Every Book Explained in the White Lotus (S1)
A Raw YouTube Video Script
While I work on other pieces, my little gears have been grinding… mayhaps it would be a fun reading experience for y’all to see the scripts I’ve created for different YouTube videos. This one I’ve actually filmed and published, I’ll attach the link at the very end of this article if you’re interested to view it, rather than read. I have always wondered what YouTube video essayists’ scripts look like, so I thought I’d share here :) Without further ado…
Books in Season 1 of the White Lotus
What every book in the White Lotus says about the character reading it
This video operates under the assumption that you’ve already watched the show, so
this will contain some modicum of spoilers. I’m not giving away everything, but be forewarned
It’s not like this video will be intelligible if you didn’t watch it. It’s just that I won’t be giving you as much background on the characters so much as how their assigned book applies to their actions and qualities throughout the season
Perhaps the most obvious place to start are with the characters whose books are addressed outright on screen. When I first saw the two girls reading Freud and Nietzsche, I was like hmm… this doesn’t seem to fit my preconceived notions of who these two girls are supposed to be, but maybe I’m close-minded. I assume Mike White is subverting expectations! Then there was the scene with Shane and the two girls at the pool addressing the fact that they hired a book stylist to choose books for them that would make them look a certain way, so. I guess I was right.
The fact that the books were not even chosen by the girls but the stylists to make them appear a certain way to the average eye perceiving them fits for Olivia and Paula. They seem to be the type to listen to the Red Scare podcast and the day after interject with at least 3 funny quotes from Dasha while they’re eating with their families. Okay maybe not so much Paula as Olivia, but you get the point. Even though the White Lotus script writes it off as there is no deeper meaning to the books than that, I argue that there is more under the surface than that. Everything put in the show is intentional. Every detail has already been thought out. So let’s pry in places they don’t want us to be looking.
Olivia 1: The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche
(scene with Rachel)
includes Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra
first I’ll quickly address what each of these stories/essays cover, and stick with me through it because we’re gonna wrap it around back to Olivia’s character
opens with a foreword and then a list of 44 postulations and thoughts from the mind of Nietzsche
clear sense of humor and sarcasm
a bit like one note that I have in my notes app that’s just titled “think thought think” where I write down literally everything that has ever come to mind — not all of them are connected
follows with a lot of criticisms of philosophy of the past and how that’s manifested with problems in philosophy of the present and blah blah blah
The Antichrist
Nietzsche has a lot to say about organized religion, how the concept of the Christian god is paradox in itself (not my words, his!)
he thinks the only positive religion that’s resulted from the world is Buddhism due to its thesis of a “struggle with suffering” rather than a “struggle with sin”
there are a lot of interesting thoughts about religion in here… you can go read for yourself and see where you stand with Nietzsche on that front
Nietzsche contra Wagner
where Nietzsche lists a lot of issues he has with the works of one musical composer named Richard Wagner
he opens with a preface and a disclaimer saying that he did not mean to take out so much anger on Wagner and then absolutely demolishes him a few paragraphs later
with words like…
and it just gets more gruesome from there.
why would you assume this was personal? It’s not like Nietzsche fell in love with one woman, then literally went to war (specifically that of the Franco-Prussian kind), and then returned to find out she was married to Wagner… that man whore stole his woman!
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche takes a fictional approach in his writing and speaks through the voice of his prophet of a main character to tell everyone God is dead and that this “superman” or “overman” (depending on translation) has taken over, who is a man that has completely overcome human nature
when this message is spread, ppl go crazy and conflicts arise as would be expected
a lot of this was reduced to hell, but all this to say Nietzsche has a biting sense of humor in his writing and a wavering grasp on morality — since different groups of people think differently on what is good and what is evil, this guy doesn’t really know what to think
Yes, the White Lotus script claims Olivia and Paula’s books have no connection to their characters (since they hired book stylists), but there is definitely still something to the choice
if we were to look at Olivia’s sense of morality throughout the show, we’d see that she doesn’t really seem to have any
sure, she seems to care about how the system of capitalism doesn’t benefit the bottom of the barrel, but since she’s at the top — who really cares? She still tries to get what she wants, including Paula’s love interest, Kai. It’s this wishy washy sense of morality that we see exemplified in Nietzsche’s work that is completely represented in Olivia
we can see this with the time Kai tries to steal jewelry from her mother in the hotel safe (orchestrated by Paula) — the moment that helping underprivileged people hurts HER, she backs out… okay, but give her another second to think… she forgives Paula
the thing is I’d assume she only forgave Paula because she wants to keep Paula in her life, not because she suddenly decided to apply her beliefs in wealth distribution to her own family
That’s evident when Olivia tells Paula what she did to try to help Kai was messed up — Olivia clearly has not got to that “overman” part of herself. She has not surpassed human nature. Nietzsche notes this dichotomy in humans and Olivia serves as its paradigm in the show. So I’d say her book is fitting.
It’s also worthy to note that while Nietzsche and Wagner were both in love with the same woman, so were Paula and Olivia
well, Olivia wasn’t necessarily in love with Kai like Paula might have been but she sure tried to steal… like… all of Paula’s prospects. There’s something there, and I think it might be a little nudge to what happens later in the season!
Maybe this is handwaving, but isn’t all of literary analysis ever? So yeah suck it
Paula 1: The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
it was at this point in the video that I was getting tired of reading psychologists and philosophers so I stopped midway in Freud’s interpretation of dreams — whatever, think I’m terrible, I don’t care!
If anyone’s heard of the man, more recently in pop culture he’s been hailed as the person that wanted to fuck his mother — that’s a gross reduction of his work, but who cares about Freud, I mean it was probably true
nonetheless, he was the founder of psychoanalysis and we can thank him for getting the train running, if nothing else at all
in this book, Freud introduces the idea of analyzing the content of dreams, saying that they all serve as “wish fulfillments” of the dreamer, even those that are nightmarish (supposedly their meanings need more analysis)
he also suggests people sometimes have some kinda masochistic desire to be stressed and that manifests in dreams
we also get a little insight into the whole Oedipus complex thing
obviously the man got a lot of things wrong, so please do not apply all this information to your own dreams — use your own discretion. maybe journal a little bit and do some introspection, i heard it’s supposed to be healing
but essentially, a dream is meant to be a wish fulfillment. that’s what we’ll take from here for our intents and purposes
I was sitting there for quite a while trying to think to myself how the Interpretation of Dreams could be applied to Paula, because I know she definitely does not have any sexual inclination towards her father, as far as we know, so I can’t take the easy way out here
Then what I realized (with a little bit of help from my boyfriend) was that Paula wasn’t like everybody else there… as a matter of fact, Paula was the only person in the whole cast of characters that had not been able to use her own money to go on the trip with everyone else
Paula is well off, enough to attend the same school as Olivia, but in comparison with the Mossbaucher’s, she’s nowhere near that level. I think it’s also important to recognize that she is mixed race, which only furthers the divide between her and the rest of the party she joined the trip with
For Paula, the whole trip is a dream — a wish fulfillment if you will
this is likely one of the only times Paula would be able to have such an expensive experience, away from her family and the real world, simply due to her proximity to the Mossbauchers, and damn it if she’s going to spend it how she wants to
she gets to vacation at a beautiful place, she gets to have a fling with an island boy, and she’d spend the most of it in a dreamy drug-induced haze if that’s what she wished
Do you see what I mean about this environment far away from the real world where you get to live out all your fantasies and nothing really seems real? You come back and you’re like aw it’s over?
she tries to keep the fling all in her own little bubble, in her own little world, much like a dream — if anyone else were to impede on it (Olivia trying to steal her man perhaps…), it’d be almost like she’s waking up, back in the real world
that pattern from behavior from her friend is pretty usual anyway, so she tries to keep the dream in her own headspace
and it’s not that much of a coincidence that she and Kai only meet at night while she should probably be sleeping, instead she’s dreaming with her eyes wide open… yeah that’s right! That’s where I was going with this!
obviously, all dreams have to end at some point, and since Paula wasn’t careful enough with keeping Kai to herself and also making sure that Kai wouldn’t be caught in his Mossbaucher jewelry heist, it ended a bit prematurely than it could have
she exposed her wishes to the real world (the Mossbauchers) and that backfired
so kids, take this as advice and keep your dreams to yourself. move in silence
Rachel: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
The moment I knew I wanted to make this video was when I noted that Rachel was reading My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante — at the time, I was watching it with my mom and told her, “Oh she would SO read that book” … and then I began thinking about the rest of the characters
Book 1 in the Neopolitan novels is My Brilliant Friend
Currently 79 years old, Elena Ferrante is one of the most well respected authors of our time, many postulating that her works are going to become the classics of the era, which is not too far off considering its influence today, all the screen and stage adaptations, and all that
Rachel calls herself a writer — her work is journalistic, of course, but she desires to write something spectacular, other than the Buzzfeed style articles that she’s normally assigned to, so I’m not surprised that she’d reach for an author with masterful technique
One common thread connecting all of her work are these multidimensional female characters, and I feel that as Rachel reads from these perspectives, she may become frustrated that her new role as wife has recently been making her feel like she’s becoming flat, but that’s just some surface level thoughts that we can dive into deeper when we consider the themes of My Brilliant Friend
Elena v. Lila
this book follows two girls that have been friends since childhood — they both love and resent each other at the same time, one of their qualities that Ferrante would probably claim is the hallmark of female friendship
Because of her families’ higher social standing, Elena gets more opportunities — whether that be getting into the right school, being able to go into writing, etc. even though she believes that Lila probably had a more capable mind than she
Lila was not able to go to school since her family pulled her in to help with their business
a great quote from Elena: “Money gave even more force to the impression that what I lacked she had, and vice versa, in a continuous game of exchanges and reversals that, now happily, now painfully, made us indispensable to each other.”
and I just have to say. Does that not EXACTLY describe Rachel? Okay, so I have two interpretations of this. First, let’s think about this through her perspective
On the trip, Rachel is struggling with the idea of continuing to advance herself career wise even though her new husband Shane has made it clear that he is happy to provide for all her financial needs
in his eyes, a career for Rachel is unnecessary since he already has all the money
in Rachel’s eyes, she wants to be someone who not only would be able to provide for her own self if necessary, but more importantly, have something to her — more than just her appearance or ability to provide sex in a marriage
Unfortunately, due to her new social standing and the hint at her poor writing and research abilities (seen in the scene between her and Mrs. Mossbaucher), all she has is money — not talent, not intelligence, not depth. Money. In this case, Rachel is Elena
if we think back to the quote in My Brilliant Friend, we see Elena thinks that her friend Lila is in possession of intellectual wealth, while she herself is in possession of material wealth. She wishes she had that, just like Rachel does. Perhaps Rachel’s new money is inhibiting her from greatness.
My second interpretation deals with the dichotomy between Shane and Rachel
In this case, Shane is Elena, and Rachel is Lila
in comparison to Rachel, I’d say Shane is pretty lacking in the areas of writing, but boy does he have the money. At least Rachel has some kind of passion there, which is enough to speak for itself
Shane has not had to work hard once in his life — whenever he comes to an issue, one of his first resorts is to call his mommy. Whereas Rachel has had to learn the ropes for herself and work to get money, much like Lila working for her family
Now, Rachel is dealing with this sort of cognitive dissonance grappling with the fact that she no longer needs to work in order to live a comfortable life, it’s all handed to her — if Lila were thrown into a similar position, I’m sure it would be a bit jarring. So that’s what I have there.
It comes down to personal preference which take you’d like to believe: is Rachel Elena or is she Lila? — or maybe there’s something completely different you see from the book that I don’t! I feel like there could be a million different ways this book could be applied to her character, but these two are my favorites.
Shane: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Not very surprised that Cornell business major frat boy who likely got accepted because his parents endowed a library in their name thought Blink by Malcolm Gladwell would be a nice poolside read, and that should be enough to tell you about this book, okay I’m done! Let’s go to the next one
Malcolm Gladwell is best known for his works colliding psychology with social sciences — often times touching on aspects of the business world which is why so many business boys love him so much
Talking to Strangers is one of the newer ones, and you’ve probably seen that on shelves if you’ve stepped in a Barnes & Noble any time in the past couple years
his books are very accessible, you know it’s fun to read about how people behave and what kind of rippling effects those behaviors have on society or whatever
my boyfriend read this one luckily so I had a minimal amount of thinking to do for this one
The full title of the book Blink is Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking — that’s pretty Shane, don’t you think?
center focus of Blink: gut feeling, snap judgements we make as humans due to our rapid cognition
in the very beginning of the book, we get a little insight into how that applies to the world of art
Some dealer had presented a very rare ancient Greek statue to be given to the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, but its quality was suspiciously intact, which made those at the museum assume it wasn’t really authentic
upon checking with the original dealer, he presented them the proper forms and it seemed it was real. They also discovered there was a layer of calcite surrounding the statue, another sign pointing towards its authenticity
However, multiple art historians were brought in to insert their opinion on the matter — and upon viewing it for no longer than a couple seconds, most all of them reported that it was fake. They couldn’t say why. They said, “it just is.”
okay well? They have all this other evidence supporting otherwise after what turned into years of analysis. What does it matter?
Turns out the documents were forged. Turns out the piece was a hodge-podge of a bunch of other Greek statues. Turns out you can create a layer of calcite within just a couple of years. Those experts have something to them.
thin-slicing is the term that Gladwell coins for being able to gauge a fact about something in a really quick moment without having to think too deeply about it — these conclusions kinda come from our subconscious
I read another book called Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman — it seems like this fast thinking is associated with our adaptive unconscious, which was definitely developed through evolution as our ability to make quick decisions helped us survive throughout the centuries
The book Blink also addresses how poorly people understand their own feelings and desires
best represented through polls: people will make a decision, but upon being asked why, it’s very difficult for them to be able to do so
Thin-slicing
Shane and Rachel got into a whirlwind of a romance (that’s our thin slice), going out together, having fun, he proposes, there are all these wedding plans, and then they get hitched. Now they’re on their honeymoon, the first time they can sit down and realize “I’m going to be spending the rest of my life with this person.”
as Rachel thinks more and more about the idea of staying in this marriage, she feels restricted — Rachel’s a bit like those historians that spent years analyzing this statue, focusing on the wrong things to use as evidence for her point and coming to the wrong conclusion every time
Shane doesn’t give it much thought at all — in a blink, he thinks, “yeah this is the one. Beautiful woman who can stick my by side.” Not once does he question it. He’s like the expert.
This is not to say that Shane is “right” about thinking their marriage will last long. I’m just saying that we all make rapid judgements, and that varies from person to person — thinking about it further tends to make that rapid decision crumble to the ground
What we can examine more deeply in terms of Blink and Shane is how poorly people understand their own feelings and desires
Just like a lot of people are not able to describe the rapid judgements that they make, Shane is not self-aware enough to tell Rachel why he chose to marry her — sure he says that he loves Rachel and maybe his brain is convincing him that that’s what he wants to believe, but what is special about her apart from any other woman that would also agree to marry him within the span of just a few months?
And if he truly loved her and cared about her, he would put her first. But perhaps Rachel is not all that he wants. He likes the role that she’s filling as a wife, but would he have chosen her in a room full of women knowing that they would also play the part?
Scene between Shane & girls at the pool — I don’t think he would have done that if he knew the reason behind his feelings and desires.
Pineapple suite is representative of that
they come on this vacation and get the wrong suite, he says his honeymoon is going to be all messed up, but Rachel insists that it is okay if they just choose to look on the bright side — really, it’s not his honeymoon that’s at stake. He says that when speaking to Armond, to his mother, to the travel agent, but if Rachel’s fine with the room, the honeymoon will be fine as well
really, what he wants is to maintain that sense of control. Here’s another example of how poor Shane explains his reasoning behind these snap judgements
Olivia 2: Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia
(scene with Shane)
In this book, Paglia looks at art throughout the centuries — from Michelangelo’s the David to the music of Madonna — under a sexual lens to prove her thesis, which essentially that sex is a natural part of human nature, and if repressed, what results is violence
The book’s divided into two parts
first: “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”
second: “The Dionysian world view”
it is in this part that paglia notes the divide between an irrational and spontaneous world view defined by the greek god Dionysus (who happens to be the god of wine and pleasure) vs. that of order and restraint defined by Apollo (most well associated with the Sun)
and she takes the stance that the western world tends to follow this Appolonian view — restrained
That only scratches the surface of what she covers, but it will be what I am focusing on for our intents and purposes
A lot of people disagree with Paglia’s takes in this, but nonetheless, her thoughts force you to sit for a minute and think about your own opinion on the matter
In the sense of Olivia, I’d like to use this quote as a jumping off point: “Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right.”
I’d like to tie this sense of sexuality devoid of moral regulations to Olivia’s reoccurring pattern of behavior of going after the men that Paula is interested in
Of course, there is something definitely wrong in her doing so, but after seeing her with our own eyes try to go after Kai on screen, it seems that she doesn’t think that she’s doing much wrong
Perhaps, a lot of Paglia’s perspective on how the western world is restraining her from expressing her sexuality aligns with how Olivia thinks — maybe Olivia even gets reinforcement from reading literature making these arguments, thinking that she is not in the wrong for desiring and pursuing Paula’s prospects and Paula is the one with the closed mind.
I feel like if we looked a bit deeper into this book, we could find a world of other perspectives and how they apply to Olivia, but for what we have based off this season, I wouldn’t say that it’s too far off
Paula 2: The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Fanon examines the negative effects of colonialism, urging for the world to question the possibility of wealth redistribution and also whether or not violence is a necessity in bringing about change — which he makes clear cannot be defined by either reform or improvement, but rather, a complete uprooting of our current system and establishment of a new one
Now this is just handed to us on a plate. Actually I might qualify it more as a slap in the face. Even if you’re a complete imbecile, if you watched season 1 of White Lotus, you’d recognize the whole colonialism plotline. As a White Lotus guest, Paula was at the center of it all, so I find it very fitting that she’s deciding to read more on the topic after seeing some real world applications — or rather, having sex with those real world applications, what have you. Sorry, that was a low blow for a joke, his name is Kai.
after meeting with Kai every night during her stay at the White Lotus, Paula learns more and more about how the hotel had come to the land and claimed it as their own, forcing the people living there to decide: did they want to take jobs to support themselves or remain distant from the company?
Kai was one of those people whose decision to work for the hotel caused strain between him and his family. It’s difficult for the oppressed to follow through with a decision that is completely their own because they probably don’t have the ability to. Paula, however, finds herself in the seat of privilege, and its likely that her digestion of books like this prompted her to help Kai attempt to steal the Mossbaucher’s jewelry
Paula 3: Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
We get a deep dive into gender and sexuality in this one — specifically how society currently views gender as a binary, either male or female
the author Judith Butler also deconstructs our perception of gender, claiming it is something that people do, rather than something people are, but what I’m going to be focusing on is the idea of a binary
I was watching some of the insider videos of the behind the scenes of each episode of the White Lotus, and Olivia’s actor Sydney Sweeney was explaining how Paula feels as though she’s pulled between two binaries
that of the rich, lavish life of the Mossbaucher’s
and that of the humble backgrounds of Kai
She then goes on to say that Paula keeps going back to spend time with Kai because she feels more comfortable with him, and as someone who lies kind of in the middle between each of these parties’ social standing — it’d make sense that she’d feel more comfortable with someone who is below her (kinda like how Olivia enjoys keeping Paula around, maybe for similar reasons)
so we can make the deduction that instead of gender, the binary that is more fully applied to Paula in the show is that of upper and lower class
Olivia Final: Écrits by Jacques Lacan
(airport scene)
collection of essays and writings from Lacan that centers around the idea of a “subject” in each person that is different than the person themself — this “subject” is what drives unconscious desires that are not fully understood by the individual
this sounds very similar to what we looked at with Shane’s book Blink — this concept saying we do not understand ourselves
and I’m going to just address this particular theory with this book. I’m sorry. I have to. Many of us White Lotus watchers have postulated that Olivia is gay, specifically for Paula
some supporting evidence could be Olivia’s defensiveness for her grandfather when her dad found out that he died from AIDS (therefore was gay)
or Olivia’s brother little Quinn making a remark about “lesbian noises”
but more importantly the nature of her relationship with Paula — the two are very close
Where I’m going to work in Olivia’s choice of book, Écrits, into this is that Olivia continues to sabotage all of Paula’s relationships, but does she understand why?
Paula claims this happens because she wants everything that Paula has
but would it be too far off to say that Olivia just wants Paula all to herself?
there is probably an element of herself that Olivia does not quite understand, and maybe her advocacy for LGBT individuals and obsession with Paula is derived from a feeling she’s not even able to identify
even if you don’t quite agree with this in particular, I still think it’s enough to say that Olivia doesn’t know why she continues to ruin things for Paula. There was a scene midway in the season where she tells her friend that she’s no longer going to be stealing her boyfriends, and then she flirts with Kai shortly after ? Why??? She’s so morally gray because she’s unable to explain her unconscious desires, pointing back to our whole Nietzsche argument!
Paula Final: Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire
Much like Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Paula is reading another book discussing the effects of colonialism — but what sets this one apart from the last is that it examines those effects on both the colonized and the colonizer
“[C]olonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.”
Moral relativism… again with the Nietzsche… and by extension… Olivia? Perhaps the Mossbauchers as a whole?
I won’t go into depth here because the topic of colonialism was pretty similar with Wretched of the Earth in terms of how it applies to Paula, especially with her relationship to Kai! I’m not surprised that she’s still interested in the topic, since she seems like the only one in the entire cast of guests that was actually bothered by the idea of the native islanders having to work for the hotel and perform as entertainment — she seems like the type to act on these beliefs, much unlike Olivia who will hold them but then ultimately do minimal to help
and of course, that is largely juxtaposed with the parents of the Mossbaucher family, who challenge Olivia and Paula with the idea of giving up their own state of comfort to help those who have less with them — if nothing else, at least these “colonizers” are aware of their unwillingness to change, but Olivia pretends not to be one of them, even though really… she is
If you read this whole thing, good god props to you. Substack told me this was too long to email. If you’d like to watch the video instead, the link is here: