[The second season of The White Lotus, HBO’s propulsive satire,
had sex on the brain more than anything else. But it never lost sight
of the razor-sharp class critique that also animated season one.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE WHITE LOTUS’S SECOND SEASON WAS A TRIUMPH OF SUBTLE BUT BITING
CLASS ANALYSIS  
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Conner Reed
December 13, 2022
Jacobin
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_ The second season of The White Lotus, HBO’s propulsive satire,
had sex on the brain more than anything else. But it never lost sight
of the razor-sharp class critique that also animated season one. _

In a cultural moment where limp “eat the rich” sentiment is
lacquered over any media that would like to appear progressive, The
White Lotus is the rare production that actually merits applause.,
(HBO)

 

This review contains spoilers.

On Sunday night’s season finale of _The White Lotus_, creator Mike
White proved two things: first, that there is near-animal satisfaction
in watching Jennifer Coolidge brandish a gun; second, that he remains
one of the sharpest satirists on American television.

In a cultural moment where limp “eat the rich” sentiment is
lacquered over any property that would like to appear progressive in
the long wake of _Parasite_’s Best Picture Oscar win, _The White
Lotus _is the rare production that actually merits applause. In its
first season, the HBO anthology series used a fine brush to paint its
elite vacationers, rather than portraying them as contemptible
caricatures so grotesque that no reasonable person could see them as
analogues — thus hitting much harder
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blander, blunter class satires like this year’s _Triangle of
Sadness_.

On its surface, season two shies away from class to zero in on sex.
Yes, the guests at the titular luxury resort — located on the
Sicilian coast this time instead of the Hawaiian Islands — are still
rich, but, from the jump, White puts less emphasis on the divide
between them and the hotel employees laboring to keep them
comfortable. Instead, he pokes at their carnal anxieties and
improprieties. There’s a grandfather-son-grandson trio, each with
generation-specific woman troubles; season one’s spacey Tanya
(Jennifer Coolidge), who worries her husband might be having an
affair; and a group of toned-and-tanned millennials (played by Will
Sharpe, Aubrey Plaza, Theo James, and Meghann Fahey) that exudes
fraught sexual tension from the moment they appear in the same frame.

 

Early on, a White Lotus employee explains the Sicilian legend of
the _testa di moro_, to which several porcelain busts throughout the
resort allude: in the twelfth century, a dark-skinned boy seduces a
fair-skinned girl while visiting her villa, only to reveal that he has
a wife and children back home. In response, she cuts off his head and
turns it into a planter. It’s a wry bit of foreshadowing — the
show is a murder mystery, so we know people die — and also a
misdirection. Plenty of sexual transgressions _do_ pile up by
season’s end, but few players are punished as swiftly for their sins
as that long-ago philanderer.

Instead, the legend simmers in the background, and White troubles it
with sharp class analysis that cuts across the season’s erotic
entanglements. If he’s less interested in lampooning elite
weekenders for their soulless pursuit of paradise than he was last
season, he’s no less attuned to the corrosive rhythms of their
excessive wealth. This time, though, he examines the overlap between
sex and currency, and shows how actual currency can cushion people
from the consequences of sexual carelessness.

Playing With Fire?

The richest example is in the season’s central foursome, whose
dynamic calls to mind an excerpt on “the sexual question” from
Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s 1934 essay _Americanism and
Fordism_
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“The new type of man demanded by the rationalization of production
and work cannot be developed,” Gramsci wrote, “until the sexual
instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been
rationalized.”

Ethan (Sharpe) and his new wife Harper (Plaza) arrive in Sicily with
Ethan’s college friend Cameron (James), a snake-smiled venture
capitalist, and his wife Daphne (Fahey). Cameron and Daphne have been
bouncing around luxury resorts for years, while Ethan and Harper are
taking uneasy steps into the club after a recent windfall from the
acquisition of Ethan’s company. The wealthier couple appears to live
in a perpetually handsy honeymoon phase; Ethan and Harper haven’t
had sex in months.

Slowly, it comes out that Cameron and Daphne have come to a (possibly
unspoken) marital agreement that belies their bliss. “You have to do
whatever you can to make yourself not feel like a victim,” Daphne
tells Harper at one point, unsubtly hinting about how she copes with
her husband’s flagrant infidelity. There’s a steeliness to her
delivery and a hint of sororal care. “This is the world you’re
entering,” she seems to say. “Hold on tight.”

When Harper first learns about the arrangement, she places herself
above it: “I _told_ you they were miserable,” she gloats to
Ethan, finding satisfaction in their own sexless but
ultracommunicative dynamic. A few days later, though, she drunkenly
cheats on Ethan with Cameron, unable to choke down her neglected
libido any longer. In response, it’s implied, Ethan returns the
favor with Daphne.

The meeker couple seems shell-shocked by the whole ordeal until
Cameron and Daphne spot them at dinner the following night and give a
smiley toast “to friendship,” their partner-swapping completely
unacknowledged. Ethan and Harper then return to their room and have
sex for the first time all season — so passionately, in fact, that
they topple and shatter the testa di moro bust in their room. When we
see them next, they’re grinning in each other’s arms at the
airport, waiting to fly back to America. The transformation is clear:
they’ve settled into the same echelon as Cameron and Daphne and
acclimated to the sexual games required to keep them there. Impulses?
Regulated and rationalized.

Not everyone, though, is lucky enough to treat sex as a game and
emerge unscathed. Take Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), the hapless,
underpaid assistant to Jennifer Coolidge’s near-billionaire Tanya.
Lamenting her digitally mediated late-millennial life, Portia throws
herself into an affair with a tatted Essex sex bomb (Leo Woodall) as
soon as the opportunity presents itself. What starts as a
hot-but-harmless bad-boy fling devolves when Portia discovers that her
paramour gets down with his so-called uncle, for whom he is — oops
— a hired rent boy–slash–hitman. In disclosing that she knows
the truth about their arrangement, Portia nearly gets herself killed.

Compare that to the interplay between Lucia (Sabrina Tabasco), a local
sex worker, and Albie (Adam DiMarco), a recent Stanford grad visiting
the resort with his wealthy father (Michael Imperioli) and grandfather
(F. Murray Abraham). Albie falls into a relationship with Lucia, who
tricks him into thinking she’s a damsel in debt to a dangerous pimp.
Determined to be a “good man” and set Lucia free, Albie asks his
dad for €50,000, which Lucia takes and runs with, leaving Albie
naked and alone in bed. He is momentarily deflated, but (as he points
out to his dad) a life-improving paycheck for Lucia is hardly a
life-ruining loss for his own family.

So he shrugs it off and pursues Portia at the airport, who’s poorly
disguised in sunglasses and a headscarf as she runs for her life. Both
he and her played with fire, and both got burned, but only she —
absent the boost of generational wealth — finds herself in any real
danger.

Myths like the testa di moro are powerful, White seems to say, and
money can mute them. Tanya, the one wealthy character to suffer any
major consequences all season, does so entirely by her own hand. In
the season’s best, bitterest joke, she miraculously uncovers a
conspiracy to kill her and seize her fortune at the last minute, guns
down the men who are about to carry it out, and then accidentally
leaps to her death once she’s in the clear.

It’s a perfect, pointed end to a season that had millions of viewers
speculating whose corpses washed ashore in episode one. Would it be
Harper or Cameron as penance for cheating? Albie, killed by Lucia’s
pimp? None of the above. The only thing that can bring a
head-in-the-clouds tourist down on their luxury getaway, White says,
is themselves.

CONTRIBUTORS

Conner Reed is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York.

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* the white lotus
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* class
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* Sexual Harassment
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* leisure
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* lumpenproletariat
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* sex workers
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