Id and the Rich: Through The White Lotuses

By Impana Jain

Season 3 of The White Lotus is making a step-by-step entry into the consumer world and we are back to watching rich people do rich people things in the HBO black drama-series. Like the other seasons, this season typically blends in ethnicity, class divide and glamour altogether through the characters of the guests, the staff and someone in between the two portrayed by Belinda’s character. While the show brings to you a lot of psychological themes like personality, giving into sexual urges, seeking familar hells over unfamiliar heavens– as seen in season 1’s climax of Rachel continuing to stay with Shane (the rich, entitled man-child) – in this essay, I want to focus on Freud’s concept of the Id impulse that stood out to me in the show.

poster from season 3 of The White Lotus, HBO

Starting off, according to Freud our personality consists of three components, the id (the pleasure principle), the superego (the morality principle) and mediator between the former two, ego (the reality principle). Id and Superego are often viewed to be opposing forces that the ego tries to bring peace within. Giving too much into either is not viewed to lead to pleasant behavior. In the White Lotus, the guests are all either rich or in some way associated with money. The show unofficially carries two sides–the guest and the staff–each representing different classes and world views. As the title of the essay suggests, the Id seems to be the driving force for most of the guest characters. A typical and explicit example of this is Shane’s character from season 1. He embodies a lack of moral thinking, a lack of rationality and even logic at times on his part.  We are given a taste of this in the beginning where he throws what can be considered to be a tantrum over the hotel room switch ups. And from there, like domino effect, we notice how he demands his impulses to be fulfilled. 

The reason the show works as a great depiction of the Id impulse through its quite literally rich characters is that having money grants you the pass of having no consequences. The phrase “kill someone and get away with it rich” is a good example to depict this. Giving into the id involves giving into every impulse, need and want without thinking about it logically and rationally, and more importantly, without thinking of the consequences. Bring our Shane back, we see that each of his “tantrums” are simply accepted. The lack of consequences is probably the biggest privilege of the rich, White privileged characters the show adorns. 

SPOILER ALERT!

Like its predecessors, season 3 also begins with a dead body, and  if you have watched the previous seasons you are 99 percent sure that it is a murder. Setting a segway to the theses of the essay, murder is the most animal way of leaning into your instincts, raw and uninhibited. It is the most one could give into the id impulse. While these murders later turn out to be less purposeful and more accidental, we definitely suspected one of them to have a hand in it. 

The depiction of sex is also another flagbearer of the id in this drama. In season two we encounter a scene where Jack (Leo Woodall) is seen having sex with his “uncle” and Camreon’s infidelity being accepted unspoken by Daphne (Megan Fahny), demonstrate the generally socially unacceptable indulgences in sex that they get to engage in (in the former) and get away with (in the latter). In one way or another, it all comes down to their privileges of their gender, race, ethnicity and the focus of this essay–their socio-economic status. Freud regarded sex in a high position in terms of what drives our behavior. Giving into raw, sexual urges without filtering it down or up to give  PG-13 versions of it according to society’s terms is a privilege and we see that privilege being used among the “guest characters”. Another example to depict this idea is Dominic Di Grasso’s (the wealthy father of Albie) relationship with Lucia Greco (the sex worker who Albie likes in season 2). 

In season 1, the manager of the hotel quotes the following lines according to Amos’ article on psychodynamism in the show:

“You have to treat these people like sensitive children…they just need to feel seen…they wanna be the only child…and we are their mean mummies, denying them their [pleasures]”.

This is the most explicit implication of the id impulse in the show because the younger we are the more the id drives our behavior. Hence, this particular dialogue stood out to me as I did research on the show and the topics of this essay. The comparison of the guests, who represent the rich folk, to children is a solid portrayal of how they demand their needs be met.

The White Lotus, at the end of the day is a satire. In congruence with the essay’s themes, we see the consequences of living a no-consequence life in the show, showing the consequences of giving into the id. This can be seen in various instances, for example, Albie finding out about his dad’s relationship with Lucia and Tanya’s death (showing that there is only so much one can get away with). An easter egg in the show are the books Olivia (Sydney Sweeny) and Paula (Brittany O’Grady) read which include Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Paglia’s Sexual Personae. In the latter, Paglia explores the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy. (Apollonian represents the logic, the rational and the structure half whereas the Dionysian represents frenzied, mad and sexually licentious half) very similar to ego and id respectively. While there is no way to say if this was on purpose, I would like to believe that it was a deliberate detail–like everything else in the show–to represent the dichotomy within the show of the middle class and the rich respectively.