Paglia and The White Lotus

my latest in The American Spectator

I first discovered HBO’s hit series The White Lotus through the hosts of the controversial Red Scare podcast, upon whom two of the characters in the first season were based. Director Mike White inhabits the cultural realm of the podcasters and their listeners, who delight in ridiculing politically correct tropes du jour. Thus my surprise when so many of my “normie” friends raved to me about the series’ second season. Did they not catch the subversive ideas White was toying with? In the culture clash between proponents of wokeness and anti-woke reactionaries, White emerges as an ingenious outlier. He proves himself capable of slyly slipping taboo ideas into his plots with a level of nuance that most countercultural reactionaries find themselves incapable of pulling off.

White, along with the other iconoclasts in his milieu, finds inspiration in theorists like Camille Paglia, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, René Girard, Christopher Lasch, and other writers who challenge modern rationalism and postmodern social constructivism, privileging aesthetic and metaphysical contentions over purely social and political ones. Season 2 — which takes place in Sicily — explores a number of themes that appear in Paglia’s debut book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence (which the Red Scare–inspired characters are shown reading poolside in season 1, in addition to The Portable Nietzsche and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams), an over-700-page tome published in 1990. The dissident art and literary critic presents a series of unorthodox assertions about sex, gender, and human nature that — in addition to provoking the ire of the feminist establishment — won her attention across the globe.

The book’s title alludes to her theory that Western culture “is ruled by personality.” Paglia traces this idea through “recurrent types or personae,” which in Latin literally translates to “masks.” Her “stress on … the biological basis of sex differences” builds on the Freudian assertion that “the mother [is] an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they escape through rationalism and physical achievement.” Such interpretations of gender dynamics — of which Paglia is a bold proponent, as well as White, albeit with more subtlety — have been scant ever since Freudian ideas were deemed taboo by hegemonic powers.

Part of Paglia’s understanding of men’s and women’s sexual “personae” is shaped by Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian polarity: The former represents the masculine impulse for stoic order and rationality, while the latter represents the feminine drive toward ecstatic, bodily revelry and the chaotic, unpredictable forces of the natural world. Paglia’s proclivity to elucidate sexuality through the specters of art and nature can be said to have inspired White’s tendency to juxtapose sex scenes with cuts to the natural world — crashing waves, underwater shots of sea life, birds flying in the air, and the eruption of volcanoes — and to works of art — ranging from paintings of Catholic saints to the mysterious “teste di moro” (the term alludes to the Sicilian legend of a woman who chopped off the head of her adulterous lover and used it as a vase for flowers).

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