The White Lotus feels like homework. That’s not even a complaint! Well, not really. I mean, homework helps you learn things through repetition, right? And The White Lotus, through its eight episodes to date, teaches you that rich people are awful and some couples and families are unhappy, and it teaches you these things over and over and over and over again. Its problem is the problem shared by all homework: All things considered, I’d rather be gaming, or reading, or watching professional wrestling, or pretty much anything but doing my homework/watching The White Lotus.
Episode two of the show’s second, Sicily-based season (“Italian Dream”), continues down the paths established in the season premiere. Harper, the Aubrey Plaza character, is an Aubrey Plaza character, seething with resentment and contempt for everyone with whom she interacts. This includes her newly rich husband Ethan, Ethan’s old college roommate Cameron (to whom she is attracted despite herself), and Cameron’s doting wife Daphne. The other couple’s comfort with their own wealth infuriates her — she has had a hard time adjusting to Ethan’s new riches since he sold the business he ran, apparently without Cameron’s input as I’d initially assumed — as does their comfort with one another, a comfort she and Ethan have long since abandoned.
![THE WHITE LOTUS S2 EP2 GREG AND TANYA ON THE VESPA]()
Tanya, a human punchline, spends the day insisting that riding on a Vespa with a man in a skinny suit while smoking a cigarette makes her like Monica Vitti. The man in said suit, her husband Greg, can barely stand her (sensing a pattern here?), which she eventually realizes. He’s also 100% cheating on her, for which reason — and not the stated rationale of battling budget cuts to his government department — he is flying back to the States for a couple of days, a fact she also now seems to be onto. In Greg’s defense, he seems spot on in his assessment of Tanya as a person who discards other people without thinking, leading to his formation of various romantic and financial contingency plans for when he winds up like one of her many assistants.
Speaking of whom, Portia spends her day with the unhappy grandfather-father-son trio of Bert, Dom, and Albie. Bert spends most of his day nagging at Dom for his failure to patch things up with his wife (to whom he is apparently serially unfaithful) and daughter (who’s taken her mom’s side). Dom manages to find the time to order the hotel’s martinet manager Valentina to allow his local gf Lucí and her pal Mia into the hotel; he reaps the reward in the form of a threesome later that evening.
![THE WHITE LOTUS S2 EP2 I WOULD DATE A CAVEMAN AT THIS POINT]()
Albie goes out for dinner with Portia, and though he says some stuff that reads as a red flag to we in the audience — proclaiming himself a “nice guy,” complaining about how women say they want nice guys but reject them when they’re available, saying he’s attracted to “pretty wounded birds” — he seems to impress Portia, particularly with his guileless request to kiss her at evening’s end. In an episode that features Aubrey Plaza in a bikini and Will Sharpe bare-ass naked, it’s the single most erotic moment.
![THE WHITE LOTUS S2 EP2 ALBIE AND PORTIA KISS]()
And unless I’m missing something, that’s it! Cameron and Daphne are happy and blithe, Ethan and Harper are miserable, Bert is an annoying old fart who processes his experiences in actual Sicily by watching the Sicily section of The Godfather on his hotel TV, Albie and Portia are the kind of people who are having a bad time using Bumble, Tanya is a comedy trainwreck and Greg is caught in the wreckage, Mia and Lucí are just here to have a good time, Valentina is a huge asshole. I guess it turns out that Mia really is a talented singer and musician, as her would-be piano-player suitor Giuseppe (Federico Scribani) discovers, but that’s really the only surprise on offer. Other than that, to paraphrase Emperor Palpatine, everything is proceeding exactly as you have foreseen.
I’m not one to complain about the absence of likeable characters on a television show. I mean, find me a halfway decent person on The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire or House of the Dragon or, god help you, Too Old to Die Young. The difference, I suppose, is that while all of those unlikeable characters are grasping for something larger than themselves, the unlikeable characters of The White Lotus are all on a luxury vacation. They’re annoying people who aren’t even doing anything interesting.
![THE WHITE LOTUS S2 EP2 CAMERON UNVEILS HIMSELF]()
Yes, I get that this is the point of the show; it’s a character study, about characters whose worst qualities only intensify over time, whose eventual epiphanies, if they come at all, only reinforce their current insipid lifestyles. None of this is artistically invalid. The problem is that all of this is easy to grasp in an episode or two. After that, you just…you need shifting sands under your feet, you know? You need crises, you need struggles, you need some kind of crescendo. Otherwise you’re just watching, I dunno, the first reel of Visconti’s The Damned on loop, with none of the descent into hell that makes the banality of evil something more than banal in the end. The White Lotus has the banality down pat. It just needs something more, is all.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, Tausi Insider, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
Comments
Post a Comment