{"id":275793,"date":"2021-08-15T10:33:54","date_gmt":"2021-08-15T10:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/08\/the-white-lotus-hbo-series-satire-rich-vacation-holiday-resort-hotel-class-review\/"},"modified":"2021-08-15T12:30:16","modified_gmt":"2021-08-15T12:30:16","slug":"the-white-lotus-is-a-perfect-satire-of-todays-rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/08\/15\/the-white-lotus-is-a-perfect-satire-of-todays-rich\/","title":{"rendered":"The White Lotus<\/cite> Is a Perfect Satire of Today\u2019s Rich"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

HBO\u2019s brilliant The White Lotus<\/cite> reminds us that class society permeates everywhere, even on a tropical island \u2014 something that US television traditionally does its best to hide.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n The White Lotus<\/cite> skewers both the entitlements of the rich and their self-serving pretensions of wokeness. (HBO)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Vacations are a special time, when you can leave that burden called society behind and dedicate yourself to more narcissistic pursuits. And be pampered \u2014 like a baby.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey wanna be the only child, the special chosen baby child of the hotel,\u201d explains resort manager Armond to a colleague in the first episode of HBO\u2019s The White Lotus<\/em>, 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<\/em>) and comedy in a hotel (Fawlty Towers<\/em>).<\/p>\n

What sets The White Lotus<\/em> and its eponymous resort hotel apart is that it serves as a container for America\u2019s 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 \u2014 a family of four plus friend, a newlywed couple, and a bereaved solo traveler \u2014 are avatars of America\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Their interactions are frequently overlaid by a doomlike portentousness \u2014 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\u2019 relations, meanwhile, serve as reminders that society (class<\/em> society) permeates everywhere, even on a tropical island, something that US television traditionally does its best to obfuscate.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> at the resort during our eight protagonists\u2019 stay. That this trope is well-executed doesn\u2019t stop it from being a tired clich\u00e9. But to showrunner Mike White\u2019s (School of Rock<\/em>, Enlightened<\/em>) 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\u2019s finale, it shouldn\u2019t do great damage to the show.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and discovering they\u2019ve 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\u2019s college friend Paula (a typical overdiagnosed and overmedicated Zoomer), the five compose your classic rich, dysfunctional family. Rounding out this VIP set \u2014 these guests, unlike most, arrived by boat \u2014 is tragic Tanya, a botoxed lady of leisure struggling to process grief for her deceased abusive mother.<\/p>\n

The characters\u2019 needy narcissism spills over into the ambit of the hotel staff. Alcoholic Tanya latches on to Belinda, the hotel masseuse, imagining her a \u201cmystical Negro<\/a>\u201d who can fill the void inside her. Stoic Belinda is left discomfited by Tanya\u2019s quasi-ecstatic response to Belinda\u2019s therapeutic massages. Belinda reluctantly accepts Tanya\u2019s invitation to dinner, despite hotel regulations urging against staff-guest confraternization. \u201cWhat?! Is this some kind of caste system<\/em>?\u201d an incredulous Tanya asks (Oh, more than you know!).<\/p>\n

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: \u201cSelf-disclosure is discouraged. . . . You don\u2019t want to be too specific as a presence, as an identity.\u201d The staff\u2019s physical labor \u2014 readying the resort before guests have even awoken \u2014 is added to by the requisite emotional labor.<\/p>\n

Armond, though, is at the end of his rope, teetering back into alcohol and drug abuse \u2014 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. \u201cI\u2019m finally being shown some respect!\u201d Shane exclaims after receiving a bottle of champagne as recompense from Armond. This \u201cKaren\u201d reimagined as frat boy needs his ego stroked. \u201cPeople have been coming for me my whole life,\u201d he bemoans to his wife, his immense social advantages recast as victimization.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s foibles and contradictions, without a paragon of virtue ever emerging \u2014 be it personal or political.<\/p>\n

In one of the many tense dinner table scenes (a stable of satires of the bourgeoisie, from Luis Bu\u00f1uel onwards) social-justice warrior Olivia denounces her mother Nicole\u2019s career, minimizing her achievement as a woman at the top of the corporate ladder, and charging her Big Tech company of \u201cunravelling the social fabric.\u201d It turns out that Nicole was merely looking for some personal validation from her daughter, not her political endorsement. \u201cI want support as your mother,<\/em>\u201d she exclaims \u2014 one of the many instances of confusion between the personal and political, the social and psychological.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cMy feeling is most of these activists, they don\u2019t really want to dismantle the systems of economic exploitation, not the ones that benefit them \u2014 which are all global, by the way. They just want a better seat at the table of tyranny.\u201d Olivia retorts, \u201cNo, that\u2019s just you, Mom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd what\u2019s your system of belief, Olivia?\u201d Nicole asks. \u201cNot capitalism. Not socialism. So just cynicism?\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s creators. When truth emerges from unlikely mouths, it is a testament to good writing.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Olivia and Paula are students in their first years of college, members of a future manager caste who imagine themselves to know everything. (HBO)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And an unlikely mouth it is. In a separate scene, pretty puff-piece journalist Rachel approaches Nicole, of whom she\u2019d 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 \u201cdouble whatever they\u2019re paying you\u201d 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 \u201csurfing the Me Too wave, using the victimization of other women to advance.\u201d No one comes off well, even Rachel \u2014 she\u2019s part of the system, too, now benefiting from the financial security she has married into.<\/p>\n

And this is precisely the point. Ideology is not what you believe, it is what you do.<\/p>\n

Teenage son Quinn, fed up with his sister and mother\u2019s self-serving arguments, explodes at the table: \u201cWhat does it matter what we think? If we think the right things or the wrong things? We all do the same shit.\u201d A moment of stunning clarity \u2014 though one quickly undermined as we learn what Quinn was driving at: eco-nihilism. \u201cWe\u2019re all still parasites on the Earth. There\u2019s no virtuous person when we\u2019re 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

Once again, the guests\u2019 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 \u2014 yet another opportunity for her to virtue signal.<\/p>\n

This self-involvement can be dangerous. Dipsey, needy Tanya casually throws out the idea that Belinda could start her own business \u2014 Tanya could even bankroll it! Belinda suddenly eyes an opportunity to prize herself out of an unsatisfying job at the hotel wellness center \u201chelping fucked-up rich people\u201d (\u201cOh, I know loads<\/em> of fucked-up rich people,\u201d Tanya spits with some venom \u2014 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?<\/p>\n

Tanya\u2019s evident psychological pain encourages a degree of audience sympathy. As does Olivia\u2019s friend Paula \u2014 caught not only in her friend\u2019s family\u2019s derangement but also in her friend\u2019s jealous crosshairs. Paula \u2014 one of the only non-white guests \u2014 identifies with the plight of Kai, a handsome Hawaiian staff member and his story of injustice (the hotel stole his family\u2019s land; now he works at the hotel performing traditional dances for the hotel\u2019s rich patrons). To \u201csave\u201d Kai, she devises a plan for him to steal a pair of Nicole\u2019s bracelets worth seventy-five grand each \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cCOVID friendly\u201d 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 \u2014 and examination of American pathologies through the prism of the family \u2014 Succession<\/em> is an obvious comparison. The latter is a far grander show, and the better drama, but showrunner Mike White recognizes<\/a> some limitations of Succession<\/em> as satire of the upper-middle class: \u201cIt\u2019s a great show, but it\u2019s very king\u2019s court. You can kind of otherize them. They\u2019re billionaires. With White Lotus,<\/em> I wanted it to be more, like, this is your next-door-neighbor rich person who is part of the system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some critics have complained<\/a> that this approach lacks dramatic tension, asking \u201cWhy should I care about these people\u2019s vacation?\u201d 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\u2019s what makes the show so provocative.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 be it Nicole\u2019s workaholic disposition or Shane\u2019s determination to pursue the resort manager at the expense of honeymoon bliss.<\/p>\n

Here is an important point about class that the show understands \u2014 with its carefully rounded and almost never totally unsympathetic characters (to be expected from a writer of Freaks and Geeks<\/em>, the only thing on screen ever to do high school well). Class is not about inequality, it\u2019s about unfreedom. A major part of the story of class society is the damaged subjects it creates. Like in Parasite<\/em>, the staff, the downtrodden, the downstairs to the rich guests\u2019 upstairs, are not good victims, or good because they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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 \u201cpolitical\u201d the opinions \u2014 say, in the face-off between those concerned with oppression and privilege and those defensive of merit and achievement. At the White Lotus\u2019s evening lobster bake, these sides are materially only divided by an expanse of table, and maybe a generation.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 The Discourse \u2014 flattening, crushing, bending out of shape, and sucking out the oxygen from the public sphere. That place where class politics might be.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vacations are a special time, when you can leave that burden called society behind and dedicate yourself to more narcissistic pursuits. And be pampered \u2014 like a baby. \u201cThey wanna be the only child, the special chosen baby child of the hotel,\u201d explains resort manager Armond to a colleague in the first episode of HBO\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7666,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275793"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7666"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275793"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275865,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275793\/revisions\/275865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}