.png)
6 hours ago
3
When the first season of The White Lotus arrived, it took a while to notice how dazzlingly political it was. The director, Mike White, has since congratulated himself about that little hook at the start: before we know anything, we know that someone is going to die. He has said that he wishes he had started all his shows that way. It is so simple yet so effective. You meander into it thinking it is a whodunnit, with a side order of who-did-it-get-done-to? Then there are some beautiful beaches, and there is some astronomical wealth. By necessity, there are some characters who are not wealthy, since who else is going to fetch the drinks?
It is not until around the seventh minute that it becomes obvious how catastrophically unhappy all the characters are, how horrible they are to one another, how disappointing and thin their existences. It had started off looking like wealth porn – the term affixed, post-Big Little Lies in 2017, to any show that was mainly about rich-people-problems and their gigantic kitchens. (In the US, with their peculiar coyness around saying “wealth” like it was a bad thing, they always called it “lifestyle porn”.)
But the first season of White Lotus emphatically wasn’t that. This wasn’t a cute reversal of expectation – “Hey, who’d have thought, even rich people get unhappy?” It was a wealth dystopia. Their money had made them coarse, stripped out their empathy, destroyed their human connections. The obsequious valet class stood in for all of us, trying to anticipate the needs of the wealthy while simultaneously despising them, unable to act on any destiny but theirs.
It was not the first show to make that point, of course. Succession landed in 2018, three years before, and there were films afterwards that pushed the greed-is-the-root-of-all-evil point harder. Glass Onion had a billionaire setting fire to the Mona Lisa, which stood in for the entire richness of human history and culture – these supervillains are coming after your stuff and they won’t stop until they have destroyed it. The Menu, if anything, made the point even more urgently: these plutocrats have to be stopped – they are going to take everything and just eat it. In The Triangle of Sadness, the delusions of the super-wealthy are revealed in a storm at sea: they think they are superhuman, but they are not even as good as one regular human.
Three years ago, culture seemed to be saying what modern democratic politics struggled to articulate – that concentrations of wealth weren’t modern and neutral, they were existentially perilous to civilisation – and it was a story as old as time.
Then came White Lotus, season two: White said afterwards that if the first season had been all about money, the second was all about sex, and if I had read that, I might not have watched it. I wouldn’t have been happy surrendering to the idea that rich people have more interesting sex than everyone else. Happily, it didn’t require such a roll-over. It was still about money, insofar as it was still set in one of the most expensive hotels on Earth, following rich people going around, being rich. And that did impact their gender relations and power dynamics, in ways that did debase their human connections, so it still functioned pretty well as Marxist propaganda.
As season three draws to a close, the message hasn’t cohered in the same way; there is a lot more melodrama in their personal struggles, patricide in their pasts, suicidal ideation in their future. Wealth is no longer their unspoken truth, their lodestar; it is more of a quest – how to get wealth, how to keep it, how to hide it, how to use it. It feels a lot more like early 21st-century wealth porn, in other words. My sister disagrees with this, incidentally – she thinks the (spoiler alert!) incest subplot is a metaphor for the intrafamilial transfer of wealth, the way it’s hoarded. She thinks the nepo-baby casting of Patrick Schwarzenegger as the main carrier of this message is its subtle reinforcement. Fine; if she is right, then this is economic critique. But I think White simply got bored of his powerful eat-the-rich message and moved on to new pastures, which is what creative people do – they’re mercurial. The rest of us, however, must be more workmanlike and remain on point; in the arc of human history, this is exactly the wrong time to get bored of having a problem with rich people.
