*Spoilers for The White Lotus, Season three below*
The girls are upset about this underwhelming season three of The White Lotus—an anthology series that follows a revolving cast of wealthy white people as they vacation in tropical locales of the exorbitant titular resort chain. Among those fans on social media who are devastated by the death of a fan-favorite character, are fans who are confused by the plot holes and annoyed by the finale’s lack of resolution and overall sense of meaninglessness.
But it was always going to end this way.
And I don’t just mean the 50-’leven instances of Chelsea foreshadowing her and Rick’s deaths throughout the season. Or the glaringly-obvious-to-anyone-with-eyes fact that rich hotelier Hollinger didn’t kill Rick’s dad because he is Rick’s dad. Not even that the audience would excuse Lochlan as just a sweet confused boy instead of someone who sexually assaulted his own brother, or that they’d blame the female wellness worker for Rick’s violent rampage—boys and men are rarely responsible for their own actions and somehow there’s always a woman to blame instead.
Yet, in a season of predictable and unsatisfying events, the most predictable of all is that creator/showrunner/writer/director/producer Mike White would frame white male violence as an inevitable force, corrupting everything around it without any hope (or desire) for change.
Of course there are white men like Timothy Ratliffe (Jason Isaacs) the wealthy patriarch who would rather murder (most of) his family and kill himself—out of “love” for them, no doubt!—before confessing that he’s led them into financial ruin and the shame of federal criminal charges. And sure, there are men like Rick (the criminally underused Walton Goggins) who, instead of seeing the love staring them in the face would rather pursue a decades-long vendetta over the love he didn’t get in his childhood. And of course, both of these kinds of violent men end up corrupting the most vulnerable people around them—women, children, people of color.
Obviously I mean Chelsea (an adorable Aimee Lou Wood) who gets caught in the literal crossfire, and Ratliffe’s wife and children who get caught in the metaphorical one. But also, because of the cycle of global white male violence, gentle Buddhist Gaitok corrupts into a typical cop who would shoot in the back an unarmed man holding a dead woman; Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) and her son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) become complicit in murder in exchange for 1% of the murderous Greg’s ill-gotten fortune (though be serious, people who think Belinda “betrayed” her one-night stand by not going into business with him after she became wealthy: Belinda had no obligation to financially tie herself to that random man she met a few days ago and made tentative pillowtalk plans with. And idk, maybe Belinda was Tanya’s one-night stand and she was never obligated either!). And Hollinger, the originator of this cycle of global white male rage and violence, in a full-circle moment, gets hoisted by his own petard.
And still, the world of The White Lotus keeps turning. Nobody even seems to notice that 5 people were murdered at the hotel they’re staying at. What was it all for?
Yes, we see structural whiteness is a corrupting power. Structural male violence is a corrupting power. Structural greed is a corrupting power. But we saw that in season one (though it’s stated much better by bell hooks, who named our intersecting systemic oppressions as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy). So, what now?
White’s just a writer, after all, just an observer of human behavior making TV shows. What else could this creative “genius” do anyway, other than just observe and report on our global white, patriarchal, violent reality for entertainment (and a lot of money)?How many times can he dig from this same well without providing any new insight or stakes or even—God forbid—a call to action?
At least for another season, apparently, as location scouting for season four was reportedly already underway before the season 3 finale even aired.
Because what the world needs is even more capaganda: capitalist propaganda masquerading as entertainment that humanizes the ruling class and makes an eager working class audience sympathize with their self-made plights. Worse, capaganda as entertainment makes workers feel even less inclined to revolt because they see that the wealthy aren’t as happy with their choices as it seems, and perhaps that karmic justice is enough. (I have a theory that AppleTV produces my favorite show Severance for these same reasons, but my theory is still baking in the oven at the moment.)
Both of White’s shows Enlightenment and The White Lotus rub me the wrong way because I see a white male writer come to the same conclusions about power—racial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power— and turn away from any sort of revolutionary application of that knowledge. As if the knowledge itself is enough and he can breathe a sigh of relief and pat himself on the back for doing “the work”. It’s actually infuriating to watch white male creators get lauded and paid for making less coherent (and therefore less dangerous) points about white male violence than the people who are most victimized by it and who have been screaming about this on pain of death for actual centuries with no relief. It’s all, at the least, unimpressive and unserious.
After season one’s offensive storytelling where the Hawaiian and Black characters at the Hawaii White Lotus were rendered backdrops for white enlightenment, I wrote a piece for Refinery29 on White and “The Limits of White Self-Critique.” It still applies:
“Excellent performances (and performers) like Natasha Rothwell as Belinda are wasted as the Black and Hawaiian characters — the ones actually best suited to critique their white oppressors through the lenses of race, class and gender — are sidelined to focus on The Real Story: the humanity of rich and powerful white people. In the characters’ fight for power, the rich white people emerge victorious as ever, the exploited white hotel manager winds up dead, and the Black and Hawaiian characters barely even get to play. This is, after all, a six-episode story about white people for white people, created, written and directed by one white man, (pun inherent) Mike White.
The White Lotus is far from alone in its shallow, self-congratulatory attempts at white introspection. Most of the so-called prestige dramas center on horrible, rich white people, with their racist, classist obliviousness as part of the appeal: Big Little Lies, Billions, Arrested Development, Succession, The Crown, The Undoing, and on and on.
Each show parades these horrible rich white characters across the screen and we’re supposed to laugh or shudder at or empathize with their messy ridiculousness, as each series flirts with the idea of disrupting the status quo. We cheer when that one outsider character calls bullshit, and — like The White Lotus’ Belinda, who believes her rich white client is really going to invest in her and make her dreams come true — we think maybe this time, maybe on this show, things will be different.
But it’s Lucy with the football. Before the nails even come out, the white savior jumps down from the cross, unscathed. The rich and powerful are only more humanized, more excusable. Even if individuals change, the system of the powerful remains powerful; the system of the rich remains rich; the status quo remains intact.
White explains what’s going on in all of these Rich White Shows (perhaps unintentionally) in an illuminating and stunningly meta interview with Vulture. Responding to a criticism he read that white people like The White Lotus because they get to remain the center of the conversation and nothing ever changes, he says, “If I took that assumption to its fullest, it would make it so that I shouldn’t even be creating anything anymore. It’s a deep criticism of who’s getting what stories made, which is a completely valid conversation.”
White — who, again, wrote and directed every episode of The White Lotus by himself — has taken the critique of whiteness being centered in his show and distilled it into the nonsensical conclusion that “white people shouldn’t exist or create things.” Even as White finds the question of “who’s getting what stories made” to be a “completely valid conversation,” clearly, there are limits. After all, what would happen to him if marginalized people got the chance to tell stories too?
Shot: “[O]bviously, it would threaten me in some way! Because this is all I can do! I don’t know how to be a general manager of a hotel!” He says.
Chaser: “I’m that white kid, I guess,” he says. “Am I going to hate myself? What do you do?”
Therein lies the frustrating end of the line for white wokeness. If you do a little digging beneath the surface of white supremacy and all of its damage, you quickly hit on the obvious answers to the question: What do you do with all of this undeserved power? These answers are carved in stone with lightning, like The Ten Commandments: give up your power; redistribute your wealth. And the white woke’s response to those obvious truths is, “But wait, like, not really, though, right? I’m that white kid. Am I going to hate myself?”
White people hating themselves is useless to us. Nobody asked for that and nobody cares how they feel about themselves. It’s a common deflection —the entire argument for why Critical Race Theory shouldn’t be taught in schools is that it might make white children feel bad about the legacy of white supremacy. It’s a plugging of the ears to silence the cries for what we’re really demanding: Reparations Now. Give up your ill-gotten power. Give up your stolen wealth. But they can’t seriously entertain that. (“Obviously, it would threaten me in some way!”)
So instead, Mike White ate his own lotus, took every dime of that HBO money and made himself the creator, the writer and director of every episode of a show that takes place on stolen land, using marginalized characters and colonization as props, instead of giving a shit in a suitcase about putting Hawaiians in place to tell their own stories — in front of and behind the camera.
It’s a satire of a satire within a satire.
“The show will move on to a different exotic-to-white-people location, presumably with new people of color to disappear into the background of The Real Story.
But perhaps Mike White might cede a sliver of power and bring on, say, a Connie Britton girlboss type to showrun next time. The title of the aforementioned Vulture interview is “Mike White Accepts the Criticism,” after all.
Or perhaps, like White admits in the interview, “accepting” criticism after you’ve been paid, praised and promised even more is literally the least one can do. “Accept” the criticism all the way to the bank. The series enjoyed steady ratings through the finale and dominated Twitter talk during its Sunday night run. The Emmy buzz for the show continues to grow. The people who keep winning are the Shanes of the world (who are really just Armonds but with the promise of white supremacy actually fulfilled). So, what incentive is there to change?
Which leaves the marginalized viewer and critic alike as Paula [the only Black guest of season one, a young friend of a rich white family]. We, the Black friendTM, have come to the realization that our white liberal shows love to talk a good talk, sprinkle in a little “white supremacy is wrong!” Add a dash of, “Obviously, imperialism was bad!” (an actual line from The White Lotus season one recited by Steve Zahn). But when it’s time to act, to divest, and to redistribute — both on the page and screen and behind the camera — they bristle at the thought and slink away with White’s infuriating conclusion on their lips: Am I supposed to hate myself?
They’ll serve us up the next unseasoned critique of whiteness (here’s looking at you, Nine Perfect Strangers), but now we know. The camel won’t be educated, dragged or willingly walk through the eye of the needle. And we’re left to decide if we want to burn it all down in a righteous blaze or be complicit in exchange for a glimpse into a world in which we were never meant to belong.”
What did you think of season 3? Let me know in the comments.
Stay watchin’
Brooke
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