Issue #111: There are no goodies or baddies
Watching shows like The White Lotus can make us better people.
When it comes to trending TV series, I’m normally so late to the party that the party is over. Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and Baby Reindeer passed me by in a flurry of crystal meth, dragons and restraining orders. I’ve thought, for some years now, about watching Succession, and I hear Severance is good.
The exception is The White Lotus. Do I make this exception because I’m a sucker for an underdog success story (who knew School of Rock’s Ned Schneebly and Stiffler’s Mom could pull off such a feat)? Or am I simply as fascinated as everyone else to watch the myriad, creative ways that the 1% can feel miserable in a 5-star hotel? Unclear. Either way, I was hooked on the most recent season, which ended with bangs plural – no spoilers here, pals – on Monday this week.
The beauty of watching the show that everyone’s watching isn’t so much the viewing itself; it’s the debrief. Over the past few weeks, I’ve enjoyed energised conversations with fellow viewers about toxic friendship trios, Aimee Lou Wood’s general excellence and er, that light smattering of incest. Yet, after watching the season finale, I didn’t know quite how to feel.
And that, I realised, was the genius of it.
I get this feeling, occasionally, when someone tells a story: it suddenly feels as if the room we’re in is constricting, the world as a whole getting smaller simply because of the force of what I’m hearing. The type of narrative that induces this is, inevitably, one where there are clear goodies and baddies.
So-and-so did this terrible thing, because of course they did, because they’re just that type of person, when clearly the only morally-appropriate response would have been to say, do or react in this way.
I know I sound holier-than-thou in portraying myself as the unimpressed bystander here, but the reality is that sometimes I am the storyteller of this morality tale: portraying the baddies in nasty voices, editing out nuances, dramatising. My capacity for empathy is drowned out by, say, insecurity, or a faulty worldview that I’m clinging on to. Sometimes, I cast myself as the baddie – particularly when I’m telling myself a story in my head. I wasn’t helpful enough. I should have stayed longer at the party. I broke their trust. I drove them away.
None of these stories hold much merit. They are neither useful, nor reassuring.
Which is why I feel privileged to have made the acquaintance of the Ratliff family, Carrie Coon and the blondes, et al. (the season three White Lotus characters, for those late to this particular party). While much focus is put on the show’s glamorous locations, The White Lotus is first and foremost character-led – which prompts a constant discourse about those characters.
No matter how I might have felt towards any of them over the past few weeks, the finale episode was a reminder – in so many ways – that people are very, very hard to judge. While everyone – at some point during the season- stepped into the goodie or baddie shoes, their character journeys were so nuanced, and so unexpected, that show creator Mike White did not give us a definitive verdict on any of them.
On the surface, this is a show about unsavoury, privileged people in a hotel. But, for its creator, it would be much too reductive to leave it there. Cue, some seriously redeeming, and complex, character arcs. Saxon Ratliff became oddly likeable by the end. Walton Goggins’ Rick is ultimately framed as a tragic victim of childhood trauma (OK, maybe one spoiler). Jaclyn Lemon won me over with her Oscar-worthy friendship speech. I even found myself giving Linda Ratliff kudos for her unashamed materialism (even if we knew that would be an unfortunate quality, once they landed back in North Carolina).
Stories matter; or, put more aptly, good stories matter. When we watch shows or hear stories with clear goodies or baddies, it is much easier to default to that black-and-white mentality in real life. To switch off from that disgraced colleague or acquaintance; to dehumanise them, even. Our capacity to treat others well can quite literally hinge on the stories that we’re absorbing.
I’ve been reading a book about neuroscience (Dr David Jack’s Your Brain at Work) which identifies the different areas activated in your brain for different processes. Various things are at play as we respond to stories, too. We use our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for reasoning and emotional processing, to feel empathy for others – but this can easily be overridden by our more emotion-centric, fear- and threat-driven amygdala, which is the part of the brain where prejudice and stereotyping originate from.
My understanding of neuroscience is limited. But I know the parts that good, or bad, stories speak to, respectively.
Fictional narratives are what allow us to remain open to the hidden depths of other people. By this, I don’t just mean books – but TV shows, plays, films, etc – all of which, according to research, increase our capacity for empathy.
Interestingly, we are in a golden era of television. From the little that I understand, there has never been more competition – various streaming services versus traditional channels versus new media forms like web series or even Instagram Reels.
It’s optimistic to see from the popularity of series like The White Lotus, and the others I referenced in my opening paragraph, that we continue to have the appetite for these complex characters. That we still yearn, en masse, to understand people more deeply, to have the patience to get to know them, at the very least on-screen or on the printed page. That – in the case of mass watching experiences like Monday’s finale – we can reinforce that universal lesson in conversation with each other: that, despite what your initial prejudice might tell you, there really are no goodies or baddies.
The crucial part – and the thing that’s harder – is to extrapolate that understanding into our everyday lives.
