Stuck in an Existential Crisis? Read This.
And watch four minutes of The White Lotus—only four.
The core suspense in Season 3 of The White Lotus hinges around whether or not the story will develop into something worth watching. The season was hailed as a complete letdown compared to its predecessors, both of which had immortalized memes of Jennifer Coolidge and Sydney Sweeney across the reverberating walls of pop culture. Four episodes in, the sole excitement around Season 3 centered around a peculiar southern voice created by the actress Parker Posey, an accent that was also the defining feature of her character, Victoria Ratliff.
Victoria was not alone: Nearly every character in the season failed to establish a memorable personality, let alone a colorful role in the plot. Out of the nine hours my partner and I spent watching the season, wondering if the end-result would yield regret, there were precisely four minutes that stood out to me. I might venture to say, however, that those four minutes made the rest of the season worth watching, for that one scene branded into my memory the etch of a cinematic gem.
My brain, or perhaps my heart, stores many of these gems. To name a few: the moment Mahito helps the warawara fly into existence, foreshadowing his own acceptance of his mother’s death in The Boy and the Heron, Elio’s father urging him to feel as much as he can in Call Me By Your Name, attempting to give Elio a will he never had, Ōtaro cheering on Nae in her pursuit of Harumichi in First Love, despite Ōtaro loving Nae himself, Evelyn’s final monologue to Joy in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Sonmi’s speech in Cloud Atlas. Each of these moments flared out of the scripts they sprouted from the way a phoenix rises from burnt coal, giving birth to something precious, something so rich in feeling that it appears as if its pixels might develop a material form, so that I might hold it in my palm and memorize its sparkled edges, despite the rest of the film cascading down into the broken fuzz of short-term memory.
In this gem, Carrie Coon delivers a scene that wraps the narrative of three women—Jaclyn, Kate and Laurie—navigating the turbulence of friendship with a crisp, golden bow, the sole narrative in the season that ends with a nourishing twist. Though all three women grapple with isolation, taking turns being the odd one out based on their predispositions—infidelity, conflicting politics, varying expressions of success—Coon’s character, Laurie, appears to be the most isolated, lacking in both what Jaclyn and Kate represent: a polished career and an abundant marriage. Her isolation leads her to take a few things too seriously, have sex with a man who attempts to scam her, and stumble over the insecurities of comparison more than anyone else. In the final episode, however, she takes a leap that sets her apart, one that changes the course of their story altogether. While Kate and Jaclyn toast to a successful trip, reciting gratitude and blessings, Laurie indulges in the opposite: the truth. She confesses to a profound sadness she had been feeling the entire time.
As Laurie delivers her truth, she posits that her failures, in the face of those she grew up with, feel transparent and exposed, and in that exposure she stumbled through tunnels of rumination. She had been attempting to define what makes her her, what gives her life meaning, since it seemed so apparent for the other two (beauty and fame, religion and marriage), and all she could come up with was a long list of failures—a failed marriage, a stagnant career, a mess of motherhood—until she found an epiphany in the rough. Laurie realizes that she does not need anything to make her her, to give her life meaning, for time gives it meaning. Living and sharing life—a process they each witness and experience alongside each other—is deeply meaningful, perhaps more than anything else, in and of itself.
When Coon delivered the monologue, the whole of me pulsed with feeling. I think a part of growing up is grappling with the fickle properties of time. Time is a fictional creation, yet it defines each of our waking days. Attempting to measure it is an inconsistent feat: a young person might be 12, 18 or 30 years old while a young star might be three billion. Time passes us and rushes us and categorizes our lives into chapters, chapters in which we are all, in effect, doing the same thing: attempting to define what meaning is (and how to acquire it).
“Existential” is a common adjective brought up by my therapist—existential pressure, existential anxiety, existential meaning—and is, perhaps, the main adjective that differentiates the human experience from the animal one. We are the only species known to proactively attempt to establish meaning in our lives. In that search for meaning, time is often seen as something we must conquer: this year we want a new job, in five years we want more money, by forty we want to feel even more secure in who we are, before death we want to know that we lived a meaningful life. It is also something that we cannot conquer, for it is out of our control. As our sums of days on this planet continue to amass, it becomes as easy as it is tangling to wonder what time is, and how, in the face of its ruthless nature, we hold onto meaning. We got the job, we found love, we started a hobby, we bid farewell to loved ones, we let new loved ones in, and the world—no matter how much meaning we define for ourselves—continues to carry on. With or without us, time flows.
At first, Coon’s monologue sounds pitiful, the energy is one of admission, of surrender, and then, as humility matures into clarity, we see something greater than the dimensions of a single emotion, something spanning beyond the narrative of winner versus loser, something as expansive and layered as the universe itself. Time, in the end, gives meaning to all of our lives. When the seasons of us come to a close and our cells fold back into the soil, meaning by virtue of this or that is a metric too small. The external properties by which we define ourselves—our things, our relationships, our careers, our experiences—are all eventually erased by time. And yet, before that erasure, and perhaps because of it, we share profound meaning. When Laurie looks at her friends, she feels the meaning of her life in full, a meaning that underlies all of our lives: that we were there, that we were them, that we are here, that we are us. That we exist. The meaning we search for is both ephemeral and omniscient, in that meaning itself is not something to be obtained or optimized, rather, it is everywhere, constantly appearing and disappearing, belonging to us so long as we are present, so long as we are aware.
I’d like to pause for a laugh, because I feel like everything I ever write trails to the gamut of presence. It is, however, a topic I keep returning to out of necessity. In a world that can too easily feel dystopian, as a member of a generation that trends towards depression and anxiety, remembering what matters—and that mattering itself is baked into our innate ability to exist—offers some relief from the pressures of today. As a thirty year old youth living in said dystopia, I often find myself overwhelmed by the future: social, political, environmental, personal. Are we entering a recession? What will we do when climate disasters multiply in frequency? How will I share life with my partner in a country they are foreign to?
While all of these questions are fair to ask, beneath each of them lies a bed of anxiety birthed from expectation: the expectation that we need to arrive at the answers now, and that in doing so, we will ensure that our lives are good, meaningful, “figured out,” so to say. The funny thing about “figuring out” as a process is that we tend to realize, at one point or another, that we were always figuring it out the entire time. Figuring things out is the human condition. As Laurie attempts to figure out what gives meaning to her life, she realizes, in the end, that she had been figuring out meaning the entire time, that by living her life as herself, witness to her two friends, meaning was being born in each moment, with or without the ego’s demand.
This past weekend, Laurie’s words seemed foretelling. In a sun stained cove made fresh by the wet breeze of San Diego, I watched one of my best friends get married. Across a span of forty-eight hours, different communities I grew up with gathered to celebrate a moment in time, a moment that encapuslated the sparkling nature of time itself: what it means when two people share a life, what it means when they commit to sharing it—pains, miracles and all.
What I love about a wedding is that it is not just about two people, it is about the millions of people they each were, are and will be. It is about the people they watched grow up and the people who watched them grow, too. Weddings are the community’s form of a convention. We gather not for an industry, but for each other: the love woven by a couple and the webs of belonging they continue to knit—across cities, phone lines and continents. As I danced, sat and laughed alongside many of the friends I grew up with, I felt what Laurie spoke of, the dazzling density that accumulates in the heart when we witness each other grow.
Though life can feel quite long, we are only here for a brief moment. As we navigate its brevity, meaning pores over us in greater, brighter amounts. The trick is being able to see it: the more we have lived through, the more we have shared, the more we have watched each other—and ourselves—stretch, break, mend and stitch back up into brighter beings, the more meaning there is in simply being here. As I watched my friend Maia say “I do” with her characteristic humor and witnessed, for another moment that I hope is only a fraction of its total, all of our friends wiggle, cheer and express ourselves—expressions of the people we were and the people we are becoming—I felt something beyond words. Something quieter than joy and wider than hope. Something I saw transpire in those four minutes on the screen.
It is a bit ironic, that when we have no words to explain what we are feeling, what we tend to be feeling is the grand complexity of meaning itself. And so, like Laurie, Jaclynn and Kate, I continued to repeat the words we consider the most meaningful. We all did.
I love you. I love you, too. ☷
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane
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