Letter #214: Paint Me Like One of Your Asian Girls

St. Augustine on White Lotus

Dad,

I really enjoyed our livestream last week, in which we scanned the American cultural landscape for signs of life. We were hopeful that we could detect a faint pulse, in part because the stifling woke prohibition on acknowledging basic reality seems to be lifting.

One early indicator of that change was Mike White’s glossy comedy of 21^st-century manners, White Lotus. Every season follows a different gang of loopy socialites to a lavish resort where they slowly expose themselves as the empty, conniving savages they are. As the disgraced industrial tycoon Mr. Jorkin tells his business partners after he’s been caught fleecing them in the Alastair Sim adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, “we’re all cutthroats under this fancy linen.” That’s what White Lotus is about.

It’s not a “conservative” show by any means—just an honest one about the shallowness and hypocrisy of high society, which today is characterized by pretensions to social justice and a grandiose array of ever-shifting allegiances to ever-more obscure causes. Underneath this courtly pageantry, rich and poor alike usually turn out to be venal and disreputable.

White Lotus Season 3 has fallen off a little, but it does have one great scene that everyone’s talking about. A seedy businessman named Rick (Walton Goggins) meets up with a criminal associate named Frank (Sam Rockwell). Frank explains, to Rick’s mounting horror, how he plunged so deep into Bangkok’s underground sex scene that eventually he turned his own lust for the female form back on himself. “I got in my head what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls.”

The edgy term for this is “autogynephilia,” which has been a forbidden topic in Hollywood because it implies that at least some transgender desire might be less an identity category than a sex fetish. That’s obviously true, or it wouldn’t be a forbidden topic in Hollywood.

But what interested me more about the scene was what it said about all desire—about how even the natural desire of a man for a woman twists into something deranged without exterior guide rails. A man can so immerse himself in aimless hungers that he craves more and more than he can possibly have, until he turns all the way inward and wants to be and have and devour himself all at once.

This is what’s referred to as being incurvatus in se, curved in upon yourself—an Augustinian definition of sin. Mike White might not put it that way, but he’s got enough artistic vision to see it happening in the dark alleys of our wayward culture.

Our discussion this month has been all about Lent, and where to point your desires—how to strip away the ones that curve back in upon themselves, like diseased branches, and leave that bright arrow of longing that points out beyond yourself. Everyone with eyes can see the difference, and everyone with eyes can see how sick we all are with directionless longing. The question is—are we ready to love something other than ourselves?

Love,
Spencer