The strange brotherly dynamics at the heart of this season’s The White Lotus can be read as a timely metaphor for the rot at the core of power, privilege and performative masculinity. But as other films such as Louis Malle’s 1971 The Murmur of the Heart, show, when the last taboo is used on screen, it is rarely straightforward.
Violence, murder and infidelity are all fair game when you book for a stay at the White Lotus. But with Season 3, showrunner Mike White committed the ultimate transgression to screen-incest. The old Oscar Wilde adage, “everything is about sex, except sex which is about power” has never been more true than in the problem of incest. The Ratliff family, headed by Southern gentleman patriarch Tim (Jason Isaacs) and benzo-addled Victoria (a highly memable Parker Posey), are wealthy one percenters from South Carolina, staying at the White Lotus Thailand so Piper can seemingly work on her Religious Studies thesis.
Saxon (played by Patrick Schwarznegger) is the type of Alpha-bro who describes things as “clutch” and requests a blender for his bro-smoothies. He’s clean in that doge-coin, embezzlement, no pain no gain kind of way. His uniform is boat shoes and a perfectly combed haircut and his smile is blinding white (the Kennedy in Schwarznegger shines through). He probably listens to the Joe Rogan podcast and has an underlined copy of Jordan Peterson’s The Rules in his suitcase. We all know this guy, and we all know that however handsome he may be, he’s a douche.
His little brother Lochlan (Sam Nivola), is not cut from the same frat-house mould of his big brother: he’s timid and twinky, and seems more at ease with their sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook ) than with Saxon, although there’s the suggestion that he’s also just bad at boundaries and wants to please everyone. The difference between the two brothers is reflected in their body language: Saxon walks around, exaggerated chest puffed out; Lochlan’s limbs are like origami folding in on themselves; a posture corrector at the spa even tells him the way he sits is “feminine”.
All season long, a tension between the brothers builds, making audiences squirm. There’s Saxon’s constant use of sexual innuendo around/directed at his family. Already, in episode one, he tells Lochy “long plane rides make me so fucking horny”; by episode two we glimpse Lochlan staring at his bare backside when he goes to jerk off to porn in their shared bathroom. Saxon calls their sister “hot” while wondering if she’s getting laid. It’s episode 6 and 7 where the tension finally breaks, during an MDMA-soaked night of debauchery on Chloe and Greg’s yacht after the Full Moon Party. First, the brothers make out while in a stupified state during a game of Spin the Bottle.
Then, through flashback from the morning after, we see young Lochy engaged in hot and heavy fucking with Chloe while also… getting his brother off at the same time. It’s disturbing. it’s a scene you definitely should not watch with your mum, as I did. Situated within Saxon’s subjectivity, I, too, felt queasy: even the implication or mere suggestion of hooking up with my own brother (hi, Sean!) would send me into a spiral. “Most people find the thought of a sexual encounter with a same-sex sibling aversive because we tend to separate out different kinds of relationships. Familial relationships are a very different kind of relationship from romantic or sexual relationships and tend to have specific boundaries regarding physical touch”, Suzannah Weiss, resident sexologist for Fleshy and author of Subjectified: Becoming a Sexual Subject, tells me. And although it’s a topic sure to get people talking—which it did—I don’t think it’s quite so clear cut. Saxon was not sexually attracted to his siblings—he was trying to teach his younger, impressionable brother about (toxic) masculinity, in the only way he knows how. He’s All Talk, a handsome jock-incel type.
In The White Lotus, we see the very real effect of such an act on a family—how it shifts the power dynamic between brothers, the nausea it induces in Saxon, how it severs their closeness, with an uncomfortable conversation between the two ending with Saxon telling Lochlan he does not need to worship him… like that.
It’s not the first time incest has been portrayed within the TV landscape (here’s looking at you, Game of Thrones), and the history of film and literature is littered with inappropriate mother-son relationships (La Luna, Ma Mère), father-daughter (Chinatown, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me) and sibling relationships (The Dreamers, Les Enfants Terribles, Enter the Void—even films like Clueless and The Royal Tenenbaums). The reality is that the incest trope stretches back even further. The Bible has Lot and his daughters, and Greek Mythology sees such twisted dynamics at the heart of Agamemnon and Oedipus Rex.
In Louis Malle’s 1971 film Murmur of the Heart, an incestuous relationship between mother and her 15 year-old son is played in as lighthearted a way as incest can be. Michael Sgracow writes on Criterion’s website, that “they make love in the least incestuous incest scene imaginable. There’s no Bertolucci-like portentousness. Malle doesn’t treat it as a taboo—he ties it too closely to the needs and dreams of a drunken, amorous woman who’s still dizzy from her breakup with her lover, and of a drunken, amorous teenager who has grown to understand the emotional needs behind her adultery. Rather than set off damaging psychic depth charges, the experience gives Laurent an unexpected shot of virility.” Malle’s vision is almost mythical in its fairytale ease: sex is transaction, affection, nothing that can traumatize or complicate.
In The White Lotus, we see the very real effect of such an act on a family—how it shifts the power dynamic between brothers, the nausea it induces in Saxon, how it severs their closeness, with an uncomfortable conversation between the two ending with Saxon telling Lochlan he does not need to worship him… like that. Both clearly feel traumatised, and it’s not a simple case of victim-perpetrator. “Sex between siblings can lead to confusion and disorientation regarding the nature of the relationship. Someone may feel taken advantage of even if it is hard to pinpoint who has taken advantage of who”, says Weiss. She implies that Lochlan, too, is a victim here—brought in by his older brother into a debauched situation that he may not have been mature enough for.
The Murmur of the Heart (1971), dir. Louis Malle
Is incest, here, too, like in Malle’s film a “trapdoor that swings up to reveal the turbulence beneath a cozy way of life”? I would say so. The Ratliff’s, like Malle’s Chevalier family, are comfortably bourgeois, never suffering for anything or having a reason to dig deep and excavate their souls. Lovable Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood, a knock out), tells Saxon early on that he is “soulless”. But by the end of the film, he’s been pushed to turn inward, dig deep. By the finale he isn’t without a meditation book lent to him by Chloe. On the boat home, he’s reading Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are. His character, one of the most despised from the beginning, has gone through the most obvious transformation, something Mike White said was “rare for a White Lotus character”.
In our hardened online culture, where extreme pornography would have shocked a previous generation, incest is a shortcut to shock, but also the ultimate symbolic act: whether it’s representing the breakdown of society, like in 1968 Paris (The Dreamers), or post-war bourgeois nuclear family dynamics (Murmur of the Heart), or the effects of the toxic manosphere, like in The White Lotus. Here, incest isn’t just provocation for provocation’s sake—it’s a metaphor for the rot at the core of power, privilege, and performative masculinity. It shows a world where the only way to feel anything is to cross a line you didn’t even know existed. For Saxon and Lochlan, that line isn’t just physical—it’s moral, emotional, familial. And once crossed, there’s no way back to the easy comfort of gym smoothies and yoga class. If anything, The White Lotus shows us that even the most abhorrent transgressions can become teaching moments—but only if they’re handled with something akin to honesty. In a world numbed by spectacle, incest might be the last taboo, with the power to make us actually dig deeper.
