Got the Travel Bug? White Lotus May Help With that Itch!

From the opening credits, it’s clear creator Mike White (School of Rock and Freaks and Geeks) is pulling no punches. Idyllic tropical wallpaper is teeming with wildlife and fruit that slowly decays. The fish are choking in the reeds. Shadows loom. 

The core of America’s wealthy elite is decaying. 

Beneath the opulent kaftans, carefully applied spray tans, gluttonous lobster bakes (a food once consumed by the poor, now a luxury for the elite) and ‘tropical kabuki’ is a destructive presence, perhaps seen most literally in Mark’s (Steve Zahn) swollen ‘papayas’. And it doesn’t take long for this rotten fruit to be noticed – you’ll learn very quickly, The White Lotus has a special kind of interest in scatology.

Heaved-up by one too many tequilas, the denial of the elusive Honeymoon Suite, or a handful of stolen Xanax, the repressed ID soon rears its head – no matter how much money you spend trying to conceal it. In fact, there are numerous allusions to psychologists like Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud throughout the series, most conspicuously poolside. 

Again, these base urges are announced from the outset, in the opening credits, where monkey-like octaves and palpitating drums prepare us for the Bacchante-like debauchery that will later ensue. 

In one particular scene, a hotel guest stumbles back to our primordial forebears, clamouring up to bed in a series of grunts and intoxicated drawls, desperate for physical affection. He’s rejected at the bar, and then again later in bed by his wife. What inflamed his day-drinking act of defiance? He found out his father was gay. 

Whatever doesn’t squeeze into the strict psychological parameters of the guests’ lives is squashed through money, power or authority. The traumas – at times made mountainous from molehills – end up costing life. 

However, perhaps most demoralising, is the lack of retribution or change in behaviour from our guests. A wife returns to the insatiable orbit of money and security. A business venture is broken by the pursuit of sex. And often, it’s the locals left footing the bill and bearing the scars. Like Tom and Daisy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, ‘they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money’. 

Power structures are brutally reinforced.

Obviously, Mike White was deeply invested in these notions when creating The White Lotus. 

‘[Hawaii] is such a paradisiacal, idyllic place. But it’s also such a living microcosm of so many of the cultural reckonings that are happening right now,’ White recently told The New York Times. ‘There are ethical aspects to just vacationing there, let alone buying a house there. The longer I spent time there, the more I realised just how complex it is. And it just felt like that might be interesting as a backdrop to this show.’

Don’t be fooled, however. Despite dripping with identity politics, virtue signalling, and the myopic hypocrisies of America’s elite, The White Lotus is still an absolute riot. 

We’ve got bat-out-of-hell breakdowns by Jennifer Coolidge and our Aussie man Murray Bartlett, pastel pink suits that’ll do more damage than UV rays, and so much eye candy poolside you’ll need your very own pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. 

Feeling brave enough to dip your toes into paradise?