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Movie Review: The White Lotus (2021 and 2022) [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-12

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SPOILER ALERT!

One night, when I was about seven years old, I was at the drive-in with my parents. At a certain point in the movie we were watching, a man took a woman in his arms and kissed her. I asked, “Is it over?”

My mother laughed. Apparently, this was not the first time something like this had happened, for she turned to my father and said, “He always thinks it’s the end of the movie when a man and woman kiss.”

Small wonder that I had reached that conclusion, even at such a young age. A standard formula for a movie was a happy ending in which a heterosexual couple overcame whatever obstacles that were keeping them apart, represented by a kiss. It was the movies’ version of the fairy-tale ending, in which it is said, “And they lived happily ever after.”

Though we may come to have a cynical view of love as the years go by, yet we usually accept such happy endings effortlessly, especially if the movie does not strain our credulity to any great degree. Some movies, however, go too far, especially when either the man or the woman undergoes a complete change of character.

One such movie is Great Expectations (1946). Pip, a young boy around fourteen years old, meets Estella, a few years older than he is. She is mean to him. Pip immediately falls in love with her, a love that lasts into adulthood, despite the fact that Estella remains cold and heartless. Throughout this movie, I kept hoping the day would come when Pip realized he had wasted his love on this worthless girl and just walk away. Instead, in the very last scene, she realizes something or other, and they embrace. They don’t kiss, but that’s close enough. We are supposed to regard this as a happy ending, which is quite an imposition.

In the first and second seasons of The White Lotus (2021 and 2022), however, the formula for the happy ending by means of the heterosexual couple has a different feel to it. Of course, not every heterosexual couple is intended to fill the slot for the happy ending. So, we are not surprised in Season One when Paula gets her lover in trouble by talking him into committing a burglary, which goes terribly wrong, or in Season Two when Adam is conned out of a lot of money by a prostitute he has fallen in love with.

Worse is Tanya’s relationship with Greg. They meet in Season One and are married in Season Two. Because she is rich, she makes him sign a prenuptial agreement. Maybe it’s because I am a bachelor, who has never been completely disabused of his foolish notions about love, but if I were considering marrying a woman that happened to be rich, then even if her money were the furthest thing from my mind, as soon as she brought up the subject of a prenuptial agreement, that would thoroughly dispel my romantic illusions. She might as well be saying to me, “You know, Honey, love doesn’t last. So, we might end up in a bitter divorce, and I wouldn’t want you to get your hands on any of my money.” It is impossible to imagine a happy ending for a movie in which a man kisses a woman right after she signs a prenuptial.

But a prenuptial agreement can have even darker implications, as Tanya would have known, had she seen the movie Body Heat (1981). In that movie, a woman marries a man she doesn’t love because he is rich, but since he makes her sign a prenuptial, she has no recourse but to get herself a lover to help kill her husband so that she can inherit his money instead. So, if you are rich and want to get married, it is not enough to require that the love of your life sign a prenuptial agreement. You should insist that your sweetie provide written consent to being disinherited as well.

But Tanya did not see Body Heat, so she neglected to do that. As a result, her husband enlists the aid of a homosexual who has been in love with him since they were young, who along with his gang of gays, sets out to have her murdered, all expecting to share in the spoils. At the last minute, she realizes what’s up and kills most of them with a pistol before falling overboard and drowning.

There is another prenuptial, this one in the first season, involving a married couple, Shane and Rachel, on their honeymoon. In this case, Shane is rich, and Rachel has signed a prenuptial agreement. Rachel is as nice as she can be, so there is no danger that she will find a lover and get him to help murder Shane. However, as we find out from her conversation with another woman, in case of a divorce, the prenuptial agreement allows for Rachel to get something, but not enough so that she will be set for life. And yet, this marriage will require that she give up her career, one that will not easily be started up again if they get a divorce a few years later.

Shane is obsessed with the fact that their room at the hotel, as nice as it is, is not the one that was reserved. He refuses to quit complaining about it, so much so that he is ruining the whole honeymoon. Then his mother shows up, who immediately notices that their room is not the one she reserved for them. In his frustration, Shane finally bursts into the manager’s office, where there are two totally naked men, all hopped up on drugs the manager stole from Paula and her friend Olivia. One man is leaning up against a desk, while the manager is on his knees, with his face sandwiched between two butt cheeks.

Shane figures this will be all he needs to get revenge on the manager for giving him the wrong room. The manager, knowing he is about to lose his job, sneaks into Shane’s room, drops his pants, turns around, bends over, and in full profile view, takes a dump, the turds landing on Shane’s shirt in the open suitcase. But Shane hears him and, thinking himself to be in danger from an intruder, stabs the manager with a knife, killing him. Homosexuals do not fare well in The White Lotus.

At the beginning of Season One, we saw Shane alone at the airport. Then there was a flashback lasting until the final minutes of the last episode. At that point, I was thinking that Rachel had decided to separate from Shane, especially after saying she regretted having married him. But then Rachel shows up at the airport, smiling at Shane affectionately, and the heterosexual couple is together again, ostensibly a happy ending. As with my reaction to Great Expectations, I had been hoping that she would realize that Shane was worthless, get a divorce, resume her career, and never marry again.

The difference is this: whereas we were supposed to regard the forming of the heterosexual couple at the end of Great Expectations as a happy ending, we are allowed to be disgusted when Rachel returns to Shane.

In a similar way in Season Two, there is a troubled married couple, Ethan and Harper, in which the husband has lost all interest in his wife, sexually and otherwise. Then, in the final episode, they seem to have resolved their problems, having hot, naked sex. Had they merely kissed, the symbol for a happy ending that used to be standard in the movies, we might have felt obligated to accept that as a happy ending for them. Their act of raw, physical sex, however, gives us no such assurance. As with Rachel in Season One, we know that Harper should get herself a divorce, and we are permitted to be disappointed when it appears that she will not.

And so, in these two seasons of The White Lotus, the formula for the happy ending through the coming together of a heterosexual couple is not intended to be accepted uncritically, but rather is subversively presented as something undesirable.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/12/2185258/-Movie-Review-The-White-Lotus-2021-and-2022

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