Down the Upstairs...

 “The White Lotus,” Season 1, directed by Mike White, 2021

A newly-wed couple, a CEO’s family and friend and a sad, lonely woman holiday in Hawaii, at the very upscale White Lotus resort.  They are nearly all light-skinned and wealthy.  As their transport boat arrives, they are greeted by the resort’s employees, led by its perpetually-grinning Australian resort manager.  One is a young Hawaiian woman on her first day at work; one is a dark-skinned spa manager; the others are light-skinned, a young man working a porter job and a masseuse.  A handsome Hawaiian entertainer and porter plays a role later.  We find out that even the overly-pleasing ‘white’ Australian resort manager is a peon too.

Aloha Rich People!

The show is set up as a U.S. Upstairs/Downstairs for modern times, a Downton Abbey that does not historicize ‘servantry.’ The manager instructs the new woman that she has to always smile and treat the guests like giant babies.  What he doesn’t realize is that she is pregnant and about to give birth, but is too afraid to tell anyone on her first day. Eventually her water breaks, a doctor is called and she gives birth in the manager’s office.  The manager is ashamed of himself for not noticing – and that is the last we hear of her!

After the first episode, the focus is increasingly on the wealthy guests and their conflicts or engagement with the workers, but mostly among themselves.  This approach is the standard one, relegating workers to a side-show, now just an 'upstairs.'  The needy, out of control woman is going to scatter her hated mother’s ashes in the ocean.  She demands immediate massage services and ultimately ‘befriends’ the spa manager, who she lures into being a friend with the offer of funding her own business.  She later dumps her for a skinny “BLM” boyfriend, and no funds are forthcoming.

The newly-weds slowly come apart, as the rich, mamas’ boy husband is miffed that he did not get the exact suite he booked on-line, and got another quite beautiful one instead.  He becomes obsessed with ruining the resort manager behind the mistake, and his new wife notices how boorish he has become.  His mother shows up to further embarrass the poor, cute bride, who thought she was on a honeymoon, not locked in a room with an entitled frat-boy moron who is only interested in sex.

The female CEO’s family – her oversharing and neurotic husband, their ‘on-the-spectrum’ son, her obnoxiously politically-correct daughter and her darker-skinned friend who is no better - crack apart, then come together, then crack apart, then …  The CEO is working on holiday, making sure her Zoom sessions feature the correct furniture backgrounds.  She is the competent one in the bunch.  The husband decides to get to know his withdrawn son, who loses his iPad, iPhone and laptop in the surf by accident and has to go ‘cold turkey’ in the real world.  They sit in the pool to learn to scuba, while the husband talks to his son about his infidelity.  Yikes!  The kid is the only likable character in this bunch after he sleeps on the beach and meets a group of islanders paddling their out-rigger ocean canoe.

No matter what we read ... we learn nothing.

Books play a role in defining the characters.  At first we see the girls reading Nietzsche and Freud; then a day later left feminist Camille Paglia and Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, all the while lying in their swimsuits by the pool. Oh so intellectual and radical.  This reminds one of the comedy scene in Goodbye Columbus where a bikini-clad girl barely reads War and Peace on the beach.  The newly-wed husband is always reading the noxious Malcolm Gladwell book Blink, about how instant decisions are the best. The newly-wed wife is reading some sappy romance, which figures. 

Ultimately, through a stupid attempt at ‘getting back at whitey,’ the friend unintentionally gets a Hawaiian entertainer arrested for burglary and assault.  It must have been all that Frantz Fanon!  She had been meeting up with the young man late at night for sex and found out he had financial problems.  This was her dumb-ass solution.  Her girl friend figures it out but doesn’t turn her in.

We have to watch these people eat, eat, eat at the all-inclusive resort; suck on champagne; go on boat-rides; have their emotional tantrums and catty comments; and try to argue politics.  The CEO’s daughter attempts to guilt-trip her wealthy parents over and over, but as they point out – “Look at you…”  The spa manager eventually gets wise with caretaking the guest's emotions.  When the crying newly-wed seeks her empathetic counsel, she says she’s done with that and leaves.  They don’t pay me enough … to listen to YOUR problems, she's thinking.

At the end the needy woman gets a new but sick boyfriend and the family makes up.  The mixed-ethnicity friend escapes scot-free from aiding a robbery and destroying the life of a young Hawaiian man.  The newly-wed husband somehow escapes some criminal charges and might even be reconciled with his new wife.  They all fly away while the 16-year old boy runs out of the airport to live in Hawaii for a bit.   Only the staff takes the damages.  This is almost like some weird version of the dopey TV classic Love Boat. The last scene of this season is the remaining staff waving in greeting to a new boatload of rich, pampered assholes. 

If this film had been made for a period after CoVid 19, the guests would be even more obnoxious.  Witness the present vile treatment of flight attendants, waiters and waitresses, hotel staff and anyone in the service economy taking care of these overgrown babies.  The Chicago Tribune recommends the 2019 Mexican film, ‘The Chambermaid,” about a woman who has to clean-up after wealthy guests in a Mexican hotel, as an antidote to the flaws of this film.  I've seen 'The Chambermaid" and it is a small but human picture of a tough life.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Manny’s Steakhouse,” “The Servant Economy,” “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “White Tiger,” “Far From the Madding Crowd,” “The Potlikker Papers,” “The Permanent Guillotine” “To Serve God and Wal-mart,” “Parasite,” “The Assistant,” “Caste,” “Richistan,” “Rich People Things.”

The Cultural Marxist

August 30, 2021