THE WHITE LOTUS Explained: Never Trust the Rich

There is no point in listing the titles of films and TV series in which representatives of privileged classes are portrayed as creatures devoid of even the tiniest sliver of conscience. Money corrupts, power robs people of their sense of being rooted in a reality inhabited also by those who are worse off. The White Lotus.

At the beginning of the last decade, a wave of Hollywood science fiction productions began, in the vein of Elysium or In Time, in which the poor rose up in revolution against the techno-aristocracy; later, even in the salons hosting more ambitious directors, for example those presenting their works in Cannes or Venice, socially charged topics concerning inequality appeared – obviously we are talking about Parasite, but also Sunset, Les Misérables and Sorry We Missed You.

The problem is that, although most of the time these theses about prevailing injustice were right, I have the impression that apart from articulating them, the creators had nothing more to say. And certainly no one was able to suggest what to do to make the current realities undergo positive change. Mike White, screenwriter and director of all six episodes of the first season of The White Lotus, also does not signal that he has aspirations to save the world by presenting recipes for the greatest afflictions associated with unjustly distributed material goods.

However, the creator must be given credit – at least he immediately makes it clear that there is little chance for change. The world is built in such a way that a better social position ensures a better quality of life. And whoever rebels against these eternal rules will be punished. The action of this HBO production revolves around several characters who come for a paradise vacation to a spa hotel located on one of the Hawaiian islands. The rich are white, the hotel staff, with the exception of its manager, are either Black or natives whose ancestors many years earlier had their land taken away by whites and were forced into low-paid labor.

Among the guests is the disgustingly rich Mossbacher family – successful woman Nicole (Connie Britton), her husband Mark (Steve Zahn), their jaded daughter Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) and screen-obsessed son Quinn (Fred Hechinger) – accompanied by Olivia’s friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady). Alongside them, the hotel is visited by the newlywed Pattons, rich mama’s boy Shane (Jake Lacy) and his partner Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), as well as Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), mourning the death of her mother.

The aforementioned manager Arnold (Murray Bartlett) tries to keep control over this whole rich menagerie, constantly smiling at the guests, yet minute by minute it becomes clearer that the man is about to explode with rage, which will trigger a tragic chain of events. The White Lotus is a biting satire about people who wallow in their privileges, not realizing that in doing so they hurt others. Virtually every scene is devoted to a different situation proving that inequalities exist on every level. Financial matters are just the tip of the iceberg.

They generate the rest of the differences between representatives of other social groups – issues connected with self-confidence, type of work performed, well-being, treatment of others, attitude toward nature, and, broadly speaking, toward the world. The world presented in the series is built on tectonic plates overlapping each other, causing subsequent earthquakes. Alongside class issues, there are also racial, gender and generational threads. There is virtually no plane of life on which one cannot notice seething conflicts.

They can only be resolved through violence. For this reason, even though this HBO production is kept in a comedic tone, there is a great deal of brutality in it. Naturally, civilized people are not inclined to fistfights, so aggression manifests itself in verbal skirmishes, cynical quips, barbs, reproaches about sins committed in the past. The rich do not pretend to be anything because they do not have to. While the poor hide their emotions and also their problems (the best example of which is the employee who did not tell anyone about her pregnancy for fear of not getting the job), the social elite do whatever they please.

They lie, lure with promises, take out their frustrations on those who are worse off. The more they crush their opponent, the better they feel. Fortunately, Mike White is not a creator whose sole goal is to hit back at the rich characters. He can see traces of humanity and sensitivity in them, and above all, he skillfully shows that most of the time the well-off are aware of their position and the consequences that flow from it.

It is worth mentioning two scenes: in the first, the Mossbacher family argues once again, until finally the statement falls that giving up their privileges would not really change anything. The world is built that way – there must be someone at the top and someone at the bottom of the food chain. The second scene concerns Quinn’s behavior, a bit of a masturbatory incel, a bit of a computer geek, for whom contact with Hawaiian nature ends with an almost metaphysical illumination. It turns out that wealth is not a state of mind but a temporary state that one can discard to finally feel real life.

Although, on the other hand, it is hard to shake the impression that through the happy ending the showrunner is mocking both the viewers and the characters presented. Aside from one tragedy that happened in passing and did not significantly affect the lives of the protagonists (after all, everything flows, there is no point dwelling on troubles etc.), almost every major character found a place for themselves. Quarrels faded into oblivion, there was even a chance to escape reality into a dreamland.

Yet in the back of one’s mind a quiet voice arises – perhaps this is White’s joke? What kind of happy ending based on reconciliation and overcoming differences between family members is this, when it has been founded on harm? A bloody sacrifice had to be made from the flesh of the story – a representative of the plebs – so that the 21st-century aristocracy could feel better. For everything to stay the same, everything must change, as a wise erudite once wrote, drilling his artistic gaze into the souls of Italian blue-blooded characters.

The White Lotus may have been built on a hackneyed concept, but it quickly turns out that Mike White has much more to offer the viewers. Above all, he has no illusions: the revolution will never come, because that is how this world was built. The HBO series is so funny that tears get caught in one’s throat when it turns out that there is no escaping the pincers of social inequality.

Read about the second and the third seasons of The White Lotus.