Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season 3, Episode 1 of The White Lotus
The White Lotus kicked off its highly anticipated third season over the weekend, and fans have already found plenty to latch onto: the toxic friendship between Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb and Michelle Monaghan’s characters; the surprise return of Greg, Tanya’s husband who put out a hit on her last season; Parker Posey’s Southern accent. But there’s one big question that seems to be dominating the conversation online: are those brothers gonna bang or what?
For those unfamiliar with the scene in question, it involves Patrick Schwarzenegger’s character Saxon Ratliff — this season’s rich, douchey bro — and his younger brother Lochlan (played by Sam Nivola) lounging shirtless in their shared hotel room while Saxon points out that their sister is “hot,” asks his brother what kind of porn he likes and then wonders out loud how he’ll be able to masturbate with him in the room. Eventually, he decides he’ll “just go to the bathroom” to jerk off, then struts over there fully nude, leaves the door open and starts queuing up some porn on an iPad while Lochlan stares at him from across the room.
It wouldn’t be The White Lotus without some frontal male nudity, but this scene left a lasting impression on fans who quickly took to social media to weigh in on whether the popular HBO series is actually going to have an incest storyline.
But is that really what’s going on here, or is it more admiration and fascination that Lochlan’s feeling for his older brother, rather than lust? Saxon’s definitely giving off sexual-predator energy; besides calling his sister “hot” and speculating about whether she’s still a virgin, he offers to share a room with his brother because, as he puts it, brothers and sisters shouldn’t sleep together after they’ve got “full-grown genitalia.” After trying and failing to pick up Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) at the pool, he rolls over to face his brother and announces how horny he is, grabbing his crotch for emphasis. But is he actually trying to hook up with his brother, or is he just performing toxic masculinity in some sort of effort to show him the ropes and help him “become a man”?
White Lotus creator Mike White loves to misdirect the audience, and he’s never been one to go with the obvious, so it seems unlikely these two will get it on. Schwarzenegger, for his part, seems to be hinting at the more chaste option: “One of the things we worked on as a group, as a family, was to try to create that dynamic: the closeness, but the oddness, the weirdness [that] we thought was normal, the older brother to younger brother relationship,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s just that Saxon has this false perception and idea of what he thinks makes a man and who he thinks he is, and he’s trying to groom his younger brother to become that.”
See? We’re all just a bunch of perverts whose minds immediately went to incest. But it sure does seem like something weird is going to happen with the Ratliff siblings. Schwarzenegger has teased that later episodes of the series will be especially salacious. “There are some uncomfortable conversations between us in the bed that are a little weird to show in front of your family… [during] episodes five and six, there will be some times that I take some bathroom breaks from [my] family,” he said.
If this particular storyline does come to pass, it wouldn’t be the first incest storyline on HBO, of course. But Game of Thrones had the advantage of being set in a fictional world and a different time. Take away the dragons and it becomes a lot more controversial. Ryan Murphy recently drew a lot of ire for having the Menendez brothers kiss and shower together in his Netflix series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. Incest onscreen is, by and large, seen as a cheap way to shock — andThe White Lotus has never been cheap.
More Like This
This article was featured in the InsideHook newsletter. Sign up now.
