I was not a White Lotus fan prior to this season. I managed to skip over completely the HBO series' first two (and, apparently, more highly regarded) seasons. I finally tuned into season 3, curious about what all the attention was about. While I found the series somewhat repulsive on many levels, there is something about rich people behaving badly, especially rich people behaving badly in very beautiful places, that is perennially interesting. Envious or not, we are at least voyeuristic about the lives and bad behaviors of rich people, whom we invariably look up to and invest with unjustified power over us, and so we find a series such as this hard to resist.
By now, everyone who is remotely interested has seen the season 3 finale and knows everything that happened and may even have analyzed it all to death. At this point, what more is there to be said?
It is easy to characterize the obscenely wealthy characters in The White Lotus as malevolent in various ways, although it is their vacuousness that seems to dominate the scene and characterize their behavior most of the time. Their much prized wealth and good looks open many doors, largely closed in real life to their envious audience. But anything resembling real happiness somehow seems determined to elude them. Only marginally more interesting as people are the hotel's workers - notably the two who have the most significant plots, Belinda and Gaitok - who are portrayed as seemingly good persons, who are inevitably roped in by their envy of the what their social betters have.
A lot of choices are made by these people. Rick refuses (fatally) to take the advice of his girlfriend, Chelsea, the only person who loves him and offers him a better path, choosing instead to remain stuck in his personal path of self-pity and vindictiveness, rooted in what turns out to have been a lie his mother had told him. (He also sets the stage for that tragic end by the utterly stupid choice, which no normal person would have made, to return to the hotel - as if nothing had happened - after attacking its owner in Bangkok, an obvious intimation of even more harmful choices to come.) Piper makes a choice to abandon her life of pseudo-Buddhist virtue-signaling and admit instead that she really likes being rich - almost getting herself killed in the process and just into time to become really rather than performatively poor. Saxon seems actually to learn something (how much is unclear) from his experience. He actually listens to Chelsea (more than Rick does) and so, maybe, has a shot at becoming a decent person in his new circumstances back home, instead of the "soulless" person Chelsea had originally called him. Belinda makes the most dramatic choice, chucking all her moral scruples to become really rich. (She too had set up her situation by her amazingly stupid choice to identify herself to a man she believed to be a murderer, something most sensible people offstage would probably avoid doing.) Gaitok, at the very low end of the White Lotus social hierarchy, struggles between remaining an unambitious nice guy with limited prospects, professionally and romantically, and heeding his own Lady Macbeth (Mook) as she strives to motivate him to become more practical and ambitious. In the end, he gets both the career and the girl. However morally compromised, Gaitok and Belinda at least get a materially happy ending of sorts. So do the most vacuous rich guests, the three life-long girlfriends, who come out of the experience at least able to appreciate what they have in one another. (That's a nice ending for them, but the turnaround - beautifully expressed in Carrie Coon's monologue - comes about too suddenly, with little explanation.)
One of the best lines in the show, which summarizes its moral compass so well is when Piper's mother Victoria assures her that the morally right thing to do with excess wealth is to enjoy it. Anything else would be offensive to the millions without wealth who are striving to attain it. Unfortunately even the enjoyment is somewhat circumscribed and in many cases quite dangerous.
Dramatically, the ending is unsatisfying. How does the family just get on the book without any reference to Lochlan's near-death experience? Does Saxon feel nothing about Chelsea's death? Likewise, her supposed friend Chloe? And the Russian thugs just go on as before, unpunished in a manifestly unjust world.
Even with enormous wealth, the world cannot completely be controlled, and the characters are forced to negotiate situations they would not have chosen. But, within those parameters, there remains much room for moral realignment, good and bad, and for finding what finally matters most in one's particular life.
No comments:
Post a Comment