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” .