![]() Then - the shore, rocks presiding over a blanket of spume that coils back into an oncoming break. The flinty facade is tinted blue against the fading sky. The screen fades to black and alights on the arches of an old ruin. The white finance bro and the newly wealthy Asian American coder carve up the sea and bask in golden afternoon light. They were college roommates and have revived an old and unspoken rivalry for alpha status. Take this example from the third episode: Cameron and Ethan soar over the water on rented jet skis. Like other satires of wealth and luxury, The White Lotus articulates the very promises it seeks to undermine, and it is hard to dissipate those kisses after they cloud the air. This Italy is art imitating life, formed by fantasies of Monica Vitti and The Godfather. There are palazzos and yachts and pools pristine as mirrors. The camera lingers on immobile faces and empty spaces, passes into them, encroaching its own uncompromising presence.ĭespite the previous description, the show is not wholly, or even mostly, grim. Copious pineapple imagery in Maui is replaced by artworks that hover behind resort guests in sinister fashion. “As yellow is always accompanied with light,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it.” And the nights in Sicily suck all the yellow out, leaving an inky blue broken up only by the surf’s boiling froth. The craggy coasts are beautiful and inhospitable. Taormina has starker personalities - its tawny days reflect pale stone Arab architecture, bleached cliffside dust, and a beige desert broken up by shrubs and cacti like bad skin. Bathed in sunglow, the sea is horizontal and tranquil, caressing the white sand beneath palm trees. The beaches of Wailea are stereotypically pretty. In Sicily, it is the physical setting that unsettles vacation dreams. In the first season, much was placed on the shoulders of Cristóbal Tapia de Veer’s score, full of “discordant flutes and steadily accelerating percussion layered with animalistic shrieks and heavy moaning.” The second season’s music is more romantic, even operatic, more piano-driven, though it plunges into darkness and tension at unexpected moments. The White Lotus takes notes from horror - slow push-ins, empty hallways, and creeping pans. But the show is formally haunted by a dread and anxiety that undermine the rejuvenating promises of luxury and natural beauty. Infidelity, abduction, swindling, and death are all payoffs to their flounderings. On one level, it’s the guests’ own petty conflicts and self-destructive obliviousness that pave their fates. This Sicily is anachronistic, marked by the ruins of ended civilizations and futures now past. The Taormina resort itself is a renovated former convent, lined with anguish-filled paintings gardens of cherub statues, their features pruned indiscriminately by time the severed heads of Testa di Moro vases, always watching. The places we see onscreen bear the marks of that history while locating the past in art, architecture, and cultural vestiges. As the largest island in the Mediterranean, Sicily is the product of centuries of conquest and battles for control between powers in what we now call Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Taormina, Sicily, provides a different playground for White. This complication delivers a warped focus, ruthless to the very characters about whom it wants to tell a satisfying story, while those most affected, with one notable exception, are left behind in their wake. The first, in Wailea, Maui, has colonialism as its backdrop and a tone described by Jackson McHenry, in a piece previewing the show’s return, as “ particularly acid, despairing.” This is an ambivalence personal to White, a feeling of being caught between acknowledging the destructive force of tourism that caters to the wealthiest and most ignorant Americans and the fantasy of island life that is too magnetic to give up. Most of the show’s protagonists are fatty with ignorance and marinated in acid, aimed at the skewer, though only sometimes literally.Įach season is a new destination. Rather than the promised rejuvenation and relaxation, vacations at the White Lotus are riddled with wrong turns both comical and tragic. The anthology series, created by Mike White, follows VIP guests of an ultra-luxury hotel resort brand and those on hand to work (for) them. THE WHITE LOTUS is ambivalent about the picturesque allure of its tourist locales. ![]()
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