Many spoilers to follow for The White Lotus
Let’s state the obvious: terrible people make for great entertainment. From the dysfunctional misanthropes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to antiheroes like Walter White, there have been countless explorations of humanity’s darker impulses. Rich people, too, have filled the pages of scripts since the dawn of civilization. With The White Lotus, creator Mike White puts the skewer to the pampered excesses of the rich, and the result is the most gripping season of television in recent memory.
The premise is simple. A group of rich tourists arrive at a luxury resort in Hawaii and wreak havoc upon both each other and the hotel’s employees. Created and shot during the peak of the COVID pandemic, the entire show is a bottle episode, and as the pressure builds, the setting feels increasingly claustrophobic.
What sets the characters of The White Lotus apart from other shows satirizing the white moneyed class is that, while all of them are loathsome to the utmost degree, most are clearly capable of at least some introspection, thus rendering moot perhaps the most compelling argument one might make about the one percent: that they simply don’t know any better. Sure, these people are all one martini away from, “It’s one banana, Michael,” territory, but they aren’t unaware that others perceive them in that manner. Their own children and spouses strongly express to them that their behavior is unhinged, and vice versa. The characters in this show know enough to know better. It would be more accurate to say they refuse to know. And what’s to hold them back from that refusal? Everyone in their orbit is at their service, owed nothing in exchange.
If self-knowledge is the forbidden fruit and money the root of all evil, then these characters are live in a veritable forest. Mark (Steve Zahn making an absolute meal out of his role as an oblivious dad) suffers a testicular cancer scare, which shakes him because his own father died of cancer when he was young. Later, after his tests come back clean, a family member calls and informs Mark that his father died not of cancer, but of AIDS, and had secretly been leading a “second life” as a gay man. This revelation rattles Mark to his core, a reaction which his daughter (Sydney Sweeney) is quick to point out reads as homophobic, and he spends the next chunk of the season going on benders, being appallingly honest with his son, Quinn (Fred Hechinger), at one point comparing sex with Quinn’s mom, Nicole — played by Connie Britton — to eating a bowl of worms, and at another claiming, “We’re all monkeys.” After all of this, however, he has an epiphany. Taking Quinn aside in the pool, Mark explains to his son that he once cheated on Nicole and had to spend years of regret and shame earning her trust back. “There’s the monkey,” he says, “and there’s the man. And sometimes you have to be man enough to stand up to the monkey.” Mark is probably as sympathetic as a rich man gets in this show, but even after his emotional journey, he is no closer to bettering himself. What hope, then, can we have for any of the White Lotus’s guests?
The resort’s staff, meanwhile, are believably redeemable. Most are victims with varying degrees of decency. (We can talk about Armond, played with delightfully demented Aussie energy by Murray Bartlett later, because I want desperately to write a whole essay about how addicts in lower middle-class situations like Armond’s are portrayed in media. Armond’s ultimate fate is, I think, emblematic of the points I’d like to make there. But I digress.)
Take Kai (Kekoa Scott Kekumano), the young waiter Paula (Brittany O’Grady) has been hooking up with and one of several nonwhite cast members exploited by the bourgeoise who swarm the resort. He explains to her that the government illegally seized his family’s land in order to build the hotel, and that he now performs traditional dances for the guests in order to afford to live. This selling-out of their culture, however coerced, makes him a pariah among his fellow native islanders. Later, when he dances at dinner, Paula must watch, and she places the locus of blame for his humiliation squarely on the shoulders of the Mossbacher family whose dime she is vacationing on. Of course, the Mossbachers are happy beneficiaries of global capitalism, their cups overrunning with the spoils of that exploitation, but Paula still crosses a line by asking Kai to rob their hotel room safe while the family is out scuba diving.
Paula, the only Person of Color in the main cast of guests at the resort, risks very little by planting the idea in Kai’s head. While Kai is shortly arrested, his life ruined, Paula will return home with the Mossbachers, her own safety unimpeded. It is a biting commentary on the intersection of race with class stratification. Even a friendly proximity to white money can put you ahead of the curve and have you back on your way to college, where you can forget all about the felony you got your summer fling arrested with.
The general pattern of cause-and-effect on The White Lotus trends downward from the uber-wealthy with no regard to the impact they may have on the lives of the servantry around them. Belinda (Natasha Roswell) the spa manager who Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya strings along on the promise of a business investment which never materializes, winds up with a half-hearted apology and an envelope stuffed with cash when Tanya decides she doesn’t want any more “transactional relationships” in her life. (By the way, where did she get that stack of money? She never had time to go to the bank. Does she just carry all of that around with her?)
The same point is made more sordidly by Armond earlier in the same episode. “They exploit me, I exploit you,” says Armond, who has traded the promise of a pay raise and flex shifts to his young employee, Dillon (Lukas Gage), in exchange for sex. In the world of The White Lotus, your freedom is defined by your station, by who pays your salary, therein circumscribed and immutable.
The political resonance of the show certainly feels all the larger in quasi-post-pandemic America. While millions are at risk of eviction, with a teetering work economy and a new wave of COVID tearing through the population while politicians seem eager to do anything but help, the careless lives of the leisure class grate all the more sharply against our sensibilities. For all their numerous flaws, the staff of The White Lotus resort are human — in fact, it is precisely those flaws which make them so endearing — and in their humanity we relate far more with them than with the guests they cater to. By the show’s end, Shane (Jake Lacy), the scion of a real estate magnate implied to be the wealthiest of the bunch, straight up murders the hotel manager and barely speaks with the police before boarding a plane back to whichever Ivy League fraternity spawned him. His ability to inflict violence and escape unscathed is an inevitable conclusion, one we can sense from the show’s opening scene, and yet seeing it come to pass does not sting any less.
The late critic and novelist John Berger once wrote,
During the Gulag, political prisoners, categorized as criminals, were reduced to slave laborers. Today millions of brutally exploited workers are being reduced to the status of criminals. The Gulag equation ‘criminal = slave laborer’ has been rewritten by neoliberalism to become ‘worker = hidden criminal.’ The whole drama of global migration is expressed in this new formula; those who work are latent criminals. When accused, they are found guilty of trying at all costs to survive.
The beaches of Hawaii may seem the furthest thing from a Siberian Gulag, but over the anxiety-inducing score from Cristobal Tapia de Veer, the guests’ disdainful treatment of their hosts becomes akin to the taskmaster’s boot. We see, domino style, the cascading effects of wealth and power. Little by little, the velvet glove of the moneyed class slips, revealing the iron fist within. They are rendered simultaneously powerful and pathetic, controlling and cowardly. Just like us, they are human. The difference is that the world will never punish them for it.
-M.A.M.