The White Lotus: A Review (Part I)
It only took about a dozen people over the past two months asking me: "Have you seen The White Lotus?" and -- probably most importantly -- the fortunate discovery that I still had access to a friend's HBO+ account (Thank you...you probably don't even remember giving it to me), but I finally got the chance to watch the show. It took me one evening to get Season 1 under my belt (when I binge, I go hard (the season is also only six episodes)), and it took me a little under a week to do Season 2. I'm glad I finally got into this show and I highly recommend you do it, too.
Why? Much more than just a show about some rich people who get into misadventures at a resort The White Lotus is a deeply complex statement on life in our times. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, and I think eventually it will be studied and unpacked the way we study great works of literature (or other great works of television like The Sopranos and Mad Men).
Overview
What is The White Lotus? I hate lengthy plot summaries. So I will just tell you this: both seasons of The White Lotus have the same basic structure. The setting is a fancy resort hotel called The White Lotus (Season 1: Hawaii & Season 2: Sicily). The main characters are the rich- and uber-rich patrons of the hotel and their families, as well as the resort employees and locals that the guests inevitably come into contact with. Each season begins with the reveal that there has been a murder (or at least a mysterious death) recently on the resort grounds, and then the clock immediately turns back to one week earlier.
On the surface, The White Lotus is simply a comedy of manners (a dark comedy of manners, if you will) set in a lavish location, featuring people who are rich, white, and good-looking, all wrapped up in a thin layer of a "whodunit" style cliffhanger. However, a quick check under the hood reveals that the show is much more than that.
The White Lotus is self-consciously a show about class and privilege in the complicated world of the early 2020s. But it is also a show about human nature, sex, lust, and desire. Even deeper than that, it is a show about the very nature of honesty, among two people in a relationship, among members of the same family, among friends, etc. It is a show that begs us to ask the questions: what is real, what is false, what can a person ever really know for sure about their partner, about their own life, and does it matter in the end?
Class and Privilege
Issues of class and privilege are everywhere on display in The White Lotus, and the show isn't even trying to hide it. Perhaps more to the heart of the matter, the show deals with what the white social elite actually thinks and believes about issues of class and privilege and the messes they leave in their wake when they come and go. Messes that, much like their hotel rooms, they do not have to clean up themselves.
First and foremost, the show is about rich, white people on vacation. There are some people of color on the show; however, in only one case (Season 2's "Ethan," played by Will Sharpe) is a person of color depicted as a paying guest of The White Lotus. This fact cannot be overlooked or over stated. Even in the case of the Ethan character (an Asian American) we get the sense that despite his Yale education and his success as a tech entrepreneur, his hold on Upper Class status is still tenuous. He has arrived, but he's not sure if he belongs there or even wants to be there.
The thing about The White Lotus, as with any great art, is that nothing -- no character, situation, or line of dialogue -- has just one, surface-level meaning. In this world, the characters are posturing for each other and, therefore, for the viewer. But are they to be believed, or are they stand-ins for something else? Are the show's writers playing games with us, showing and telling us what to believe as they leasd us in circles so we eventually end up tying ourselves up in the same mental and emotional knots as the main characters?
Consider the dinner conversations that take place night after night among the Mossbacher family. One of the convenient constructs of the "resort/vacation" model is that the show repeatedly puts its characters together -- every evening and morning -- for meals, at which they can discuss the previous days events or continue talking (arguing) about whatever ongoing issues they're having.
The Mossbacher family -- consisting of Mother, Father, daughter, son, and one of the daughter's friends from college -- provides us with probably the most clearly articulated road-map for deciphering The White Lotus, at least as it relates to class and privilege. The daughter and her friend ("Olivia" and "Paula," played by Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O'Grady) are college students studying at -- we assume from what they read, how they talk, and how they dress -- an expensive (but probably not that elite) liberal arts college. They are getting an excellent education in the current academic ideas of race, gender, class, and privilege, and know how to tie their parents' brains and tongues into rhetorical knots. But as concerns their fundamental understanding of basic economic realities they are portrayed to be naïve, as one might expect.
Thus, in this one family, we have the rich, white Liberal person's modern day condition represented in all its conflicted, squirm-inducing glory. One one side we have the mother and father -- the old guard -- who, almost regardless how she ("Nicole," the mother, played by Connie Britton, is by far the primary breadwinner) made her way to the top, she has arrived there and has found a way to square her monetary success, wealth, and social status, with her good, dutiful, modern-day Liberal views. She knows that it's important to care about the less fortunate, less privileged, and those who do not share her lifestyle; she "gets it," we are led to believe. But, at the end of the day (at least in her mind), she earned it and she's not giving any of it away.
Class and Privilege Part II
In one of the very opening scenes of Season 1, the resort manager ("Armond," played by Murray Barlett), gives his employee ("Lani," played by Jolene Purdy) a short speech on how they as the staff of the resort must disappear from view. Following some "Japanese" model of hospitality service, Armond states that they must become benign and invisible presences, with no names, even though they wear name tags. However, it quickly becomes apparent this is not the way things are going to play out at The White Lotus. The guests and the staff interact, form friendships, fight, lust after each other and, of course, have sex.
How, in todays world, in which we are attempting in every way to tear down class and social barriers, to make invisible people more visible, and to make sure everyone has a voice, could we pretend that Armond's "Japanese" model of namelessness and facelessness could possibly work, even in an expensive resort? The very idea seems imperialist, outdated, and almost cruel. Maybe that's why it is so laughable, and yet absolutely perfect from a writing perspective, that it's among the first lines uttered in the entire series.
Among the always problematic "relationships" that crop up between the resort guests and the staff is the relationship between the white, wealthy, middle-aged Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge), and one of the day-spa employees, a black woman named Belinda (Natasha Rothwell). After elbowing her way onto Belinda's schedule, and receiving an amazing massage, Tanya sort of latches onto Belinda -- who is very reluctant at first -- and essentially strong-arms her into become her personal spa employee for her stay, and -- in another supremely awkward moment -- wheedling and pleading until she gets Belinda to agree to go to dinner with her.
Tanya, who is enormously wealthy (the number "half a billion dollars" comes up at some point), encourages Belinda to open her own spa business and fills Belinda up with the hope that she herself will fund the business, even at one point asking her to draw up a business plan. However, when Tanya's attention gets taken up by a romantic interest, she quickly loses interest in Belinda and her business plan. By the end of Tanya's stay at the resort, her enthusiastic encouragement of Belinda's business has faded to: "I'll think about it." As she departs, she leaves Belinda with an envelope of cash. Is it a tip for her services? Is it a second prize "I jerked you around, so here's some money" type thing? Either way, the cash comes off as vulgar, impersonal gesture.
All of this leaves Belinda crestfallen. As part of the plot, anyone could see this coming a mile away; however, it is a powerful and sad statement about wealth, economic mobility, and privilege. Or, is it the writers of the show toying with our sensibilities? Again, in The White Lotus, nothing is just "what it is."
Then, as if that weren't enough, Tanya (unconsciously (she is too genuine to be so devious, that much we know)) plays with Belinda, filling her up with dreams of opening her own business with Tanya as a backer. As a resort employee with (one assumes and is expected to assume) little in the way of assets of her own, Belinda is caught up in this dream, viewing Tanya (again, even if reluctantly) as a way forward. Hardly incidental to the plot is the fact that the business Belinda wants to start is a spa that offers affordable spa treatment to low-income women.
So when something new comes along and Tanya gets lost in her own world and her own desperate craving after affection, she turns her back on Belinda and her business idea, and it becomes that much more of a political act. Tanya is not just turning away from Belinda's business, but from the economic plight of all women of color who lack the funds to start businesses on their own. Tanya could probably fund 100 businesses such as the one Belinda wanted to start -- and not see a dent in her own personal net worth -- and yet, when she has an opportunity to do some good with her money, even on a micro level, she brushes past this opportunity as though it was something on a dessert cart she contemplated for a moment and then decided against...if she even gave it that much thought.
At one level, the meaning is obvious. We are again spoon fed the message that wealth and the access to wealth has the ability to change the trajectory of individuals lives, uplift families and communities, and create opportunities. The lack of access to wealth...creates the opposite of that. For a few days Belinda feels as though she has access to some life-changing capital, but Tanya snatches that chance away, or rather turns away from it as an afterthought.
But...here is where The White Lotus plays with us. This very situation puts Belinda, a black woman, in a victim role, having been "tricked" or given false hope by a rich white "savior." We are expected to feel sad for Belinda and mad at Tanya. Right? Or...by feeling that way, is The White Lotus baiting us into being complicit in this victim narrative, ourselves? What about Belinda's responsibility in all this? Are we meant to assume that Belinda has no agency of her own? Are we meant to assume that Belinda has no hope in life other than to wait for a rich white benefactor to help her out? Are we meant to assume, further, that a woman like Tanya has some obligation to use her wealth to uplift people and enable them to live their dreams? This is The White Lotus messing with our heads.
What about the idea that Belinda could have, all along, been saving money, or applying for a bank loan, or otherwise positioning herself to start her own business? What about the idea of convincing lawmakers to subsidize business loans to women and people of color? What about removing the systemic racism from the financial and legal system that makes it more difficult for women and people of color to participate in entrepreneurial capitalism? No, The White Lotus does not ask us to look at those ideas. The White Lotus is more concerned with leading you into a trap and closing the door behind you so quietly that you don't even realize you're in a trap.
When we see Belinda, in tears, shredding up the business plan she was supposed to give to Tanya, we naturally want to cry for her and -- in the world of the film -- perhaps we should; however, I submit to you that in such moments, if you do cry for poor Belinda, the writers of The White Lotus are snickering at you just like you snickered at Olivia and Paula's limousine liberalism. When it concerns The White Lotus, nothing is as it seems, and there is a double and triple meaning behind everything.
To be continued...
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