The White Lotus is as clueless about Native Hawaiians as its charactersīut Nicole (Connie Britton) and Mark Mossbacher (Steve Zahn) return to the room unexpectedly, resulting in an encounter where Mark tackles Kai. She thinks he should steal the family’s jewelry, to sell it and win back a tiny drop in the bucket of the ill-gotten gains of white America. Paula gives Kai the code to the safe in the suite where she is vacationing with the Mossbacher family, while everyone is supposedly out for the day. The story of Kai offers a window into what series creator, writer, and director Mike White is up to. Ultimately, those with a higher position on the social ladder rewrite the story to wash away the pain and horror of anyone who isn’t them. The White Lotus is rife with instances of characters intermingling, then accidentally making the lives of people beneath them on the social ladder just a little bit worse. Paula is hoping that her hotel staff lover, Kai (Kekoa Scott Kekumano), has gotten away with robbing the family Paula has joined on vacation. Rachel has decided to leave her boorish husband, Shane (Jake Lacy), on their honeymoon. They aren’t the main characters, per se, but they are the characters who have the most to lose and whose ascent of the class ladder puts them in a perilous position.Īs the finale begins, both women are on the precipice of major change. By the season’s midpoint, it is zeroing in on two characters in particular as our windows into this world: newlywed Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) and best friend along for a family’s ride Paula (Brittany O’Grady). The show takes a while to reveal which of its characters are our social climbers, thanks to its expansive, tremendous ensemble cast. The White Lotus is unique for how incessantly it spotlights its rottenness. But the ladder itself is rotting from within. The genre is often built around social climbers, who aim to navigate the class ladder without losing the qualities that make them protagonists worth rooting for. You can obscure the rottenness in the happy ending of a rags-to-riches story, or you can play it up with a lot of screwball comedy, but it’s always there. The point of the class satire is that it’s built around the rotten core of class in America, and stories of social climbers have a rich history in American pop culture. The White Lotus, broadly speaking, is a class satire about social climbing. The White Lotus satirizes class by using old tropes in new ways Olivia (Sydney Sweeney, left) and Paula are college friends who ill-advisedly go on a vacation with Olivia’s family. The show’s affluent vacationers are impervious to anything but their own whims, and they never stop making the same mistakes. Then the finale comes so very close to shaking up several characters’ status quo, only to bring them right back to where they started. ( The White Lotus has been renewed for a second installment, but it will feature new characters in a new location, so this is the last we’ll see of the current cast.) The show comes so very close to making at least one or two of the rich characters at its center face the fact that their way of life - and the comfort to which they’re accustomed - must change if the world is to become a better place. I won’t be surprised by viewers who find the finale utterly depressing. Only two characters materially change their circumstances, and one of those two characters ends up dead. You can try to escape the ultrawealthy white people who comprise most of the show’s cast of characters, it suggests, but you’ll almost always end up subsumed by them. Yet on some level, it does not believe those systems can be changed - only observed. The HBO limited series vividly dissects the entrenched systems of power that rule the planet with an iron fist.
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