The White Lotus sucks, and why that matters

In all of cinema there are few things I like better than an intimate moment in a diner, and the extended pancake scene that constitutes the ninth episode of Euphoria is a classic, a kind of photonegative It’s A Wonderful Life in which the angel, Ali this time instead of Clarence, attempts to forestall a suicide on Christmas Eve. In lieu of Clarence’s heavenly projections, Ali has only his voice and experiences with Alcoholic Anonymous’s Twelve Steps. His task is to sell his charge, the teenage user Rue, on the possibility, and desirability, of salvation from drug addiction-unto-death. Like George Bailey, she’s reached a dead end, but unlike George, she has a bleak history of pain to draw on for evidence about who she is. Ali persists. “The sentence you’ve given your- self is that you, Rue Bennett, are beyond forgiveness. That punishment is way too harsh, and it’s also way too easy. It allows you to keep doing exactly what you’re doing without changing, because you deserve it...This is why the world keeps getting worse. People keep doing shit that we deem unforgivable and then in return they decide there’s no reason to change. So now you got a whole bunch of people running around who don’t give a fuck about redemption. That’s scary.”

For a series-length illustration of his point, see The White Lotus, Season 2, which is replete with people doing shit we deem unforgivable and not giving a fuck about re- demption. What scared me about the show, which was puerile, was that the writer, Mike White, also didn’t seem to give a fuck about redemption, or justice; neither did a good portion of its audience, which mistook the show for a takedown of the rich, when it was, instead, an irresponsible hall pass of the sort we really can’t afford to be handing out right now.

It is not a deep take on The White Lotus to say that none of the characters are lik- able. I understand that the repulsiveness is a mirror positioned to show the audience our resemblance to the gallery of character failures onscreen, and that the potentially redeemable characters are offscreen: you and me. The mirror works as well as it does because its characters have just enough complexity to disguise the fact that each is a reality TV-style typecast of a privileged American or Brit—the naif new money, the self- righteous employment lawyer, the recent Stanford grad, and so on—but their unrelent- ing childishness lost my trust that they had anything meaningful to say about me.

Take the dynamic between Ethan, who recently sold his tech company, and his wife Harper, an employment lawyer. Although both are, apparently, socially aware pro- fessionals in their mid- thirties—able to use words like "white passing”—neither seems to have the emotional-communication skill set to navigate what should have been some softball dilemmas in their relationship. Why are they on this vacation in the first place? Couldn't they have discussed their friendship with Cameron and Daphne, as well as their new money and the problems it would present them, before they got to Italy? Is this really the first time they are problem-solving around their sex life? Is Ethan really so blockheaded that he can't accede or emote when his wife is coming on to him, and such a weakling that he will hang around while his friend, predictably, cheats? The answers to these questions may be yes. There are people for whom this would be so, maybe especially in the tech-finance-Hollywood Bropocalypse these characters arise from.

But among the people I know watching The White Lotus, the answers would be no. Because we've grown in our thirties, and learned many lessons these characters seem to have skipped, we would have avoided many of the interpersonal pitfalls on which its plot relies. And though we certainly haven't explored moneyed white vi- ciousness from every conceivable angle (there are just too many), we know some things about this now, and have a lot of new language. If we are anxious to see our- selves in these unsavory people, it’s because we retain the liberal instinct to self-flagi- late, and The White Lotus exploits this, but to our credit, we have less in common with Ethan, Harper, and the rest than the show wants to think.

Maybe we are not the target audience, and The White Lotus is speaking directly to the elite, in order to destabilize them with its satire, but if so it misses badly, as it fails to deliver a character one could safely identify with, or any kind of real justice through which the viewer, put on notice, could adjust their personal behavior.

A rule of storytelling is that every person is a protagonist in their own narrative, and will reject a storyline in which they are cast as the villain, dupe, or fall guy. People don’t want those roles for themselves. (This holds for any type of storytelling, includ- ing the stories we tell about our friends, families, political enemies, and even our- selves. When Rue gives in to the idea that she’s an irredeemable “piece of shit” is ex- actly when she resigns to eventual suicide.)

Most viewers of The White Lotus will eventually reject an identification with the characters, no mater how alike they may feel at first, because of the derision the show cynically heaps upon them. Again and again, the path to protagonism seems depress- ingly blocked for these characters as even their softest traits get painted black. We see Albie blocked when his attempt to chide his father and grandfather on the patriarchy is presented as needling, meek and ineffective. The show then ridicules his judge- ments of the elder generation. "We used to respect the old," says his grandfather. "Now we're just reminders of the offensive past." Shortly, Albie turns to his father's vices and barters his mother's emotional safety for a 50k euro endowment to a gf he just met, who plays him. Harper's awareness of the world’s power dynamics is seen to cause buzzkill marital frigidity and, god forbid, endanger the vibe among the incuri- ous elite. Dom's sexual addiction is an unbeatable frailty caused and made lonelier by the fact that one's male family can't be counted on for emotional support, only lies and hypocritical outrage. Tanya's longing for love and emotional fragility are foolishly attached to yet another untrustworthy man. Portia, who I thought may be the show's moral foil, falls subject to a rote “bored with the nice guy” narrative. She has her heart broken and her phone stolen by yet another toxic man. All of the Italians are semi-cari- catures. The male gays, laughably, would kill for interior (design) beauty. With the ex- ception of, possibly, Valentina, there is no one with whom to cast your lot—and no vi- sion of how your lot would be improved if you did—so the show turns into a spectator circus. We’re not growing with any of these characters, because we can’t identify with any of them, because they aren’t growing themselves.

This would be fine if The White Lotus instead delivered some kind of plausible jus- tice to any of these characters, but it frustratingly does not. After an appalling display of unchecked sex drive and will to power, culminating in a poisonous emo-homicidal showdown—which tracks with a typical endgame plot line from the Transformers series —almost everyone still alive seems frankly fine. The two couples come to virtually no harm. At the end, Cameron and Daphne appear glowing, untroubled. Ethan and Harper’s sex life miraculously reignites through (no, good guess, but not better “com- munication and trust”) just having sex! The DeGrassos return home negligibly poorer but no worse for wear, and are back to their misogyny. Portia’s kidnapping hasn’t left her visibly scarred. And though Tanya dies, it happens at the hands, not of poetic fate, but the disinterested villain gravity. We’ve spent seven episodes building toward a karmic takedown for these despicable people, but the losers are the viewers, who are left where we started: with the impression that, with enough money, there are no con- sequences, and nothing matters. Maybe these rich people feel sad inside? Fine. But so does the large section of America whose material security is challenged by the social, business, and political practices of the winner-take-all economy. We see none of these people. And if this show was a cathartic vehicle in which the elite get to whisper their sadness to the na- tion, as if in solidarity, while saying next to nothing about the effects of their power hunger, then eww.

Maybe it was all just for fun? Nah. It is a mistake to the subscribe to the “aww come on it was all just for fun” winking and jabbing that does so much work to forgive the unforgivable in our culture. Plus, the show itself would reject this reading. It is satire. It clearly has something it wants to say. And besides, even if it is just entertainment, we should never forget the massive soft power that Hollywood and its financial backers can’t but use to influence our perceptions and debates.

Think about the vast and varied violences that the movies have done to Black peo- ple over the last century, on and offscreen, for “entertainment,” and the impact of that violence on the public perception of communities of color. Think about the industry's tremendous disregard for women. I am not for creating a permanent class of villains out of anyone in our culture, including the wealthy (they can do that for themselves), but no mass-market production gets to ignore representation, and The White Lotus is representing the rich in a certain, miscalculated way.

People are talking about The White Lotus because it points a finger near the 1% and says, "See?" Yet the effect of the mild critique is to serve as a kind of permission structure for yet more selfish nihilism from just these sorts of people. Unlike Rue in the diner, for whom nothing matters because she has narratively condemned herself, for The White Lotus’s rich, nothing matters because they float on a cloud of privilege, and this is why they also have no belief in redemption or motivation for change. The White Lotus thus becomes a part of the plutocracy’s fortress of “don’t-look- here”. In this bargain, we don’t question the ascendancy of the rich, and in exchange, we get to watch content in which their (highly paid) avatars fill homes and spiritual vacuums with luxury goods and experiences. The money from the creation of these goods and experiences, demonstrably, does not trickle down, but the behavior pat- tern does, so that for many viewers the dominant emotion one has while watching Daphne swipe her card is is a kind of comfortable envy. “I have problems too,” we seem to say, “and if I had that kind of money, I could ignore them in Sicily, instead of in front of HBO. But look, they’re no better than me! They behave badly and feel sad too!” And this it the point. We’ll live with their tax breaks and bailouts, thank them for their charitable contributions, keep our affordable housing and kids out of their spa- ces, and pay their monopolies while they to strip the social contract of meaning, so long as we can plausibly believe it leaves them maladjusted, miserable, and mean. It’s a distraction that works for us, but it works much better for them, since it also rein- forces the Promethean self-image that they suffer for the magnitude of their important works, without which society would surely crumble. They serve us this content them- selves, on their networks (HBO is owned by TimeWarner). Every once in a while, if we get too close, they'll reluctantly cough up one of their own, like the Sacklers, whose drugs Rue consumes, or like Harvey Weinstein, who has his cheap proxy in The White Lotus. But this is not what mainstream class accountability looks like.

Neither is this a strong critique of masculinity. In the post-#MeToo world, The White Lotus makes no news when it demonstrates that toxic masculinity and the patri- archy are destructive. What would be fresh is seeing culturally-literate, emotionally-ag- ile men emerging from the ashes as a desperately needed solution to the question "How to Be A Man in 2022?” for adults left bereft by their loss of innocence, but eager to do better. Instead, it struck me as of a piece with the tragically forlorn manhood that Gen-X writers have been serving us for going on two decades—see for example some of the works of Judd Apatow, or shows like Succession, or even _Curb Your Enthusias- m_—without any compensating vision for how to move on from that cultural moment. We've laughed with some of these characters, seen them roasted, and we've been made to empathize with them, pathetically. But this vision of stunted manhood is tired, and it has done enough to shut down the conversation about what masculinity could actually look like if we imagined alternatives. It’s not fun anymore.

Does all storytelling have to be responsible, and who gets to say what responsible means? I'll say this: There is such a thing as irresponsible storytelling. We know this now. Don’t yell “stolen” in a crowded election. And don’t yell “inevitable, tragic, doomed” to male millionaires. It only encourages them. Responsibility needs to be among the criteria we consider as we evaluate, produce, and consume stories: we need to examine the intention of a narrative, as well as its effect, and ask “Can we af- ford this?” In our shared, constructed reality, stories are told before they become real. Asking for more responsibility out of our public storytellers is exactly where we need to start to fix our culture, not the end product we can expect when our culture is "fixed".

As for The White Lotus, I subscribe to the idea that, if we are going to make it through this lifetime without severe social cataclysm, that we are going to need to talk our way down from extreme plutocracy, which, given the captured state of power in the United States today, means that the rich will have to reform themselves: through fear, pressure, coercion, self-interest or altruism they will have to believe in the desir- ability of change as they divest from addictive destructions and embrace caretaking as the 21st century's new mega-model, where consumption was the 20th's. Responsi- ble storytelling at this moment in history is that which brings people along in this be- lief. We deserve to catch a glimpse of an alternative reality in which our miseries are offered a middle offramp forward—different, more beautiful, possible. Barring that, we deserve satire that saves space for everyone on the future justice committee, but in The White Lotus we get neither.

HBO itself, along with the other streamers, has shown that responsible TV can be deeply gratifying and entertaining. Many recent shows, including Euphoria and Inse- cure, demonstrate that well-rounded characters—characters that take our grasping at- tempts at morality and growth seriously—can be dark and funny, human and dramatic, moving and satirical too.

For a different contrast, see the writing coming out of Sex Education and Ted Las- so. Both offer an alternative universe for our consideration: a world that is just like ours, except that the characters consistently communicate about life's important, chal- lenging matters, and eventually find a way through, to growth and understanding. In Sex Ed, Principal Groff, a character nearly as repellent as those in The White Lotus, struggles to cope with his estrangement from his job, his wife, his son, and the world at large; his change as he finds acceptance and cooking was deeply moving. His son's transformation from bully to sensitivity was equally compelling. On Ted Lasso, Han- nah's transition from vindictiveness to vulnerability, for example when she sings karaoke in front of the team, or Jamie's tempering in the face of rejection, offer other examples. Many other shows, written by younger writers and people of color, are do- ing this really well.

Can we get some of this treatment applied to the uber-rich, whose character flaws, like those of the Greek Gods, really are destroying the world? Not because they de- serve it, but because they need to see themselves as changeable moral agents, just like the rest of us, and because it could be culturally therapeutic?

As we struggle with race, class, gender, power, and change in social life, we need to be able to highlight and center the parts of ourselves that are good and worthy.

Doing so requires admitting that we have some. It requires seeing moments of up- ward realization, of redemption, even and especially within characters so wretched. The culture industry should be leading on this. Instead, The White Lotus seems to be saying that money, whiteness, and adulthood are inevitably vilifying, and that millenni- al/Gen-Z attempts to rectify or to imagine alternatives—to care—are inevitably alienat- ing and doomed. Not only do we need that not to be the case, it is not the case, and saying it’s so is part of the problem facing efforts to make real change.