When the golden-hued sunlight covers Shane Patton (Jake Lacy) in an airport, something seems deeply wrong. Then, the news drops—an unnamed someone has died on his honeymoon. Immediately, Mike White adds tension that courses through every episode as the audience waits for it to snap. It’s this tension that keeps an audience coming back for more in a show that was painfully hard to wait for in a week-by-week release.
Mike White’s 6-episode HBO Max series The White Lotus follows the interactions and intersections of four groups at a Hawai’ian resort called The White Lotus: the resort staff, including resort manager Armond (Murray Bartlett) and spa manager Belinda (Natasha Rothwell); honeymooning newlyweds Shane and Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) Patton; the Mossbacher family, headed by Nicole, CFO of a large tech corporation; and Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge), a rich woman who came to spread her mother’s ashes. The convergence of these groups leads to high tensions, which is only heightened by Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score that lingers under nearly every moment. Knowing that someone has to die eventually, the viewer sidesteps into a golden-tinted world similar to our own. The premise, then, is that these groups of people are trying to enjoy a tropical vacation. At the same time, the hotel staff—most notably Armond and Belinda—attempt to cater to the guests’ every request quickly, and with grace. Over the course of six episodes, though, characters experience their own unraveling at the hand of the resort; facades crack and cruelty spreads like venom.
To connect the staff with the guests, The White Lotus uses Rachel Patton and Paula (Brittany O’Grady), a friend of Olivia Mossbacher, as sympathetic audience eyes into the lives of the wealthy and privileged. Rachel comes from a more middle-class background—at one point Shane mentions that Rachel’s mother wouldn’t even be able to afford the plane ticket to the island. Paula, unlike the other resort guests, is not white. Both of these women have connections with the resort staff that none of the other guests do, providing a much-needed viewpoint into what it means to straddle the boundary between staff and guest.
The show soars when it allows the characters to rapidly devolve on screen. Jennifer Coolidge is a particular standout for how effortlessly she is able to portray Tanya as a comedic force constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown. I found myself anxiously awaiting the story to find its way back to Tanya, whose antics seem to be both the most accessible to an average viewer and the most absurd. Connie Britton’s Nicole is equal parts critical mother and hurting wife, all behind a mask of success and propriety that only gets peeled back as the show progresses. Murray Bartlett consistently steals scenes as Armond, the resort manager with a sordid past. The care and attention these characters were given in the writers’ room and on screen is evident in how easily it is to be invested in their lives, even though all trajectories seem bent toward chaos.
While the main cast is strong, The White Lotus begins to falter at the periphery, specifically in introducing side characters with little background whose storylines don’t necessarily resolve. In each of their cases—Lani (Jolene Purdy), Kai (Kekoa Scott Kekumano), and Dillon (Lukas Gage)—take on roles that are akin to plot devices, only serving the main cast in order to push the story along. Particularly the storyline of Kai, a native Hawai’ian, could have been handled with more care. In a show that wants to point out the problems inherent in a place like The White Lotus itself—which is built on stolen land—it fails to make any meaningful connections to native Hawai’ian culture or the effects of American colonialism. Even through the eyes of Paula, the show’s only nonwhite resort guest, White attempts to make the connection between colonizer and colonized. She is often subject to blatantly racist discussions, treated as an agreeing party when Mark Mossbacher discusses imperialism at the dinner table, concluding that it may not be right, but that’s how the world works. Paula and Kai’s intertwined story—as lovers and want-to-be topplers of “the American Way”—fails to provide any resolve to the multitude of discomforts regarding imperialist actions that White references throughout the show. Kai’s character arc ends abruptly off-screen, warranting nothing more than a few mentions from the main cast about what happened to him. While the point of the show may be that those in power can get away with anything, there’s a clear cognitive dissonance because the show obviously wants to say something about imperialism and colonialism. In treating Kai as disposable, The White Lotus loses any empathy it might have for native Hawai’ians and the criticism it could have of the show itself. This disorganized approach to a very serious (and timely) issue makes it impossible to determine what, if anything, Mike White intends to say about America’s imperialism.
The continuous unraveling of the characters and the resort itself makes The White Lotus so all-consuming to watch. When it plays, my eyes are stuck to the screen, anxiously anticipating what might happen next. It’s the type of eerie suspense that should belong in a David Lynch film; something seems awry, but it’s too indeterminable. As the story swings back and forth between the perspectives of the wealthy guests and the resort staff, tension compounds on itself. Though the show fails to effectively engage with anti-colonial rhetoric, it does force viewers to come to terms with myriad inequities and injustices done to the Hawai’ian people. In giving voice to both the resort staff and the guests, The White Lotus makes an effort to push back against one-sided narratives and show how the fates of these two distinct groups are tied to one another, however unbalanced it may be.
