Momtaza Mehri is a poet and essayist and was Young People’s Poet Laureate for London in 2018. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Granta, Poetry International, and elsewhere
A white lotus bears too much meaning. In Buddhist tradition, lotuses represent spiritual purification and supreme enlightenment. Nirvana is especially elusive in The White Lotus, HBO’s latest stinging satire set in the tropical confines of a Hawaiian resort. The show is populated by a bevy of affluent holidaymakers whose worst impulses are activated by too much sun, sand and suspicion. At first, we are thrown into the aftermath of a whodunnit and its attendant cargo labelled “Human Remains”. Tragedy unfurls in reverse as bouncy newlyweds Shane (Jake Lacy) and Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) arrive at the White Lotus resort with a soon-to-be-dampened enthusiasm.
Alongside them, we meet the Mossbachers, a family unit headed by high-powered search engine CFO Nicole (Connie Britton), her hypochondriac husband, Mark (Steve Zahn), her artfully unimpressed daughter, Olivia, and withdrawn son, Quinn. Olivia’s college friend Paula – another source of bored vocal fry and quips – joins them. Jennifer Coolidge is distinctively raspy as Tanya, a dazed, alcoholic grappling with her mother’s recent death. Murray Bartlett oversees all as the deliciously erratic Aussie hotel manager, Armond, attending to the countless whims of guests even as he teeters on the edge of a breakdown.
Creator Mike White narrows the sphere of action. Barbs are thrown and anxieties soon flare. Nicole tries to snatch some family time amid Zoom meetings with Chinese backers while her husband faces a cancer scare. His health woes reveal a family history that unsettles his perceptions of masculinity and fatherhood. Like sunscreen slapped on skin, secrets lubricate the atmosphere. Meanwhile, Shane is provoked by the first, and most irksome, snag troubling the picturesque honeymoon booked by his mother. Instead of the Pineapple Suite with its famed plunge pool, the loved-up couple are forced to make do with the Palm Suite instead.
Armond won’t admit to a double-booking slip, triggering a cat-and-mouse obsession between him and an increasingly wrathful Shane. The Pineapple Suite becomes a totemic object, revealing the couple’s serious incompatibilities and mismatched priorities. Rachel sees a side of her husband she may have been able to previously, or conveniently, ignore. Her marriage ensures she won’t have to work a day in her life if she so pleases, a suggestion Shane encourages. After all, his own mother is one such lady of leisure. Even in comfort, claustrophobia threatens this leafy idyll.
Tanya’s quest for a grief-relieving massage lands her in the hands of Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the resort’s capable spa manager. Belinda is exceedingly patient, which quickly makes her captive to Tanya’s self-pity. With unwitting cruelty, Tanya dangles a life-changing offer - she will fund Belinda’s dream wellness centre just because. At the first distraction, Tanya shoots down the sense of hope she inspired. There lies the rub - the resort’s poolside proletariat must also cater to the psychodramas and fantasies of their rich guests. Tight grins stretch the faces of workers who hide pregnancies on the job while micromanaging the wealthy’s needs. “You have to treat these people like sensitive children,” pill-popping Armond reminds his staff. Anyone who has ever toiled in hospitality will probably wince throughout The White Lotus.
Relations are equally murky between the guests. Generational conflicts are staged over exotic fruit platters as Olivia and Paula tag-team the middle aged into ideological submission, while the younger Quinn wastes away in incel-adjacent detachment. The show’s writers use Olivia and Paula as mouthpieces for a jaded contrarianism, skewering the zeitgeist’s speech patterns. They make sure Nicole hears them calling Hillary Clinton a neoliberal warhawk. Conviction is besides the point when you just want to piss off your old-hat liberal parents. Though such psychological warfare is fun to watch, it clumsily lifts too much from social media’s hinterlands of mutating terminologies and context-specific discourses. As the young would say, it tries too hard. Elsewhere, Rachel struggles to make the leap from the listicle ghetto to serious reportage. Her dreams curdle, especially after a brutal encounter with Nicole, who is her self-actualised feminist role model.
In his Letters from Hawaii, Mark Twain described Maui as a place devoid of “trouble or sorrow or weariness”. The White Lotus portrays the same island as a heat sink of high-end ennui and class rage. Six episodes are enough to make you feel like you have overstayed your welcome. It’s a breezy romp that points to the future of pandemic television’s fishbowl urgency. A concept delivered during lockdown, it makes use of evocative location and compact plotting as an incubator for peril, inequality and racial stratification.
By the end of the trip, only Quinn is renewed. He comes out of his shell, leaving behind his soggy mattress to hit the waves with his new local friends. Someone’s hell is someone else’s paradise. Amid the inane chatter, perhaps that’s the only dharmic wisdom to be gleaned.
