Review
America
Culture
Feminism
Film & TV
6 min read

White Lotus understands a lot - but not Christianity

Here’s what the girl squad storyline gets right and wrong.
Three woman dining in a luxury hotel in Thailand, turn and look to the camera.
Kate, Jacylin, Laurie.
HBO.

I really rate The White Lotus.  

This multi-award-winning show is one of the smartest around. It’s almost like a modern myth. The specificity of the premise alone is incredibly satisfying: White Lotus is the name of an international chain of high-end resorts, a luxurious touchstone for the rich, the famous, and the dodgy. Season one took viewers to Hawaii, season two jetted us off to Italy, and this year we find ourselves welcomed to Thailand. 

Each new series has a new location, a new cast and a new set of intelligent storylines. the only thing that ties the three series together is the omnipresence of the White Lotus hotel. Oh, and the presence of murder. Each series opens by telling its viewers that one person that we’re about to meet will die – it just takes us eight episodes to find out who.  

I’m convinced that Mike White, the writer and director, must be one of the most perceptive people on the planet. I wouldn’t be surprised if, before he entails on writing another series, he just sits and watches the world. He endeavours to notice, endeavours to understand. I say this because he seems to discern the way people work: the way they love, the way they hate, the way they rest, the way they hide. And then he turns it up to eleven when crafting his characters.  

Honestly, if Mike White hadn’t mastered the art of noticing, White Lotus wouldn’t work. But he pays attention to people; deep, intense and curious attention. That’s the magic sauce, I’m sure of it.  

In the latest episode (episode three of season three, as it stands), there’s a scene that caught me by surprise. Its perceptiveness stopped me in my tracks.  

Is Mike White over simplifying this, or is he saying what he’s seeing? That people have reduced the greatest, deepest, largest and truest story ever told to an association with red or blue?

We’ve been introduced to three friends: we have Kate (Leslie Bibb), Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Laurie (Carrie Coon). They’ve been friends since school, but now in their forties, life has taken them in different directions. Kate lives in Texas with her picture-perfect family. Jaclyn is a newly married and semi-famous TV star, living and working in LA.  And Laurie is a divorcee, working hard and raising her daughter in New York City. They’ve come to Thailand (at the invitation and expense of Jaclyn) to re-connect and make some new memories.  

But it’s not that easy.  

Each woman is caught in a tussle of loving and loathing who the other two have become, they celebrate each other’s ‘successes’ and instinctively compete with them in equal measure. It’s masterfully done. As deeply as they want to be good friends to each other, perhaps for old time’s sake, this trio is not a safe one to be in.  

One evening, after Laurie has had an ‘energy healing’ session, Jaclyn mentions that she can get on board with spiritual practices a whole lot easier than she can get on board with ‘religion’ – Christianity, she states, is made for men. She can’t seem to find herself, or any other empowered women, within the biblical story. And so, she finds herself gravitating to ‘witchy’ alternatives.  

I’m a woman, a pretty ‘feminist’ one at that. I’m also, first and foremost, a Christian. And so, I think I have the right to say that this is incredibly perceptive of Mike White. I have this conversation time and time again: people wondering why a woman, one who believes in the social, economic, political and spiritual equality of the sexes, would ever hitch their wagon to the Christian tradition. Honestly, sometimes I feel like a unicorn.  

Yet, when the ‘Christian’ church was first bubbling up (we’re talking first century) it had the reputation of being a religion for women and slaves. Everywhere it travelled - city by city, village by village - women (of every socio-economic background) flocked to the Christian community in dramatic numbers. It changed the cultural landscape. Jesus, the Galilean saviour that these communities couldn’t stop talking about, kept company with women in a history-making way and they were determined to do likewise. Now, what I can’t deny is all of the patriarchy that has been thrown into the mix since. To pretend it’s not there would be silly of me.  

So, I hear you, Jaclyn. But I’ve gone straight to the source (Jesus) and I’ve hit upon a disconnect between the story I believe/the saviour I believe in, and the way it/he has been used against my gender – so I’ve stubbornly chosen to ignore the latter. I’ve never let it drive me away. I find my whole self (my gender included) forcefully loved by the God I know, endlessly drawn into his company, convinced by his assertion that he made me – fearfully and wonderfully. 

Oh Jaclyn, they can try to tell me that Christianity isn’t for me, but I ain’t budging.   

The dinner conversation moves on, Kate hits back – she tells her buddies that she, in fact, goes to her Texan church every Sunday and finds it ‘very moving’. Jaclyn and Laurie, both wide-eyed, sympathetically state that it must be hard to be around people who voted for Trump. And then it becomes obvious, to those in the scene and those of us watching it, that Kate herself voted for Trump.  

It’s an emotionally intelligent watch: two women feeling viscerally betrayed by their friend for voting in such a ‘self-defeating’ way. And the friend on the other side, betrayed that they would think of her so differently as a result of her well-intentioned political leaning.  

I live in the UK, and so I was taken aback that these women were able to draw such a confident line between A and B – between Christianity and one particular political party. Because of the perceptive nature of Mike White (as evidenced by the lines that came before these ones), I trust that this is somewhat accurate. It may not be the truth (I’m sure not every Texan Christian voted one way), but it’s certainly a perceived truth.   

It intrigued but mostly troubled me. It made me wonder what the meaning of ‘Christian’ is becoming, or perhaps has already become – people holding the cross in one hand and a political party in another, claiming that to love one is to love the other. Are we really known as people who are wanting a messiah in the White House, a Saviour in the Senate? Is Mike White over simplifying this, or is he saying what he’s seeing? That people have reduced the greatest, deepest, largest and truest story ever told to an association with red or blue?  

To Jaclyn, Laurie, Kate, and all those you represent – I’m sorry if we haven’t done the best job at representing ourselves, or Jesus, to you.  

To Mike White – watch us a little longer, watch a little deeper. We Christians are neither a patriarchal nor political tribe; don’t squeeze us into the boxes that we’re pretending we fit in. That’s our bad. There’s more to us than that. You have my word. 

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Review
Culture
Film & TV
Romance
8 min read

Meet our top 5 rom coms for Valentine's Day

Love is the core of every truly good sweeping story.
A couple sit at a table in a diner talking intensely.
Castle Rocl.

1. The Apartment

Billy Wilder’s directorial tour-de-force is a timeless classic – proof for the sceptical that black-and-white films lose nothing in their monotone. Comedy legend Jack Lemmon plays C.C. "Bud" Baxter, an office worker who desperately seeks preferment. He impresses his superiors by allowing them to use his Upper West Side apartment to entertain their mistresses away from the gaze of their wives. He is also desperately seeking love, in the person of elevator operator Fran Kubelik. The only problem is that she is spoken for – she is the mistress of the big boss. Baxter juggles his ‘apartment schedule’, the disapproval of his neighbours, and his sorrow at seeing Fran slip away. 

The script is the perfect combination of laughs and smiles. The performances are excellent, especially Lemmon’s balletic physical comedy (the spaghetti strained through a tennis racket scene stays with me like an old friend). The message is important: love hurts. The film resonates just as much now, in our world of HR and workplace boundaries, as it did then. Baxter, and ESPECIALLY Fran, are victims of those with power; except they don’t use violence or coercion to exert their control, they use the promise of acceptance, of love. Love is not a trifling emotion, as some of the most vapid frippery of Valentine’s Day may suggest, but the deepest motivation a human being can have – look at what Jesus does out of love. It is a dangerous thing when treated as instrumental and disposable, and can yield terrible and tragic results if abused. Thankfully, The Apartment ends on a note of hope and expectation…but it really has you on the edge-of-your-seat up until the end, and gives you and new appreciation for the sanctity of romance and love.  

2. Notting Hill

We had to have a Richard Curtis pic – I’m a patriot after all! Naturally Four Weddings is excluded because of that one…appalling…unforgivable line…OF COURSE ANDIE MACDOWELL NOTICED THAT IT WAS RAINING! 

Anyway. Notting Hill is such a lovely and gentle film. Hugh Grant is effortless as divorced and timid bookseller William Thacker. His life is comfortable yet a little empty, with his only real company being his unspeakable lodger Spike – Rhys Ifans in a career-defining role. His life is turned upside-down when Hollywood superstar Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) enters his shop, leaves, and then has him spill orange juice all down her front. Romance develops between the two but is continually stalled by the very different worlds they inhabit: Thacker lives a quiet life in Notting Hill, and Scott is a globe-trotting paparazzi-magnet who cannot seem to keep any aspect of her stage-managed life private. I won’t go into anymore of the plot, as you’ll know it even if you haven’t seen the film…it’s a National Treasure by now. 

The wonderful message of this film, other than London property prices were ludicrously generous back in the day, is that love is a feeling and a force that can cross any boundaries. This is a modern-day quasi-Romeo and Juliet: two people from seemingly incompatible worlds allowing their love to break down barriers and overcome obstacles…except here we have a happy ending! Love is the greatest leveller this world knows (there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, man nor woman) – it is the equaliser of the human experience and fount of understanding, empathy, and mercy. 

3. Knocked Up

I’m afraid we move to less elevated fare and instead begin the descent into puerility. One can expect nothing less from director Judd Apatow, who has made his name by combining the compulsory schmaltz of a rom com with the sweary gross-out humour of our less-civilised age. Nevertheless, this film has real merit.  

Katherine Heigl is Allison Scott, an ambitious reporter for an entertainment news channel. She goes out to celebrate her well-earned promotion, has a little (or a lot-tle) too much to drink, and ends up having a one-night stand with aspiring internet celebrity pornographer Ben Stone (Seth Rogen). Their dalliance leads to the inevitable – pregnancy. Allison finds herself in the invidious position of having dinner with Ben, to inform him of her maternal state, only to realise that she finds him repulsive. He is everything she isn’t: she is ambitious, organised, and stable, while his greatest achievement is a collection of bongs and a potential website detailing moments of on-screen nudity. They are chalk-and-cheese…and yet they both decide to try and make their lives compatible to raise their child together. 

It's not a clever film, and the laughs are all guilty guffaws at over-the-top toilet humour, but it does have heart. It is the story of two people who don’t find love in a glance across a crowded room, or through a shared interest, but through a shared struggle. It is the story of two people who learn through difficulty, pain, and self-sacrifice what it means to live for another; even if that other person is yet to be born. At the centre of this film – after digging through tranches of (apparently hilarious) excrement – is the message that love is not instantaneous or easy, but something that is worked towards and maintained through giving up one’s own wants and pleasures for the good of another. I wonder which two-thousand-year-old story embodies this theme? 

4. The Princess Bride

The phrase ‘cult-classic’ might as well have been invented to describe this film. It is a mad-cap tale incorporating piracy, palace intrigue, and a giant. I…I…I can’t even try to give a plot synopsis. It goes all over the place, as if it where story-boarded by an over-imaginative seven-year-old who’s been given a surfeit of sugar (sorry William Goldman). The humour, essential for the ‘com’ to the ‘rom’, is more-often-than-not accidental, but humour there is in spades. Its silly, and its sweet, and its certifiable…but it works. 

What puts The Princess Bride in my Top 5 is the epic sweep of the film. I’m pretty certain it didn’t intend to be a rom com, but I count it as one, and so it is the only rom com that manages to also be a mythopoetic tale. Perhaps Shrek is in the same league…but I can’t forgive the sequels and the overuse of Eddie Murphy. The Princess Bride is a wonderful reminder that love is a great, epic, poetic, mythic, legendary force in the world. Love has started and ended wars, it has rewritten the tablet of history over and over again, and is not a ‘story’ that can be confined to a ‘meet-cute’ between two unreasonably attractive people in a New York coffee shop – it is the very language of reality, and so is the lens through which we must view not only ourselves and our immediate loved ones, but the whole of the universe and the whole of human history. Love is the core of every truly good sweeping story – especially that story that begins with the loving creation of heaven and earth, their salvation in the love of the Cross, and their reconstitution as the New Heaven and New Earth where love of God is the primary vocation of all. 

AAAAAND…it starts and ends with Peter Falk as a grandfather lovingly telling this story to his sick grandson…the heart melts… 

5. When Harry Met Sally…

In the kingdom of rom-coms Nora Ephron is the Empress to whom all others bow, and this is her greatest conquest! When Harry Met Sally… is epic in its sweep, but in a very different way to The Princess Bride. It is epic in that it is a love story that takes over a decade to play out. Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) meet by chance in 1977. Serendipity is at work: he is dating her best friend, and so, as a matter of convenience, the two share a car to journey from Chicago to New York. As in many rom coms their personalities couldn’t be more different, and although they share chemistry, Sally chafes at Harry’s confident assertion that men and women cannot be friends. The journey ends unhappily, and the two have no intention of every meeting again. 

Five years pass and the pair find themselves on the same flight. Serendipity strike again when Harry learns that Sally is dating his neighbour. The chemistry is sparking reactions, but when Harry suggests they become friends Sally declines, citing his previous assertion about male/female friendship. 

Another five years pass – and so a serendipitous meeting is in the diary – and there is a chance meeting in a bookshop. Both are now single and have faced the sting of love lost. They strike up a friendship. The friendship matures and deepens, and those around them can see that they are falling in love, yet their determination to be friends leads them to have romantic attachments to other people. This falls apart after a night of high-emotion and comfort turns into amorous passion. Their friendship is seemingly ruined, and both miserably start to live like without the other. 

UNTIL… 

On New Year’s Eve 1988 Harry realises that he cannot be whole or happy without Sally and runs to find her at a party, to declare his love for her in the greatest speech in rom-com history! The cinema cheers! What makes When Harry Met Sally… dear to my heart is that seeming serendipity I keep mentioning, because it teaches us a vital lesson about love. There is no true chance, no true serendipity in love. Love is the very glue that binds all creation together. The Scriptures, the great mystics of the faith, the very person of Jesus Christ, teach us that God is love and that this love is all and is in all. There is no coincidence in love – love really is what makes the world go round. In the end, just as Harry and Sally seemed destined to be together, we are destined to be united with God in love. 

I started this list a little sceptical and burnt-out with the romance of Valentine’s Day. Having reengaged with these five films I am revivified and reconverted to the great name of love. Love drives us, heals us, and ultimately embraces us in eternity. What a wonderful legacy for St Valentine to have.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief