The morning after reverses yet more roles: While the brothers, especially the once-unflappable Saxon, reel with shame, Chloe is essentially unbothered, perching cat-like above the deck to recap with Chelsea. Asked if she hooked up with Saxon or Lochlan, she blithely says no: “I hooked up with both of them.”
This is the enduring allure of The White Lotus: It woos viewers with lush, Bachelor-fantasy date settings and a classic murder mystery, then shanks us with commentary on privilege and power (I haven’t felt entirely comfortable at a resort since Season 1). In the contemplative latest season, White gives his female characters an uncommon level of sexual agency, which they use and abuse at will—much like, you know, men. Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) cheats on her husband with Valentin (Arnas Fedaravičius), the hotel staffer she’d been pushing on her divorced “bestie” Laurie (Carrie Coons), though Jaclyn’s particular marital arrangement is nebulous. Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) beds her sweet colleague Porchai (Dom Hetrakul), who suggests the very next day that they open a spa together—eliciting a kind, vaguely pitying smile from her that seems to say: Bless his heart.
And Chloe trumps even Saxon as the show’s most virile animal, wearing her sexual potency as confidently as her Easter egg-pink Jacquemus resort wear. She sets her sights on Lochlan, telling Chelsea that “innocent young guys” are one of her kinks. “When they see you naked, they shake, and you can see their little hearts beating inside their chests,” she coos. While it may lack the intricacy of Frank’s (Sam Rockwell) monologue about his fetishes in Episode 5, here is a woman speaking her still-taboo desire (sex with an 18-year-old high schooler) out loud. More than one White Lotus guest laments the prevalence of young women dating wealthy older men at various stages of baldness, but Chloe owns the fact that women, too, can lust after younger partners as a matter of type. She calls Lochlan her “little magician,” but maybe this is White’s sleight of hand—suggesting that she isn’t so different from Gary after all. It might not be pretty, but it feels like parity: allowing female characters to be stupid with want; to be as messy and human and calculated as any man.
