By ATTA WONGSUCHAT
EXCERPTS FROM LAW OF THE JUNGLE
In classic Anthropological tradition, primitivity is defined by the subhuman, the body of colour, and non-Western epistemologies. Infinitely existing in the state in which it spawned, it is the unbuilt and un-evolved. Untouched by social structure, norms, and rules, primitive behaviour is that which precedes development. It is raw, simple, and, predicated on a chronotic timescale, it is primeval — the very first. For the temporally modern West and cerebrally advanced Human, primitive behaviour regresses from an established social and moral convention, demarcating it from the civilised. It is the unsophisticated and the animal. Uncivilised or ‘animalistic’ behaviour is therefore an expression of the innate, unmediated by socialisation and lacking in logical reasoning or thought, driven purely by instinct. In 1871, Edward Burnett Tylor — often regarded as the father of cultural anthropology — outlines “the definiteness of moral principles” as a method for ethnographers to measure the “grade” of civilisation; deviant behaviour is deemed sub- or pre-human. Because this ideology is predicated on Biological and Anthropological imperialism, it is inevitably an unstable one; full of contradictions. Nonetheless and subsequently, they pervade and underlie our collective conscience. I adopt these beliefs as a way to dissect them.
To me, the crux of The White Lotus appears to boil down to the matter of unadulterated desire; one so pure and powerful that any regard for consequence is obliterated. Discussing Season 1 of the White Lotus, Karim Townsend writes that Mike White overturns the classical idea of the primitive subject by projecting animalistic behaviour on the white hotel guests. Season 3 maintains this tradition, emphasising to us the absurdity of whiteness and wealth through portrayals of lack of self-restraint, hypersexuality, and social anomie.
The eroticism of The White Lotus has undeniably been a critical vessel through which primitive desire is expressed. Saxon is emblematic of this idea; written as a hypersexual douche, he gets boners during massages, masturbates with the door open, openly discusses his sister’s sex-life and attractiveness, preaches toxic masculinity, and incessantly hits on hotel guests. His sexuality is predacious and almost assaulting; unwanted yet thrust upon everyone, us included — I can see his predatory grin so vividly in my mind’s eye.
In Darwinian terms, hypersexuality is a natural and necessary ‘male’ inclination to widely disperse one’s seeds for survival. Its association with non-human animals or the ‘un-evolved’ unsurprisingly ‘necessitates’ racist discourses of ‘barbaric’ cultures as hyper-sexual — an imperial rhetoric historically and presently used against the racialised body. This display of hypersexuality communicates an inability to move past the physical and the feral towards a domesticated, cerebral way of knowing. While Saxon acts as a satirical archetype of the straight, cis, white finance bro — vulgar and entitled to other’s bodies — White’s depiction of a feral sexuality poses questions of what the implications are when we frame gendered, political, and socially learnt dynamics as innate, uncontrollable urges.
More broadly across the rest of the cast, sexuality is framed in a way to emphasise moral deviance from normative nuclear frameworks. As explored above, sexuality or the provocative is framed as a deviance from morality; the inability to resist temptation. What is more perverse than sex? Weird sex. Sex outside the confines of the normative. Threesomes; Chloe and Jaclyn’s infidelities, a disobedience to monogamy; Gary’s voyeuristic aspirations that threaten the intimacies of sex; Belinda and Pornchai’s elusion of professional boundaries; Frank’s (shamelessly articulated) desire to be fucked ‘as an Asian girl’, his fantasies spanning racial parameters; Lochlan’s quiet admiration of his brother’s body that culminates in him pleasing it — an expression of a patriarchy taken past its normative limits. White has used non-normative sexual acts to accentuate these guests’ animality. Without a moral education, the guests act upon primitive and pure physical desire, regardless of consequences and rid of shame.
SEE FULL STORY IN ARTIFACT ISSUE N°1