Was The White Lotus worth renewing?

the White Lotus is the latest culprit of the mini-series turn TV show phenomenon earning itself a whopping 10 Emmys in the limited series category last year before promptly announcing a second season unlike the likes of big little lies or mayor of East Town however I give anthologies the pass for this cardinal sin even by the metric of awards anthologies have always been awarded as limited series per season and Anthology was the only viable way to continue the series anyway my concerns about this second season stemmed more so from where they always stem an anxiety that such quick turnover would Foster a rushed writing process and a weaker story so imagine my surprise when the trailer dropped and we got what looked like basically the same coloring book outlines as the first season just filled in with a different color scheme now that the season's actually out I'm willing to admit that this was a somewhat reductive mindset but it wasn't entirely off base and of course in order to talk about the Sicilian White Lotus I have to give some context on my experience with the first season that was when the trailers also put me off of filled with terminally online buzzwords and advertising of Vibe of generally flat satire which I went into off of pure faith in Mike White and sure enough the first episode was pretty euphoric an incredible cast of b-listers or at least a minus listers character actors all of whom I've wanted to see in more stuff and was happy were able to spearhead what was HBO's headline show for a couple weeks a thorough aesthetic world is built here and even though the dialogue is expectedly buzzword heavy it certainly feels like Mr White is in on it and showcasing the absurdity of discourse while still managing to speak the language and the satire of the show bleeds into the form which has an unabashedly Digital Love Island look that's similarly at once hideous and also representative of the modern Condition it's diagnosing developing its examination of Reason versus Primal Instinct in humans the man vs the monkey and more importantly how this intersects with the modern consequences of colonization in each episode we see a hard shift from lackadaisical daytime activities and conversations to a nighttime filled with Relentless cross-cutting Conjuring a demonic energy that can seemingly only come out at night as though the moon's gravitational pull brings out everyone's base desires the connective tissue that gives the show its persistent kinetic energy is crystal ball Tapia devere score which itself is filled with Primal animalistic noises and a prevailing sense of exoticism that embodies these ideas employing what sounds like a stereotypical Native American war cry in its main theme that serves as a constant reminder of the stolen land this Resort is built on and the perspective its privileged inhabitants have toward the people it belongs to this presents the White Lotus as an institution as a microcosm for the current furthest reaches of colonialism and as we see these night scenes and the characters become more Primal we also see more of their colonialist politics come out after peeling back the nice family young lover outer shells the wolf in sheep's clothing of it all but white is smart enough to humanize these characters despite all the Sinister implications which puts it A step above a lot of other recent social satire with sort of ostensible Eat the Rich sentiments which tend to make easy targets out of these figures instead of tackling would actually make them hard to penetrate in the real world the other thing that gives this season its momentum is the pure knowledge that someone's going to get killed at the end of it an age-old trick the White Lotus proved still has worth giving some narrative Foundation to the Demonic filmmaking and general sense of dread a lot of these ideas get developed a little more in the later episodes but it's all there in that first episode and my biggest problem with the season is that it doesn't really go anywhere from there there's a clear structure that every episode follows but rather than developing a linear story within these structures we kind of just repeat the same beats in every episode case in point Rachel and Shane arguing about the honeymoon suite in the first episode was a fun premise and I was looking forward to what other marital quibbles they'd get themselves into given this Dynamic instead the honeymoon suite tension carries on through the rest of the season well past its mileage and while it technically leads to the key plot point of the show I was a little underwhelmed by how repetitive it is or how the Sun has a revelation about the beauty of Nature and drops his switch into the ocean and then in the next episode he's back to the screenager he's started out as and we have to watch him have nature Revelations over and over again it's like there are so many characters to juggle while working toward the finale some beats had to just be copied and pasted into the next episode so as to basically stall the runtime so despite the momentum the murder mystery gives us the real currency of the show is the conversations birthed from the repeated scenarios in everyone's vacation itinerary Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O'Grady max out the show's Twitter buzzword quota at the poolside Steve Zahn overshares to his son at a scuba lesson Jennifer Coolidge goes on some out of touch musing I will say this does give the show a stronger sense of episodic value rather than serialized tension settling into a pattern we can expect with familiarity week to week and there's new stuff to be gleaned from these conversations in every episode but I can't say I wasn't a little underwhelmed by this lack of inductive narrative culminating in an ending that I think was pretty phoned in there's poetic justification for where everyone ends up but none of it really hits like the initial momentum of the Season promised the colonialist commentary on only really pays off in the thread with Kai and a little unceremoniously at that since the death we're waiting for the whole time is really quite arbitrary arment has this sort of uncut gems unraveling and Shane faces the ultimate consequence of his privileged particularity which plays into their individual arcs but it really has little to do with the themes so frequently pointed at by the filmmaking it's almost like sketch comedy where the ending isn't really the point since there's material from moment to moment but it's one of those things where the parts end up being more valuable than the whole and the opening framing device feels like a bit of a false promise I still enjoyed the show overall as a mosaic of modern ailments but it clearly hit an early Peak and plateaued from there so I had no idea what more Mike White had to say after all this that would make another installment worth more than just a cash grab while he's got the Zeitgeist in the palm of his hand real quick I just wanted to add a little post script to this section because I'm about to basically spend the rest of the video [ __ ] on the first season's writing compared to season two but it wasn't until sitting down to edit and combing through the footage and basically re-watching the show and chopped up pieces that I realized just how much better season one looks than season two to the degree that I think it's worth bringing up and it'll eat at me if I don't when I call season 1 hideous I mostly mean the attack sharp digitalness and the piss color grade both of which I feel effectively communicate the themes and tone of the show but it's also incredibly Lush using a constantly shallow depth of field to isolate the characters and form these gorgeous portraits of them with bokeh that melts into the subject and though the whole thing almost entirely uses soft diffused light it's still able to find moments of CD genre motivation for its lighting this all elevates the surreal tone of the show so even though it's entrenched in immediate 2021 realism and modernism it leaves the impression of a hazy memory that I think is suited for a story about a vacation for whatever reason Ben kuchens who shot season one didn't return for the second season and I don't think Xavier grobay did a great job carrying the Baton the lighting is way sharper for one thing which before I realized this was a new DP I attributed to the climate of Sicily versus Maui that for a show with so many wide Vista shots there are only so many many ways to diffuse the sun itself because even when they diffuse the light on the subject's face the background still has those harsh Shadows but another Factor could be that season 1 taking place entirely in the resort gave cochins more control over lighting than grobay did and historic Untouchable locations like the Coliseum and then when they were in locations that they did have more control over they still needed everything to match but even in the hotel Interiors with full control the image is sharper and flatter and not in a way that Services the themes any more than the first seasons did while still balancing a sense of heightened reality not only does this season have a more romantic tone but it's also much more in conversation with the past than the first season so that haziness would be even more fitting here as it stands the more neutral white balance this season has I think is emblematic of how less visually expressive everything else is with pretty much every scene lighting for realism and not much else and this is where I think that Primal element is lost I originally didn't want to focus too much on the look of the show because TV in general tends to lean more on its writing but not only in the age of prestige TV should we be holding it to a high higher standard but even comparing the show to itself they hit that standard before and then lost it and were only left to imagine what kitchens could have done with a location like Sicily but anyway where were we oh yeah I was wondering what more Mike White had to say after all this that would make another installment worth more than just a cash grab while he's got the Zeitgeist in the palm of his hand let's find out after of course a word from our sponsor hey guys Grill Master here back for another episode of binging with Captain today we're taking a look at Factor who provides fresh never Frozen Ready-to-Eat meals for when you're on the go today I was gonna make the Trek all the way to key foods to buy minced pork for the gochujang noodles I was planning on making which of course would have derailed my whole day instead this package arrived on my doorstep and in two and a half minutes I have dinner right in front of me this especially comes in handy during the holidays when there are too many moving parts to keep track of and it's cheaper than dining out use that extra money to splurge on a gift for your mother God knows she deserves it now you might be thinking Captain I thought you were a hellofresh Ambassador through and through and to that I say think again bub factor is owned by hellofresh so chew on that after poking ventilation holes in the plastic layer with a fork and knife and heating it up for two and a half minutes and when you're done go to go.factor75.com tjw60 and use code tjw60 to get 60 off of your first order so Flash Forward to season two where the ante is just slightly upped in every regard still a lot of a minus listers but now we're working with a couple proper a-listers nudging up the average by a hair for one episode longer than the first season instead of one death hinted at we now have multiple deaths to look forward to it's raising the stakes pretty much the bare minimum amount and then as expected we do get a lot of identical archetypes to the first season we have the [ __ ] up family the Young Rich yuppies Jennifer Coolidge with someone trying to get her money the gay concierge praying on a younger employee the exploited locals stealing from the vacationers as a form of Retribution and we even still have a moment of halfway obscured peen in the first episode to establish that this is HBO God damn it now to be fair season one is just the balls and season two is just the head so there's some mutual exclusivity but you gotta wonder what season three is gonna have to do to show just the shaft now the cynical mind would attribute all this to a lack of turnaround time between Seasons that rather than build something from scratch the writers are only erasing down to the original frame framework and building up from the same Foundation it's a purely economical decision the more optimistic mind would say that this is in service of etching the white lotus's identity as a TV show that beyond the fact that it still takes place in a White Lotus Resort there has to be some shared structural DNA between the seasons for it to feel like a cohesive work and the mind who truly believes in Mike White would posit that this is an act of Mythology that these repeating archetypes in each White Lotus location Elevate the resort from the singular microcosm it was in season 1 to a demonstration of history repeating itself across the span of human existence seeming to put forth that the tale of humanity is one of stupid horny rich people exploiting a still horny underclass and that sex is the Catalyst that brings these conflicts to a head this is supported by the artwork in the title sequence and this idea is certainly present in the first season but it's much less zeroed in on the plot with Kai which again is the only thread that really lives up to the show's thematic promise sees this intertwining of colonial Reckoning and sex as a catalyst between glasses and then sex is also the Gateway for armin's downfall who's basically the face of the White Lotus as an establishment but again the first of these plots is severely underbaked and the second is more about the petty rivalry between Shane and Armin than anything else so it's actually a notable Improvement how comprehensively this aspect underlines every story in this second installment it's not without some sacrifices the murder mystery wasn't as much on my mind this time around so much as anxieties about where these threads could go that didn't involve death the shift tonight isn't in a stark contrast with the daytime stuff as it was last time around I mean for a season so explicitly about sex I just didn't get the same sense of the dionysian taking over and people returning to their Primal selves aside from individual moments here and there and while the tourism economy is still a dialogue baked into the setting we don't have the same themes of colonization as the first season which broadens what the White Lotus represents there's still some socioeconomic contrast between the main characters and the locals but this aspect is downplayed significantly by comparison and the little after show blur from weight he says that the first season kind of highlighted money and then the second season is sex and I think the third season it would be maybe a kind of satirical and funny look at death and I mean let's be real those three themes are all tackled in both seasons but it makes sense then that he's choosing to emphasize some of them more than others based on the given season and despite zeroing in on the sex stuff not everything is more focused here the world of this season is much less insular for instance seeing the residents leave the White Lotus property and expanding the scope of the story even more granted the first season was only confined to the property for coveted reasons but I found that self-containment to add a sense of dramatic boundaries to the show that I quite liked that everyone is trapped here together so their wires are bound to get crossed for this reason it's actually a miracle that season two somehow still feels tighter overall but it does beg the question why Sicily aside from the sex factor I mean which is admittedly a big part of it but of all the places with a Four Seasons Resort they could cheat for a White Lotus what about Sicily informs the themes at play here there seems to be a thread that's mainly vaguely gestured at with empty references about Italian media consumed by Americans and it's there enough to keep it on your mind it gets a signature White Lotus discourse treatment with Albie commenting on how these old Italian movies perpetuate a patriarchal perspective which not only sounds like the typical modern Tick-Tock armchair lecturer Nails on a chalkboard the show loves but has the added hypocrisy of how his own actions play into the patriarchy but other than that I think the media is mainly just one tile in this season's Mosaic illustrating a sort of Italian sense of machismo and familial Duty that's the real umbrella of the season the Godfather movies play into this there's a motif of Italian specters watching the men holding them to their husbandly duties like the eyes of Dr TJ eckelberg and I think this sets up more dramatic character dilemmas than the first season rather than a series of first world problems to flagellate these targets of satire this season seems to fully empathize with the series of loveless relationships at presents even if it doesn't hesitate to show us how it's these people's own faults the satire is still there and the media through line does also play into it with ironic That's Amore needle drops and again defaulting to The Godfather as a cultural litmus test criticizing the American practice of romanticizing Italy while rarely venturing outside of the curated experience of the resort I don't know why they keep giving us it's additionally fitting that the theme song This Time Around is just a Euro Pop remix of the original theme song and through this bastardized perspective there's some fresh air in its examination of old ideals that I didn't expect it's not reverence for the past per se as the old ideals quite literally get smashed in the finale but the show does use them to shake its head at what the current generation has evolved into it targets toxic masculinity but not so much the trite alpha male personality you'd typically get with this examination of machismo or perhaps an older generation of it instead it's more interested in the anti-machismo personality that was born out of reaction to the alpha male type a Neo machismo if you will I mean the two most deplorable characters this season are the nice guy in cells who claim to respect women but Ethan still gaslights Harper and Alby still enables Lucia to be exploited offering to contribute to the same system he tries to sympathize with her being trapped in and that's why I think the Central Family Dynamic is so much more mythologically structured than the one from last season the three generations of Italian men each informing the other characters Albion Dominic's relationship for instance is the same as Ethan and Cameron's the more outwardly old-school display of machismo and Dominic and Cameron inciting a reaction to be the opposite from Alby and Ethan who wind up still being the same thing but just in a roundabout way that's even more spineless where Ethan finds a bit of redemption Alby reaps what he sows with Lucia and uses that to further fuel his self-pity there's also a parallel between Bert and the ancient Italian busts as icons of the old ideals looking down on the new generation I used to respect the old now we're just reminders of an offensive past everybody wants to forget but Bert is sort of explicitly the opposite he embodies everything bad about the past with none of the actual cultural ties to it he's a creepy misogynistic old man but he doesn't even have a connection to the old world that's so often used as an excuse for such old man behavior again though even the respected icons are eventually destroyed and a fit of classic White Lotus everybody sucks rhetoric so I guess it's not just everybody sucks but rather everybody has always sucked the trade-off of the central family having these more analogical roles compared to the family in the first season is that they don't have as much to do collectively on a narrative level alby's pretty active but what little dramatic meet Dominic is given at the start disappears pretty quickly and Bert gets pretty much nothing aside from a poetic afterthought toward the end of the season well there is no homecoming foreign which is a shame considering Michael Imperioli and F Murray Abraham were two of the actors I was most excited about this season the intended irony is that the purpose of their trip was to reconnect with their roots and then they only spend about 20 minutes actually doing that but they're not up to much else otherwise fortunately thinking about the whole structure of this show is a matter of allocating resources to the cemented archetypes means that the yuppies now have a lot more to work with here even when I felt the Harper Ethan conflict was stalling a little bit it translates more into a sense of Slow Burn plot development rather than sheer repetition like season one and having two couples instead of one allows for us to get every possible combination of one-on-ones among them so we can see the different faces they put on in front of different people and piece together their philosophies and aggregate it's like the fast food version of something like Pauline at the beach but I don't even mean that as a bad thing as one thread in a show at this many moving parts I'll take it and despite there being repeated beats elsewhere in the show like Cameron holding off on paying Lucia for seemingly no reason we have a much stronger sense of momentum here over all it doesn't feel like each episode is just settling into the same routine as the first episode Albion Porsche's relationship in particular develops fluidly over the first few episodes and each thread has a strong sense of before and after essentially dividing the season into two halves Greg leaving Porsha moving on to Jack and Alby consequently moving on to Lucia Mia drugging The Pianist and Cameron and Ethan's night with Lucia and Mia all form roughly a midpoint from which each of their Loosely intersecting stories becomes about something else again I think the family Dynamic is the least fleshed out here Dominic finds himself in an interesting dilemma but it's inherently a dramatic stalemate all he can really do is complain about it to Bert and ask Alby to stop seeing Lucia and vice versa since he can't tell I'll be the truth without ruining the admittedly few steps he's taken to fix his family and I'll be also a little stagnant after the midpoint he learns more about Lucia's situation he asks for more and more money but he starts out head over heels for her and ends head over heels for her rather than there being a progression working him to the point of paying her debts off but again this plays into the kicker at the end where he claims to have gotten played even though he was more than eager without any sort of real push so I clearly don't know what I want from this show Harper and Ethan's plot becomes more interesting after the midpoint though for the first half we mostly sympathize with Harper and for a minute there she actually feels like the only White Lotus character with any sort of real moral fiber but after she confronts Ethan we lose her perspective almost entirely not that we start to sympathize with Ethan but we mostly stick to his point of view watching what's been telegraphed between Harper and Cameron come to fruition maybe and if these four start out as fast food Palling at the beach they finish as fast food eyes wide shut no longer running from the psychosexual barrier between them but confronting it head-on is the only means of saving their relationship and their smashing of the old icons is a bit of a Triumph for them as they're now at least as functional as Cameron and Daphne but that kind of relationship isn't necessarily a Triumph in and of itself I think it's just Mike White diagnosing what a certain Modern Love looks like it's an ode in clunkier in less cinematic terms than its Inspirations to the unknowability of another person and making peace with what happens behind closed doors I guess that's still pretty Pauline at the beach I wonder what the Venn diagram there is I feel like it would have to be love in the afternoon but I'm digressing this thought won't come back to haunt me this thread is also the most bait and switchy out of all of them in my opinion it was kind of an obligatory tease with Bert having the head injury and saying well there is no homecoming but I feel like this is the one white really wanted us to think would end in death there's also the thread with Mia and Valentina and The Pianist and now that I think about it that was definitely the least fleshed out threat here to the point where I hadn't even considered it when I started writing this section I'm honestly kind of glad it didn't take a lot of run time though there's some pining a fake out death pretty inoffensive payoff with a fun jab at meritocracy you got what you pay for with that one I'm also glad things worked out for the local characters this time around I get the satirical purpose behind Kai and Lonnie's fate but even for this show it felt a little cruel and not only do things work out for Lucia and Mia but they're basically the connective tissue of all the threads this season instead of on the periphery Porsha felt like sort of a new archetype this season not that gen Z girl is new to the show but how she gives Jennifer Coolidge more momentum by proxy as I thought her thread was pretty stagnant in season one and I found Porsche's thread in the second half with Jack just as intriguing and fluidly unfolding as with Alby in the first half both men seeming ideal at first and slowly revealing their dangerous qualities tour episodes later Jack especially does a great job transitioning from genuine Charisma when it's necessary exciting with scary undertones to just being obnoxious and even still taking that obnoxiousness into a kind of heartbreaking reveal about his life the sense of Full Circle when she meets back up with Albie is also satisfying and I think there's something kind of sweet about the two of them as selfish people winding up together even if there's no way things actually work out for them but it turns out Jennifer Coolidge didn't need a proxy this time around because the big threat of course is Tanya murdered at the hands of the gay Mafia at the start I expected them to hint at mob stuff only to subvert it and have that not really be part of the story in just an American expectation of a story set in Italy and then it actually was the mob so that's kind of funny but I was so annoyed with the direction they took Greg in this season for so long just to complete 180 and then to write him out of the show entirely I thought it was a total cop out I thought it was at least in service of a more intriguing and seedier plot in the second half but when we got to the actual explanation and saw the foreshadowing as far back as season one it became so [ __ ] absurd that it 360'd back around and became good again I thought Tanya was going to be like the mascot of the series showing up to all the different White Lotus locations but that was clearly the intent so he wouldn't expect her to be the one who dies I was obviously frustrated as I've mentioned with the lack of relevance armin's death had to the themes of season one so I was definitely scrutinizing that this time around and it came a lot closer what I thought they were doing at first was that Tanya's prenup stipulated that Greg wouldn't get the money unless she cheated which she of course realized after being orchestrated into cheating instead it's just that they were seducing her to get her to an opportune place to put a mob hit on her it still ties a little bit into sex but not as much as the first idea and in that scenario there's no real reason why they had to get her laid to kill her or why they wouldn't just kill her when they had her isolated in Palermo instead of right in front of the resort in fact for that reason I'm open to the idea that the mob plot was actually born out of Tanya's American paranoia and that it really was just a cheating stipulation but there's enough going on there that like what else could it be and if death is according to Tanya what the Clause was then yeah they were clearly gonna whack her another behind closed doors thing I suppose which I guess is the through line for the whole ending here Porsche never learns the whole truth about Jack so he's behind closed doors Alby agrees to put in good word for Dominic whose relationship with Lucia is kept behind closed doors from both Alby and his wife Valentina and Mia's romance that gets me of The Pianist job is kept behind closed doors Porsha decides to leave Italy instead of verifying that it's Tanya who got killed closing that door off for herself what happened between Cameron and Harper what Ethan and Daphne did on that island and the whole dirty truth of their spousal relationships is kept behind closed doors I mean God why does this sound so familiar wait wait just a minute oh [ __ ] off are you kidding me it was so obvious all along Michael white that is not Corleone you broke my heart the crazy thing is these endings all pretty much work on their own clearly doing the same thing renowned films of the past have done to great success is bound to work in your favor but the fact that this has to be a Godfather riff almost takes the wind out of my sails I don't know what am I supposed to do with that Michael's Arc is about corruption from the old way putting work before the family smashing the old icons if you will so there's a parallel drawn and it's full circle with Italy and what have you but I don't know what good does being so in conversation with another work actually do I was ready to defend the ending that knowing who dies doesn't negate the worth of everything leading up to it because those threads have stakes and anxieties that hold their own even without death on the horizon but I don't know something about this is very upsetting to me I guess the fact that it's more or less implicit and I didn't even think about it until I had written most of this video is a testament to how much Works in and of itself but there's also a part of me that just feels feels like taking the ethos of another work and applying it to your own without really recontextualizing it is cruel but maybe it is recontextualized I guess by definition it has to be the Godfather itself is the emblem of old ideals old Cinema tradition the Canon and by employing it in this digital 360 shutter serialized window into not just the modern state of relationships but the modern state of Cinema of TV shows taking over in the age of streaming and six episode seasons and miniseries that inevitably get renewed after making enough money is how this season is really smashing the icon and showing us How Far We've Come For Better or For Worse maybe this was Mike White's master plan all along making a season that in and of itself is the most telling example of where the industry's at right now in order to end on a self-reflexive idea indicting the very state of the industry that made a success possible or maybe the fact that an empty reference at the end of a fun summer vacation comedy of manners can rile up such a reaction action out of me is the real power of this season of throwing everything to the wall and seeing what sticks I think I need to decompress this is not at all where I expected things to go I can't tell if I love the man or despise him things were so much easier when he was just Ned schneebly and the guy from Survivor who wrote Jack Black's best movie I don't know what do you think am I reading too much into this is there even such thing are you gonna go to go.factor75.com and use coupon code tjw60 at checkout are you gonna go visit my patreon and perhaps watch the latest episode of Happy Hour I know the answer to some of those questions until then you know where to find me this has been the White Lotus season two thank you for watching and goodbye

Channel: Taylor J. Williams

Views: 44,466

Keywords: White lotus, HBO, Mike white, Season 2, Albie, Michael imperioli, F Murray Abraham, Aubrey plaza, Theo James, Haley Lu Richardson, Jennifer Coolidge, Sicily, The godfather, L’avventura, Portia, Daphne, Four seasons

Id: bPDstSxTMLk

Length: 27min 29sec (1649 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2022