Allow me to remind you of an episode from the third series of Friends. Joey has encountered a TV spot warning against buying chicks as Easter presents. “The sad fact remains that most of these little guys won’t live to see the Fourth of July,” the presenter says. Our reliably chuckle-brained hero reaches for the phone and dials. “You guys got any of those baby chicks?” he says. “Because I was watching this commercial on TV and, man, those guys are cute.”
So, anyway, what about The White Lotus? Searing eat-the-rich satire that gets at the horrific inequalities baked into the capitalist arrangement or shameless advertisement for the luxury lifestyle? Well, plainly a bit of both.
Mike White, creator of the show, the third season of which began on Sky this week, has made decent efforts to argue for the soulless disappointment of waking up in Egyptian cotton to a breakfast of langoustines on gold foil. “You’re supposed to be escaping from all of the problems of the world, and you realise you can’t really escape them,” he said of models for luxury hotels featured in the series. “The sense of unease you feel is almost amplified in places where you’re supposed to feel so relaxed.”
It seems, however, that the real thing was a little too nice. When researching the first season, set in Hawaii, Laura Fox, production designer, decided the Four Seasons in Maui, where they were filming, was not sufficiently vulgar. Her job “was trying to find a version of a new hotel that was kitschy and flawed and rich, like the characters”, she told Architectural Digest.
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So there you have it. The set dressing is deliberately tasteless. The guests at the various hotels – Sicily in season two, Thailand in the current run – are consistently vile. The story ends with violent misery being visited on those taking, to paraphrase the Sex Pistols, an expensive holiday in somebody else’s misery. The first few seconds of season three detail what seems like a wholesale massacre of the posh and the privileged. We then flash back to arrival.
Who would want that? Who would want to associate themselves with such sickening decadence?
Well, it seems, almost anyone who can afford to. Following the broadcast of the first season, in 2021, the Four Seasons in Maui was deluged with requests for bookings. “It’s taken on a life of its own. You couldn’t imagine the amount of calls we’ve gotten,” Ben Shank, its manager, told the Guardian. This week John Rees, owner of a boutique travel agency, told the Today programme in the United States that “the White Lotus effect” is a real thing. “You guys got any of those baby chicks?”
We are in the middle of an unexpected craze for eat-the-rich films and TV. Three years ago Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, set on a luxury cruise that goes violently wrong, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and then went on to a best-picture nomination with the Oscars. In 2019, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, in which Korean underclass infiltrate a wealthy household, also took the Palme d’Or before actually winning the best-picture Oscar.
On television, Succession enjoyed bringing the superwealthy down a peg or two, even if it left them with their skyscrapers and helicopters. The BBC’s Industry (still a cult?) goes among nasty young cutthroats as they seek to make it in the horrible investment-banking world.
The White Lotus is, however, a tad more compromised than those shows and films. It is hard to imagine anyone wanting to hire a luxury yacht after watching the passengers vomit themselves to death in Triangle of Sadness. Everyone in Succession is well fed and well housed, but the icy camerawork and clinical set dressing do little to recommend this life to mortal wage slaves.
The White Lotus’s true cousins are beasts such as Emerald Fennell’s so-so Saltburn and the indestructible Mad Men, entertainments that know they’re revelling in a lifestyle even as they’re making monsters of its high celebrants. With each new season, newspapers would celebrate Mad Men for allowing its characters to be shamelessly amoral. The papers would then offer tips on how to dress like Joan Harris or drink like Don Draper.
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On a less vaunted level, something similar was happening with Dallas back in the 1980s. “These people are awful. Oh, I so want to be them.” This has always been a key component of the American dream. Just look how many people want to be Elon Musk.
Still, there is a possibility that all those now flocking to the luxury settings for The White Lotus will, having been schooled in social inequalities on the show, be that bit nicer and more generous to the staff. Right? No, I don’t think so either.
