In some ways, the first season of the HBO series The White Lotus, the caustic, multi-award-winning comedy-drama set in a luxury resort on the coast of Maui, Hawaii, was a prototype for these movies. It skewered the monstrous entitlement of the self-regarding wealthy, like Shane, the old-money real estate agent who melted down because he was given only the second-best suite. But, unlike recent eat-the-rich cinema, The White Lotus denied its audience the satisfaction of any sort of karmic payback. In the end of the first season, the staff suffered the most, while the careless guests walked away largely unscathed. The queasy political punch came from the reminder of power dynamics that should have been obvious all along.
Throughout the second season of The White Lotus, this time set in an opulent Sicilian hotel, creator Mike White hinted that there would once again be an ideological arc to the show. The season — which opened with the discovery of a corpse floating in the Ionian Sea — seemed obsessed with masculinity as well as money. First there was the Di Grasso family, whose three generations represented three approaches to manhood. Albie was the too-nice guy convinced that gender is a construct. His grandfather, Bert, was a confident chauvinist. Caught between them was Albie’s father, Dominic, at once a compulsive philanderer and a self-described feminist, unable to reconcile his ideals and his desires.
Then there was Cameron, the obnoxious finance bro, and his college roommate, the nerdy and reserved Ethan, whose tech startup made him rich. Cameron cheated on his own wife with Lucia, a prostitute; urged Ethan to cheat on his wife, Harper; and may have slept with Harper himself. There was every reason to think that a reckoning was coming for some of these men, one that would put their power struggles and the privileges that have protected them into a new light. The repeated shots of testa di Moro vases — which represent a Moorish man beheaded by his lover when she learned he was married — seemed to foreshadow consequences for sexual treachery.
But in the end, the elements of The White Lotus ripest for TikTok deconstruction were red herrings. The more significant foreshadowing turned out to come from Cameron’s wife, Daphne, enthusing about true crime on Dateline: “I love it. Husbands murdering their wives. Happens a lot on vacation.” While the finale’s deaths were dramatic, the motive behind them was completely banal. And the other subplots, which seemed to be building toward violent climaxes, were revealed as fairly harmless vacation adventures.
No moral framework determined who won and who lost. Tanya, after taking control of her life by shooting the gay aesthetes conspiring with her husband to have her killed, psyched herself up with a girlboss affirmation — “You got this” — then died in the dumbest way possible. Her husband, Greg, an awful man, presumably gets her fortune. The plucky, sympathetic Lucia made out very well too. There was no comeuppance for Cameron; after almost drowning Ethan in a fight, he and Daphne dined with Ethan and Harper as if nothing happened, toasting the good life. It was all absurd in the existential sense of the word.
In the second episode of this season, Portia, an awkward young personal assistant, complained to Albie about feeling oppressed by the internet. “I just want to live,” she said, adding, “I feel like I just want to meet someone who’s totally ignorant of the discourse.” If The White Lotus is again a cultural harbinger, then in 2023 we’ll see a rash of movies that try to transcend politics rather than comment on them.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michelle Goldberg
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