Oh, Laurie. I was rooting for you to save the day. The White Lotus guests might’ve all checked out – some leaving on a yacht, others in body bags – but many fans are still reeling over a finale that was at best, underwhelming and at worst, utterly nonsensical.
Let’s be frank: the disappointments were many. Blackpink’s Lisa was as underused as a subservient cheerleader. Greg-slash-Gary got off entirely scot-free alongside the Russian robbers. Saxon didn’t get his comeuppance for being an avaricious incel. Chloe was too busy trying to fulfil her boyfriend’s sexual fantasy to mourn the death of her best mate. And we were cruelly denied the litany of memes that would’ve surely been spawned by Victoria Ratcliff’s reaction to becoming the destitute wife of North Carolina’s answer to Bernie Madoff.
But the heftiest let-down of all was Laurie’s much-dissected monologue. At least it was for me. Look, I get that a lot of people loved it – some have gone so far as to call it the highlight of the whole series, describing it as “tear-jerking” and “life-affirming”. I couldn’t disagree more. Frankly, as the praise piles up, I can’t help but feel increasingly irate at the egregious gaslighting of it all. Have we been watching the same show?
The speech takes place over dinner on the final night of the holiday. Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), and Kate (Leslie Bibb), have just spent several minutes reflecting on the past week, speaking so evangelically about the trip and their friendship that I started to feel nauseous. “Everything is in bloom. All our flowers are in bloom,” cooed a saccharine Kate after paraphrasing her pastor. “I’ve just been in the best mood all week,” concurred Jaclyn, adding that no amount of yoga or meditation could ever make her feel as grounded as being with “real friends”.
A quick recap: this trio of old friends has spent their entire holiday sniping at one another. If Jaclyn and Kate weren’t making Laurie feel inadequate for being a single mother to her face, they were putting her down for drinking too much behind her back. And if Jaclyn and Laurie weren’t gossiping about Kate being a Trump supporter, they were tacitly sparring over their hot health mentor, Valentin, who Jaclyn eventually slept with – though not before trying to push Laurie onto him first. Everything was a competition. Every decision elicited judgement. And not one compliment could be given without a hint of passive aggression.
That’s just a sliver of the toxicity that plagued these women for the duration of the series – and presumably also their decades-long pseudo-friendship. Hence why Jaclyn and Kate’s paean over dinner felt so jarring. These women don’t actually like each other. And yet, instead of pointing this out in an acerbic diatribe that would’ve been true to her character – as I’d hoped she would after admitting she’d felt “sad” all week – Laurie ultimately succumbed to the illusion.
“[…] I just feel like as you get older, you have to justify your life and your choices,” she began. “And when I’m with you guys, it’s just so transparent what my choices were and my mistakes.” Laurie confesses to having “no belief system”, before lamenting how nothing has given her life meaning. “But I had this epiphany today: I don’t need religion or God to give my life meaning, because time gives it meaning,” she said. “We started this life together. I mean, we’re going through it apart, but we’re still together. And I look at you guys and it feels meaningful and I can’t explain it, but even when we’re just sitting around the pool talking about whatever and inane s***, it still feels very f***ing deep. [To Jaclyn] I am glad you have a beautiful face, and [to Kate] I’m glad that you have a beautiful life. I am just happy to be at the table.”
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of valuable takeaways in this speech – finding meaning beyond life’s external markers of success, managing expectations, owning your shortcomings – but none of them have anything do with female friendship, which the series ultimate presents as an empty performance. Why, after spending the week she just has with these two women, has Laurie reduced herself to a complacent cipher?
Why gush about Jaclyn’s “beautiful face” and Kate’s “beautiful life” when we’ve been led to understand these are masks the women are hiding behind? Jaclyn uses male attention to fill a void and Kate is a Republican housewife, neither of which Laurie found any beauty in before. Sure, friends aren’t supposed to judge one another, but what about the preceding eight episodes made you think anything about these women’s bonds were real?
What I wanted from a Laurie monologue was honesty. Surely that character would’ve rankled at Kate’s mini sermon, or at least challenged Jaclyn’s assertion that she’d been in a perpetual good mood all week. She would have pointed out how different each of the women have become and the inauthenticity lingering at the root of their dynamic, one that, at this point, is being upheld by little more than nostalgia. I wanted Laurie to call these women out for their vanity, and for being so judgemental. To recognise that this friendship is over – and probably has been for some time.
Ultimately, I wanted a pontification on the complexities of female friendship and the artifice we all tolerate within relationships we’ve grown out of. So many of us have been in Laurie’s situation. We put up with competitiveness and the compliments that feel like subtle insults. We accept our place at the bottom of the hierarchy, the one who serves to make the top dogs feel better about themselves. We do it because we think that’s what we deserve. And because it feels easier than standing up for ourselves. It would have been so much more powerful to see Laurie point some of this out.
Female friendships are a wondrous, messy, glorious thing. For women, they’re the foundation of life itself and, as Laurie said, can make even the most inane conversations feel meaningful. But that doesn’t mean they’re always going to be good for us, nor does it mean we should cling onto them against all odds. Friendship breakups are a tough but necessary part of life; they help us get rid of people who might be holding us back and focus on those who are pushing us forward. It’s vital, it’s healing and it’s being true to who we are and what we want. That’s what I wish Laurie would’ve said at the dinner table.
If you’re still not convinced, just think about what would have happened if we’d had one more scene showing Laurie going to bed later that night, leaving Kate and Jaclyn alone with a bottle of Sauv. What do you think those two would have talked about?
