Though it opened with a mystery-box setup—who’s in the coffin getting loaded onto the airplane?—The White Lotus was far from a whodunit, or a who-died. It was, instead, a pretty matter-of-fact show, plain and harrowing in its depiction of cruel and witless wealth and its effects on those at the disposal of the people who have it. Mike White, who wrote and directed every episode, did not waste much time on coyness or cliffhanger serializing. His series, among the best of the year so far, had urgent themes to attend to, a gallows-humor rumination on America past, present, and future.
We did still want to know who was in that coffin, though. Which is why, when I first watched the finale, I immediately felt the glum little dip of anticlimax. I can sometimes be a gullible TV watcher, and so had spent much of the series wondering if it might be Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) in the box, somehow killed on her depressing honeymoon with husband Shane (Jake Lacy). Or maybe it was Connie Britton’s character, Nicole, felled by an infuriated, shamed Rachel, or by Nicole’s self-conscious husband, Mark (Steve Zahn). Many television viewers, like me, are now primed to watch series as cases to be cracked, constructing elaborate theories based on only the merest of suggestions.
The more I thought about the sad end of hotel manager Armond (Murray Bartlett), though, the more I began to see its inevitability. Of course the blithe richies were going to pack up and leave the hotel almost entirely unscathed, folding back into the relative ease of their lives, leaving the dead and injured and scarred behind them. It’s not a subtle point, but it’s a valuable one—one I should have seen coming, and now understand as probably the only way things could have gone.
The bookend scenes of the series, with Shane pouting and testy in the airport terminal, made up the third part of an important triptych inlaid into The White Lotus. Tellingly, gallingly, we never saw Shane interrogated about why he stabbed a hotel manager in his room; even the possibility of consequence was elided, skipped right over as the minor detail it was. That omission echoed the disappearances of Lani (Jolene Purdy), who desperately tried to conceal her pregnancy in the first episode, and Kai (Kekoa Kekumano), who was never seen again after the robbery gone wrong—but was presumably in a great deal of trouble.
Look how uneventful the loss of these people—their push into poverty, their probable incarceration, their death—was in the show’s deliberately narrow purview, working class people shuffled in and out of the frame until their utility was expended. There was also, of course, Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), one of the hotel employees preyed upon by the vampire guests (particularly by Tanya, a mess of a manipulator played by Jennifer Coolidge) who did, actually, get a small moment to assert herself toward the end of the series. But it was a weary rebuke, not triumphant, and the last we saw of Belinda was her plastering on another wan smile as a new horde of potential bloodsuckers made their way toward her.
In all that lopsided shape, The White Lotus told a deeply tragic story, and an angry one. It’s tricky to assess the show on thematic terms without wondering if it was a copout to focus so heavily on the rich white characters in the name of point-making. Should we have seen more of Lani and Kai? Should Rothwell have had more to play? Maybe so. But as it was, the show’s purpose was to depict the collision between classes and the stark inequity of the subsequent effects. The hotel’s employees were sent reeling into ruin while the guests gathered themselves up and figured themselves changed for the better for having had an experience. It brings to mind the “anecdote” monologue from the end of Six Degrees of Separation—a crushing lament about rich people’s indifference to others, viewed as novelties and spoken about at dinner parties with a faraway, inexact regard. Though no one in The White Lotus had the reality-quaking epiphany that Ouisa of Six Degrees had.
Maybe young Quinn (Fred Hechinger) came close. He decided, rashly, to leave his self-involved family and go paddling away into the future with some locals. White ended his series on that strangely, perhaps perversely poignant note. The reality is that Quinn probably wouldn’t stay in that life for long, either growing bored and restless or being dragged back home by his parents. Or both. Quinn’s flight from his monied prison was probably not a victory, and may be in service of the larger metaphor of The White Lotus.
Could the series have been about colonialism all along? Not just in the broader context of Hawaii and what was done to it by white America, but an actual allegory for the mechanics of imperialism: the arrival, the decimation, the careless abandonment? That is not exactly Hawaii’s story; the wealthy, white, and oblivious (or worse) still flock to the islands and romanticize and exploit its indigenous cultures. That may be why we saw Quinn attempt to assimilate himself; he found shallow, dilettantish illumination in a cherished tradition not his own. He may even have invaded it.
The White Lotus didn’t hinge on one event, as the mystery coffin framing device might have suggested. Instead it tapped into the continuum of so many events, injustices and slights and petty rages that have formed a membrane between the one percent and almost everyone else.
One line from the series sticks out to me most resonantly, a sorrowful and chilling sentiment that speaks bracingly to the limits of perspective and empathy. “Something bad could have happened,” says a tearful Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) when confronting her friend (and prop) Paula (Brittany O’Grady) about the robbery disaster. Exhausted and disillusioned, Paula responds with a simple, though rather huge reply: “Something bad did happen.” Something terrible for Kai, and for Paula’s sense of herself in the world—her guilt, her displacement, her loneliness. Lives were forever altered, but Olivia only saw it as a linear narrative pointing toward her and her family and what might have been had the universe not, yet again, rewarded them. Bad things did happen, are happening, all over, the direct results of rapacious consumption, of desperate measures, of needs clambered after and power wielded.
In the end, the something-bad was escaped from, soon to be forgotten by all but the ones left behind—and by Paula, now reentering her old life with a tragic understanding, and a shame, in her heart. One hopes all this catastrophe will eventually come to claim the reckless people who got away, that the wave will catch up to even Quinn, swiftly gliding across the sea. But The White Lotus suggests that it won’t, not any time soon. Or, at least, if it does, the Nicoles and Marks and Olivias and Quinns and Rachels and Tanyas and Shanes of the world will find a way to pass that trauma and consequence onto someone else. Because things like that just don’t happen to people like them.
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