My emotional journey with Season 2 of The White Lotus continues to take unexpected twists and turns. I’ve been entertained, bored, vaguely disdainful, but as of this week’s episode (“That’s Amore”) I’m disconcerted. Like, what if Mike White is right? What if people really are like this — all of them grasping, self-deluded, hypocritical assholes? What if my friends and loved ones are secretly like this. What if I’m secretly like this? How can I ever have a healthy, trusting relationship of any kind ever again? How can society survive???
Take the case of Ethan and Harper as an example. After a day of hemming and hawing, Harper finally sends the desired message to Ethan by leaving the condom wrapper she found in their couch on the bathroom sink, where he discovers it. He denies, accurately, that he did anything wrong (given what he’s suspected of I think we can give him a pass on briefly kissing Mia), and insists, again accurately, that the condom isn’t his.
But Harper doesn’t believe him. She spends the rest of the day pointedly not believing him. She grills him and Cameron on their sex lives, apart and together, to further make it clear that she doesn’t believe him. Cameron figures all this out, starts coming onto her, and she still doesn’t believe him.
The only conclusion we can come to, beyond that Cam is a sociopath who’s steering Harper away from narc’ing on him to Daphne (who doesn’t care anyway) by trying to make her complicit, is that Harper already dislikes Ethan so much that she’s willing to believe terrible things of him, or even that she’s simply using this as a pretext to lash out whether he’s telling the truth or not. Meanwhile, rather than put up a fight, Ethan just sits there and glowers and picks up on the vibe between Cam and Harper and does nothing; you can tell that this kind of pointed inaction is a big part of what’s led Harper to dislike him so much. Are these our options in life? Weird misplaced aggression or helpless miserable passivity?
Then there’s the matter of poor, gently self-righteous Albie. After a great time with Lucí (marred by a ghastly crash cut by director White from his orgasm to the breaking waves), he defends the dignity of escorts to his grandfather and father (who’s increasingly miserable with his own loneliness and with Albie’s closeness to one of the sex workers he himself patronized), then spends the day with her. What he doesn’t realize is that she’s running some kind of scam on him, inventing a pimp in order to guilt him into…what, exactly? He’d already made clear that he’d pay her if she’d let him. To maneuver him into shaking down Cam for the money Cam owes her? Is that even necessary?
Mia, meanwhile, successfully propositions Valentina into letting her take over the bar’s piano in exchange for sex. This comes shortly after Valentina demotes her work crush Isabella’s colleague in order to get him out of the way. Everything in these people’s romantic orbit is depressingly transactional, depressingly lopsided in terms of personal power.
Even the relative bright spot of Tanya’s whirlwind bromance with Quentin and his pack of fantastic international gays gets ruined. Quentin takes Tanya to the opera, chuckling a bit to himself at her ignorance but ultimately sharing a heartfelt, hand-holding moment when the music brings them both to tears. He gives a moving monologue about how he’s only been in love once, with a straight guy, and how ever since he’s devoted his life to the pursuit of beauty instead.
I’ll say he has. At the end of the night, Tanya overhears an, ahem, commotion and walks in to discover Quentin getting fucked by his nephew—“nephew”?—Jack. Jack, for his part, had spent the day romancing Portia, from fucking her on a yacht to leading her on a dine-and-dash adventure in the Palermo streets. Another pair of lying liars!
The “happy” relationships at play in the story are hardly an improvement. Daphne and Cam have obviously adapted a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy that works well enough for them, but only because Daphne retaliates when she feels he’s cheated in order to make herself feel better. (She passes on this advice to Harper, much, I suspect, to her own eventual detriment.) Bert insists that his relationship with his late wife was a happy one, only for Dom to insist that she knew about Bert’s every dalliance and that she died a bitter woman; Bert blithely insists that he loved her, she loved him, and it is indeed as simple as that.
After watching this bunch of miscreants at work, I found myself hoping Bert was right! Even though his conception of his marriage is both self-serving and completely delusional, at least it’s a happy delusion, predicated on the idea that love conquers all. It seems like everyone else on the show is much closer to Quentin, having given up on love entirely, no matter what kind of lip service they pay to the idea or to its presence in their lives with their significant other should they have one.
And again, I’m disconcerted. What if we’ve had The White Lotus all wrong this whole time? What if it’s not about how rich people are assholes? What if rich people are just a science-fiction-style metaphor for real people? What if we’re the assholes?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.