White Lotus in the jungle

I am a writer in Los Angeles, which is just a sidelong way of saying I still have roommates as I approach 30. I’m lucky in that it’s a largely frictionless affair, though the television is far too communal for someone who watches far too much of it. The other night I was catching up on HBO’s The White Lotus when one roommate wandered in and asked if he could have the TV after my soap opera. I was quick to protest but soon thought better of it.

The White Lotus is a soap opera about the people who turn up their noses at soap operas and a guilty pleasure that takes pleasure in making you feel guilty. It is written and directed by Mike White, who for all his many credits and awards I will always identify first and foremost for his role as Ned Schneebly in School of Rock. Each season of White Lotus is set at a different luxury resort of the (fictional) White Lotus chain — respectively, Maui, Sicily, and in the latest season an island of Thailand. Each season also starts with a flashforward glimpse of a corpse, the question of course being who is the cadaver and more importantly who made it. 

A season usually follows three groups of guests at the hotel, with three dynamics White frequently returns to. The first group will be a family, all the more messed up for how normal they try to appear. In season three this is the Ratliffs, the sort of North Carolina genteel family who wear boat shoes mainly out of principle. The Father (Jason Isaacs with a wonderfully atrocious accent) starts getting phone calls that the FBI is cracking down on his financial malfeasance back home. Meanwhile, Mom (Parker Posey with a just plain atrocious accent) self-medicates with benzos while the children start acting like they’re in that Folgers commercial — you know that one I’m talking about, the Lannister one. Something is rotten in Durham. 

The second dynamic is the friend group maintained solely out of habit, here represented by Laurie (Carrie Coon), Kate (Leslie Bibb), and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), three childhood friends on a girls trip who constantly profess how much they love each other, in the way only someone who hates your guts can manage. Much like Survivor (which Mike White has twice been a contestant on), there is safety in numbers. When all three are together, they’re best friends, but when one splinters off, all the other two can do is gossip and plot against her. My grandpa lived in Utah for a few years and joked that when one Mormon friend visited him, they would drink, but when two Mormon friends visited him, they each acted like they’d never seen alcohol in their life.

The third and final dynamic is the love too messed up to fail. If the first groupings are about how keeping up appearances just covers the rot, White here suggests that the rot isn’t so much of a problem if you just acknowledge it. Rick (Walton Goggins) is a criminal of some sort, bickering and belittling his much younger girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), in her attempts to cheer him up. But Chelsea is teflon to the insults and Rick protests much about his annoyance with her. You sense they play into their roles, like Laurel and Hardy. As it turns out, Rick is trying to kill the man who killed his father. You’d be stressed too. 

There are also fringe players, a remora economy of hospitality workers and scammers with the lines frequently blurred. Keep an eye on Mook (Lisa), a staffer I don’t trust, and not just because she’s played by a K-pop star. One of White’s greatest talents is casting, creating metanarratives for those of us who pay too much attention. In the first season, he cast Alexandria Daddario opposite Sydney Sweeney, the former it girl forced to reckon with her replacement. Here we have Bibb and Coon cooing and cursing Monaghan, the only actress of their trio who sniffed the A-list. The predatory eldest Ratliff child is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son, and we can’t help but think of papa whenever he postures and gropes.

The White Lotus is a show that loves to rub your nose in the contradictions. It hates the rich and their nonsense but gets as much pleasure out of the luxury porn as the rest of us. It’s a show for those who feel guilty about colonization via tourism yet also mocks us for that guilt not stopping our vacations, for thinking that guilt makes us better and acting like the natives are victims and not operators of their own. 

The White Lotus is not political but is fascinated by politics, which it understands as another affectation, like boat shoes. Each season has a college-aged student in the family who espouses leftist critique of their surroundings, which the show agrees with while hating the source. Praxis comes easily from the cabana, and the show suggests that any astuteness from the rich and young is a coincidence and temporary at that. When the trio of older female friends finds out one of them voted for Donald Trump, it’s more a social faux pas than something to be truly morally outraged over. It’s merely the ammunition they need to tear her down, tut-tutting her selfishness while a Thai worker massages their feet. 

CONTRABAND BESTSELLERS

Above all else, The White Lotus is interested in people, or more precisely how much people pretend they aren’t animals. Each hotel is located in natural splendor, but it is an alien beauty — one is reminded of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, where nature is indifferent if not hostile to the encroachment. The resort is but a scab on the land, the veneer of civilization even thinner. 

There are frequent shots of monkeys around this season’s White Lotus, glaring on branches just out of reach, occasionally bounding down and startling the guests. The guests consider them an intrusion, but are they that much different? The patrons of White Lotus deal with mating and urge and blind animal rage just as much as our furry cousins but with considerably less dignity. According to Mike White logic, the greatest sin isn’t being a mess but wasting your energy in denying rather than dealing. The guests are just monkeys with delusions of grandeur and civilization.

Joe Joyce is a writer. Follow him on X at @bf_crane.