Doom Service
I’ve been trying to figure out what makes The White Lotus such a rewarding stream, one you want to repeat literally the moment an episode ends, and it’s largely the lack of commitment. The series only run about seven episodes, and depict the socio-economic melodrama between guests at a four-star resort whose franchises occasionally exhibit two-star behaviour. Its second outing is now all the way into its fourth hour, but you know the score from the jump: the formula works because it runs the emotional length of a real-life vacation. For dessert, after quite the buffet, The White Lotus dangles over proceedings the revelation that at least one of its principal characters is going to die.
The show’s creator and show-runner Mike White, who before this was responsible for (yes) School of Rock and once participated in (yes) Survivor, doesn’t plant Chekhov’s cannoli just so you can help crack a murder mystery. That would be typical, simplistic, old hat, and also it would be on CBS. Knowing someone’s headed to the great beyond, but not who, humbles the way you consume a show that dabbles in mostly bearable awkwardness. In a world now divided quite distinctly into a left and a right, on everything from gender and the economy to climate change and candy bars, this is an ingenious empathy device. The fact that no one’s in their natural domain levels the playing field once everybody starts to run into each other by the pool or the bar — the ceiling of mortality equalises things still further, by lending a quiet gravity to nearly everything everyone says and does. We know there is a ‘gun’, and if we keep our eyes open we’ll catch the subtlest clues as to where it’s been hidden.
The White Lotus dazzles precisely because all its subterfuge is infinitely more interesting than its great reckoning. The first time round, we watched a young marriage and a best friendship and a hotel manager with a very bad habit unbuckle, under the weight of when the holiday experience doesn’t match what the brochure promised. We were handed the knowledge of darkness on the horizon, but only so that exotic musical cues could streak beneath our sandals, and so that the show’s cinematography (which makes you want to book a holiday) could hint at spectral interference: at forces or conditions bigger than petty arguments, odd sex, and the financial and therefore power dynamics within relationships.
I was skeptical that the show’s second season could repeat the trick(s) so perfectly, because so much of the first season’s magic felt indebted to Hawaii’s status as a myth (and not so much a place) that you visit. Where White Lotus I used the ocean to threaten cameos by mermaids, with a lens only too glad to surf mostly mild waves, White Lotus II places a hand on its brow to peer out across running ridges and steep drops — zooming in, eerily, on the cubist expressions of stoic, ruthless sculptures. I admire how this show spurns the heavy hand, only depending on cutaways to peculiar skies to switch conversations or allow its cast a change of clothes. The White Lotus is more fascinated by real life than the fireworks it takes to bullshit one cliff-hanger, or hashtag, after another.
Only two guests are cashing in their benefits from staying at the White Lotus in Hawaii, for this sojourn in Italy. The problems are familiar because they’re such human ones; the need, in particular, to uphold the theatre of being abroad with friends or family — to ensure everything’s amazing, and to pretend old wounds can at least be cauterised by sightseeing tours.
Two young couples are in town to dispose of some new money. Three generations of Italian-American men explore their roots, mostly from tables at all the outdoor restaurants — a randy patriarch, a pariah with a platinum card, and a Zoomer effortfully playing by the rules of modern engagement. An assistant who feels her youth is spilling hopelessly out of a jar does her best to stay out the purview of a millionaire boss, whilst staying on standby for said millionaire boss. Two attractive locals hop in and out of scenes like a pair of sprites in a Shakespeare play, wholly capable of fucking up appearances for somebody.
For the most part these people keep to their traveling bands or itineraries, addressing stalemates they thought they’d left behind in less glamorous apartments, at desk jobs, perhaps the airport. There are things I do wish had been handled differently this season. The negotiation of intercourse, for instance, is nowhere near as clumsy or laboured as all the difficult conversation that precedes it. Certain characters’ rhythms and routines are broken a little unceremoniously, or without much regard for prior gardens — as though the show secretly wishes it had secured itself more time to develop all their baggage.
But there’s no denying the show’s power, which remains very much intact. The White Lotus is obsessive in its quest for tension in even the most innocuous moments and sequences, and in the way it uses photography to elevate earthly quarrels to the stature of World War.
