Most scenes, even pleasant ones, have a conflict at their center, built around the characters' wants. Simple Scene: I walk into a supermarket, see they have bananas on sale and go for them. So does someone else. Maybe we debate it; maybe we have a physical altercation. Maybe we do something else entirely, even something benign, like talk about the weather. There can be a million strategies we each use to get what we want. But eventually one of us is going to get those bananas. One of us is going to win and one is going to lose.
I love looking at dialogue scenes in this way, thinking about what is the want that each character has going into a scene, and then how do they battle it out.
And there's a couple great examples of how writer Mike White does this. Today I want to talk about episode 205; tomorrow, I'm going to end all this writing about WHITE LOTUS with my very favorite scene of the entire series (so far).
So: there's a moment in 105 where Bert and Dominic have dinner by themselves. Dominic is concerned because Albie is now dating Lucia, who Dominic had originally hired as a sex worker for the week.
The scene begins with each of them blaming the other for where things are at. Bert says Dominic modeled this behavior. Dominic says Bert actually did the same with him, and it fucked him and his mother up. Bert insists, We had a good marriage.
There are the two wants: Dominic wants Bert to see he was a terrible father and husband, and responsible for Dominic's woes. Bert wants to believe he and his wife were happy. The conflict is clear, the battle lines, drawn.
And it's a battle of myths. Each of these men has fabricated a fiction in which they are not to be to judged for their behavior. In Dominic's he is the victimized little boy. In Bert's he's the husband of the year. (He actually thinks of himself as thoughtful for not having rubbed his wife's nose in his affairs.)
The thing I love about the scene is how equally paired they are. Dominic's strategy is to get more and more personal in trying to get his father to face what he's done. He starts from the fact his mother knew Bert was cheating, and then goes deeper and deeper into the consequences of that knowledge—how Bert's choices made her life hell, how she died bitter, and finally how it has wrecked his own life.
You'd think that Bert reducing his wife to a bitter woman at her death would be the last shot fired, the worst thing that Bert did. And objectively that seems accurate. But instead Dominic positions his own suffering last, as though it were the worst thing Bert did.
(And if that sounds like a ridiculous assertion for Dominic to make, yeah, it is. White uses this battle scene to also reveal just how deluded and narcissistic Dominic is. It's always great when you can get a scene to serve multiple purposes at the same time.)
Bert's strategy is also one of increasing intimacy. He starts with his general thesis: "We had a great marriage." Then, hearing his wife knew everything, he asks, "So why did she stay?", using his wife's actions to suggest her feelings. His next comment goes further, asserting straight up, "She loved me."
And when Dominic turns the conversation to his own experiences as a result of his father, Bert also makes the move to a personal, first person sharing: "I loved her. And she loved me."
Their last back and forth is really interesting: Dominic says, "It's not that simple." And based on what we know now, he is clearly correct. Bert was a serial adulterer and his wife suffered as a result.
But then Bert responds: "Yes, it is." Another simple, declaratory sentence, put just as authentically and calmly as Dominic. And Bert's right, sometimes it is as simple as that they loved each other, no matter what else happened in their marriage.
So in the end we're left with a tie. They're both right (and both ridiculously deluded).
From a storytelling point of view that creates tension for us; we enter into a scene expecting to be a winner. What the hell is this? It's a great moment of fucking with our expectations.
And in doing so, that lack of resolution becomes a way of highlighting what's really important here: not the battle, but the fact that these two men are absolutely the same. How can there be a winner when two men are making literally the same arguments? I knew her better, she felt how I said, my myth is correct.
And in that sort of uncomfortable space of inertia, we're given a glimpse of the endless hall of mirrors that is their relationship. These men are forever trapped in this dance, because they each refuse to see beyond their myths.
In the finale we get that moment where the two of them and Albie all check out a passing woman. And one interpretation of that moment is, Albie is going to become just as awful to women as they are. But I actually think what he shares with them is more that sense of mythologizing. With Lucia's prompting he imagined himself as her savior, even after it's so clear that that is probably not true. And in a sense he was doing that with Portia, too, and his grandfather. Underneath his mild-mannered demeanor he really is Superman.
Which is another delusion (and inertia) entirely.
