The White Lotus

 The White Lotus is an eight part mini-series written and directed by Mike White.  It airs on HBO in old-style format -- that is, one episode a week.  Streaming services allow viewers to binge-watch shows of this kind, dumping all episodes on-air at one time.  This sort of presentation is destructive, I think, to most shows.  By their nature, TV series are highly repetitive; a limited group of characters has an adventure that has to be protracted across eight hours or ten or 12 hours.  Tv isn't very subtle and the characters tend to be broadly conceived with cartoonish traits -- they just keep doing the same thing over and over again.  Furthermore, eight hours' content generally exceeds by, at least, four hours what most writers can develop as a coherent plot.  So these shows repeat the same sorts of events refracted through the sensibilities of their caricatured cartoon characters over and over again.  This can become tedious very quickly as shown by The Boys, reviewed elsewhere in these electronic pages.  Individual episodes are, often, very exciting, feel innovative and fresh -- yet, when binge-watched the whole enterprise becomes an exhausting slog.  For this reason, The White Lotus, which is "appointment TV" -- that is, you sit down once a week to watch the show -- works pretty well and, in fact, generates a fair amount of suspense.  I think the program would likely be unbearable if binge-watched since it is an exercise in snarky cringe comedy (in large part).  But as a weekly "fix", it's fine.

In effect, The White Lotus is a well-crafted variant on Vicki Baum's landmark novel Grand Hotel (Menschen im Hotel) published in 1929, an international best-seller for the Austrian writer, and made into a famous and excellent movie Grand Hotel in 1932.  Baum's novel invents a formula employed in many other novels about businesses where disparate groups of people gather -- a noteworthy example, of course, are the Airport films.  The White Lotus follows the fortunes of three groups of people, guests at the eponymous Hawaiian luxury resort.  The narrative is shameless, using an old, but effective, "hook" to engage the audience's interest:  the show starts in an airport in which one of the characters is waiting morosely for a plane.  As cargo is being loaded onto the jet on the runway below, we see that a casket is shoved into the cargo hold.  Obviously, one of the protagonists is coming back from his or her vacation in a metal box marked "human remains."  Who?  The show, then, flashbacks from this moment to a week earlier when the guests arrive at the White Lotus resort (apparently actually an ultra deluxe Four Seasons hotel).  This is a smarmy device but undeniably effective.  As I write this note on the Sunday morning before the last episode, I am looking forward to the final episode and the "reveal" tonight when I will learn the identity of the corpse in the cargo hold.  White's script is carefully (and effectively) designed to make it unclear even up to the last episode as to which character will perish -- this is a cunning accomplishment.  

White's script is well organized and the progress of the show is lucid with clear exposition.  He doesn't unnecessarily proliferate characters or subplots.  In fact, the scenario is fairly simple.  The plot follows the fortunes of three groups of guests:  an ambitious young woman has married an arrogant, entitled rich kid and they are honeymooning in the hotel; a wealthy family dominated by an aggressive business woman seems to unravel on their vacation; a lonely woman in her late fifties has come to the hotel to scatter her mother's ashes and has a love affair with another guest.  Vicki Baum in her prototype for this sort of thing recognized that a story of this sort requires that several of the guests be sympathetic and, even, admirable.  White's failing is that he doesn't acknowledge this necessity -- with the exception of the bride who discovers that her husband is a nasty, rude lout, none of these characters are particularly likeable; indeed, they are all more or less loathsome.  That's why the show is best devoured in small doses -- otherwise the viewer will suffer from a surfeit of disgust at the vicious behavior of the hotel guests.  Of course, a hotel is more than its guests and White could, at least, make some of the staff at the resort sympathetic.  But he's an equal opportunity satirist -- the staff members are also either pathetic or nasty.  The Lotus' manager is a sleazy homosexual, a drug addict who falls off the wagon when he misappropriates the drugs brought on vacation by the two "mean" girls in the story  (inevitably the character comes to resemble an unfunny version of Basil Fawlty), the college-age daughter in the dysfunctional family and her biracial friend.   The manager sexually harasses the boys on his staff and, generally, misbehaves, all the while glad-handing the uber-wealthy guests.  A Black massage therapist bonds with the woman carrying about her mother's ashes -- there are some lesbian implications in the relationship, but we can pretty clearly see that it's set up for the masseuse to be the victim of the wealthy lady's whims.  (The wealthy lady embarks on a sexual relationship with a man associated with BLM -- she thinks that this means "Black Lives Matter" although, in this context, the acronym stands for Bureau of Land Management.  (It's not clear how a glorified game warden could afford to stay at this luxury hotel.)  After a cancer scare, the husband of the arrogant lady executive, almost gets seduced by the hotel manager, and confesses a marital infidelity (implausibly) to his 18 year old son, a boy that the mean girls torment relentlessly.  The show briskly cuts between the melodramatic crises afflicting the three groups of guests. and, in some episodes, this parallel cutting is very effective, particularly in a schematic sequence in which the different groups are dining on the terrace while the hotel staff puts on a lurid, floor show involving much drumming, dancing, leaping around, and playing with torches -- a demonstration of the folk performance arts of the "primitive" original tribes on the island, now dispossessed by the big hotel built on their ancestral grounds.  This racist spectacle induces the biracial girl (who is carrying on with one the hotel boys) to persuade her lover to steal several valuable bracelets from the safe in her room, a blow for justice, the girl thinks, but one that predictably results in disaster.  

The show is only sporadically funny but its engaging.  There were a couple of slow and inconsequential episodes after the first show and I didn't really like the rather clumsy exposition at the opening, but the program grows more interesting with each episode after its rather tedious start.  The characters have no depth -- they're caricatures of caricatures -- but their antics are interesting.  White's script is acollection of cheap shots, but they are well-taken I suppose, although who knows? how many people have any familiarity with this milieu and the characters who inhabit it.  The show's general theme is that the rich are evil children who accidentally destroy those around them, not out of malice but negligence -- the idea dates back to Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby:  "they were careless people, Tom and Daisy, and they smashed things up and then retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."  The show is handsomely produced with raging surf beating against off-shore rocks and gorgeous Hawaiian panoramas -- except for opening airport shot everything is locked into the White Lotus location.  

Mike White, the show's director and writer, is an interesting figure.  The bisexual son of a gay right wing ghost-writer for religious figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, he's been hip-deep in network dreck -- he and his father were on The Amazing Race and he participated in the reality-Tv show Survivor.  I greatly admired his work with Laura Dern on Enlightened and he has written several impressive screenplays including School of Rock and Beatriz at Dinner.  He has a trademark tone, a kind of snarky cynicism with a soft underbelly, and his scripts teeter on the verge of cruelty as to their characters without exactly crossing the line.  As I've noted above, this sensibility is best consumed in small rations..