Jia Tolentino
speaker
981 appearances
13 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Jia Tolentino’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The White Lotus Official Podcast · Season 3: A Final Goodbye with Aimee Lou Wood · 10 Apr 2025
podcast
Hello and welcome to the White Lotus official podcast companion to season three. I'm Gia Tolentino.
And welcome to the last hurrah, the bonus episode for our season three companion podcast. We'll be talking to Amy Lou Wood later on. But first, like, we're just going to be talking about the big things of this season. What the fuck was this all about?
It's interesting because people – I think people will have said – like, everyone liked to be like, first season is about money. Second season is about sex. Third season, it's about spirituality. It's about life and death. But all of these things are the same idea to me. Like, does that make sense to you?
The condition of being human is to live in a state of identity and desire. And these are the things that cause you to self-imprison. These are the things that cause your suffering. The things that we desire tend to be money and sex.
So it's like, it's the same. It's always going to be the same mess of themes to me. I mean, there's an aesthetic tilt towards one thing over the other. Like, season two is so, like, hot Sicilian. It's a very bodily season, et cetera. And this... There's lots of eternal return. There's a lot of bouncing droplets.
There's, you know, there's a lot of, you don't know what time it is of the day because it's this golden Thailand hazy.
It's always magic hour. It's 10 a.m., it's magic hour. 3 p.m., magic hour. Middle of the night, somehow still magic hour. But you know what I mean? Like, I think your theory is correct. And I think it's also, yeah, I think it's every single story.
And I think that there's no real difference between the prison of identity and the prison of desire for money, the prison of desire for sex that you can't have or even sex that you can. Like, it feels like the same exact question to me.
I think that one of the things that this season is asking overtly, and that the other seasons were not, is like, do you have a soul? Do you have, like, simply, do you have a soul? Which of these characters has a soul? What would remain of you if your life changed drastically? Like, what is there actually to you underneath whatever? And that, to me, it's like...
It's like Lachlan is the one kind of with the claim on it because he's not – he's the one that is not clinging to a belief structure yet. And he's the one that kind of has an intact soul almost as a result, you know? Like there's something where – like I was going to ask you – Which of these characters' belief systems sort of stands the test of this week at the White Lotus?
You know, like I think kind of Chelsea's kind of does. Chelsea is a wackadoo. Like, hey, read this book about how we're all sorted into groups one through 12. And if we're in, you know. And we're both in group seven, and so that means we're something to each other. But she's right. Chelsea has a belief in something beyond the visible and given, and it's an extremely open-ended one.
It's one that does not seek to establish or control anything. It's just her entire belief system is that there's something beyond this, and there's something we can do with that. And that I think she's kind of probably objectively correct in that she's— kind of vindicated.
And then the other ones that I think like their belief systems, like they're ones that obviously don't, like most of the Ratliffs, their whole belief system is going down the tubes.
Yeah, right. And again, it's a belief system that does not – it doesn't seek to establish a rigidity of like this is how you should be, this is how you shouldn't. Like Laughlin is like – it's the motion of it. So it's Laughlin and it's – Chelsea, and I think it's Lori, too. You know, like, I think what she says at dinner is really nice.
It's like, then I realize that perhaps the meaning is just simply that I have existed, and so have you.
Yeah.
There's something in here about whose sense of self is capacious enough to accommodate multiplicity. Like, the people whose sense of self and sense of identity fails are the ones who understand their identity to be one of It's the most rigid ones, right? It's like Victoria.
It's like probably Jacqueline and Kate, you know, that their sense of self and identity is just very firmly in a bounded, checkmarked, good, admirable, visible, you know, and that is me and everything else is folded into that narrative. And the people whose senses of self don't trap them, but...
ground them and free them or whatever are the people it seems to me whose senses of self are firm insofar as they are open-ended perhaps all the way to frank who seems to be able to accommodate a 45-hour crack binge or whatever too and he's just like yeah i'm in my underwear stabbing this mannequin and tomorrow i'll be doing my ablutions at the temple or whatever
You kind of get the impression with Frank, you know, who's like, okay, here's my meth and my knife. And shift five of hookers from nightclub downstairs or whatever. And the next day I'll be back at the temple. I don't know if this is my personal projection onto this character. You're like, I get it. Do you know what I mean?
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