White Lotus Season Two

 

This season has been quite uneven for me.  Love the scenery, love the ubiquitous sculpture,  love the music.  But by episode four, I’ve gotten tired of the one dimensional characters - which is all of them except for Mia - the carefree, uninhibited lounge singer ( and a very good one, too).  She’s a part time sex worker, but not at the expense of her dignity. She recoils at the piano man’s offer to advance her career in exchange for sex, until she understands it as just a way to get what she wants. And like the statue shown above  ( I guess this variant of the testa Moro is common in Sicily) her gender is flexible.

In Hawaii, the White Lotus resort was a family getaway.  In Thailand it’s a spiritual retreat.  In Sicily it’s more about sexual adventure - but other than sex between married partners, 100% of the sex is with hookers.  I don’t necessarily consider this depraved - but the opportunities for serious drama are limited unless a there’s something like a La Traviata courtesan romance.  By the end of episode six this may  happen between Albie and Lucia.

Several other dramatic lines are becoming clarified and reaching towards resolution at that moment as well. As with the sexual act itself, it's the mounting tension rather than the resolution that's the most compelling, so I'll write about this season now, before watching the concluding episdode. 

What will Harper and Ethan do about their marriage? Harper has done all that she can: she’s complained that their sexual relationship is dead - and then tried to make Ethan jealous.  It’s all up to Ethan now.  An easy going guy, he’s finally angry and doing some hard thinking.  Does he still want Harper in his life now that he’s become wealthy?  I can’t figure why he would want to marry such a shrew in the first place - but maybe we’ll get to see another side of her.

What will happen to rich Tanya and her assistant, poor Portia? At the end of episode six, a drunken Jack has let the cat out of the bag (at least for me). The wealthy Quentin pulled him up from the gutter for sex and other uses, and now his job is to keep Portia away from Tanya so Quentin can get a piece of her 500 million. Yes ... Quentin is a creep who makes friends so he can betray them. Can Mike White conceive of a gay character who is not depraved? Hopefully Portia will try her best to save Tanya and survive the sinking ship to become sadder but wiser.

Hopefully all the other characters will do the same - at least Albie and Mia who are at the beginning of hopeful adult lives.  Lucia is too entangled with the local underworld to escape. There’s always the chance that Dominic’s wife will fly in from L.A. to reconcile with her husband, but this is not Fantasy Island.

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Well… the ending was more than I had hoped for — even if, once again, saturated in patriarchal values.

The evil, scheming Gays are all slaughtered by the rich/poor old fag hag as she desperately tries to save her life - and like Madame Butterfly she ends her own life - though inadvertently in a final act of clumsy helplessness.

Portia and Albie are sadder but wiser - and have exchanged phone numbers at the airport. (Equivalent to marrying at the end of a Shakespeare comedy)

Dominic is well on his way to being forgiven by his absent wife - thanks to Albie’s transactional intervention. I thought the monetary exchange was repulsive - but as with the sex workers, everyone got what they needed.

There was no drama in the Daphne/Cameron marriage. He does what he wants and she gets what she wants.  We can only admire her wisdom: “don’t be a victim to life”

While the intense drama between Harper and Ethan has been resolved, at least temporarily, the old fashioned way:  he finally felt like fucking her - as Mount Etna shot fire and smoke into the sky. Hurray for male desire!  No discussion  necessary. The way of the alpha male.

The season ends on a happy note as Mia and Lucia triumphantly stroll arm in arm down a narrow, busy street in urban Sicily.  Lucia had enlisted a male accomplice to help score 50,000 Euros from Albie, while Mia now has a permanent gig at the piano bar of the White Lotus - and then helped her new boss, the resort’s director, Valentina, launch her life as a Lesbian. 

All’s well that ends well.

I love happy endings.

and would really like to visit Sicily

if only I could afford the hookers

and stay in an art filled palazzo.

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One final thought:

It did occur to me that Roman Catholicism is as endemic to Sicily as Buddhism is to Thailand, yet it’s almost completely absent from the ambience of Season Two. Two paintings of saints are all I can recall.

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Perugino, St. Sebastian

Topics discussed on Reddit

Concerning Season Two as a whole

For me, Season Two was all about Romantic ambience of the place - in contrast to the exclusively non-romantic sexual relationships. The music, scenery, art and other furnishings were so much better than the other seasons that I really didn’t miss the profundities. Episode 7 was great, and the final shot of Mia arm in arm with Lucia is unforgettable. Loved those girls. When Mia began to belt out her goofy version of Amore, it saved the season. And she turned out to be something of a sex therapist. What a wonderful human being. I certainly agree about the DiGrasso’s. Way less engaging than the Mossbachers. Eventually all of the tourists got tiresome - though I did admire Daphne the most. She was a child centric mom with the motto : “ Do whatever you have to not to feel like a victim of life”. Words to live by.

Concerning the singing of Beatrice Granno (Mia) :

At that point in the film, I was beginning to get bored with the repetitive petty dramas — so when a bright eyed girl started belting out old chestnuts in such a unique, fresh style .... it was thrilling. In reality, if I were actually sitting in a restaurant, she'd be disruptive. But she does express such a raw, unaffected love of life. She's not covering a song as much as filling the space with joy. I might well have been grateful for just that special moment. She's an artist - doing what artists are supposed to do. 

At the end of the final episode, the smiling Mia and Lucia walk arm-in-arm down the crowded streets of Taormina. Their joy is an antidote to all the sadness that came before. The escort and the artist - appropriate companions in a film that prominently featured the music of Puccini. Don't think that 50 grand Lucia milked from Albie will last very long, however 

 Concerning the Homophobia of Mike White:

A director need not be homophobic for his film to broadcast atavistic attitudes. As with a Shakespeare comedy, heterosexuality has triumphed with all the male/female couples re-uniting at the end: Portia/ Albie, Dominic/off-screen wife, Ethan/Harper, Daphne/ Cameron. And as with Season One, the most transgressive gays have been slaughtered by heterosexuals. The patriarchal order has been restored in a most violent fashion. 

Gangsters could have been hired to bump off Tanya with no need for a party of old, upper class, art loving men to be the intermediaries. But that would have been much less fun. And if those men weren't all gay, wouldn't it have been much less believable? Mike White is a great filmmaker - yet we also might notice that this masterpiece of satire is deeply conservative

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Domenico Beccafumi, St. Lucy

The artworks in Season Two are discussed in "Artworks are more than just plot clues in The White Lotus season 2 – they are the show’s silent witnesses", an essay published in TheConversation.com , an international web that solicits and publishes essays whose content would be suitable for academic approval but whose style is journalistic.

Predictably, it eschews aesthetic response while focusing on White Lotus as a critique of the wealthy. Hurray for Marxism!  But it does have. this great video that juxtaposes a scene from Antonioni’s L’Avventura with the scene from White Lotus that quotes it.

here is my response:

Can’t artworks also more than just “silent witnesses” ? For some, they can be portals into specific, passionate attachments to life - contributing to the ambience of the entire season two of White Lotus. The paintings by Perugino and Beccafumi deepen the humanity of characters who might otherwise be dismissed as comic stereotypes. 

You did a great service in providing good reproductions. But similarly, you did a disservice by showing two mediocre Testa di Moro instead of the thrilling one actually used on the set. Believe it or not - when it comes to art - beauty actually can make a difference - even if it’s irrelevant to your notion of “academic vigor” .

White Lotus : Season Three

 

A Buddhist-like renunciation of the world is at the center of this season. Can Americans pull it off when immersed in a lush, palatial, tropical island sanctuary under the care of therapists and spiritual counselors? Are you kidding me?  Of course not. We are what we are.  The wellness resort is just more bling - a well appointed pit stop in the rat race.  Even the local Thai characters become, if anything, more worldly by the last episode ( as the peaceful Gaitok learns to use a pistol which he eventually uses to kill Rick and get promoted to chauffeur)

Rick, by the way, is the extreme example of an unredeemable lost soul.  His motivations remain a mystery until the fifth episode and his background is never told.  Was he a professional criminal? We’ll never know.  A last minute therapy session may have averted disaster - but this would not be his fate. I love to watch the charismatic, rubbery face of the actor, Walton Goggins - but he did fail to make this character very believable. It may have been an impossible task.

This is mostly the story of a spiritual crisis in the Ratliff family whose patriarch abruptly learns that he faces financial ruin over a brief episode of white collar crime for which he takes no responsibility. Contemplating suicide, he has an audience with the Abbot of the local Buddhist monastery- asking him what happens after we die. The venerable monk tells him that our lives are like drops of water thrown up momentarily like spray from the great ocean of being - into which we fall back when we die.  It’s a beautiful, peaceful image, and lacking evidence to the contrary, I prefer to believe it.  Zero moral content.  No merit-based reincarnation. No eternal ego.  And as some critics have pointed out, not especially Thai Buddhist. More appropriate for a spiritual retreat in the hills of California.  But this series is about Americans, by Americans and for Americans. So it’s quite appropriate. (see quote at end)

All of which may be fascinating, but the series is really about narrative ambience as far as I’m concerned. The music, sets, costumes, flow of story, control of tension and release.  Mike White is a genius - and he’s still getting better.

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BTW - we might note that one set of characters, the three amigas, has zero interest in spirituality at all. They’re just looking for fun and friendship.  The two career ladies get fucked by a handsome young Russian dude, and the third, a housewife, just wants to hang out with women who are unlike the ladies at church.

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Luang Por Teera's answer to "where do we go when we die" closely follows text on page 46 of “Zen Mind, Beginners Mind” by Shunryu Suzuki  (1904-1971), abbot  of the first Zen Monastery outside Japan, in Los Padres National Forest.

 Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called "mind-only," or "essence of mind," or "big mind," After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life. When the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it; it resumes its own nature, and finds composure. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river! If this is what feeling will we have when we die? I think we are like the water in the dipper. We will have composure then, perfect composure. It may be too perfect for us, just now, because we are so much attached to our own feeling, to our actual feeling is not so easy. But by your practice of zazen you can cultivate this feeling.

White Lotus season one

 

“An all-star cast head to a resort and unleash their worst, most privileged impulses” .. Rotten Tomatoes

…. But actually it’s the paid staff who make all the trouble.  Isn’t it Armando, the resort manager, who pilfers the pharmaceuticals, sexually abuses the lower paid employees,  double books a suite as well as a boat ride, and ultimately poops in a guest’s suit case?  Isn’t it Kai, the native fire dancer, who beats up two guests and steals  their jewelry? Isn’t it Paula, the subsidized college student, who enables and provokes Kai to his misdeed?

Tanya, the heiress,  is the only character who is seriously rich.  She over dramatizes  her unhappiness, but what rules has she broken?  She tells her therapist that she may bankroll a private practice.  She replaces  that offer with an envelope stuffed with cash - but that is hardly a misdeed.  She actually didn’t owe her a damn thing.

A fascinating woke ideology often drives conversation at the Mossberger family dinner table - and the adults resist it. When Paula boldly queries “what do you stand for”?, they are silent. But don’t their lives as parents and professionals ( not elaborated in this story) provide an answer in deeds rather than words?

Actually - this  fable, charming and beautifully created as it is, comes from a very conservative (patriarchal) place:

Poor Mr. Mossberger and his swollen testicles - redeems his masculinity by physically attacking the non-white native who is assaulting his wife.  That native is apprehended and presumably punished severely, but that all happens off stage.  His destiny is evidently  not worth knowing.

The wealthy heiress, turns away from therapy to find relief from her misery in the arms of a vigorous man who just wants  to “ have some fun”  At one point, she tells him repeatedly to leave, and he boyishly pouts “no … I want to fuck you” And so he does - with her unspoken consent.

The Mossberger son asserts  his manhood by abandoning school and running off with a .crew of strapping young lads who are circumnavigating Polynesia. 

The Mossberger daughter shows true love and comfort for her poor half-white friend who had betrayed the generosity of her family and denounced their bond of friendship. 

Rachel, the recent bride, who had second thoughts about becoming the trophy wife of a man/boy finally, meekly, accepts that as her future.

Armando, the resentful  gay resort manager who cannot control any of his urges for sex, drugs, or revenge,  ultimately does something really disgusting and is immediately violently killed by his nemesis, the rich boy heterosexual.

Feminism, socialism, anti- colonialism, gay identity, and racial justice have all been crushed and all ends up right with the world.  Wokism lies in ruins.

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 This reactionary agenda has been hidden in plain sight  by the arts of stagecraft.  It is not a one dimensional melodrama.  That is quite a tribute to Mike White, the auteur and the  actors, musicians, and other skilled staff he assembled and coached.  Like a silk thread pulled  from a cocoon, the narrative carefully unfolds, as the eye, ear, and mind are held tight from one moment to the next. It’s the magic of a mimetic art.

But it’s also hidden because both viewers  and reviewers don’t want to see it.  They don’t want to admit that underneath the respect for social justice they’re supposed to have, their gut feelings remain patriarchal and xenophobic.  That’s why Republicans keep winning elections, despite their egregious faults.

( it reminds me of another show that also turns a theme  of patriarchal dominance into a thing of  wonder and beauty: Mozart’s Magic Flute)

The role of Belinda, the magical negro, plays no small part in the diversion.  This multi talented black woman is the only adult shown doing an important job with competence and compassion. This would be a very different story without Natasha Rothwell being so convincing.

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Posted on Reddit:

Concerning the final scene with Rachel and Shane

 Rachel is reconciled to Shane in less than five minutes of screen time after Shane has hunted down and killed an intruder into their bedroom just as Nicole restarts sex with Mark shortly after Mark has tackled the man who broke into their's. By a certain kind of old school thinking, both of these intruders are "others". Armond is homosexual and Kai is a person of color. See any symmetry there? Upscale white men are rewarded with sex after fighting off men who are not. Rachel consents to be a trophy wife because - well - Shane finally deserves a trophy. I'm certainly not advocating this kind of patriarchal, sexist, homophobic, racist thinking - and I doubt Mike White would either. But it's in the structure of the story he wrote — and there are other examples in Season One as well