Rich People, Ostracized Trump Supporters, Performative Wokeness, and Evil Gays: The White Lotus Skewers Everyone

The first season set up the heart of the show—one about privilege, class, and social dynamics that reflect an inescapable social hierarchy. The wealthy vacationers at the top, and the hotel staff who wait on them hand and foot at the bottom.

Each season opens with the arrival of a score of wealthy vacationers via boat to some idyllic resort destination around the world. The show’s writer, Mike White, has affirmed that this is a motif about colonialism. These recurring themes of colonialism, class, privilege, and social hierarchy poise it as yet another liberal critique of the world’s inequities. But it’s not. The White Lotus is a lot of things and it deconstructs countless archetypes. 

It does so with a level of sophistication only matched by shows like Succession, whose dialogue often felt like it came straight out of right-wing Twitter. It’s rare that we get a social critique from a left-wing perspective that doesn’t caricature its subjects. If anything, The White Lotus likes to poke the bear of its own side so often that its liberal viewers are often convinced that the show is a mouthpiece for conservative politics. 

Season one mocked the performative woke politics of its teenage characters just as often as it mocked the privilege of the ultra wealthy. Season two explored the concept of mimetic desire through the lens of two complex couples: Harper and Ethan—a sexless couple whose pretentious coastal liberal elite sensibilities cause them to look down on the blissful ignorance of Piper and Cameron. Harper comes to learn that Piper is a lot smarter than she lets on and emasculated Ethan gets into an alpha male competition with insufferable tech bro Cameron. We also get Albie, whose quintessential Nice Guy routine is just another side of the same misogynistic coin he criticizes his father and grandfather for embodying. The White Lotus depicts very realistic social dynamics and it doesn’t suffer from over moralizing to make its points.

In season one, Rachel is trapped in a marriage with an insufferable wealthy douchebag who doesn’t “see” her as anything more than arm candy. He wants her to quit her mediocre job as a freelance writer and give up these fantasies of being a self made woman in favor of becoming his trophy wife. He has a coddling Boy Mom who treats him like a God and assures Rachel that every woman wants the life they’re offering her. Rachel sees herself as better than these women. She wants to be self made, to have a fulfilling career, her own success instead of riding off the coattails of her husband, and to be recognized as an equal. As honorable as those ideas may be, we learn they’re something of a fantasy.

Rachel isn’t actually a good writer. She produces fluff pieces for minimal compensation. Though she detests being married to a manchild who throws tantrums whenever he doesn’t get his way (like over the Pineapple Suite), she tries to stay true to herself and leave him. But in the end, something unexpected happens. She stays. She betrays her values and accepts her lot as a future trophy wife, becoming the very thing she once looked down on. Why? Because in real life, the concept of a black-and-white choice is kind of an illusion. Life doesn’t play out like the fantasies we see on television. Rachel might have strong convictions about the woman she wants to be, but reality hasn’t unfolded in her favor. She isn’t particularly successful or talented, and financial security ultimately proves more persuasive than her ideals, even if she would like to pretend she’s above it. 

The White Lotus thrives in this ambiguity, showing that the choices people make are more complicated than they seem. It also deconstructs common cliches, allowing its woke POC characters’ convictions to be just as hollow. Season one's Olivia and Paula are Gen Z personified. They're in college, they're woke, they hate neoliberal-neocon hybrids like Hillary Clinton, and they’re constantly micromanaging Olivia’s family for various moral infractions, no matter how situationally absurd—like her father coming to terms with his own father’s secret gay lifestyle—something Olivia hilariously tries to guilt trip him over and condemn as homophobic. Speaking of gays, The White Lotus allows its gays to feel like real, fully fleshed out humans, who are sometimes chaotically self destructive, other times murderously evil—sometimes sexually repressed, other times bitter, resentful, and predatory. There are no sacred cows.

It allows its female empowered feminists to be hypocrites, who sometimes emasculate their male counterparts. It positions the Nice Guy Albie as someone who’s disgusted by the toxic masculinity of his father and grandfather. The grandfather sees women as walking sex objects, while his father thinks much of the same, though he wrestles more with his conscience over his infidelity and “sex addiction.” Albie sees himself as a more sophisticated, progressive man who sees women as equals, but he possesses the same level of entitlement over women’s attention as his paternal line have. He tries to guilt trip Portia for not taking interest in him simply for being a “nice guy” despite her explicitly telling him she’s looking for some adventure, that he can be more aggressive, and that she wants a man who “isn’t aware of the discourse.” 

He immaturely tries to manipulate her into being receptive to his advances and sabotage the connection she has with the more exciting Jack. Everyone gets owned by their own myopic mindsets. Portia speaks to the shallowness of modern women, who want a taste for adventure without any actual danger. When she finds out that Jack’s “adventure” is more than she bargained for, she starts to appreciate Albie’s character. Meanwhile, Albie, in an attempt to get back at Portia, finds “love” with a sex worker previously hired by his father (holding in my vomit).  He manages to convince himself paying her for her affections is different than when his father does it. Once again, Albie enforces his savior complex onto every woman he encounters in his life, and unknowingly gets taken advantage of by the “down-on-her-luck” sex worker. His delusions of saving her from an abusive male pimp are exploited so she can take advantage of him for his money. He thinks he’s saving her from an abusive situation, when really, he’s the one getting played. 

The White Lotus is kind of making fun of everybody. If we get rambling dialogue over dinner in a heated confrontation, chances are neither side is really supposed to be the winner. When Olivia snarkily tells her parents over breakfast that Paula left dinner early because she felt uncomfortable watching Hawaiians have to dance for a bunch of white people, Paula just sits in uncomfortable silence. Olivia’s father starts to ramble. 

“Look, obviously, imperialism was bad. Shouldn't kill people, steal their land, and then make them dance. Everybody knows that. But it's humanity. Welcome to history. Welcome to America. I mean, what are we gonna do, huh? Really. Nobody cedes their privilege. That's absurd. And it goes against human nature." Paula looks like she’s had an epiphany as he says, “We're all just trying to win the game of life. How are we, how are we gonna make it right? Hmm? Should we give away all our money? Would you like that, Liv? Hmm? Yeah, that's what I thought. Mm-hmm. Maybe we should just feel shitty about ourselves all the time for the crimes of the past? Wear a hair shirt and not go on vacation?”

I sometimes see conservative accounts boosting this scene as if it’s a straightforward vindication of conservative sentiments and an owning of the liberal oppressor-oppressed lens. I think that’s a little presumptuous. Who is the victor in this situation? Is it Olivia, whose faux moral posturing doesn’t stop her from enjoying the wealth and privilege her “evil” family affords her? Is it the dad, who subscribes to a kind of moral fatalism? Or is it Paula, whose moral convictions move her to convince Kai, a native Hawaiian she becomes romantically entangled with, to take his reparations from the white man by robbing Olivia’s family? 

Kai’s family was displaced by The White Lotus purchasing their land, and now he works as a low-level employee at the resort. The self-righteously woke Paula wants to exact revenge on the white family she sees as holding people of color—especially the natives—down. But it’s Kai who has to eat the consequences (getting caught, and likely ruining his life) all because of her moral posturing. In the end, Paula continues to enjoy the fruits of her friend's privileged family. While her moral convictions pushed her to take action, they only made Kai's circumstances worse, while she remains unaffected. The show doesn't crown any side as right or wrong as much as it argues that the status quo remains in place, regardless. 

Season three is off to a slower start. Without the illustrious Jennifer Coolidge shouting iconic lines like “these gays are trying to murder me” and a cast many have criticized for being less interesting than previous seasons, it’s split audiences. However, the heart of the show remains: it explores familiar archetypes but fleshes them out in a way that reveals their hidden layers. One of the plot lines of this season deals with three aging friends who are attempting to reconnect after what seems like years of growing apart. One is an aging actress clinging to what’s left of her youth and vanity, another is a recently divorced lawyer who’s kind of the black sheep of the friend group, and Kate is a socialite housewife living in Austin. 

This subplot has been a way to explore the passive aggressive cattiness of female friendships. They use toxic positivity to give backhanded compliments, use faux concern to disguise petty gossip, and they’re constantly shifting who’s in the in-group and out-group. The most recent scene depicting this dynamic poised Kate as the one being singled out by the group (it shifts every episode) for being outed as a conservative Trump supporter. She’s a housewife who goes to church and lives in Texas, after all (even if it is Austin). 

Yet again, this ambiguous scene was subjected to various interpretations based on the viewers’ political leanings. A number of Trump supporters interpreted the scene negatively, as if it was rubbing salt in their all-too-familiar wounds, while some conservatives thought it was finally acknowledging the way conservatives are socially iced out by their presumptuous liberal friends. The most common perspective from liberals was to see it as laughing at Kate rather than with Kate. 

The scene isn’t endorsing any one political side, but it is criticizing the implied homogeneity of liberal coastal elites, who don’t even consider that you might not already agree with every one of their political takes. It reveals an implicit entitlement in liberal circles, where heterodoxy in friend groups isn’t just discouraged, but shunned. This specific interaction is a microcosm of national polarization and the way it works its way into social settings. Everyone may be retreating into their own filter bubbles, but liberals assume adherence to liberal orthodoxy, while conservatives self-censor in order to maintain social harmony.

I’ve seen some criticisms of The White Lotus as yet another rich-people hate porn for rich people. It does ultimately subscribe to a tenet of liberalism that believes people are still being held down by the legacy of colonialism, for example. Sometimes, when a conservative-minded character is rambling in a way that is entirely dismissive to the plight of the “oppressed” I make a Leo Dicaprio-esque point and say “wow he’s literally me.” But I think it deserves more credit than that. It doesn’t treat rich people as a monolith and it also has deep empathy for its characters, even if they’re incredibly flawed. 

The show gives space to explore how the burdens of being on top can be just as unbearable as being stuck at the bottom (I’m looking at you, Jason Isaacs), and tragic figures like Tanya show a destructive ignorance as a consequence of being insulated by their wealth, not a deep-seated malevolence. The cynic in me can’t turn down a good show that tears everyone down with it, even if I don’t always agree with the implications of its writing. I’ll be damned if it isn’t compelling, and it’s certainly a post-woke liberal critique of social order and privilege, which is a lost art. If wokeism is the butt of the joke, I’ll let Mike White lib out as much as he wants.