[HBO’s brilliant The White Lotus reminds us that class society
permeates everywhere, even on a tropical island — something that US
television traditionally does its best to hide.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE WHITE LOTUS IS A PERFECT SATIRE OF TODAY’S RICH  
[[link removed]]


 

Alex Hoculi
August 15, 2021
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ HBO’s brilliant The White Lotus reminds us that class society
permeates everywhere, even on a tropical island — something that US
television traditionally does its best to hide. _

The White Lotus skewers both the entitlements of the rich and their
self-serving pretensions of wokeness. , (HBO)

 

Vacations are a special time, when you can leave that burden called
society behind and dedicate yourself to more narcissistic pursuits.
And be pampered — like a baby.

“They wanna be the only child, the special chosen baby child of the
hotel,” explains resort manager Armond to a colleague in the first
episode of HBO’s _The White Lotus_, a six-episode miniseries about
rich people on vacation in Hawaii. The comedy drama, whose finale airs
tonight, is a scathing satire, neatly availing itself of two TV and
film tropes: trouble in paradise (say, _The Beach_) and comedy in a
hotel (_Fawlty Towers_).

What sets _The White Lotus_ and its eponymous resort hotel apart is
that it serves as a container for America’s social antagonisms, its
guests and staff playing out the drama of class society and its
twenty-first century delusions in a tropical idyll. The principal
members of the superbly cast ensemble number ten in total. The eight
vacationers — a family of four plus friend, a newlywed couple, and a
bereaved solo traveler — are avatars of America’s ruling class and
its professional adjuncts: self-pitying but vicious, woke and
superior. These are complemented by put-upon staff: Belinda, a hotel
masseuse, and the manager, Armond.

Their interactions are frequently overlaid by a doomlike
portentousness — judicially aided by an over-amped score of tribal
drums and crashing waves that ratchet up tension without ever serving
as a substitute for the real drama on screen. The characters’
relations, meanwhile, serve as reminders that society
(_class_ society) permeates everywhere, even on a tropical island,
something that US television traditionally does its best to obfuscate.

The sharpness of the social satire is, it must be said, urged along by
a cheap plot device: we learn in an opening scene flash-forward
that _somebody died_ at the resort during our eight protagonists’
stay. That this trope is well-executed doesn’t stop it from being a
tired cliché. But to showrunner Mike White’s (_School of
Rock_,_ Enlightened_) credit, it works as a hook to get the action
started; thereafter, the dramatic tension is self-sustaining. Even if
the showrunners fluff the death-mystery denouement in tonight’s
finale, it shouldn’t do great damage to the show. 

Instead, the hotel guests generate their own compelling drama.
Newlywed couple Shane (heir to a real estate magnate and an obnoxious
douchebag in a Cornell cap) and Rachel (a clickbait journalist and the
only guest not evidently from money) are in the process of discovering
each other — and discovering they’ve made a huge mistake. Nicole
(high-powered tech company CFO) and her demasculinized husband, Mark,
are parents to Quinn (an alienated and screen-addicted teenager) and
college sophomore Olivia (a self-obsessed and cruel wokester).
Accompanied by Olivia’s college friend Paula (a typical
overdiagnosed and overmedicated Zoomer), the five compose your classic
rich, dysfunctional family. Rounding out this VIP set — these
guests, unlike most, arrived by boat — is tragic Tanya, a botoxed
lady of leisure struggling to process grief for her deceased abusive
mother.

The characters’ needy narcissism spills over into the ambit of the
hotel staff. Alcoholic Tanya latches on to Belinda, the hotel
masseuse, imagining her a “mystical Negro
[[link removed]]”
who can fill the void inside her. Stoic Belinda is left discomfited by
Tanya’s quasi-ecstatic response to Belinda’s therapeutic massages.
Belinda reluctantly accepts Tanya’s invitation to dinner, despite
hotel regulations urging against staff-guest confraternization.
“What?! Is this some kind of _caste system_?” an incredulous
Tanya asks (Oh, more than you know!).

Belinda keeps her cards close to her chest, in an echo of what Armond
(a star turn by Murray Bartlett as a swishy, camp, recovering-addict
hotel manager) advises another employee: “Self-disclosure is
discouraged. . . . You don’t want to be too specific as a presence,
as an identity.” The staff’s physical labor — readying the
resort before guests have even awoken — is added to by the requisite
emotional labor.

Armond, though, is at the end of his rope, teetering back into alcohol
and drug abuse — requiring only a push from douchebag Shane, who
insists on antagonizing Armond for having double-booked the prized
Pineapple Suite. Though honeymooning Shane and Rachel enjoy a
beautiful suite with its own perks, Shane demands his pound of flesh.
“I’m finally being shown some respect!” Shane exclaims after
receiving a bottle of champagne as recompense from Armond. This
“Karen” reimagined as frat boy needs his ego stroked. “People
have been coming for me my whole life,” he bemoans to his wife, his
immense social advantages recast as victimization.

It is these sorts of moments that are so astutely observed in the
show. Mike White has his characters pushed up against one another such
that they land blows, exposing one other’s foibles and
contradictions, without a paragon of virtue ever emerging — be it
personal or political.

In one of the many tense dinner table scenes (a stable of satires of
the bourgeoisie, from Luis Buñuel onwards) social-justice warrior
Olivia denounces her mother Nicole’s career, minimizing her
achievement as a woman at the top of the corporate ladder, and
charging her Big Tech company of “unravelling the social fabric.”
It turns out that Nicole was merely looking for some personal
validation from her daughter, not her political endorsement. “I want
support _as your mother,_” she exclaims — one of the many
instances of confusion between the personal and political, the social
and psychological.

Olivia and Paula are written perfectly as students in their first
years of college, members of a future manager caste who have learned a
little about the world and imagine themselves to know everything. At
one point, Nicole hits back at the pair: “My feeling is most of
these activists, they don’t really want to dismantle the systems of
economic exploitation, not the ones that benefit them — which are
all global, by the way. They just want a better seat at the table of
tyranny.” Olivia retorts, “No, that’s just you, Mom.”

“And what’s your system of belief, Olivia?” Nicole asks. “Not
capitalism. Not socialism. So just cynicism?”

That such a skewering of the radical and self-serving pretensions of
well-to-do wokeness should come from a Hillary-stan girlboss is some
achievement on the part of the show’s creators. When truth emerges
from unlikely mouths, it is a testament to good writing.

Olivia and Paula are students in their first years of college, members
of a future manager caste who imagine themselves to know everything.
(HBO)

And an unlikely mouth it is. In a separate scene, pretty puff-piece
journalist Rachel approaches Nicole, of whom she’d written a profile
some years before, seeking life advice. Rachel feels she is losing her
independence, now that she has married into money, and worries her
career will evaporate (execrable husband Shaun even proposes to
“double whatever they’re paying you” so that his new bride
become the trophy wife of his dreams). It is revealed that in that
piece Rachel argued Nicole had climbed to the top of the corporate
ladder “surfing the Me Too wave, using the victimization of other
women to advance.” No one comes off well, even Rachel — she’s
part of the system, too, now benefiting from the financial security
she has married into.

And this is precisely the point. Ideology is not what you believe, it
is what you do.

Teenage son Quinn, fed up with his sister and mother’s self-serving
arguments, explodes at the table: “What does it matter what we
think? If we think the right things or the wrong things? We all do the
same shit.” A moment of stunning clarity — though one quickly
undermined as we learn what Quinn was driving at: eco-nihilism.
“We’re all still parasites on the Earth. There’s no virtuous
person when we’re all eating the last fish and throwing all our
plastic crap in the ocean. Like a billion animals died in Australia
during the fires. A billion. Where does all the pain go?”

Once again, the guests’ preening narcissism leads them to
continually misrecognize the political as personal and vice versa. For
example, when self-pitying father Mark is traumatized by the impromptu
news he receives (his late father was gay, had led a double life, and
died of AIDS, not cancer as previously believed), unfeeling daughter
Olivia interprets it as an expression of homophobic disgust — yet
another opportunity for her to virtue signal.

This self-involvement can be dangerous. Dipsey, needy Tanya casually
throws out the idea that Belinda could start her own business —
Tanya could even bankroll it! Belinda suddenly eyes an opportunity to
prize herself out of an unsatisfying job at the hotel wellness center
“helping fucked-up rich people” (“Oh, I know _loads_ of
fucked-up rich people,” Tanya spits with some venom — clearly
referring to her abusive parents . . . and maybe herself). Later,
Tanya starts a vacation romance and seems to lose interest in her
erstwhile favorite Belinda. Will Belinda be left in the lurch, holding
a business plan with no addressee?

Tanya’s evident psychological pain encourages a degree of audience
sympathy. As does Olivia’s friend Paula — caught not only in her
friend’s family’s derangement but also in her friend’s jealous
crosshairs. Paula — one of the only non-white guests — identifies
with the plight of Kai, a handsome Hawaiian staff member and his story
of injustice (the hotel stole his family’s land; now he works at the
hotel performing traditional dances for the hotel’s rich patrons).
To “save” Kai, she devises a plan for him to steal a pair of
Nicole’s bracelets worth seventy-five grand each — thereby
exposing him, not her, to a great deal of risk. She only does so,
however, once she learns Olivia had been flirting with Kai, trying to
steal him out from under her. Funny how alleged passions for social
justice so often come interlaced with personal vindictiveness.

That such a show has been made in the contemporary United States may
be an accident of circumstance. It was greenlit because HBO was
looking for something “COVID friendly” from a production point of
view. Shooting on location at a Hawaiian resort hotel fit the bill.
But HBO does have prior. In its satire of the rich — and examination
of American pathologies through the prism of the family
— _Succession_ is an obvious comparison. The latter is a far
grander show, and the better drama, but showrunner Mike White
recognizes
[[link removed]] some
limitations of _Succession_ as satire of the upper-middle class:
“It’s a great show, but it’s very king’s court. You can kind
of otherize them. They’re billionaires. With _White Lotus,_ I
wanted it to be more, like, this is your next-door-neighbor rich
person who is part of the system.”

Some critics have complained
[[link removed]] that
this approach lacks dramatic tension, asking “Why should I care
about these people’s vacation?” But it is the (if not quite
ordinariness, then) lack of exoticism of the show that makes it such
cutting satire. After all, a sense of entitlement is common to
vacationers lower down the social order too, and this is what makes it
such engaging viewing. So much is invested into your one week away
amid fifty-one weeks of slog that the need for it to be perfect and
unencumbered by ordinary social concerns looms large. This is why the
trouble-in-paradise trope, the vacation disaster idea, recurs so
frequently, in fiction as well as in our own fears. It’s what makes
the show so provocative.

But what makes the guests at the White Lotus that bit different is
their evident lack of concern with making a nice time of it; they,
unlike most, wear their leisure lightly — be it Nicole’s
workaholic disposition or Shane’s determination to pursue the resort
manager at the expense of honeymoon bliss.

Here is an important point about class that the show understands —
with its carefully rounded and almost never totally unsympathetic
characters (to be expected from a writer of _Freaks and Geeks_, the
only thing on screen ever to do high school well). Class is not about
inequality, it’s about unfreedom. A major part of the story of class
society is the damaged subjects it creates. Like in _Parasite_, the
staff, the downtrodden, the downstairs to the rich guests’ upstairs,
are not good victims, or good because they’re victims. They have
their foibles and their damage too. But we sympathize because their
agency, their freedom, is far more circumscribed than those they
serve.

This is socially structured. It is not about having good opinions or
being a good person. Ideology works through what you do, not the
thoughts you hold in your head. Understanding things this way
allows _The White Lotus_ to pierce through the endless
self-important culture wars, whose foundation is precisely the
opinions one holds and the opinions of others one holds and the
opinions one presumes the other to hold. And this remains true no
matter how “political” the opinions — say, in the face-off
between those concerned with oppression and privilege and those
defensive of merit and achievement. At the White Lotus’s evening
lobster bake, these sides are materially only divided by an expanse of
table, and maybe a generation.

That their narcissism prevents them from perceiving it is by the by:
What would it change? At issue is that their materially structured
delusions are continually splattered over the US media. This is
contemporary politics — The Discourse — flattening, crushing,
bending out of shape, and sucking out the oxygen from the public
sphere. That place where class politics might be.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE
Facebook
Twitter
Email

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Hochuli [[link removed]] is a writer and
research consultant based in São Paulo, Brazil. He is co-host
of Aufhebunga Bunga [[link removed]], the
global politics podcast, and co-author of Politics at the End of the
End of History.

 

* SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]]
* DONATE [[link removed]]

OUR NEW ISSUE, “THE WORKING CLASS,” IS OUT IN PRINT AND ONLINE
NOW. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
[[link removed]] AT A DISCOUNT TO
GET IT.

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit portside.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]