The White Lotus and the Western Social System
- David R. Goyes
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
David R. Goyes
In the first season of Mike White’s The White Lotus (2021), eight main characters go on vacation to Maui, Hawaii. In the first suite are the Pattons. Shane Patton comes from a wealthy, conservative family and is obsessed with himself and his appearance—the archetypal egocentric personality that craves acclaim. Shane married Rachel Patton for her physical beauty, but disdains her intellectual capacities and professional dreams. Rachel, although unhappy with Shane, remained married to him for his money. In the second suite are the Mossbachers. Nicole and Mike Mossbacher, a wealthy yet dysfunctional couple with racist and homophobic views, are obsessed with money and control. Even when they take their children, Olivia and Quinn (plus Olivia’s friend Paula), on vacation, Nicole works nonstop as Mike has a crisis upon discovering that his father was bisexual. Meanwhile, their daughter Olivia and her friend Paula seem to enjoy each other’s company, enhancing their time together with drugs. As fresh university students, they put up a façade of social consciousness, carrying with them badge-of-honour books like Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. Quinn, the youngest of the Mossbachers, seeks refuge from his loneliness in a family that fails to pay attention to him in the entertainment provided by video games and porn, never detaching himself from his computer, his Nintendo Wii, and his phone. In the third suite is Tanya McQuoid, the heir to a fortune her mother built at the cost of neglecting her. Tanya developed a borderline personality disorder, throwing tantrums whenever something doesn’t go her way and never getting satisfaction despite her wealth. When Tanya cries, the nothingness inside of her shines. Tanya tries to fill her void with booze, money, and lovers—to no avail. What these eight characters have in common is that they all enjoy high privilege, based on their money, whiteness, and citizenship. Their three suites and the hotel’s facilities, which encompass the beaches around, provide the stage on which the characters seek entertainment, acclaim, and wealth.
At the start of the first episode, a group of locals—workers at The White Lotus Resort & Spa, Maui—wave at the eight guests as the boat carrying them approaches the coast. From their land onwards, Armond, the manager, caters to the guests’ every whim. Belinda Lindsey, a masseuse, goes above and beyond her professional duties to comfort Tanya and soothe her existential angst through friendship and traditional therapy. Kai, a native Hawaiian who works as a waiter and dancer at the resort, dates Paula and trusts she is genuinely interested in him. These ‘servants’— Armond, Belinda, and Kai—embody ‘characteristics that align with paradise’s exotic yet non-threatening image’, and are seen as ‘part of the landscape rather than autonomous agents…welcoming and non-threatening—exotic enough to provide a sense of difference and allure but not so foreign or independent as to discomfort tourists’.[i] They are shaped to serve the visitors. Through Kai, the waiter and dancer, viewers learn that the paradisiacal location where The White Lotus Resort is built lies on Indigenous Kānaka Maoli lands, taken over by waves of European and US colonialism. Hundreds of thousands of natives were murdered in the land seizures that opened space for the resort. The infrastructure of the resort in itself—and even before looking at the behaviour of the guests—bears witness to how the privileges of the rich, white (neo)colonisers come at the cost of native populations and ecosystems. The imposing building subjugates nature. The high standards of living of some come at the cost of others:[ii]
But also the tourists, with their whims and through their power, subdue the local, racialised people. The luxuries offered by the White Lotus Resort do little good to the characters’ maladaptation to life—it seems to instead reinforce and deepen their distorted view of life. Shane, the egotistical rich, fails to enjoy the location because he was given a suite slightly less luxurious than the one he booked. Nicole Mossbacher, the mother and entrepreneur, cannot relax because her highly profitable company needs her to remain present at all times, enslaved by her computer. Mike Mossbacher, not knowing how to cope with his father’s deviation from heteronormativity, drinks to repress the discomforting information. Olivia and Paula pretend to be friends but distrust and envy each other, each wanting to be the star. Quinn, displaced from the suite by his sister, sleeps on the beach, where he masturbates. Tanya McQuoid ditches the friendship offered by Belinda for the attention offered by a man. Each character, in sum, finds a way to disconnect from the fundamentals of life, living instead in a reality mediated by money, luxury, technology, and pretence.
It is the locals, however, who pay the highest price for the guests’ deviant desires for entertainment, attention, and money. Armond, the manager, is fired for not giving Shane the room he wanted. The termination requiring only one call from Shane’s mother to a powerful contact. Kai, the waiter, is sent to prison after being caught trying to steal a necklace from the Mossbachers; the idea, however, was Paula’s, who convinced him that the burglary would be social justice—a distorted notion incepted during her vacation performative activism. Belinda Lindsey, the masseuse, wastes days working on a business proposal that Tanya McQuoid led her to believe could lead to a business partnership, but which Tanya forgot for the sake of the man entertaining her. Living Well at Others’ Expense[iii], the title of German sociologist Stephan Lessenich’s book, captures The White Lotus’ plot: Someone’s luxury is somebody else’s scarcity and exploitation.
Art and clarity
The White Lotus fascinates but discomforts viewers, mainly those whose lives more closely align with the represented characters. They feel their ways of being, their values, and their goals mocked. That is the role of art in society: not to mock, but to offer sharp and uncomfortable criticism, allowing us to clearly see what seems blurry in the complexity of everyday life. The White Lotus can be criticised for exaggerating people’s behaviour to a cartoonish extreme, but art has never been about accurately representing reality. Art seeks to sharpen certain aspects of social reality to make us aware of them. Cubism pioneer Pablo Picasso said ‘We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth.’[iv] With this statement, he responded to complaints that his art was not an exact copy of ‘reality.’ Also German painter Georg Baselitz attempted to liberate himself from the shackles of replicating reality by painting portraits upside down. He explained,
It has to do with my belief that painting is not a mirror of reality. That is a myth. It’s about reinventing reality, and one of the best ways to destroy this myth is by painting the image upside down.[v]
The White Lotus may not capture people in all their complexity and inner struggles, but it serves as a useful exaggeration that allows us to see more clearly the social systems that dominate us. The series is a sharp critique of white privilege, the shadow side of tourism, colonialism, and global divides. It reveals how ‘innocent’ acts, like a vacation in paradise, can be part of an oppressive system and how the privileged live in luxury at the cost of ‘the others.’ It denounces the destructive drives of contemporary globalised culture.
The White Lotus reveals through its (at times) parodical rendition of tourism that humans are disconnected from what matters in life: nature, health, safety, belonging, esteem, harmony, compassion, appreciation for the beauty of ‘small’ things, and purpose.[vi] The disconnect creates a void within people and produces significant ontological anxiety; that we don’t matter, that life has no meaning, and that happiness cannot be attained by sober living. The show exposes how people attempt to conceal their discomfort and anxiety through endless materialist signalling of their value, consumption of luxury and entertainment, and validation-seeking. The eight characters of the show are disconnected from one another, their families, and even themselves. They live with a void within that they try to fill with excesses. Tanya McQuoid shows self-insight and declares to be broken inside. ‘I want you to get out of here and save yourself,’ she said to her would-be-lover and continued, ‘I’m just like a…I’m like a dead end.’[vii]
Severed from the essentials of life, the characters do whatever it takes to cover for their discomfort and throw a mantle of meaning over their lives.[viii] Shane builds his identity and life’s purpose around the material comfort he has, which others lack. Everything around him, including his wife, serves as a trophy to mark his value. Nicole Mossbacher is obsessed with profit, no matter what needs to be sacrificed, including time with her family. Quinn embraces the ‘convenience’ of technology by living in an online world of video games and porn that allows him to forget the dissatisfaction of life. Olivia and Paula put up a façade of rebelliousness while in reality yearning for acclaim for their ‘alternative’ ways of being and thinking. Yet, in line with Allan G. Johnson’s sociology,[ix] these characters do not behave destructively out of individual flaws, but are moved by their participation in a hegemonic social system with its rules, values, and goals. Their behaviours, ways of seeing, and ways of being are partly shaped by the culture and structures of our society. Their subjectivities have been shaped by a system that equates extravagant wealth, attention, and luxuries with winning in life. The lifestyles exemplified in The White Lotus are the product of a social system based on the story society tells about fulfilment and happiness —a story that has been shaped across centuries.
The White Lotus focuses on white, wealthy characters in the West. But their way of life and views have swiftly spread across the world due to the universalisation of Western standards, and trickled down to less economically wealthy people. The hegemonic social system and its ‘path of least resistance’ glues people to one way of doing things. Even those who know of the destructiveness of their lifestyle behave the same. Quinn, the youngest in The White Lotus, said,
What does it matter what we think? If we think the right things or the wrong things? We all do the same shit. We’re all still parasites on the Earth. There is no virtuous person when we are all eating the last fish and throwing all our plastic crap in the ocean.[x]
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