There’s a part in season three of the HBO series The White Lotus that viewers won’t easily forget. Frank, a newly sober American expat living in Thailand, where the show takes place, begins to explain to his old friend Rick why he’s gone sober. In detailing his descent into partying and sex addiction, he describes what he sees as a kind of Buddhist realization about his own desires: It’s not that he wants to exploit and subjugate the Asian women he pursues; it’s that he wants to be the Asian women.
“What appears to be a very straightforward form of white male domination of the Asian woman’s body gets turned on its head,” says Poulomi Saha, a UC Berkeley associate professor of English who studies post-colonialism, psychoanalytic critique and feminist and queer theory. “It’s a brilliant way to think about the cost of unending pleasure being accessible to you — it changes you.”
It’s one of many moments in the series that Saha says are revelatory — not simply because they’re shocking, but because they hold up a mirror to race and gender dynamics in American society in a way that’s unique in television today.