While viewers, in general, seem to perceive that they should disapprove of all this decadence, it’s been hard to discern a clear point of view from the network. Not every show needs to be a polemic on behalf of the 99 percent, and there are pitfalls to an approach that’s too heavy-handed or obvious. But it’s also hard to take HBO’s “eat the rich” manifestos all that seriously when the network is now run by a bunch of private equity Nosferatus.
Where has all of this swiping at the rich gotten us? Mike White, in an interview he gave toward the end of The White Lotus’s first season, described the show as both a critique and a fantasy. “You go to these colonial spots, and the architecture, the houses, they’re so fantastic,” he said. “It’s so perverse—you go there and you think, This is living! This is the house! I want to be Isak Dinesen in Africa! But then it’s, well, this is not what someone should be wanting.” That is not what someone should be wanting. At its best, The White Lotus is a show that immersively dramatizes the allure of this sort of affluence-enabled fantasy. We may attach ourselves to Kendall or Shiv, but the lives of the people on Succession are ugly, visually hollow; we may match our heart rate to Yasmin or Harper on Industry, but we are grateful to leave that cesspit of stress. Everyone on The White Lotus is a villain, but it’s hard not to want what they have. Mike White helps us to feel that and to sit with it. It’s fantastic, and it’s perverse.
And White has provided us with a buffet of character actors in their prime who might end up playing that corpse at the end. It could be one of the members of the Ratliff family. Father Tim (Jason Isaacs) is a tightly wound businessman from North Carolina who, it seems, might soon be embroiled in a scandal back home, though his wife (Parker Posey) is too blissed out on prescription medications to notice. His three children are embroiled in a passive-aggressive, incestuous, psychosexual lust triangle that has all the hallmark discomfort of Mike White’s vintage Chuck & Buck era. It could be the Hollywood actress (Michelle Monaghan) who’s bankrolled a girls’ trip with her childhood friends (Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon), possibly to reconnect, possibly to lord her success over them. It could be the troubled Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins), who’s clearly brought his young girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood, who’s an absolute revelation here) on this trip under false pretenses. And those are just the guests. It could be Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong), the dopey, charming security guard with an unrequited crush, or Sritala (Lek Patravadi), the mysterious, former pop star owner of the hotel and a figure of special interest for the ominously named Hatchett.
This season takes special advantage of that, in particular, in the physical arrangement of Monaghan’s actress and her friends. The trio’s interconnected, tiered suites quite literally signify the power imbalance between them. Monaghan is in the master, with Bibb at her right hand, and Coon in a treehouse alone. During the day, the three women have terse, playacted conversations. It’s clear they don’t really know one another anymore, and their reunion in Thailand has trouble gaining traction. But night after night, after a couple of bottles, the women return to their suites, and, at some point, one of them retires to her room, leaving the other two alone. In that tipsy solitude, jaws unhinge, and the shit talk commences at an operatic level. Because of the arrangement of the rooms, however, the sleeping member of the trio always goes to bed with the poisonous, inaudible hum of gossip, slander, and resentment soaking the walls. Several screener episodes in, I’m hoping it never blows up, that it stays at this exquisite simmer, but, as White keeps visually suggesting, the tsunami is on its way.
Since then, White has done the same thing for Laura Dern, for Molly Shannon, for Joan Cusack, for Salma Hayek. How many times has Mike White written the best role a beloved actress has played? The White Lotus is set up almost as a laboratory for these kinds of alchemical experiments. Coolidge as the daffy and depressed Tanya in the show’s first two seasons, Meghann Fahy as the slitheringly sunny Daphne and Aubrey Plaza her deadpan foil Harper in Sicily, and now there’s Parker Posey. Together, finally, they’re almost too powerful.
After giving Victoria two episodes of instantly meme-able one-liners, White begins the third episode inside her dream. She’s standing on the beach, barefoot in blue light, fully attentive. She turns to see her youngest son, sitting between hotel staff members, who tells her, “This is what it looks like before a tsunami.” Two more staff members wrap her in a comforter, and, with her North Carolina mansion uncannily looming behind her, she begins to walk into the sea. She collapses as the giant wave engulfs her, and then we cut to her, not jolting awake, but slowly, calmly opening her eyes. She is closer to this grim horror, more aware, than we realize, but, by the end of the episode, she’s her old self again.
When her older son tells her he’s scammed the family an invite to a yacht party, she’s indignant. Her son reassures her that she shouldn’t worry, the people are rich. “Just because people are rich doesn’t mean they’re not trashy,” she says. Her daughter chimes in from the corner, “Most rich people are trashy.” Victoria replies, “I wouldn’t go that far.” This is what it looks like before a tsunami. Or maybe not.
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