By Sam Stella
For all of its twists and turns, the American television drama, The White Lotus, has never yet taken off into the…how should we phrase it? Magical? Fantastical? Transcendent? Mystical? Its characters and stories, though divided in so many (often painfully) familiar ways are united in being circumscribed by the immanent frame. Nonetheless, in the world of the show, miracles abound. The American philosopher Stanley Cavell invites us to see miracles in the extraordinary moments of ordinary life, especially those moments in which we are unexpectedly transformed. For Cavell, the supreme example of hypothetical miracle comes in a moment in Henrik Ibsen’s The Doll’s House. Norah declares to her husband, Torvald, that the only way that their marriage could continue would be for a “miracle of miracles” to happen; they would have to become totally different people. What is most miraculous is to become something better than what one was.
Besides The Doll’s House, Cavell draws his examples of “miracle(s) of change” from Hollywood comedies of the Golden Age, specifically from those he calls “comedies of remarriage.” Characteristically, these Golden Age films feature a divorcing couple who go on a journey that results in the discovery that they and their marriage have been transformed such that their union is made unexpectedly real. This is a miracle. Central to these films is the idea that marriage is based upon a friendship and that the relationships in them mirror the political relationships of Americans to one another.
These same themes—friendship, transformation, remarriage, and analogies to civic life—run through Mike White’s blockbuster television series The White Lotus. In this spirit, Laurie’s monologue to her friends in the finale of the third season belongs to the genre of miracle testimony. Furthermore, reading it this way shows the translation of the miraculous into the distinctive register of American post-secularity. That is, it shows how miracles and the miraculous yet bless the “religiously unaffiliated.”
Laurie, played by Carrie Coon, is hungover. This is the final evening of a luxurious and mindful Thailand getaway with her childhood best friends that has devolved from optimism into a smoldering reexamination of their old aggressions and wounds. Beautiful Jaclyn has become a TV star. The things she wants offer themselves to her, and what she wants is exactly what is just out of reach of her closest friends. Take, for example, Valentin, one of the resort’s “health mentors” with whom Jaclyn initially tantalizes the divorcée Laurie until claiming him for herself in the dead of night. Kate’s life is easy too. She does not work, her husband is rich, her children are thriving, and she is satisfied with life. But this comfort has had costs. Kate’s revelation that she voted for Trump shocks her friends, and Laurie sees it as a sign of deeper moral compromise. Laurie’s life is much different than her friends’: her daughter, we learn, is difficult, her marriage has failed, her career has not developed as she’s hoped, and her body ages unimpeded by plastic surgery. Jaclyn and Kate each have done and said things to alert Laurie of their awareness of her shortcomings. Laurie remembers that things between them have always been this way, and it hurts.
So badly, in fact, that we are prepared to believe that Laurie has come to hate the others. She spent the night before in a montage of rebellion, drinking with Valentin at a Muy Thai boxing match and going home with one of Valentin’s friends. Hours prior, Laurie and her friends were having it out, their resentments having had enough time to finally boil over. Kate and Jaclyn pointedly accuse Laurie of resenting others out of the unhappiness she has brought on herself. Laurie calls Jaclyn vain and selfish and tells Kate that her idyllic life is a gross deception. Then, she storms off.
The next day, Laurie barely speaks to Jaclyn or Kate, except for when Jaclyn tells the half-asleep Laurie that she wishes for them to be friends. An entire day past, they sit together for a final dinner and Jaclyn and Kate take turns summarizing the trip. Each describes the rejuvenation and joy they’ve felt in this paradise. Laurie’s open mouth and sharp looks suggest disbelief at what she’s hearing. Have they forgotten how they’ve hurt each other? Did they never notice? Then it is her turn to speak. After starkly announcing that the week has made her profoundly sad, she recounts her religious history. “I have no belief system. Well, I mean, I’ve had a lot of them. I mean, work was my religion forever, but I definitely lost my belief there. And then I tried love and that was just a painful religion, just made everything worse. And then even for me, just like being a mother, that didn’t save me either.” We and her friends are, for the moment, unsure of where this is headed.
This is not just “religion” as a metaphor for whatever it is in life to which one is most devoted. That is, Laurie is not again simply recounting the ways that life has disappointed her. On the one hand, this religion-talk is out of place and introduces an uncomfortable tension. But on the other hand, this season of The White Lotus has primed us to think about what religion might be. The resort’s proximity to a Buddhist temple is a major plot point for another story arc, the resort employs an army of meditation guides, and at least one character refers to astrology in making sense of her experiences. Most notably for these three women though, Laurie and Jaclyn are surprised and a little disappointed to learn that Kate has become “religious,” which in this case means Christian. But none of these seem initially to be related to what Laurie wants to talk about.
To see what Laurie means by “religion” I suggest looking at its grammar within her speech. Laurie tells her friends (and us) what religion means by what it has failed to do or be to her. It was to be a “belief system” and one which would be as faithful to her as she was to it. Laurie trusted careerism in a wager that her professional life would prove worthy of her faith. It has not, and it seems that the failure goes beyond the fact that her career has stalled, but how? As a partial answer, Laurie tells us that love has failed as a religion too because it was “painful,” and “made everything worse.” Religion, then, was to be a belief system that could bring ease to her life. Finally, we learn that religion has no less than existential stakes. Laurie tells us that “just like being a mother” has failed to “save” her. Again though, from what has Laurie needed to be saved?
The beginning of her speech gives a clue. The reason she has been sad all week is that time with her friends has made her feel as if she had to justify her “life and choices.” Their successes show the depth of her failures. Their knowledge of her strips her of comforting self-delusions. Laurie says, “when I’m with you guys, it’s just so like transparent what my choices were and my mistakes.” The existential threat Laurie feels is that she has not been able to give good reasons for choosing the things which have caused her pain, for not having responded aptly to the world, for her failures as she sees them reflected in the lives of her friends—in other words, for herself. The religion she has been looking for is something which would make her intelligible to herself and those to whom she is most intimately revealed. Religion, as she means it, would allow her to say this is why I have done what I have.
As promised, Laurie has experienced a miracle and a conversion. Her testimony begins in earnest: “But I had this epiphany today: I don’t need religion or God to give my life meaning, because time gives it meaning.” In this, Laurie is like many others: well-educated and well-off city-dwelling Americans under 50 who describe themselves as “nothing in particular” in terms of religion. What this actually means is not that Laurie has given up trying to ground herself in something that would make her intelligible to herself (this “something” being what she has meant by “religion”), but that she has, to her astonishment, discovered that reason springs from ordinary life with her friends. What religion, even in unconventional guises, was meant to give is no longer needed. She concludes: “We started this life together. I mean, we’re going through it apart, but we’re still together. And I look at you guys and it feels meaningful and I can’t explain it, but when we’re just sitting around the pool talking about whatever inane shit, it still feels very fucking deep.”
Miracles are signs that indicate extraordinary agency by being strange effects. Translated into one register of American no-religion, the miracle of Laurie’s epiphany and conversion points to, to quote Cavell, “the extraordinariness of the ordinary.” Though immanent, even inane, this non-religion still bumps against the ineffable. Laurie can’t say it better than that simply being friends gives reason to her life. Her conversion—and the unexpected effect that is the miraculous sign—is manifested as she turns to the others to declare, “I love you.”