EPISODE 3: A Bookwatch REVIEW
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The White Lotus Recap: Sex Talks
>>It’s fascinating to see how quickly Mark bends the new information about his dad into a self-serving narrative. He believed he was the “flawed child of an icon”; now, he’s using his dad’s secrets to excuse his shortcomings.
>>Nicole explains to her daughter over family dinner that, as you get older, you come to value your dignity more than sex — a revealing set of counterpoints. Mark doesn’t hear because he’s still at the bar, accidentally propositioning Armond, who has enjoyed 400–500 pau hana drinks.
>>Belinda is pathologically empathic, and Tanya’s distress seems to blossom when she has witnesses.
>>it’s time for another round of bookwatch. Paula has progressed from Freud to Frantz Fanon’s book on colonialism — a topic she brought up at dinner in last week’s ep and which is always germane when holidaying in the stolen Kingdom of Hawai’i. Olivia has traded Neitzsche for his disciple Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, an ambiguously anti-feminist text that is sure to rankle her even more than her mother does.
>>What point is Mike White making with their vacation syllabus? That a liberal arts education is largely performative? That it breeds cynicism? Or is Shane, who alleges they’re not reading at all, kind of right — intellectual history is simply the new black?
>>Shane splashing the young women with pool water while at the same time negging them is my personal watch-through-your-fingers, cringe-of-the-week moment. Rachel, horrified and embarrassed and maybe even jealous, has to flee the scene. For her part, Rachel is finally cracking open Elena Ferrante, which is fitting.
>>My Brilliant Friend is the exact novel you bring on vacation and can’t finish when you realize it’s darker than you thought it would be. As previously mentioned, Shane, who really doesn’t need encouragement to trust his own gut instincts, is still flipping through Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.
>>The first three episodes of the series collectively established and exposed these flawed castaways and the chaos they cause just by being themselves; now it’s time for things to get really out of control.