Why Wasn’t Anyone Traumatized in the ‘White Lotus’ Finale?
This article contains spoilers for the finale of the third season of “The White Lotus.” Unless you’re an employee or a guest at a White Lotus resort, in which case it appears that it is impossible for your day to be truly spoiled.
“The White Lotus” is a show about vacation. It deals with the dos and don’ts of vacationing: Do go out to party! (Do not engage in incestuous relations while partying.) Do sample the local cuisine! (Unless the fruit is poisonous, in which case please do not give it to your family.)
And it is a show about murders.
And apparently, based on Sunday’s season finale, no one is traumatized by them. Hours after a mass shooting takes place at the pristine White Lotus resort in Thailand, characters who have just witnessed intense tragedy hop on a boat and seem to sail happily into the sunset, or simply show up for work as if nothing happened.
“Only in Hollywood,” Tracey Musarra Marchese, a professor at Syracuse University who specializes in trauma, said with a chuckle.
But some of the characters’ reactions, which raised questions about their plausibility and prompted admiration for one character’s athletic sprint, might be completely normal in the face of trauma, experts say.
“Sometimes what happens is in the moment because your system — physically, mentally, emotionally — you’ve been so overwhelmed that you might dissociate,” Marchese said.
Not everyone experiences acute stress, such as flashbacks, nightmares, anxiety or apprehension, after a traumatic event, Marchese said. Acute stress disorder, a precursor to post-traumatic stress disorder, is often diagnosed within days of a stressful event. A PTSD diagnosis comes weeks later at a minimum.
Trauma responses can include denial, fear, anger, confusion and anxiety, said Dr. Lorenzo Norris, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral health at George Washington University.
There is also the possibility of becoming emotionally detached as a protective mechanism in the aftermath of a traumatic situation.
“Basically, you start to become numb,” Norris said, adding that it could be the mind’s attempt “to slow things down and take you away from the emotional pain.”
Maybe that explains why the third season of “The White Lotus” ends the way it does. Life goes on. Vacation continues.
In the finale, a brooding guest named Rick (Walton Goggins), who has traveled halfway around the world to confront the resort’s owner (Scott Glenn) for killing his father, impulsively approaches him, steals his gun and fatally shoots him.
As he attempts an escape, Rick kills the resort owner’s bodyguards and is then shot in the back by a security guard.
The gunshots send staff members and guests, including a trio of oft-bickering friends (Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb and Michelle Monaghan), running away. Coon’s character sprints with such urgency that it has become a meme.
(“Look, I’m an American and I’m a New Yorker, and if you think I don’t know where the exits are in any building I’m in, then you’re not paying attention to the news,” Coon told Variety.)
Yet, minutes later, guests and resort employees appear generally undisturbed by what they have witnessed.
As guests leave the island by boat, only Monaghan’s character, Jaclyn, seems melancholic, though the audience doesn’t learn whether it’s about the shooting, her devolving marriage or something else. Employees stand on the shore doing the traditional smile and wave to a now-rich Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) and her beaming son, Zion (Nicholas Duvernay). The season opened with Zion hearing the gunshots and hoping that his mother wasn’t a victim. Within hours, that concern has completely disappeared. (One would think Belinda would be rushing to get out of there with her new riches — a $5 million payment to buy her silence about a murder from a previous “White Lotus” season.)
It might just be that Hollywood wants a happy ending. Mike White, the show’s creator, thought the armchair critics were being too literal, calling them the “logic police” in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“This isn’t a police procedural, this is a rumination-type show,” he said. “It makes me want to pull my hair out. Is this how you watch movies and TV shows?”
(The logic police showed up when the “White Lotus” police apparently didn’t.)
Experts said they would expect to see more variation in reactions to trauma.
“It would be highly unlikely that three people would have had that same experience where they were just like: ‘Yeah, OK. We’re fine; nothing happened,’” Marchese said, referring to the trio of friends, though she added that reactions can be delayed.
After the shooting, the partying continues around the resort as the guests make leisurely exits. Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong), the meek security guard who spent the whole season eschewing violence before shooting Rick in the back, appears to receive a promotion as a bodyguard to Sritala (Patravadi Mejudhon), the resort’s co-owner, who seems unmoved after having recently witnessed her husband’s death. Like the trio, she was aghast in the moment of Rick’s attack. But if she was upset in the aftermath, the audience doesn’t see it.
The shooting wasn’t the only near-death experience. Lochlan Ratliff (Sam Nivola), a teenage scion of a well-to-do family from North Carolina, narrowly survives after ingesting poisonous fruit that his father, Tim (Jason Isaacs), unintentionally left out. Granted, Tim did almost kill his whole family the night before, but that’s beside the point. On the boat ride off the resort, no one in the family seems concerned — the only tension point is Tim’s oblique reference to an impending business scandal. It’s almost as if the poisoning never happened.
This is a slight departure from previous seasons. At the end of Season 1, a hotel manager is stabbed after defecating in a guest’s luggage (a spoiler of a different kind). But the audience sees glimpses of a police investigation and the staff’s reactions. In Season 2, the events around the death of Tanya McQuoid-Hunt (Jennifer Coolidge) happen away from the resort, though concerned guests and staff members are briefly seen reacting to the discovery of her body.
For the most part, “The White Lotus” in Thailand is not concerned with the lingering effects of trauma. Just vibes. Or maybe the lack of a response is a creative choice: Anyone who visits a White Lotus resort must know how to suppress their emotions.
“People have different ways of making sense of their reality,” Dr. Norris said.