Instances of Crypto-Transgression #4: The White Lotus, by Adam Lehrer

With a most simple narrative pitch, "Rich People on Vacation," Mike White creates a show that addresses the totality of contemporary life

A great painter (Duchamp) puts a toilet in an art gallery (Fountain.) A great novelist (Capote) investigates a murder (In Cold Blood). A simple concept is that which often yields the most potent of art. Da Vinci called simplicity “the ultimate sophistication.” Indeed, for when the artist gives themselves very strict parameters to work within, it’s almost like it allows him to filter out all the proverbial bullshit and narrowly focus on the FUCKING TRUTH. It shouldn’t be too surprising then that screenwriter and director Mike White, best known for Jack Black vehicle School of Rock and his brief but beloved HBO series Enlightened, is one of the few artists alive who really understands the moment that we’re in. His colossal monster of a hit HBO series, The White Lotus, is among the most elegantly simplistic of narrative constructions I’ve come across: rich people go on vacation. And in this construction, White has stretched The White Lotus in its second season out to be a grandiose, surreal, operatic art-porn that literally says everything about the world that we’re inhabiting, right now, in 2022.

Those who have watched The White Lotus all the way through last night’s stunning and orchestral S2 finale might even find the series a strange candidate for the crypto-transgression theory, at least according to the aesthetic criteria that I’ve outlined in the crypto-transgression essays I’ve previously published. Infidelity. Prostitution. Uncle-nephew incest. It’s all very naughty and not all that cryptic about its transgression. But I’d like to take everyone back to the beginning of S1, when bourgeois characters portrayed by an assortment of actors ranging from iconic (Connie Britton, Jennifer Coolidge) to dreadfully underrated (Steve Zahn, Murray Bartlett) to the positively cummies inducing (Alexandra Daddario, Sydney Sweeney) first descended upon the fictional White Lotus resort in Hawaii. While it was clear that the show had an undeniable vibe, a seductive feeling accentuated by the extreme physical beauty of both the setting and the actors, that drew you in, I’d wager that the vast majority of us got absorbed into the narrative by the “whodunit?” device of figuring out who the corpse is in the show’s first sequence. In fact, White has stated that he used the dead body angle for this exact purpose: drawing us into the particular dreamscape of The White Lotus. “Had I only known if I’d put a dead body at the beginning of Enlightened, maybe people would’ve watched Enlightened," he said.

The White Lotus at first appeared to have all the trappings of yet another HBO prestige drama series. It was elegantly made, expensive looking, and made various rhetorical and narrative gestures to contemporary politics and social criticisms. And then, with every episode, it became clear that White’s worldview stands in sharp contrast to the vast majority of hacks and creatives who currently populate Hollywood, and a delightful reactionary streak floated closer to the episode with every episode.

First, there was the breakdown of Armand, the hotel manager portrayed by Bartlett, who becomes so exhausted by his precarious class status as a middle manager forced to exploit his workers while he is exploited by a multinational conglomerate all while having to liaise between the often bizarre demands of his ruling class guests against the often arbitrary rules of his ruling class bosses. Armand’s breakdown was at first slow, managing a crisis of a worker in labor that he nevertheless pulls off, and then rapid, finding the bag of pharma goodies left behind by the characters Olivia (Sweeney) and Paula (Brittany O’Grady) that entices him to say “fuck it” and leave his white knuckled sobriety behind him. Armand, spurred by a burning hatred for the guest Shane Patton (Jake Lacy) who just won’t let a booking mistake go, reverts to what the viewer can assume is a prior state of homosexual debauchery. Mike White, who has said he longs for homosexuality depicted with transgression, takes much pity on Armand, a man who has found himself forced into the role of the “friendly fag” by his job, and asks the audience to understand his backslide towards degeneracy. So, when Armand finally makes a pass at his favorite bellboy — “I’m obsessed with you, I want to get you naked, what do I got to do?” — we don’t condemn him. Instead, White forces us to ask ourselves: “When did we let ourselves get so repressed? When did we decide to lose touch with our base desires, and pretend that we don’t all share them?” White’s disdain for the sanitization of both culture and day to day social life is clear. What the fuck happened to our libidos?

Further evidence of something excitingly negationist in the first season is in White’s depiction of the aforementioned Paula. Paula is Olivia’s best friend, invited to spend vacation with Olivia’s parents, Nicole and Mark Mossbacher (Britton and Zahn) and brother Quinn (Fred Hechinger.) At first, Paula and Olivia are thick as thieves, bonding over sarcasm, critical theory, and the distinct feeling that they are intellectually superior to Olivia’s slightly out-of-touch, Gen X bourgeois parents. Overtime, however, the extent of Paula’s rage feels theatrical and misguided to the point where you’re thinking: “How dare this spoiled girl treat these nice people who took her on this vacation so poorly!” Oh, did I mention that Paula is a POC, of sorts? And the way that she speaks to Nicole, in particular, is repulsive. White appears to have a real issue with the idea of the “white Karen,” because even though Nicole falls into that stereotype, White shows her favorably as someone who has worked her ass off mercilessly to provide for her family only to find find herself in a culture where her work is discredited, either because she’s a “Karen” or because bloggers (like the one portrayed by Daddario) don’t think women can achieve absent the aid of #MeToo. Paula, despite being in Hawaii for free, becomes depressed and starts fucking a Hawaiian tiki dancer named Kai.

Finding out the combination to a safe where the family keeps an expensive watch, Paula passes the combination onto her lover and talks him into stealing it, with disastrous results. The situation ruins the dancer’s life, and only strengthens the bond of the family. Paula, however, gets away with it entirely. This is where I fell in love with The White Lotus. I can’t imagine another TV creator treating Paula as anything other than the sympathetic heroine, and yet here she’s a villain. White is not impressed with the innate rage she feels towards the wealthy white family that has offered her their kindness. He accurately identifies her anger as not the rage of the proletarian, but the resentment of the over-educated petty bourgeois. Paula’s rage is a ressentiment. She’s not mad at a world that allows that kind of wealth to exist, no – she’s mad that she doesn’t have access to that kind of wealth. Paula’s disposition is of course the disposition of all social movements in the US, from #MeToo to #BLM, and it doesn’t take too much textual decoding to identify what White communicates here.

And with all these delightful gestural provocations sprinkled throughout the show’s first season, nothing could have prepared me for the epic scale and embedded transgressive content of S2. White has decided to center every season around a well-worn philosophical theme. Season 1 in Hawaii was money, and Season 2 in Sicily is all about the sex, baby! Indeed, the gorgeousness of the vast majority of the cast is worth the price of admission alone, but what makes you stick around is the way that White dissects sexuality in all its various permutations: love, erotic, transactional. They’re all there, often intertwined and dialectical. Season 1 already established Mike White as perhaps the most gifted casting director in Hollywood — and, believe me, the ability to cast a show or a film is an underrated artistic skill on its own — and the second season has blown that first cast out of the water. Again, with a mix of icons (Michael Imperioli, a returning Jennifer Coolidge) and an assortment of total unknowns who all effortlessly pull off their roles (Haley Lu Richardson, Leo Woodall), White employs a collagist approach to human personality that makes the show’s dialog and conversational sequences nothing short of a fucking delight to watch.

There are the Italian whores, the jaw droppingly beautiful Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and the cute but dowdy aspirant lounge singer Mia (Beatrice Grannó), who throughout the series fuck their ways towards the achievements of their respective goals, almost as if White understands that in a deeply spiritually bereft late modernity where commerce reigns supreme ,she who understands that sex is, at root, a transactional act will most benefit from their sexuality. The sexual certainty of Mia and Lucia is sharply contrasted with the sexual woes of three generations of DiGrasso men: grandpa Bert (F. Murray Abraham), father Dominic (Imperioli,) and son Albie (Adam DiMarco,) traveling to Siciliy together in an attempt to track down and possibly reunite with their family in the old country (they do and no, it doesn’t go well.) Bert’s a womanizing widower, shielded by his generational norms from the harm that he caused his late wife and to his son, whose now a sex addict himself with a marriage on the rocks. But unlike Bert, Dominic is a Gen-X product of second wave feminism, instilled with deep self-hatred concerning his perversions and failure to respect his wife according to the norms of his generation. Albie, on the other hand, seems just as horny as his elders, but is brainwashed by the political sloganeering of Gen-Z and also carrying his own sexual complex borne out of disgust with dad and grandpa’s womanizing. He wants to be better than them, but White suggests that his failure to reconcile with his own male libido is a kind of cultural castration being inflicted upon an entire generation of men (based.) This is emphasized by Albie’s excessive killing of the mood with Portia (Richardson), who he seems to have a love connection with but can’t take charge, overly concerned with fluid concepts around consent and respect of women to the point that he seems to shrivel her labia. Nietzsche wrote that “The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reaches into the pinnacle of his spirit.” Sexually deadened by social media and screeching feminist professors, Albie’s actual spirit suffers. It's suppressed. Bummer. All of these men wrestle with their sexuality and their romantic natures — a most Italian of predicaments, to be sure — whereas the whores walk through life with songs in their hearts, unburdened by such beliefs because they’ve come to terms with desire as a capitalist enterprise.

There’s college buddies Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Cameron (Theo James) and their respective gorgeous brides Harper (Aubrey Plaza) and my personal favorite character Daphne (Meghann Fahy). White makes fascinating distinctions between the two couples throughout the season. Ethan is a late bloomer – a nerd who didn’t realize how hot he is until striking rich after he was married (and years of an intense running and calisthenics regimen.) Cameron and Harper are suffering a sexual bout, largely due to what White suggests is the couple’s rigorous honesty with one another. The idea that honesty might not solely be the best policy in marital affairs is a provocative one, but one that strikes true. They’ve lost mystery in their love, and with the mystery has gone desire. Cameron, on the other hand, is a hardened fuck boy, the type of obnoxiously handsome and charming type who has no doubt been over-sexed since his teen years. Cameron is horny as all fuck and can’t stop playing grab ass with every sexy young woman he comes into contact with, demonstrating an absence of consciousness about his predilections that borders on the sociopathic. And yet, he absolutely adores Daphne, showers her with love and affection, and receives it back in kind. Daphne too is shown to have some sense of agency in these matters – she both knows about Cameron’s extracurricular fucking and also finds ways to redirect his wandering eye towards her, saying more than once that she absolutely refuses to be a victim. They’ve made their marriage a game, and they fucking love playing it. Ethan, on the other hand, compulsively runs and compulsively jerks his dick off to porn, clearly disconnected from his joie de vivre and ignoring Harper’s emotional and sexual needs. In White’s warped, crypto-transgressive vision, it is the utterly faithful couple that has deep marital issues and could learn a thing or two from the less than faithful couple. Brilliant. And true. There’s SO MUCH FUCKING TRUTH in The White Lotus that if often makes me feel like crying out with joy and recognition.

I loved all of these characters. I saw my own feelings about the world, my spiritual malaise and my alienation and my qualms with social orthodoxy, reflected in them. By comparison, White’s decision to bring Coolidge’s instantly iconic Tanya, a billionaire heiress from San Francisco with drink, drug and mental problems who spends the first season attempting to spread her mother’s ashes in the ocean before shockingly finding love with a single average joe type named Greg (Jon Gries,) a slightly befuddling one. As pleasurable as it is to watch Coolidge at the peak of her neurosis and glamor, the first three episodes in Italy didn’t give Tanya much to do. We learned that her marriage to Greg is already on the rocks, though few amongst us were all that surprised about it. We learned that she made Greg sign a prenup – a source of tension in their marriage (more so than we could have initially assumed, as it turned out.) And we meet her long suffering assistant, Portia, and Greg is furious to discover that Tanya brought her on their romantic vacation. So we get a couple episodes of Tanya driving her husband insane, torturing her assistant who she demands remain invisible, but close. And then, the narrative layers. Greg gets a late night phone call from a mystery associate, who he reminds that Tanya is “clueless,” before breaking the news to Tanya that he has to leave for a few days due to a work obligation. His reason? Well, he signed a prenup. How could he support himself if things didn’t work out between them? And then, Tanya gets an operatic send-off into death so cinematic it warrants the designation of “film within the series,” and it’s fucking glorious.

Once Greg leaves Sicily, Tanya befriends a British fag named Quentin (the spectacularly hard-to-read Tom Hollander) and his merry band of creepy and possibly sinister homosexuals. Quentin is, on-the-surface, flabbergasted by Tanya’s undeniable sense of vintage glamor, and befriends her by inviting her to drinks at a beach club. Tanya brings her suffering assistant Portia, who finds herself charmed by Quentin’s handsome and strangely proletarian seeming nephew Jack (Woodall.) The two seem to actually be having a good time. Tanya laps up the compliments, and Portia gets fucked by a man who seems to have his balls, standing in sharp contrast to the effete and sexually paralyzed Albie. They decide to venture with Quentin and his gang to his decadent, old world aristocratic villa in Palermo. Jack treats Portia to a night on the town. Tanya goes to the opera, and is brought to tears by Madame Butterfly. Her and Quentin even share an impassioned conversation about the importance that beauty holds for them. Tanya lives for it. Quentin would fucking DIE for it. And for a moment, it feels like White is waxing lyrical on the loneliness of being in love with art in a world that no longer has much use for it through the mournful voices of these two fascinating, aging characters. And then, well…. Then things get really fucking weird.

Awakened in the night by strange noises, Tanya walks in on Jack fucking his “uncle” in the ass. Clearly disturbed, she tells Portia she needs to slow down with this guy and worries that she doesn’t think Jack and Quentin are related, but doesn’t explain further. Blinded by her own narcissism and the first real sense of fun she’s felt in ages, she keeps her guard down. Jack takes Portia back into town, and Portia starts to get the sense that Jack’s charisma is a lot darker than she could have initially detected (it’s a safe rule of thumb: infallible charm is a bad sign, wake the FUCK up Portia!) Tanya, meanwhile, is the guest of honor at an old money homosexual rager and blasts booze and cocaine with a well-hung La Cosa Nostra-affiliated heterosexual. Just before she gets fucked, however, Tanya finds a picture of what appears to be a much younger Quentin AND TANYA’S FUCKING HUSBAND GREG! Nodding towards the conversation that the two had previously, when Quentin recounts falling in love once with a heterosexual cowboy on a ranch in Colorado, and it turns out Greg IS that cowboy. At this point, the audience knows what’s going on: Greg has hired an old friend with criminal connections to get the money denied to him by the prenup. In all likelihood, that means he needs Tanya dead, and the ominous framing of Tanya being sexually worshipped by the mafioso against beautiful opera music doesn’t bode well for her.

In the show’s stunning finale — seriously, at 90 minutes the finale is likely not just the best TV episode of the year, but even the best cinematic experience, period — Tanya and Portia finally figure it all out over the phone. Portia manages to guilt her handsome captor into freeing her, but Tanya is stuck on a boat with Quentin, the mafioso, and the sinister homos, and she is terrified. The show morphs into a claustrophobic thriller as Tanya makes all manner of attempts to get off the boat to safety, but sees no success. Finally, she makes a mad dash to grab the well-hung gangster’s black bag and confirms her suspicions: it’s full of rope, tape and a handgun. In a state of extreme exasperation, Tanya manages to murder all of her potential assassins. She then walks up to Quentin, rapidly bleeding out, and asks him: “Is Greg cheating on me? I know you know!” The man plotted her murder and her deluded, narcotized mind still can only worry about his infidelity. Hilarious! Finally, attempting to escape, Tanya falls off the boat and smacks her head on the dingy. It is revealed that she is the body washed up in the ocean at the beginning of the season, and the other bodies were her potential murderers.

“In Italian opera, the women are supposed to cry and die,” says White in an interview with he and Coolidge. “And I just imagined that that could be an appropriate story for the site of Sicily and this battle of the sexes, and Tanya is a victim of that.”

Mike White: hats off. Brilliant.

2022 has been, against all odds, a resuscitation of the cinematic arts. Blonde. Vortex. Tár. Terrifier 2. Crimes of the Future. There were so many masterpieces that I found myself elated. Something in the culture IS changing. And The White Lotus is a part of that, but perhaps even more so. It benefits, as outlined here, from its formal elegance and narrative simplicity. Well, no. The narrative is quite complicated, but the SET-UP of the series and the tight parameters that White works within are what allows White to make this series so much more than the sum of its parts. Who knew a show about vacations could so deftly address the totality of universal human experience: money and sex, exploitation and alienation, narcissism and ego. All of it. Moreover, White addresses these concepts with a unique point of view that refuses to capitulate to the ideology of his HBO overlords. The so-called “marginalized” characters are not the infallible heroes. The asshole, self-obsessed, and often morbid rich characters are certainly not the villains. With arguably the simplest set-up on prestige television, White renders the most complicated depiction of human social relations anywhere in pop culture.

The show’s shift of focus from class antagonism to sexual anxieties was not, of course, without its detractors. Libtard critics, likely dismayed that they had a harder time bending S2’s narrative according to their ideological whims, made limp dicked criticisms of it throughout the series. “In Hawaii, White put class criticism first and cis-het marital tension second,” writes the insufferable Roxana Hadidi. “Without a greater guiding thesis about why marriage reaffirms gender roles for people who otherwise consider themselves progressive, The White Lotus feels defanged.” HAH! Are you retarded, Roxana? Defanged? I think what Roxana is bothered by is not by the show’s alleged defanging, but the fact that the show is baring its teeth less at the bourgeois and more at people like Roxana – the people who refuse to see that so-called cis-het relations are still the most common human relations on Earth and, thus, worthy of artistic depictions.

Do audiences share Roxana’s concerns about the direction of the series? Evidently, fuck no. The S2 finale drew over FOUR MILLION viewers, doubling its previous high from the penultimate episode of the season. This means that pop culture consumers are feeling similarly to Mike White. They are sick of someone like Paula being posited as the victimized heroine. They are tired of pretending that women are infallibly “good.” They no longer want to look at a horny, rich white man and see nothing but one-dimensional evil. White has done the unthinkable with this series. He has created a show that draws the viewer in with its simplistic and oh-so TELEVISION narrative set-up and uses the set-up to complicate the viewer’s understanding of social reality. Certainly, there are formal and narrative precedents to this series. Polanski’s Knife in the Water, Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, and Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach are all great films that similarly use the vacation set-up to weave complicated images that evoke the surreality and anxiety of human relationships. Mentally, I’ve even connected White’s vision to something of a hybrid of Fassbinder’s use of ensemble casts and evocation of class and social dynamics with the slapstick vacation humor of something like Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But getting back to my initial point, what’s thrilling about The White Lotus is its demonstration that a minimal plot pitch can outline something that truly rises to the occasion of the moment that it’s made in. NOTHING seems to understand contemporary culture and social life better than The White Lotus. Nothing. THAT is its crypto-transgressive quality.