Diksha Sundriyal
Every season of Mike White’s ‘The White Lotus’ focuses on a group of people who are complicated, to say the least. The more we get to know these people, the worse they seem to get. The guests, more often than not, are entitled, spoilt, vain, and vile, which is what, perhaps, makes it easy to believe that things could get so much worse so easily within a span of a week or so. The third season of the show carries this thematic skeleton and wraps it in the beauty of Thailand. With each episode, the tension increases as different aspects of the characters come to light. What’s more interesting is the recurring motif of monkeys, which has been there since Season 1 but is particularly pronounced in the third season.
The Monkeys Represent the Core of The White Lotus Season 3
Each season of ‘The White Lotus’ is defined by an overall theme that seeps into the general narrative of the show. On the surface, it is about a bunch of rich people who land themselves in trouble while vacationing at a resort. However, there is usually a running theme throughout the season that adds more meaning to the story. In the case of Season 3, it is about the inner animal inside people. Explaining the reasoning behind the prominence of monkeys in each episode, Mike White said that this season focuses on “people trying to reach their spiritual dimension at this animalistic base.” Because Eastern religion and spirituality are at the center of the story, setting it in a place that is surrounded by deep woods presents an interesting contrast, which also taps into the dual nature of the characters.
The monkeys that we see in the show are often caught at a distance. They stare at the guests from their branches, appearing as ever-present entities that are always watching everything. The first reference that connects them to guests comes in the first scene itself when Amrita tells Zion to calm the chattering of their monkey minds. So, as people go around trying to manage their stress, calm their minds, nurture their bodies, and find a semblance of balance within themselves, they have the chaotic monkeys looking at them as if their own animal side is looking at them, trying out all this stuff, when in reality, their base nature will remain the same.
As if to confirm that the guests, and even some of the staff, are indeed monkeys, the intro of the season features paintings full of monkeys, with each frame hinting at one or the other guests and even holding a clue to what is eventually going to happen in the show (though it might not be obvious at first glance.) This motif recurs in the intro scene for the guests, where the Ratliff siblings are captured in a frame that makes them look like the three wise monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. As the third season progresses, we see the monkey-chattering in the minds of the characters grow louder, which paves the way for the chaos that will ultimately result in a shootout.
Over the course of eight episodes, the people in the resort, particularly the guests, start to unravel, and the reason for this can be jotted down as nothing but their inability to learn to control their animal nature. While some characters are really putting in the effort to tame their mind, there are others, like Saxon, who freely exhibit it and are even proud of it. At the end of the day, it all comes down to whether all or even some of them will rise above it and be more than animals clawing at each other.
Read More: Is The White Lotus a Real Luxury Resort in Thailand?
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