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Mike White’s Mischievous Vision for “The White Lotus”
Black’s bug-eyed charisma makes this pathetic sermon seem halfway convincing, and gives viewers a moment to calibrate their opinion of Dewey. (Would you entrust your child to this man?) “School of Rock” is basically a wholesome family film, but it delivers a complicated message: even a flawed doctrine can be compelling, and transformative. This, perhaps, is a lesson that White learned as a boy, sitting next to the pulpit when his father was preaching. And perhaps he learned it again at Wesleyan, where he wrote a thesis on Judith Butler and earnestly studied the scriptures of postmodern theory. “Wesleyan was, like, the P.C. school, before institutions all became sort of like that, and I embraced the theology of that for a long time,” he says. (The atmosphere there was intense enough to inspire the 1994 satire “PCU,” co-written by Zak Penn.)
Attentive followers of White’s career may find themselves anticipating the loopy gospels that his characters preach—and then, inevitably, fail to entirely practice. In “Enlightened,” the main character, Amy, is emerging from a breakdown and trying to put her newfound wisdom to use. The show opens with our hero sobbing in a bathroom stall. “You look insane,” a co-worker tells her, and the subsequent episodes complicate this judgment without quite refuting it. By the end of the second season, Amy is a crusader against corporate corruption—but also, still, an annoying and bottomlessly needy presence, as so many of us are, at least some of the time.
After her breakdown, Amy goes to a retreat in Hawaii, and a voice-over narrates the words we see her writing in her journal:
I’m speaking with my true voice now, without bitterness or fear, and I’m here to tell you: you can walk out of hell and into the light, you can wake up to your higher self. And, when you do, the world is suddenly full of possibility, of wonder and deep connection.
Like much of what Amy says in the course of two seasons, this is ludicrous without necessarily being wrong. Part of what White loved about the character was that she wasn’t cool—she had little in common with Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper, or other manly television rogues. White says that HBO executives worried about the “emo voice-overs” that bookended many of the episodes, and the “tonal ambivalence” that has long been one of his favorite qualities. At one point, Amy’s ex-husband goes on the Hawaiian retreat that she loved. He hates it. “It’s like I’m in a Hawaiian prison,” he says. The episode was broadcast in 2013, the year that White bought a house in Hawaii—having decided, apparently, that Amy’s notion of finding renewal in the middle of the Pacific Ocean wasn’t so ridiculous after all.
Even by Hawaiian standards, Kauai is a low-key place: quieter than Oahu and less opulent than Maui. White lives across the street from the ocean, and he has set up editing bays in several units of a time-share development nearby, an arrangement that suits both his temperament and the show’s budget. (The state government offers a twenty-seven-per-cent tax credit for certain film-production work undertaken on Kauai.) I visited White there in early December. A few friends were in town, and his flatulent bulldog, Peanut, was following him loyally wherever he went. He seemed to have recovered from the stress of the shoot, although now he was facing the stress of having to edit the footage into a show that met his standards. “I’m so fried, bro,” he said, strolling along the wide beach, with mountains framing a neon sunset. “It’s really nice to be somewhere like this, around all this natural beauty, and just chill.”
In fact, White’s time in Hawaii did not seem particularly chill. He said that his relationship with his long-term boyfriend had fallen apart because “The White Lotus” had taken over his schedule; his life was one long working vacation. And yet he was already thinking about scouting locations for the fourth season. “I’m not in a relationship, I don’t have kids,” he said. “I’d love to have a break, but two weeks in I’d be, like”—he imagined himself sitting home, restless—“what are we doing?”
Not all of White’s projects have been manifestly personal. (He once spent a couple of weeks doctoring the script for “The Emoji Movie.”) But, after the failure of “Cracking Up,” he fulfilled a promise to write something for Molly Shannon. The script became “Year of the Dog,” which was released in 2007, as White’s directorial début. Shannon played Peggy, a lonely office worker who develops a passion for animal rights after the death of her dog, Pencil. In a different kind of film, Peggy might learn some lessons, find a boyfriend, and return to her office job, wiser and happier. Instead, a trapdoor seems to open in White’s script, and Peggy falls through it. She commits financial fraud and attempts murder; offered an unlikely chance at redemption, she abandons her old life to devote herself to animal welfare. She explains her conversion, naturally, with a voice-over speech that is among the most cockeyed in the Mike White œuvre: “How do I explain the things I’ve said and done? How do I explain the person I’ve become? I know I’ve disappointed everyone, and I’m sorry for that. I wish I was a more articulate person. I believe life is magical.”
By the time White made the film, he was a vegan—he says that his opposition to animal cruelty is about as close as he comes to zealotry. Shannon and White are a reliably funny and off-kilter team (she also appears in “Enlightened” and “The White Lotus”), and not long ago she came to visit him in Hawaii. One day, while White was distracted with a phone call, Shannon tried to pet Peanut, who nipped her in the face. “I have no hard feelings toward Peanut,” Shannon told me. If anything, she seemed pleased to know that White had such a fierce protector.
White says that, in some ways, the “White Lotus” character he most resembles is Quinn, the socially maladroit son from Season 1, who doesn’t seem to care about anyone or anything until he joins a sea-canoeing crew of local men. Exalted, he decides not to go home.
White now owns two houses on Kauai. Compared with the tourists, he is a local, but compared with the natives he is a wealthy interloper, not entirely different from the “White Lotus” characters he satirized. “Unless I feel somehow personally indicted, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything that bold,” he told me. “I have to take these people seriously enough that it isn’t just a satire.” One of Kauai’s most famous part-time residents, Mark Zuckerberg, reportedly owns more than a thousand acres of beachfront property, including an underground bunker. But the difference between his compound and White’s modest pair of houses is merely one of scale. “I can make fun of Mark Zuckerberg—but I am also that person,” White says.
Last fall, HBO announced a global partnership with Four Seasons, the resort chain where the majority of all three seasons of “The White Lotus” were filmed. (The companies promise “on-site activations at Four Seasons properties globally designed to engage audiences across multiple touchpoints.”) HBO sells “White Lotus” bathrobes, and Coffee-mate is celebrating the show’s return with a “White Lotus”-branded nondairy creamer flavored like Thai iced coffee. One day, when I was having lunch with White, he got a text from his father, who still lives in California, proudly sharing the news that the show had made the front page of the Los Angeles Times. The headline read “THAILAND GEARS UP FOR ROLE PAYOFF.” The article reported that the country was expecting an influx of visitors thanks to the show.
White recognizes that glamorous locales are essential to the reliable television formula that he describes as “attractive people in beautiful places doing sexy, dirty shit.” He was lured to Thailand not just by its narrative possibilities but also by tax incentives that the other main contender, Japan, was unable to match. Much of the season was filmed at a Four Seasons on Koh Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand, where a suite can cost as much as fifteen thousand dollars a night; some scenes were filmed at a secluded hillside hotel in Phuket. Footage of the two would be combined to create the fictional White Lotus Thailand.
Most of the actors, like their characters, were visitors, but the cast also included a handful of renowned locals, none more renowned than Lalisa Manoban, the country’s leading pop star, who is better known as Lisa, from the world-conquering K-pop group BLACKPINK. At first, White was wary of Manoban, even though she had a strong audition, not to mention a hundred and five million followers on Instagram. He didn’t want to seem desperate for attention, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with the extra security that would be required. But he came to see that it might seem disrespectful, both to Manoban and to her country, not to cast her. When the news broke that she would have a part, some of the show’s Thai staffers broke down in tears—and, White says, Thai officials became even more eager to help.
White acknowledged that his desire to do right by Thailand sometimes conflicted with his lifelong desire to tell stories that are “mischievous,” as he puts it. “There’s moments where I’m, like, ‘Do I want to show this side of Thailand?’ ” he said. He was referring, perhaps, to the raffish culture down the hill in the Patong entertainment district, which is known for providing a more unpretentious vacation experience than the one typically depicted in the series: rowdy bars, late-night massage spas, Muay Thai fights. “I feel this need to show the beauty, make people want to come here,” White said.
Last summer, when HBO released the first images from the new season, some viewers objected to the sepia tones: they thought it looked as if White had filmed Thailand with a so-called Mexico filter, an approach made infamous by the Steven Soderbergh movie “Traffic,” which contrasted yellow-tinted scenes set in Mexico with blue-tinted scenes set in the United States. (Critics felt that the yellow tint was a lazy way to evoke a world of heat, dirt, and disorder.) By December, when the first teaser was released, set to a song by the beloved Thai rock band Carabao, the images were noticeably less yellow.
Many viewers have heard of the Bechdel test, named for the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who in 1985 depicted a character saying that she would watch a movie only if it had at least two women in it who had a conversation about “something besides a man.” Watching the first season of “The White Lotus,” I found myself thinking about a different standard. I call it the pervert test. Whenever I see a nonwhite character onscreen, I find myself wondering, Could this character possibly be a pervert? Or at any rate a creep, a brute, a charlatan, a narcissist, a villain? Or will this character turn out to be drearily decent, possessed of no serious flaws except those which can be justified by the character’s backstory or by the flaws of society?
The thought arose because “The White Lotus” is so full of transgression and bad behavior, especially when it comes to sex. In the first season, Steve Zahn plays Mark, who is thrown by the revelation that his late father was gay. His daughter, Olivia, played by Sydney Sweeney, torments him by cheerfully considering the precise arrangements. “Even if he wasn’t a top, it doesn’t mean he was femme,” she says. “He could have still been butch, Dad.” (Zahn’s character does not find this consoling.) Armond, the hotel manager, played by the Australian actor Murray Bartlett, bears a resemblance to Basil Fawlty, the manic proprietor in “Fawlty Towers,” the old British sitcom. He is also a gay man who commits a spectacular act of sexual harassment, and an even more spectacular act of nonsexual harassment: in a frenzy of anger and desperation, he defecates in a guest’s suitcase.
Understandably, perhaps, White seems a bit more cautious when it comes to race. Natasha Rothwell, who plays the spa manager Belinda, is Black, and her character sometimes sounds like a spokesperson. “The clientele here is mostly rich white people—and to be honest I struggle with that,” she says in an early episode, as if expecting viewers to nod along. By the end of the season, though, these mostly rich white people have been complicated and, in some cases, vindicated. Olivia and her stringently progressive friend Paula, played by the biracial actor Brittany O’Grady, function as a kind of Greek chorus, offering deadpan observations of the world around them. But Paula turns out to be, if not precisely a pervert, then probably some kind of villain. “I was, like, ‘This is going to get me in trouble,’ ” White said. “But I felt like it was worth it.” As it happened, there was not much trouble. Reviews were almost uniformly positive, and though one critic described Olivia’s cracks about her grandfather’s sexuality as “disturbingly unfunny,” it’s not clear that White considers this a criticism.
In the new season, Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey play a couple whose vacation is complicated by unwelcome news.Photograph by Stefano Delia / HBO
The pervert test did not much apply to the second season, in which virtually everyone was white. That season was even more of a sensation than the first one, thanks in part to its debauched atmosphere. Two of the most memorable characters were high-spirited Sicilian sex workers. And White seemed to take particular pleasure in inverting his father’s cosmology, as Tanya descended into a hellish subculture of what White describes as “evil gays.” The whooping theme song became an unlikely night-club hit, summoning a world of bad behavior.
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