Imagine my surprise as I am watching the season three premiere of HBO’s “The White Lotus” and Duke isn’t just mentioned within minutes of the show starting, but an entire subplot revolves around a college debate between Duke and UNC. Is this play about us?
Typically, most shows' and movies' university references stick to the top Ivies. It has become a pop culture joke that every teenage character applying to college easily obtains admission into a top school regardless of their previous academic rigor — think Elle (Joey King) from “The Kissing Booth” franchise.
While Duke feels like the whole world to us, it is a — kind of — niche school for such an overt mention in a massive TV show. So, if the writers are not sticking to the go-to college names, why did they choose Duke?
“The White Lotus” is a dark comedy centered around a fictional luxury resort chain. Each season follows an ensemble cast in a new vacation destination. The show satirizes the dynamics of the hotel’s wealthy guests — each main group has some deeper, darker backstory that culminates in a tragedy by the season’s end.
In this season, there appears to be five groups: a trio of blonde women on a girls' trip, an unhappy couple with a large age gap, the workers of the hotel, Belinda (a resort masseuse from season one) and her son and the Ratliff family — the impetus of our Duke-oriented conversation.
The Ratliff family consists of two Blue Devils — father Timothy (Jason Isaacs) and eldest son Saxon (Patrick Shwarzenegger) — and two Tar Heels — mother Victoria (Parker Posey) and middle child Piper (Sarah Hook). There is also youngest son Lochlan (Sam Nivola) who is choosing between Duke and UNC. The Ratliffs are stereotypical North Carolinians, with southern drawls and big university pride. They came to Thailand because Piper wanted to interview a Buddhist monk for her college thesis, a pursuit that everyone else, except Lochlan, finds unserious.
Saxon works in finance with his father, and both characters have a corporate, reeking-of-toxic-masculinity vibe. In a characterizing piece of dialogue, Saxon says, “I don’t need a vacation, I love working.” Victoria is portrayed as a ditzy mother hen, while Piper is a down-to-earth character embarrassed by her parents' wealth and brother’s crude jokes. In making his choice between Duke and UNC, Lochlan hears arguments from his parents for their respective alma maters. “What’s the decision? You got into Duke; you’re going to Duke,” Timothy says at dinner, while Victoria silently mouths “Chapel Hill … Tar Heels.”
“White Lotus” is known for its rich character development. One of the show’s best features is how it uses small details in dialogue and body language to give deep character insights — we often can tell exactly who a character is by one throwaway comment. So, this affluent family's vocal ties to Duke and UNC, a somewhat rare collegiate mention in the grand scheme of entertainment, is interesting to say the least.
The first time the viewer hears from the Ratliffs is when they are greeted by hotel staff after leaving their boat. Despite their obvious wealth, they seem less high-brow than other White Lotus residents, donning Vineyard Vines instead of Loro Piana. One staff member immediately clocks this subtle socioeconomic difference, asking the family how they found the hotel. Timothy mentions how Piper is a student at Chapel Hill working on her senior thesis, and Victoria immediately jumps in to explain the family's ties to Duke and UNC.
This unprompted elaboration about the family’s affiliations to the two universities is quintessentially American. The international hotel staff give a confused look because they are across the world and likely have no knowledge of the Duke-UNC rivalry. This interaction shows the audience how self-important the Ratliff family is in overestimating their universities’ prevalence. Moreover, it expresses how the Ratliffs are eager to use prestigious universities as a status symbol, even if such a symbol means nothing to these workers.
Just from this episode, it seems like keeping up appearances and perception is going to be a major theme of this season — like it has in the past two. In the Ratliff family specifically, they are especially concerned with shaping Lochlan, who is meek and awkward, into the image of the more traditionally masculine (albeit chauvinistic) Timothy and Saxon.
In the final scene of the episode, Victoria emphasizes to Timothy that they have the ideal life with perfect children. “You did it. Everyone tells me what a great man you are,” she says. It is interesting how her compliment stems from external societal validation, instead of her internally expressing how she loves Timothy for who he is. The trope of the Ratliffs being perceived as the perfect North Carolinian family is inevitably going to be disrupted in typical “White Lotus” fashion.
I wouldn’t claim that Duke has the greatest reputation based on its portrayal so far this season: Duke is associated with one of the worst, most misogynistic characters (Saxon) and a potential white-collar criminal (Timothy). However, it is interesting to analyze how Duke is being portrayed in entertainment from an outside, creative lens. Maybe we are a bit more insufferable than I thought we were, and watching this show is like looking in the mirror.
I am so curious to see how our beloved university will continue to be mentioned throughout the season; I really hope that at the very least there is some sort of discourse about tenting. If there is one thing to be sure, HBO is guaranteeing that even in our leisure time, we never forget to recite GTHC.
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Olivia Prusky is a Trinity sophomore and a social media editor for Recess.