Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola on ‘The White Lotus’; Blake Lively in ‘Another Simple Favor’. Credit :
HBO; Amazon MGM Studios
Warning: This story contains spoilers for Another Simple Favor, on Prime Video now.
Call me old-fashioned, but when did incest storylines become, for lack of a better word, common?
Never did I anticipate writing a story about the rising inclusion of incestuous storylines in mainstream media. However, it needs to be talked about. As a Christian who works in media, such storylines aren’t something I personally want to see across the content I consume.
Of course, I recognize that we live in a world where incest occurs. But my objection is that in recent depictions of the taboo topic, it has been treated either as a punchline or a turn-on. I find both such depictions disturbing.
Case in point: Another Simple Favor — the glitzy, Italian-set successor to Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively‘s chic 2018 comedic thriller, A Simple Favor — which arrived on Prime Video on May 1. I got to see the hotly anticipated sequel a week early, something I was excited about as a fan of the first film. But nothing could have prepared me for the “twist” the film takes. Brace yourself, because this one is a doozy.
Another Simple Favor, directed by Paul Feig and written by Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis, sees Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick) reuniting with friend-turned-nemesis Emily Nelson (Lively) as she prepares to wed Italian businessman Dante Versano (Michele Morrone) on the island of Capri. However, the festivities are interrupted by an unexpected murder, leaving Stephanie to wonder if she’s being set up in a plot for revenge.
Like its predecessor, Another Simple Favor is filled with many twists, including a disturbing incest plotline.
Emily’s triplet, Charity (also played by Lively), whom we were led to believe died in the womb, is very much alive, as their aunt Linda (Allison Janney) kidnapped her after helping to deliver the three sisters. And on the day of Emily’s wedding, Charity kidnaps her and drugs her to the point where her body is paralyzed.
Repeatedly noting how they are “one” and “just need each other,” Charity cuddles up close to Emily and caresses her, telling her she’s “only ever gonna make you feel good, so good” because “it makes me feel good.” At one point, Charity offers to show her how they “can feel so good at the same time,” leading to Charity appearing to slide her hand down Emily’s underwear. Emily, unable to move, looks on in horror. Then, Charity hops on top of her to kiss her.
Blake Lively as Charity and Emily in ‘Another Simple Favor’. Amazon prime
Cut to: “So, Charity is a sister-f—er?” asks Kendrick’s Stephanie, who is being told the story from Emily afterward. Emily responds, “You couldn’t wait to say that, could you? … Well, I mean, that might be the definition of too soon.”
“Are you okay, by the way? Sorry. That was really dark. We kinda skipped over that,” asks Stephanie, and Emily jokes, laughing, “Oh, thank you for your concern. It happens. Well, it never f—ing happens.”
Nothing more is shown during the assault scene, but the implication is worrisome, especially since this occurred without Emily’s consent, unlike the disturbing incident from A Simple Favor involving Stephanie engaging in full-on intercourse with Chris (Dustin Milligan), a man who is revealed to be her half-brother.
That incident — which occurred after the tragic death of their father when she was just a high school senior, something that Stephanie revealed to Emily in confidence — led Emily to playfully mock Stephanie by calling her a “brother-f—er.” The Charity character, too, is played for laughs at times, but the latest offering in the Simple Favor world at the very least doesn’t go too far to show just how horrifying Emily’s predicament came to be. (By the end, Emily had to kiss Charity once more in order to get her long-lost triplet to take the fall for her many crimes.)
Dustin Milligan and Anna Kendrick in ‘A Simple Favor’. Lionsgate
Still, I wonder what the purpose was in including such a storyline in the first place. I don’t think it added anything to the somewhat entertaining yet largely underwhelming sequel or its more clever predecessor. It’s now just a part of what is a growing number of incest storylines appearing in mainstream content.
Just a little more than a month prior, the internet was ablaze as fans of The White Lotus, created by Mike White, reacted to a shocking incest kiss between brothers Lochlan and Saxon Ratliff, played by Sam Nivola and Patrick Schwarzenegger, respectively. It’s something that, while still surprising, audiences theorized from the season 3 premiere could be a possibility for the direction of the season.
After its airing, David Bernad, an executive producer on the HBO hit, told The New York Post that “there’s a specific reason in terms of the narrative storytelling, and the larger thematic idea Mike is trying to get across.” White himself, later explained to The Hollywood Reporter after fans witnessed the incestuous dynamic take a darker turn, as they wound up engaging in a threeway, that he didn’t “want to write identity coming-of-age stories.”
“I’m not interested in someone coming out. I like something that feels kind of naughty, which is the opposite of that. I also want to make the wider audience complicit in those stories so that they’re suddenly going down this wormhole with me,” White, 54, explained. “There’s some kind of pleasure in getting a bigger audience on board with these erotic moments. And the incest thing, it’s really more about someone who is trying to connect with his brother and his sister through the things they value. Saxon is all about getting off, and Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) is renouncing the materialistic.”
“It’s amusing to me when people approach the show in this very literal way, like the show is about incest,” he also said. “I’m glad we found you, but you’re not really the audience.”
Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola on ‘The White Lotus’. Fabio Lovino/HBO
White’s risqué storyline was actually too much for some actors who auditioned, as casting director Meredith Tucker told THR that “finding the Ratliff children took a little more legwork, more auditions.” She recalled how they “had to tell people beforehand,” adding, “We said, ‘There is going to be some same-sex kissing and stuff. Are you comfortable with that?’ I think maybe one kid for Sam’s role dropped out, but some of these kids were barely 18, so I could understand.”
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But White had actually been prepping audiences for this kind of storyline since season 2, where audiences may recall what was initially believed to be a sexual encounter between an uncle and nephew — played by Tom Hollander and Leo Woodall — but it turned out there was no relation at all.
Another Simple Favor and The White Lotus are far from the first instances of incest-related storylines to spring up in popular media. One of the earliest examples in film was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which depicted a father-daughter incestuous relationship. Meanwhile, on television, the now-canceled soap Passions featured a teenage couple discovering they’re allegedly half-siblings and deciding to remain together, even going on to have a child.
Ari Aster‘s hotly debated short film, 2011’s The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, caused a stir for its depiction of a son inflicting an incestuous relationship on his father, all of which occurred within a Black American family, to much controversy.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Game of Thrones (based on the A Song of Ice and Fire novels), which displayed countless examples, including relationships like the one between siblings Cersei and Jaime Lannister (Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), having occurred since they were children. Its popular spinoff series, House of the Dragon, is also no stranger to exploring the topic, with many members of the Targaryen family marrying each other to keep the bloodline pure. (It’s also fair to note that the Faith of the Seven, a dominant religion in Westeros, condemned incest.)
Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau on ‘Game of Thrones’. Neil Davidson/HBO
The tricky subject has spanned across anime and manga, cartoons like the controversial Comedy Central series Drawn Together as well as Rick and Morty (whose fans complained about the abundance of incest storylines) and literature like V.C. Andrews’ infamous 1979 gothic novel Flowers in the Attic, which has since been adapted across the screen and stage, with the most recent being a prequel series starring Kelsey Grammer that appearing on Lifetime in 2022. Of course, even the Bible tackled incest relationships across several stories, including the marriage between Abraham and Sarah, who are half-siblings.
Data from Statista indicates that between 1980 to 2022, roughly 15% of families in the United States reported an incest occurrence in the family and 46% of child sexual assault victims were raped by someone in their family. Meanwhile, only 20% of incest victims reported the crime to authorities.
IncestAware.org also notes that incest rates are still tough to pinpoint due to related abuse often going unreported, so the actual number of related cases is unknown.
Should incest be talked about? Yes. But how far should we go? As a Christian, I think we should draw the line at playing it up for jokes (i.e., the frequent incest humor and kissing between Arrested Development‘s teenage cousins George Michael and Maeby, played by Michael Cera and Alia Shawkat) and showing full-on sex scenes (i.e., A Simple Favor and Game of Thrones).
At the very least, we should not be inserting such narratives for the sake of shock value or without purpose — and a perfect example is Ryan Murphy‘s Netflix series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. The series controversially featured a kiss between the brothers, played by Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez, as well as a scene of them showering together. It implied an incestuous dynamic was occurring between the Menenez brothers, though trial expert Robert Rand denied that such activity ever took place.
I had a conversation with a friend recently about the incest storyline on The White Lotus. I expressed disdain with the direction, indicating that it didn’t feel necessary to the story and felt more like shock value to shake up a largely slow season. My friend said incest isn’t “that bad” because it’s usually “consensual,” and that there were “worse things.” This ultimately hit at my fear, that depictions of incest in mainstream content will desensitize us to it and maybe even normalize it, almost in a way that overexposure to violence in media has created a desensitization to it as well. Is that a society we want to be a part of?
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org
If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.
