The first season of The White Lotus was fun and enlivening: set in Hawaii, it skewered the lives and minds of the fairly wealthy. Shirley Li incorrectly describes them as the one percent, but they’re more like the world’s fifteen percent: they can’t afford to buy entire islands but can take luxurious vacations at expensive resorts. That first season crackled with wit and we went along for the ride because things happened and much of that had to do with drugs and sex and turds in suitcases and the dead bodies that piled up.
Nothing happens in season two, and yet it’s been consistently been lauded as some brilliant and “acerbic” work of art when, in reality, White Lotus this time around is just the sound of a queer man, the writer and director Mike White (he describes himself as “gay-ish”), laughing all the way to the bank, having convinced a world of mostly straight critics and viewers that he’s some kind of a genius satirist of their world. Because, let’s face it: this season has been about nothing but the sad, miserable lives of straight people stuck in sad, miserable marriages. We see them jerking off (Ethan, who is no longer aroused by his wife played by, excuse me, Aubrey Plaza), we see them lusting after what they think might be forbidden fruit (all three DiGrassio men, falling for the plainly obvious sex workers scoping out the hotel’s clientelle), groping other people’s spouses under the dinner table (Cameron, coming on to Harper), making up entire scenes of their spouses fucking their friends (Ethan, even as Harper sleeps next to him), convincing themselves that their affairs add to the “mystery” of marriage (Daphne, who needs to tell herself that she’s actually in a sexy arrangement with her husband).
It would have been at least mildly interesting to see a gay couple stuck in the same doldrums but, of course, we’re all still living in the golden glow of gay marriage and are not allowed to think of gay coupledom as equally boring and mundane as the straight sort. Gay characters do exist: an entire yacht filled with them sails up to Tanya and offers her a glimpse into an exciting “gay” life (she uses the word a lot, like a visitor to a zoo squealing at the macaws) and yet, everything about this encounter is odd and nothing about White’s portrayal of the characters rings true. Tanya is a wealthy woman from San Francisco, a city filled to the brim with both aspirational and wealthy gay men: she can be naive but she’s not so incredibly dumb that she can’t see through a group sniffing around for handouts and flattering her in the process. As with the heterosexual set, there’s nothing interesting about this lot — unless you’re a certain kind of straight viewer at whom this series is aimed. At the end of the fourth episode, Tanya sees Jack fucking his “uncle” Quentin from behind. It’s an explicit scene, sure, but no less so than the straight ones we’ve witnessed so far and yet the internet lit up with references to it as “shocking.” White, in an interview with Variety, said, “There’s a pleasure to me as a guy who is gay-ish to make gay sex transgressive again…I just think transgressive sex is sexier.”
But for whom, exactly, is gay sex “transgressive?” If we consider matters like cinema codes and representation, sure, it may once have been transgressive to show gay sex, but is it really that big a deal, now, at least in a North American context and on, of all places, HBO? It could be argued that the possibility of incest is transgressive but, please: one look and you know that the unwashed Jack is no one’s nephew but a wandering indigent toy boy kept on by the older men to service them and lure younger playthings to their parties.
Or is it, rather, that it’s “transgressive” to a certain kind of straight audience? White’s comment is bewildering to anyone who lives in a world where gender and sexuality are fluid and changing and the idea of transgressive sex seems quaint and old-fashioned but it makes sense if we consider that this second season of White Lotus is really about nothing more than recuperating heteronormativity, to make it interesting once again. And it erases the role that sex plays within the economy of that arrangement.
Again: nothing happens in this season and we’re taken through the endless minutiae of two relationships (Ethan and Harper, Cameron and Daphne) as if the ride through their dreary landscapes tells us anything enlightening about the state of contemporary marriage. Ethan and Harper haven’t had sex in so long that they seem unlikely to ever procreate (they claim to want to have children) and, meanwhile, literally on the other side of their wall, Daphne and Cameron are all over each other all the time, as if meeting for the first time at a club, every single night. In the last episode, Cameron literally can’t hear the sound of his own child calling to him on his wife’s phone, so dissociated is he from his role as a parent, so wrapped up in his own sense of self. As Tanya desperately tries to figure out her escape from the yacht, Daphne leads Ethan to a distant island and we can safely assume that they fucked somewhere between the rocks and the sea. In the end, both Ethan and Harper engage in what is for them torrid sex — but only after each has committed infidelity of a sort with another.
Critics and viewers, so enamoured of this show, will no doubt insist that this has been the point of White’s satire all along: that he casts a bemused and sceptical eye on heteronormative couples who have no idea how to exist in relationships outside of the rigours and demands of what is expected of them. But the six episodes leading up to the last one have given no indication that this sort of coupledom is to be mocked. Instead, we’ve been irradiated with constant, bleating, back and forths between Ethan and Harper about how miserable they are and to constant, insistent prattle from Daphne and Cameron about how sexy they are because, ooooh, they each know how to play games, including extra-marital sex, with each other. This isn’t a moral judgement: it’s simply to point out that there’s nothing interesting about infidelity, except maybe the rush of danger and fear of being caught, and that it can’t make a marriage more interesting.
Marriage in itself can be any one thing or the other: enlivening, joyful, painful, abusive, or — as with the couples here — deeply boring. Married people have to interest each other, outside of petty game-playing, to make their relationships work and those relationships have to work without the structure of marriage. In White Lotus, the idea that infidelity somehow makes these couples interesting is a distraction from the simple fact that they are only held together by the enormous piles of money that make it possible for them to vacation at an exclusive hotel in Sicily where, eventually, many bodies wash up on the shores: the detritus of an ill-planned attempt to wrest a woman’s fortune from her, and her ill-fated attempt to escape. Upon their return, Daphne will continue to do nothing at all but attend yoga classes taught by her lover and Harper, finally schooled in her new friend’s ways, will learn to do the same. Greg will probably die rich off his inheritance, but remain in mourning for Quentin (who was, in all likelihood, the one with whom he was having an affair). But the money will help enormously.
Watching Daphne smugly describe how she makes her marriage work by keeping things a “mystery,” I’m reminded of an episode titled “Vixen’s Run,” in the long-running Midsomer Murders. DCI Tom Barnaby is shocked that Lady Annabel Butler had a dalliance with her groundsman solely to produce a child who could be installed as an heir to her husband’s fortune. In response, Butler clucks, “Mr. Barnaby, please try not to be quite so middle class. Most of the better English families breed out now and then. Just as well. Without new blood, they’d all have been gaga generations ago.” This idea that the upper classes are free (behind discreetly closed doors) to engage in affairs, either for the purpose of procreation or just because their class status inoculates them from the dreadful fate of being “middle class,” runs through a wider cultural discourse on marriage and class (lower class women who are as frivolous about sex are, of course, dismissed and denounced as sluts).
Lady Butler didn’t bang her groundsman for the joy of it. The infidelity was an economic arrangement, meant to protect her own interests: to ensure that she produced an heir and not be chucked aside by her husband as he looked for the next and supposedly more fertile wife to carry on the bloodline. But of course, Lady Butler has to turn her economic necessity into something lighter, a marker of class distinction between her and those loathsome, stuffy middle classes.
White Lotus is playing a similar game: substituting economic need with a cultural attitude towards sex and infidelity. Harper, newly wealthy, at first resists what she often stingingly berates as the sheer stupidity of their wealthy friends who can’t even be bothered to read the news. But they don’t have to: capital flows free of the effects of pandemics and natural disasters. Her class indoctrination begins with infidelity but her sexual dalliance can never declare itself out in the open: if Ethan explodes and divorces her for being unfaithful, she’s left with nothing more than what she might have negotiated with a pre-nuptial agreement (unlikely given that they got married before he became fantastically rich).
For all her complaining about Daphne and Cameron, Harper seems incapable of even exploring the area outside the hotel grounds: the first time she leaves is when she’s practically abducted by Daphne for a single night in an expensive villa. Making out with Cameron like a teen girl and then fucking her own husband as if she were, I don’t know, his wife or something: these are the most exciting things that happen to Harper on vacation.
There’s very little that’s transgressive about the sex in White Lotus, gay or otherwise, and most of this second season has been a pointless meandering through endless breakfasts and lunches and the constant complaining of people who have the money but little idea about what to do with it, beyond charity and buying objects that include drugs and sex. The only thing that seems transgressive is how much attention this season has managed to absorb, riding on the coattails of its much smarter predecessor.
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Image: Screenshot of the title card from the first episode of the limited series.