saved. On the surface, it’s a throwaway line. But it holds weight – philosophical, spiritual and Shakespearean.
Buddhism teaches anatta, the doctrine of no-self. It’s the idea that release comes through relinquishing ego, embracing nothingness. Since we are essentially nothing, all that ever can come from us is nothing: the business and strife and frustration of life is in fact empty froth on the surface of a deep nothingness. And Shakespeare knew the dangers of misunderstanding that “nothing”.
“Nothing comes from nothing” is a favoured maxim of King Lear. After asking the first two of his three daughters to express profusely their love for him, he rewards them with land and wealth. Turning to his third daughter, Cordelia, he asks, “What can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak,” to which she responds:
Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.
Lear: Nothing?
Cordelia: Nothing.
Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.
If Cordelia gives Lear “nothing,” he will give her “nothing” in return – no dowry, no inheritance, no kingdom. This exposes how Lear has come to place a transactional value on love. In his mind, affection must be spoken, quantified and rewarded with land and power. He’s unable, or unwilling, to recognise the moral worth of Cordelia’s honest, restrained love because it offers no immediate gratification or political utility.
At this early stage of the play, Lear, like The White Lotus’s spiritually bankrupt denizens, falsely clings to worldly value, not seeing it as mere illusion. Belinda’s spiritual bank, however, was full. Yet in the season’s finale, the repetition of “nothing comes from nothing” after Belinda’s ethical one-eighty hints at how fateful her choice really is.
In one moment, she trades enlightenment and true (if restrained) happiness for the nothingness of wealth. At the start of both The White Lotus and King Lear, “nothing”, whether it means death, poverty, or solitude, is a threat. By the end, it’s all that remains.
Emily Rowe, Lecturer in Early Modern Literature, King's College London
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.