This absurd scene from the show White Lotus nearly made me cry. Watch and we’ll discuss after.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKfDTyE0zTA&t=1s
“Well, you know I moved here because I had to leave the states, but I picked Thailand because I always had a thing for Asian girls. When I got here, I was like a kid in a candy store. If you’ve got money, no attachments, nothing to do... I started partying. It got wild. I was picking up girls every night—always different ones: petite ones, chubby ones, older ones, sometimes multiple ladies a night. I was out of control. I became insatiable.
You know, after about a thousand nights like that, you start to lose it. I started to wonder: Where am I going with this? Why do I feel this need to sleep with all these women? What is desire? The form of this cute Asian girl—why does it have such a grip on me? Is she the opposite of me? Is she going to complete me in some way? I realized that after a million women, I’d still never be satisfied. Maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls... Really, not really. No, really... really.
So one night I took home some girl, turned out to be a lady boy, which I’d done before, but this time instead of me being with the lady boy, the lady boy was with me. And it was kind of magical. I got in my head what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls getting with me, and to feel that. So I put out an ad looking for a white guy my age to come over. Found a guy who looked a lot like me. Then I put on some lingerie and perfume, made myself look like one of these girls. I thought I looked pretty hot.
And then this guy came over and had his way with me. Then I got addicted to that. Some nights three, four guys would come over. Some I even had to pay. And at the same time, I’d hire an Asian girl to just sit there and watch the whole thing. I’d look in her eyes while some guy was with me, and I’d think: I am her, and I’m with me.
Hey, we all have an Achilles heel, man. You know, where does it come from? Why are some of us attracted to the opposite form, and some of us the same sex? It’s a poetic act. It’s a metaphor. A metaphor for what? Are we our forms? Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside too, or inside could I be an Asian girl? I don’t know. Guess I was trying to sleep my way to the answer.
Then I realized I gotta stop—the drugs, the girls, trying to be a girl. I got into Buddhism, which is all about spirit over form, detaching from self, getting off the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering. Being sober isn’t so hard. Being celibate though—it’s tough. I still miss that buzz, man.”
“I am her, and I’m with me.”
That line got me. It captures something I think most people are too scared to admit. We don’t want others. We want to possess the image of ourselves through the other. Desire isn’t just attraction. It’s a fantasy of completion. And every time you chase it, whether it’s love, sex, power, or even healing, it flips on you.
Sam Rockwell’s character spends years sleeping with women, trying to satisfy an urge. Maybe another body will exhaust him. But, he only becomes more insatiable.
To be insatiated is perhaps when you are consuming things without substance. Though lack of substance is precisely what’s sustaining you. What you are consuming is actually nothing you want. If what he wanted were simply these women, then one of them should have satisfied him. Instead every women was a promise that broke the same night.
Eventually he asks a more interesting question, what exactly am I looking for in this woman? Is she somebody capable of completing me? Or perhaps I don’t want her, I want to be her. On a tangent, I’ve met too many flounderers who like to dress in drag the first chance they get for an event. It’s a shame Halloween only comes around once per year.
There is an unstable boundary between desire and identification. To distinguish between wanting another person, wanting what we imagine they possess, wanting to be desired the way they are desired, and wanting to become the version of ourselves that seems possible through them. “Do I want you?” and “Do I want to be you?” are not always completely separate questions.
So he changes positions inside his own fantasy. Instead of sleeping with the desired woman, he dresses like her and finds a middle-aged white man who resembles himself. The detail that the man looks like him is important. He has effectively placed a version of himself on the other side of the sexual encounter. He can now occupy the position of the woman he desired while another version of himself occupies his old position. I suppose porn does this effectively well. I mean, how many angles do you need to watch two people fuck. And who requested the shot behind the balls.
But even that is not enough. He hires an Asian woman simply to watch. He does not only need to become the object of his desire. He needs the object herself to witness him becoming her. He looks into her eyes while the other man has sex with him and thinks:
“I am her, and I’m with me.”
Perhaps this is the reason why sometimes people send a photo which should have been a screenshot. A screenshot gives you the information; the photo gives you their view of the information. The phone in their hand, the screen in front of them, the angle from which they encountered it. Sometimes we don’t simply want another person to see what we see. We want them to see it from where we are standing.
His fantasy has become geometrical. There is the self. There is the person he desires. And there is the position from which he imagines that person experiences him. He is trying to occupy every point at once: to be himself, to become his object, to desire himself and to experience himself being desired.
He wishes to experience himself from somewhere outside himself.
Just as what we sometimes want is access to ourselves through the other. We want to know what we look like from inside their desire. Escaping our own nude prison. Which I suppose tattoos are like adding a bit of green to your prison walls to make yourself feel better.
Attention is intoxicating in that it reveals a version of you that you could not produce alone. It would be more accurate to say you’re borrowing people’s eyes. If it happens to be the case you dont find yourself beautiful, the more you search for the eyes that find you beautiful.
Which is okay until you mistake that the other person contains whatever they made possible in you. Not like being loved necessarily correlates to you finding the love within yourself.
You start to feel like you need them as auxillary support. Keeping you up. Keeping your fantasy alive.
So when you lose a person, you lose a version of you. Which in turn, is grieving you.
The comical extreme of Rockwell’s character makes something ordinary to see. Desire is rarely a simple line running from me to you. The other person can become a screen onto which we project missing possibilities of ourselves.
And that is what I find moving about this scene. Rockwell’s character is intelligent enough to realise that the objects themselves are no longer answering the question. He has slept with the women. He has become the woman. He has reconstructed the fantasy from the opposite position. And eventually he arrives at Buddhism.
Though this is another proposed solution to the same problem.
The final movement - perhaps the problem is wanting objects at all.
So he tries renunciation. Detachment from form. Detachment from self. Detachment from the endless carousel of craving and suffering.
And then, beautifully, he admits that he still misses the buzz.
You can change your explanation for your desire much faster than you can change the way your enjoyment is organised.
That is what made the scene emotional for me. Not simply that this man does not have the answer. It is watching somebody become intelligent enough to realise that every answer he has tried has reproduced the question.
Sex did not answer it. Becoming the desired object did not answer it. Multiplying the fantasy did not answer it. Spiritual renunciation has not entirely answered it either.
But something important has happened. His behaviour is no longer random.
There is a structure connecting the apparently contradictory things he has done.
There are reasons why the things you do that make the least sense to you keep making sense to some other part of you.
And I sympathise enormously with people who remain confused by their own behaviour. Why do I keep making the same mistake? Why am I attracted to this kind of person? Why does somebody become less attractive once they finally want me? Why do I keep destroying something and then desperately trying to recover it?
We are usually given answers from spirituality, attachment theory, evolutionary psychology or conventional relationship advice. Some of those frameworks can be genuinely useful. But psychoanalysis introduced me to an entirely different way of asking the questions.
Instead of only asking what you want, it asks why you want in precisely this way.
Instead of only asking how to eliminate the behaviour, it asks what the behaviour has been doing for you.
Instead of treating masculinity and femininity as two collections of personality traits, it asks how becoming a man or woman changes the way a person negotiates desire, identification, loss, dependence and the other sex.
And instead of assuming heterosexuality means masculinity desires femininity and femininity desires masculinity, we recognise our inherent bisexuality. Something of each is already involved in the psychic life of the other. Sometimes what attracts us in the opposite sex is precisely something we have struggled to recognise in ourselves.
My joy in watching this scene was that psychoanalysis allowed me to understand the depths of it. My little way of feeling “haha you won’t get it like me”.
But once I’ve had my excitement, I realise it’s always funner to share.
“If we hate each other, than why do we fall in love” is what I wrote in response. Taking our journey through how the mother and father shapes us differently. How our unconscious fantasies organise attraction, and why the people we love become entangled with parts of ourselves we have lost, rejected or never learned how to inhabit.
Along the way, I want to answer questions that seem unrelated until you begin seeing the structure connecting them. Why is it so difficult to define what a woman is? What produces the peculiar solidarity that can emerge among men against women? Why do narcissistic personalities sometimes attract wealthy or powerful men? What actually happens psychologically in what men jokingly call “post-nut clarity”? When is overwhelming early affection love bombing, and when is it simply love?
But underneath those questions are larger ones. Why do we desire anything at all? What are we perpetually searching for in other people? What does it mean when you desire something you already know will destroy you? How can you distinguish fantasy from what feels like a deeper intuition? And why does getting exactly what you thought you wanted so often leave behind the strange feeling that this still was not quite it?
I’m around 350 books through my 500 goal. In an attempt to take ideas that can be extraordinarily difficult and turn them into something pragmatic enough to change how people understand their relationships.
The book ends in a culmination of my thinking about gender difference. But I don’t want to simply give you conclusions about men and women. I want to build the framework slowly enough that, by the time we arrive there, you can see the structure for yourself.
Because the most interesting discovery psychoanalysis gave me was not an answer to the question of what we really want.
It was a better question.
Why do I keep wanting in precisely this way?