Review: Mike White’s The White Lotus Is a Mesmerizing Critique of the American Dream

Often funny and always wicked, the series spends its time patiently rending apart the images its characters have of each other.

The White Lotus
Photo: Mario Perez/HBO

The setup of writer-director Mike White’s The White Lotus reads like an Agatha Christie whodunit: An eccentric assortment of leisure-class strangers come together at an upscale resort—and one of them ends up dead. But there are no idiosyncratic mustachioed Belgians or unassuming English ladies on hand to supply the sequence of events that culminate in murder with a tidy explanation, no single focal point that will eventually restore order. There’s not even much of a mystery to be unraveled, though what plays out over the course of the limited series’s slow-burning six episodes is certainly a kind of unraveling.

The White Lotus opens with two kinds of framing devices. In the first, a flash-forward, Shane (Jake Lacy), a dejected honeymooner whose wife is nowhere to be seen, watches the body of someone who was killed inside the eponymous isolated luxury resort in Hawaii where he’s staying being loaded onto his flight back to the mainland. In a flashback to a week earlier, we see Shane again, now framed within the judgmental gazes of Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) and Paula (Brittany O’Grady), a pair of smart, beautiful, and viciously supercilious college sophomores who are sharing his ferry to the White Lotus resort. Observing the predictable haute bourgeois banality of the conventionally handsome Shane snapping selfies with his delicate-seeming new wife, Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), the two invent biographies for the couple: “She loves him, but …” Olivia says; “… he’s got a small dick,” Paula fills in.

Often funny and always wicked, The White Lotus spends its time patiently rending apart the images its characters have of each other and of themselves, as suppressed feelings break through the cultivated, sanitized façades that comprise their lifestyles. The series is less a situational comedy about the stress of vacation than a satire on white American privilege. But it’s one in which the laughs are often supplanted by intimations of a barely obscured and gathering darkness, and in which the plot often appears subordinate to the seductive atmosphere of Disneyfied decadence gradually sliding into degradation.

Advertisement

This offbeat dramedy hardly counts as Marxist allegory, but its depiction of the pretensions of the ruling class splintering under the weight of inner contradictions might qualify it as a fellow traveler. “They exploit me, I exploit you,” the hotel manager Armond (Murray Bartlett) raves to his employee Dylan (Lukas Gage) in a late episode, in a pitch of desperate abandon. Initially a consummate professional who, in episode one, coaches a new hire that the resort’s pampered guests “just need to feel seen,” Armond functions at times like a dramatic chorus, articulating in fits of frustration or delirium the show’s wry subtextual commentary on the lifestyles of the rich and famous. (At one point, this involves drunkenly invoking Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters” to describe his wakefully slumbering guests.)

Much to White’s credit, the series doesn’t view the upper class getting “woke” as a sufficient solution to its somnambulant march toward death. Olivia’s facility with cultural studies vocabulary doesn’t mean she’s not leveraging her knowledge for personal gain. If Armond is the character most eloquently aware of how this microcosm of post-millennial American society functions, his apparent foil is Shane, the rich bro-boy who enjoys the license that his abundant privilege gives him to not reflect on anything, and whose obsessive need to be kowtowed to leads to the simmering conflict that bubbles up over the course of the series.

But Armond’s surprising perspicacity is also darkly mirrored by Mark (Steve Zahn), Olivia’s father, who often tries to deliver sage, fatherly wisdom even as he constantly fails to achieve any kind of perspective on his own life. “Don’t hide the monkey,” he counsels his son, Quinn (Fred Hechinger), in episode three, providing the teen some dubious (and in context, homophobic) advice about the dual nature of human masculinity. That Armand quotes Romantic poetry while Mark paraphrases a novelty Beatles song neatly sums up the bitterly comic dichotomy the series draws out between the ethos of service workers and their patrons.

Advertisement

That said, Armond and his hotel staff are not necessarily the centerpieces or the embodied moral heart of The White Lotus. The narrative constantly shifts perspective to reverse or undermine the audience’s sympathies. More impressively, while the hook in the framing narrative presents a mystery, White doesn’t structure his story as if it were a mystery box whose solution contains all its meaning. It’s easy to forget that the carefully structured cascade of often highly absurd events we witness will culminate in the death of an unknown resort staffer or guest. The lead-ins between episodes don’t titillate with shocking plot revelations, but with intriguing character moments, like Quinn, the recovering social media addict, encountering the natural beauty of a humpback whale breaching at sunset.

It could be reasonably observed that the hypocrisies of wealthy white vacationers at an exclusive resort built on former native Hawaiian ground constitutes low-hanging pineapples for satire. That The White Lotus tells us that modernity and money corrupt—and suggests that nature and indigenous life may be one possible escape hatch for the prisoners of this lifestyle—hardly makes its take on white, Western culture groundbreaking. However, its simultaneously feverish and methodical demolition of the myth of the innocent vacation makes it a mesmerizing critique of a certain kind of American dream.

Score: 
 Cast: Jake Lacy, Murray Bartlett, Alexandra Daddario, Steve Zahn, Connie Britton, Jennifer Coolidge, Sydney Sweeney, Brittany O’Grady, Fred Hechinger, Natasha Rothwell, Lukas Gage, Molly Shannon  Network: HBO  Buy: Amazon

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.