Appetite Studies: Sam Rockwell in “The White Lotus” and The Futurity of Desire
This piece is part of a series that responds to the theme of the 2025 Cleveland Humanities Festival: “Appetite.”
Appetite is the theme of this year’s Cleveland Humanities Festival. Zach Savich organized three previous series on the festival’s themes, which were discourse, wellness, and awe, leading down all kinds of unexpected, fruitful paths. We thought about forgoing the series this year but I had the appetite for organizing it so here we are.
that’s right.
The graphic for the festival this year shows the word appetite next to a brain with four subsidiary words surrounding it: craving, desire, ambition, and hunger. Within this nexus of words, I’ve been searching for something to write about, and I eventually settled on Sam Rockwell’s (as Frank) monologue in episode 5 of Season 3 of The White Lotus.
Ambition: today we are embarrassed about the form our ambitions take as goals, and if we aren’t embarrassed we probably should be. Hungry for: security, to not have to feel hunger, to escape from absence. Our ambitions tend to become private, the striving to fulfill a private fantasy that we map onto something grander. We actualize through achieving it virtually. We dig deep into ourselves to find, say, inner peace or fulfillment, to self-actualize which in turn bestows our groundless actions with some semblance of legitimacy, perhaps even virtue. We build monuments of virtuosity at the altar of the self, ourself, and through that burrowing in we hope to strike the gold of the universal. A sort of westernized convolution of Buddhism that comes less from conscious renunciation than a contentment with an emptiness at the end of the brick road of hyper-consumption. When stasis is all you can hope to get, call that state holy and you better believe it or else what’s burning both sides of the candle even for?
Sam Rockwell’s ambition: escape to Thailand for an initially obscure reason. Appetite for: sex with Thai women, frankly. A dialectical reversal flips the script; actual desire: to be one of them. Specifically, what he really wants is to be the other party in a sexual act with himself, to be the fetishized person being desired by his abstracted self, in a Kojevian turn of events. (Kojeve’s theory of desire, based on Hegel’s lord-bondsman dialectic and a huge influence on the thinking of one Jacques Lacan, was that desire isn’t simply about desiring an object, but rather about desiring to be desired, and desiring the object that desires you, in what could potentially become a house of mirrors of recognition and mis-recognition).
Appetite: not just hunger as such, but a preferential hunger with a healthy dose of desire added on. A satisfaction coupled with a fancy being tickled. Perhaps we could add the word taste to this, of an aesthete or gourmand. But a danger as well. An insatiable appetite, obsession, fetishization. Sam Rockwell’s appetite: sex as often and with as many women as possible. Every night, multiple women, for thousands of nights. Enough time to realize the appetite was for the above, to be one of these women specifically in relation to himself. An appetite for oneself satiated via a corporeal re-routing. Until the appetite for anything goes away, a desire to hop off the train of desire. Or rather, the appetite remains as it is forever in a dormant state of sobriety. Escaping the carousel of samsara. A desire for appetite to remain a potentiality, something only achievable through something like prayer or faith, forever and always.
Craving: the state that appetite takes when dormant, desiring to slip out like the evils in Pandora’s box. Potentiality constantly gesturing toward, crying out for, the actual, satisfying itself through fantasy.
The appetite of the audience: fearful of what we would do if we, to summon Lacan, “never give way on our desire.” We watch Sam Rockwell go on for five minutes about how his fetish flipped on its head and eventually led to a Buddhist withholding and Western sobriety. We laugh because it’s so out of the blue, but also to distance ourselves from the desires we don’t want to awaken in ourselves. We enjoy watching him relay his suffering as we sit in the position of a priest hearing confession, proud of ourselves for situating our desires in acceptable nexuses. Acceptable taste. We laugh from a place of presumed safety as we entertain ourselves to death not so much out of enjoyment but rather in order to keep ourselves from coming even close to being able to discern what we actually desire. We are afraid of ourselves.
Rockwell reveals all this to his friend Rick, Walter Goggins’ character, who does not judge but rather listens intently in stunned silence. I don’t think he pities his friend. Rockwell’s monologue reveals too much, paradoxically, to warrant a response. The only response to pure honesty is mute incomprehension.
Hunger: base, brutal, the most primal of all instincts. Sub-type: a hunger to navigate the world in a way that skirts its sufferings, that seeks encompassing comfort—a resort. A temptation to self-blind, to self-witness rather than look beyond the gates. The possibility of passive satisfaction overwhelming the possibility to fathom the object we desire, to know the place where we are. We become desiring-machines that have no idea how to desire anymore. Never give way on your desire? My dude, how do I even begin?