The Perverse Reason We Can’t Resist The White Lotus
And White has provided us with a buffet of character actors in their prime who might end up playing that corpse at the end. It could be one of the members of the Ratliff family. Father Tim (Jason Isaacs) is a tightly wound businessman from North Carolina who, it seems, might soon be embroiled in a scandal back home, though his wife (Parker Posey) is too blissed out on prescription medications to notice. His three children are embroiled in a passive-aggressive, incestuous, psychosexual lust triangle that has all the hallmark discomfort of Mike White’s vintage Chuck & Buck era. It could be the Hollywood actress (Michelle Monaghan) who’s bankrolled a girls’ trip with her childhood friends (Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon), possibly to reconnect, possibly to lord her success over them. It could be the troubled Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins), who’s clearly brought his young girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood, who’s an absolute revelation here) on this trip under false pretenses. And those are just the guests. It could be Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong), the dopey, charming security guard with an unrequited crush, or Sritala (Lek Patravadi), the mysterious, former pop star owner of the hotel and a figure of special interest for the ominously named Hatchett.
As usual, the mystery is more of an undercurrent for the season than its focus. The real drama lies in giving a group of malcontent elites jet lag and letting them bounce off one another. The ingenious thing about setting this anthology in an all-inclusive resort is that White is able to create something like a narrative hell house for its inhabitants to navigate. Each suite, each lanai, each floating yoga island is a chamber of horrors. And the whole property is optimized for the kinds of set pieces that make great TV: doing a sequence every episode that crosscuts between multiple separate, simultaneous, socially violent dinner scenes is one of the showiest, and most enrapturing, dramatic flexes on television right now. In other words, the White Lotus itself is designed, architecturally, to produce drama. It’s a building that smothers its guests in luxury.
This season takes special advantage of that, in particular, in the physical arrangement of Monaghan’s actress and her friends. The trio’s interconnected, tiered suites quite literally signify the power imbalance between them. Monaghan is in the master, with Bibb at her right hand, and Coon in a treehouse alone. During the day, the three women have terse, playacted conversations. It’s clear they don’t really know one another anymore, and their reunion in Thailand has trouble gaining traction. But night after night, after a couple of bottles, the women return to their suites, and, at some point, one of them retires to her room, leaving the other two alone. In that tipsy solitude, jaws unhinge, and the shit talk commences at an operatic level. Because of the arrangement of the rooms, however, the sleeping member of the trio always goes to bed with the poisonous, inaudible hum of gossip, slander, and resentment soaking the walls. Several screener episodes in, I’m hoping it never blows up, that it stays at this exquisite simmer, but, as White keeps visually suggesting, the tsunami is on its way.
