In The White Lotus season three, Thailand is tinted yellow. Here's why

There's a common thread between the first and third seasons of "The White Lotus": they both have a yellow tint. This satirical comedy, created and directed by Mike White, tells the story of a group of wealthy Americans vacationing at a luxurious White Lotus resort in Hawaii in its first season, with the Hawaiian scenery deliberately depicted as warm. This warm depiction helps to create a sense of paradise, even as the characters' flaws are exposed.

The second season tells the story of what happened at a sister resort in southern Italy, where the sun shines brightly, but the color palette is more neutral. And in the third season, the anthology series moves the stage to Thailand, a place that also presents a yellow hue. The internet has taken note of this warm color grading, sparking discussion and analysis of its potential meaning and implications.

It is generally believed that the use of yellow tones in movies and TV shows is to imply a warm climate. But the summers in Sicily are just as hot as in Hawaii and Thailand. So, why is Italy, so far, the only "White Lotus" destination that has been portrayed with a more neutral color palette? This discrepancy raises questions about the artistic choices and potential underlying messages behind the show's visual style.

The work of film and television colorists mainly has two elements. The first is correction, which is the process of adjusting the footage to ensure that the colors are cohesive. The second is color grading, which is the use of color to create a visual style, giving a film or TV show an identity, and, like a soundtrack, guiding the audience to produce certain emotions. Nicholas Maling, a film colorist in Melbourne, says that film and TV shows sometimes use "extreme color grading" as a "creative force to take people to another world," such as the faded blue of "Twilight" or the saturated fury of "Mad Max." This creative use of color helps to immerse viewers in the story's atmosphere.

But the most common is neutral color grading, using contrasting or eye-catching tones to distinguish time and place. For example, transitioning from color to black and white or sepia indicates a flashback scene. And the use of color filters has become a common technique in movies to distinguish different locations. Juan Melara, a film and television colorist in Tasmania, explains that colder tones are often used when Eastern European and Scandinavian countries are depicted in Western films and television. He says that regions like South America, the Middle East, parts of Asia, and Africa are often shrouded in warm tones, while the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe usually get more neutral tones. These color choices contribute to the overall perception and representation of these regions.

This can partly be attributed to the natural environment: the light in London is scattered by clouds; while when shooting in the Middle East, you are under direct, glaring sunlight. However, while the natural palette may be part of the reason for using warmer or cooler tones in certain geographical locations, exaggerating these tones is a technique that became popular around the turn of the century. Melara, along with many other colorists, believes that Steven Soderbergh's 2000 film "Traffic" played an important role in the way different locations were color-graded. Soderbergh's choices have influenced subsequent filmmakers and their approach to visual storytelling.

The film coincided with the widespread application of digital color correction, and Soderbergh used different filters to distinguish between the two American storylines and the third Mexican storyline in the crime drama. The latter was painted with an exaggerated, vivid yellow, positioning Mexico as a completely different world from the United States; a lawless place rampant with drug cartels. "'Traffic' wasn't the first movie to do this, but it was probably the first to push these looks to such an extreme," he said. "And because that's how it's been done for the past 25 years, movies and TV shows continue to use this established language because 'that's how it's always been done.'" This ingrained practice perpetuates certain visual stereotypes.

This color grading method later became known as the "Mexico filter," and as the name suggests, it has been widely used in Mexico, from "Breaking Bad" to "Saw X." But it has also been frequently applied to other countries in the Global South, from Bangladesh in "Extraction" to Uganda in "Queen of Katwe." The widespread use of this filter raises concerns about its potential to reinforce negative stereotypes and perpetuate biased representations.

Melara believes that the Mexico filter has become a kind of film shorthand, representing more than just heat. He says that over time, the warm look has begun to symbolize a place's lower socioeconomic status (and everything that comes with it) and is unfamiliar to filmmakers or characters. Maling also agrees that socioeconomic status seems to be "to some extent" associated with a warm look, saying, "A lot of the warmer climates are indeed developing countries." This association can inadvertently contribute to the perception of these regions as less developed or desirable.

But he doesn't think warm tones are used to "put a country in a lower position," or that the warm look is shorthand for the Global South. "It's always about creating, about enhancing the world of the series or movie. Simply put, I don't think it's that deep," he said. Rini Elizabeth Mukkat, director of communications at the Media Diversity Institute, who is responsible for studying how the media portrays the Global South, says that it is definitely deep and believes that adding a warm look to countries that belong to the Global South has been used so frequently and with such negative connotations that it is now equivalent to adding a "colonial perspective" in movies and TV shows. This perspective can reinforce power imbalances and perpetuate harmful stereotypes.

Mukkat says that narratives that don't take the time to show the actual complexity of people are "very dangerous." Intentions aside, she believes that filmmakers have a responsibility to consider whether their portrayal of marginalized communities who are already subject to stereotypes is "promoting those stereotypes." This responsibility extends to all aspects of filmmaking, including color grading, which can have a subtle but significant impact on how audiences perceive different cultures and regions.

Maling and Melara used words like creamy, rich, vibrant, and full of life to describe the color grade of "The White Lotus" season three. Some scenes, especially those at night, used a cool blue. Given this, both colorists believe that the yellow grade in the daytime scenes partly comes down to emphasizing Thailand's oppressive heat and humidity. "But I think it's also used as a way of showing that these characters are no longer in a Western country. It's an exotic 'faraway land'," Melara believes. This exoticization can further contribute to the othering of non-Western cultures.

Maling believes that a warm grade may have been used again this season to help the narrative. "\\[The yellow's\\] beauty is that it can immediately separate reality, you can enjoy watching it as if you were seeing it through a portal, and sometimes it's more enjoyable than having something that looks real, and then you try to imagine it in a real context, and then you think, 'Well, that's not going to happen.'" But there is no explanation for why Sicily's grade was different. "The White Lotus" aims to be a sharp social satire dealing with themes such as class, money, colonialism, and exploitation. The varying color grades across seasons could be interpreted as a deliberate commentary on these themes.

Mukkat acknowledges that the yellow grade may be a visual extension of this satire, conveying how a group of predominantly white privileged people see a place like Thailand, while exploiting it for their own enjoyment, which is the result of decades of exposure to the Mexico filter. But she doesn't think any of these potential reasons are justified. "When someone watches a show \\[with this color grade\\], your idea of a place like Thailand is singular," she said. "It's poor, it has corruption, it has crime, it's unsafe, but it has these beautiful resorts, which is really not the whole of the country." This singular representation can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and limit viewers' understanding of the country's complexities.