Sneering at, or with, “The White Lotus”

Kyle Stevens examines the farce at the heart of the third season of HBO’s “The White Lotus.”

By Kyle StevensMay 12, 2025

• Cultural Studies

• Television

IF ALL YOU knew about season three of HBO’s The White Lotus (2025) was what you saw on social media, you’d probably think Parker Posey was its lead. Her pronunciation of words—“tsunami,” “Buddhism,” “Piper, nooo!”—in an unhinged Durham accent has created a viral sensation, landing her character’s signature phrases on mugs, T-shirts, and even in club mixes. Now that the season is over, with five people dead and all cell phones returned to guests, I want to return to the moment we first meet Posey’s Victoria Ratliff, perched on a yacht, sneering at a reclining Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins) smoking an offensively odorous cigarette.

And what a sneer it is. In this one expression, we see the premise of the show in the promise of a lip. This sneer is also key to understanding the show’s farcical approach to class politics.

Victoria’s face is the first we see among the wealthy guests being ferried to their exclusive resort. In the prologue preceding this shot, things start with a bang: viewers hear shots off-screen promising more mystery, more violence. In this context, our group of vacationers are not just new characters but also new suspects. A similar air of danger and suspicion animates the show’s opening credits, which begin with shots of painted animals and villagers in separate frames. Gradually, the humans and animals respectively begin to take on each other’s behaviors and move into one another’s spaces. People roost in tree branches; monkeys smoke. Eventually, the creatures become more aggressive, overpowering towers of humans and toppling ships as they tear through and eat the masses. One of the reasons the opening credits are so fascinating is that they first appear still, but then aspects subtly move. The effect is uncanny, prompting unease and enjoining the audience to look closely, to be alert to what might not, at first glance, be all it appears to be.

Like Victoria’s sneer. A sneer is not a sinister smile, like Norman Bates’s smirk at the end of Psycho (1960) or the many crazed, even demonic, facial contortions contemporary horror films fixate on, from the closing shot of Pearl (2022) to the imagery of the Smile franchise. Nor is it an evil grin, though there are shared etymological roots pertaining to the showing of teeth. The sneer particularly “reveals [our] animal descent” according to Charles Darwin, in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, not least because it displays the aptly named canine tooth. “If our ears had remained movable, their movements would have been highly expressive, as is the case with all the animals which fight with their teeth,” he writes, “and we may infer that our early progenitors thus fought, as we still uncover the canine tooth on one side when we sneer at or defy any one, and we uncover all our teeth when furiously enraged.”

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is the first scientific book to feature photographic images, both as objects of analysis and as illustration of its points. Throughout, Darwin regularly compares “relaxed” or “unemotive” faces with expressive ones (images of the latter were often obtained through horrific means: photographer Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne hooked up electrodes to the faces of people hospitalized with mental illness and galvanized particular muscles). I’ve written elsewhere about how, in conducting these studies, Darwin was analyzing not simply the expressive face but also the movement between the photographs, creating something like his own imagined cinematic close-ups. The sneer, however, is legible in the stasis of a single photograph. And stasis is just what Victoria wants. She’s conservative. She desires to conserve and protect the established order of things—for her to stay wealthy, for her kids to stay home, for class mobility not to exist.

Though Darwin may not have put it this way, Posey’s baring of teeth relays quite clearly that Victoria is no Real Housewife of Durham. There will be no catfights; this is a pack animal. (Significantly, cats—unlike dogs—do not sneer.) She cares whether her daughter joins the herd at Duke or Chapel Hill, as we learn in the first episode. And when Kate Bohr (Leslie Bibb) recognizes Victoria from a long-ago baby shower, Victoria cannot admit that she was once in a group with her. “I’m on vacation with my family,” she protests. Indeed, given this matriarch’s endogamous desires, it shouldn’t surprise us that her children turn to each other for sex.

This desire to constantly construct in-groups and out-groups makes Victoria the exemplary White Lotus character, and her sneer its paradigmatic gesture. Simply put, she needs Rick to sneer at: she cannot be Victoria Ratliff without others to condescend to and be repulsed by. She cannot belong to the wealthy class, cannot be “decent people” without “boat people,” as she is fond of calling the local yacht owners her son Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) befriends.

Like her wealthy counterparts at the White Lotus Thailand, Victoria’s identity relies on a logic of exclusion—one that is, of course, cruel and often leads to violence. It is this logic that is at the heart of the series, especially evident in the character of Belinda Lindsey (Natasha Rothwell), who, with a dismissive smile just short of a sneer, becomes a class traitor the moment a windfall hits, abandoning plans to open a spa with Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul)—just as Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) did in season one.

The sneer incarnates the paradox of the uber-rich of today. They show contempt for the underclasses they depend on in order to be upper-class, and no concern for the construction of social infrastructure or “public things,” as did the robber barons of an earlier era and another recent Sunday night staple on HBO, The Gilded Age (and it’s hard to miss the Carrie Coon-nection between the two).

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Victoria’s contempt for Rick nuances the sneer, imbuing it with more than just the bestial aggression Darwin attributed to it. Contempt is tricky to define. Unlike supposed synonyms, such as “scorn” and “despise,” which can be phrased directly with their objects, we say we have contempt for. Contempt requires a prepositional distance, a grammatical flag that it is not just a feeling but also a position, a stance.

Perhaps the best elucidation of the concept comes from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man. The main character, George, reflects on his feelings about being mocked by the neighborhood kids:

George is ashamed of his roarings because they aren’t playacting. He does genuinely lose his temper and feels humiliated and sick to his stomach later. At the same time, he is quite well aware that the children want him to behave in this way. They are actually willing him to do it. If he should suddenly refuse to play the monster, and they could no longer provoke him, they would have to look around for a substitute. The question Is this playacting or does he really hate us? never occurs to them. They are utterly indifferent to him except as a character in their myths. It is only George who cares. Therefore he is all the more ashamed of his moment of weakness about a month ago, when he bought some candy and offered it to a bunch of them on the street. They took it without thanks, looking at him curiously and uneasily; learning from him maybe at that moment their first lesson in contempt.

Again, unlike other experiences of condescension or disdain, contempt involves more: the children, in that moment, both dislike George and need him, and it is that need that transforms the dislike into something much more vehement. Contempt becomes a more sustaining feeling, in which loathing meets holding a grudge.

The centrality of contempt to The White Lotus may help to explain the show’s enduring popularity. But is it contempt for the wealthy that sustains our interest in the show? Or does this show have contempt for us as viewers? How sympathetic are we to those like the Ratliffs? And how sympathetic are we meant to be? If we laugh at them, what is the tenor of our laughter at characters so privileged and yet so resentful?

To answer these questions, it helps to think about genre. Genres both shape our expectations of art and reflect our experiences of it—including, in this case, White Lotus’s depiction of privilege.

Out of curiosity, I googled “The White Lotus Genre” and received a list of seven genres, all prominently and equally displayed at the top of the search: comedy, comedy/drama, soap opera, drama, thriller, mystery, and crime fiction. To this, I could add the first line of the show’s description on its HBO home page: “The White Lotus is a sharp social satire.” Radio Times proclaimed that the show “invent[ed] the ‘Aloha Christie’ genre” while being, at the same time, “an addictive, genre-busting blend of cringe comedy, whodunit drama and ‘wellness’ satire.”

Arguably a more salient category for understanding The White Lotus might be the one Lauren Berlant calls the “situation tragedy,” a contemporary genre wherein “the subject’s world is fragile beyond repair, one gesture away from losing all access to sustaining its fantasies.” (By contrast, the subject of a situation comedy, when faced with instability, “performs a slapstick maladjustment that turns out absurdly and laughably, without destroying very much.”) Characters in this genre attach to family and friends as a compensatory value, yet such value is also coerced since they cannot find meaning elsewhere. They must find validation in present intimacies to distract from the struggles of working-class life, as capitalism withholds any appealing futures. Such promises of intimacy, according to Berlant, enable us “to imagine that having a friend, or making a date, or looking longingly at someone who might, after all, show compassion for our struggles, is really where living takes place.” The “epiphany” that Laurie Duffy (Carrie Coon) tearfully shares with her two girlfriends in the final episode—that “time gives [her life] meaning”—would seem to be a case study in Berlant’s formulation.

Typically, however, characters in situation tragedies are excluded from middle-class lifestyles and social spaces, living with a longing for “the good life” that will of course never come. Berlant’s discussion of the situation tragedy is found in her now-famous book Cruel Optimism (2011), whose central tenet is that the majority of us living under capitalist conditions are exhausted from the pursuit of desires we are told to achieve but which the very same system prohibits us from achieving. Yet the inhabitants of White Lotus resorts are meant to be living the good life. They do have choices and possibilities afforded by wealth and social mobility, even if the show’s flashback structure throws a veil of fatalism over the story that might distract from this fact.

If some of the more sincere moments in The White Lotus belong to the situation tragedy, other more ironic ones reveal the series’ debts to another genre—arguably, the genre that itself sneers: farce. “In melodrama fear enjoys itself,” writes Eric Bentley in The Life of the Drama (1964), whereas “in farce hostility enjoys itself.” In this way, farce is well suited to tell stories that mock the powerful, authority, and convention—and the authority of convention. Traditional farces were all about sticking it to the wealthy (at least so long as they pandered to the king at the last moment to avoid censorship, à la Tartuffe). Bentley continues: “If there is an equivalent in farce and comedy for pity and fear in melodrama and tragedy, it is sympathy and contempt.” Irony, anger, and the feeling of being torn between sympathy and contempt were emulsified into the mode centuries ago and, arguably, are now default settings for inhabiting our current world. Hence our need for stories that reflect these feelings back to us.

Oscar Wilde—who understood a farcical sneer as well as anyone—wrote, while wasting away in prison, “If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.” The threat of the sneer is ambiguous. Cowardice sneers at him, but is cowardice on the attack? Or is cowardice cornered by Wilde, ready to defend itself?

We might ask similar questions of The White Lotus. Is it attacking these characters, or is it afraid of them? Is it sneering at or with us? And do we take pleasure in its mockery of wealth’s affordances—having a miserable time in a beautiful place—because we ourselves feel cornered, powerless, desperate to strike back, even if our only means is by streaming prestige TV?

Perhaps it’s both. What The White Lotus does so well is to create a compelling dynamic in our experience, as we oscillate between the pleasure of the farcical elements’ aggression and the instinct to retreat from the show’s cringe moments. After all, it’s Parker Posey. Of course she performs a sneer so arch yet so savage as to solicit a laugh (or a gay gasp, as it did in our household).

This affective oscillation ensures a degree of compassion for this collection of people who are anything but a collective, fellow feeling that even extends toward the ultimate perversion for its presumed audience—an “independent” Trump voter (Bibb’s Kate). Instead of Molière’s stock characters, we get psychologically complex ones with real, if misguided, feelings. And that is what makes the show so bitter. They really are awful people. We can feel good about ourselves for trying to understand them before hauling out the guillotine.

And still audiences set-jet to the show’s resorts and locations.