Meditating on The White Lotus!

Why does a show that’s entirely about privilege never make you angry? Because it is what it is!

My theory about the over-done five-star hotels (in the Third World at least) is that they are temporary palaces, designed for the rich to feel like they’re kings. Capitalism being the new royalty. Technically this momentary, fleeting monarchy is democratically open to all, so long as you can pay for it—unlike palaces from the past, so it’s not all so unfair. 

The White Lotus resort, on which the stupendous conversation piece for an HBO show is named is, of course, in Hawaii—and therefore not in the Third World. And yet one of the opening sequences of the six-part series (that recently dropped on Hotstar+Disney) tells you all that you wanna know about a world within a world—built for those blessed with privilege to escape from the latter. 

This is when the property’s GM (general manager; the brilliant Murray Bartlett) instructs his servers/waiters that their goal is to disappear behind masks as purely interchangeable entities. He’s essentially asking the resort staff to invisibilise themselves, because that’s how the rich would like it.

“They need to be seen—treat them like sensitive children,” he tells his staff. Just as he treats himself as a parent—denying the thumb-sucking brats what they instantly desire, by convincing them that what they already possess is wonderful! 

Makes sense, when you generally consider that the world isn’t as much divided between the haves and have-nots, as it is between the seen and the unseen. And yes you can go back to being a pesky child, if you can afford it! I’m sure you’ve been on business meetings, where serious men negotiate minutiae over money, and one of them, to seal the deal actually suggests, “Okay we’ll add some sweeteners!” Same guys, another context. 

Now I haven’t been to Hawaii. But I have lived in the Third World—chiefly defined by how the poor get treated, in comparison to the wealthy—all my life, to know that The White Lotus might even ring truer in India, rather than where it is actually set. Which of course also confirms that the uber rich are a nation-agnostic class of their own.

Even as India’s own mainstream pop-culture, for instance Bollywood, is full of stories about the well off—a charge the late filmmaker Yash Chopra defended as “glamorous realism” about polite societies. Or Karan Johar calls “emotionally (as against socially) relevant films”. Which aren’t too different from, say Crazy Rich Asians either. A lot of people will deride it as not “real”. Because real = poor. Like, ‘real India’, you know!

What do these stories mainly deal with? First World problems like crises in relationships, sex/“chemistry”, esteem, loneliness, self-actualisation, etc. Since violence and oppression (safety/security) have been taken care of. As have all other lower needs on Maslow’s pyramid: food, water, warmth, rest.  

The gaze on this lockdown series is obviously the creator’s (the excellent Mike White). But the best way to access this world for a viewer is obviously through the eyes of the proverbial outsider’s. 

The new migrant to this lot is a young wife (Alexandra Daddario), a commoner if you may, newly married to a filthy rich, real-estate dude. A trip together is fairest test for mutual compatibility/character. That first trip, in her case, happens to be the damned honeymoon. She simply looks appalled, rolling her eyes, all through! 
How do the teenaged young, GenZ if you may (represented here by actor Sydney Sweeney), react to the world they didn’t quite create? Theirs is probably the generation most conscious of power play and class privilege— totally leading the drive to call out the tone-deaf among us—cancel culture, as it were. Exposure through quality education privileges them that world-view. 

As on The White Lotus, as with life, they’re subtly mocked on occasion. The same way anybody who constantly questions or proposes the rich and poor as the only binary is put down as “lefty” or “champagne socialist” in their thinking! The flip side to this is blindly accusing the elite of elitism. As if the two are one and the same thing. Obviously, they’re not. 

“Nobody cedes privilege, that’s human nature,” the father (Steve Zahn) tells his young girl on the show. Simple, but satya vachan. The fact is, for all the rolling of eyes, the newly wedded wife, obviously attracted to the dude for several reasons, is still with him. And it’s not even a rich-poor thing—whether a cop on the street, or the guard in your building; we use privilege when we get the chance. 

As does the resort GM in The White Lotus—forgetting briefly that privilege, effectively, is what you can get away with. He can’t with a lot, beyond a point. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Why does a show that’s entirely about obvious class divides not get you angry? I guess, because the world is what it is. 

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14

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