It begins with a corpse. Daphne (Meghann Fahy), one of the well-heeled vacationers basking in Sicilian luxury on the second season of The White Lotus, is just taking a final dip in the Ionian Sea before she and her finance-bro husband Cameron (Theo James) head back to the U.S. after their weeklong stay. She’s just been gushing to a pair of new arrivals about the great time she’s had—the staff are so attentive, the food is amazing, and, my god, the wine. “Italy’s so romantic, you’re gonna die,” she tells them. “They’ll have to drag you out of here.”
A few moments later, Daphne is butting up against a body in the glimmering blue water, which we’re told is only one of several resort guests who’ve just met with a fatal ending. (How many? The best a hapless concierge can manage is “a few.”) As on the first season of Mike White’s pandemic-era hit—and on HBO’s smash Big Little Lies, from which he borrowed the tactic—the corpse assures us that not every one of the show’s characters, many of whom seem impossibly insulated by wealth and privilege, will end the week as they began it. Somebody’s going to get what’s coming to them. But on this season, the morbid flash-forward hardly seems necessary. From the moment the White Lotus’ guests step off the launch and onto the dock in Taormina, there’s death in the air.
It’s nothing to do with the pandemic, which is never mentioned explicitly and barely comes up at all. The closest the show gets to acknowledging the cataclysm of the past few years is when Haley Lu Richardson’s Portia, the harried assistant to Jennifer Coolidge’s daffy heiress Tanya—one of only two characters returning from the first season—comments that she’s spent the past three years inside, doomscrolling on her phone. But in the shadow of Mount Etna, whose looming presence White periodically reminds us of, a calm surface is no guarantee of safety. There’s always something ready to erupt, or threatening to pull you under. The White Lotus’ rooms are decorated with examples of testa di moro, “Moor’s heads,” ceramic vases inspired by the local legend of a woman who was unknowingly seduced by a married man and cut off his head in return for his deception. Crumbling statues and cracked frescoes watch with eyes worn smooth by time, remnants of an empire that once seemed so powerful it could never fall—and then did.
Apart from Portia, who depending on how you look at it is either the resort’s lowest-status guest or its most privileged employee, the only vacationer who seems bothered by any of this is Harper (Aubrey Plaza), a labor lawyer who has suddenly found herself vaulted into the 1 percent by the sale of her husband’s company. Ethan (Will Sharpe) is doing his best to familiarize himself with the good life, reconnecting with his college roommate Cameron, who has plenty of tips on how to spend his newly acquired fortune. But Harper can’t unwind, can’t even get to sleep without an Ambien, because of “everything that’s going on in the world.” Exactly what that “everything” means is hard for her to say, perhaps because she’s not used to being asked. Cameron and Daphne just stare at her for a moment, like animals reacting to an unfamiliar sound, and then they say, like what? “I don’t know,” Harper scoffs, “just the end of the world.”
The world, of course, is always ending, and it always has been. It’s one of the sharper moments in White’s writing, which slips between acute caricatures and easy targets, to observe that Harper’s anxieties aren’t ipso facto superior to Cameron and Daphne’s obliviousness. Sure, they’re insulated to an absurd extent—not only do they not read the news, Harper fumes, “they don’t even read.” But she’s got her blind spots as well, so focused on the outside world she can’t see herself at all. She scorns the other couple’s overt displays of affection, which, I mean, come on, are so obviously for show. But if she notices how her own husband is withdrawing from her, how their agreed-upon goal of having a child has been stalled by the extinction of their sex life, she doesn’t seem to understand why that’s happening, let alone what to do about it.
The White Lotus isn’t a whodunit, because we don’t know who got done, but it evolves like a mystery, coaxing us (sometimes forcing us) into one understanding of its characters, then making us think we’ve gotten them all wrong, and then that maybe that’s wrong, too. We’ve got the Di Grassos, three generations of American men who have come to explore their Sicilian roots, easily pegged at first: Bert (F. Murray Abraham) is an elderly horndog who’s making up for having been married for 53 years to the same recently deceased woman by flirting with every woman unfortunate enough to cross his field of vision. Dominic (Michael Imperioli) is a Hollywood producer who’s done something bad enough to make his wife and daughter drop out of the trip, and his son, Albie (Adam DiMarco), is a recent Stanford grad so steeped in newfound sensitivities that he can hardly talk to a woman without asking for permission first. But the grandfather shows subtle signs of cognitive decline as well as a blinkered understanding of his own past, and Albie’s delicate ideals clash with a vein of aggression both passive and otherwise—the family peacemaker is growing fed up with his role.
As in the first season of The White Lotus, shit tends to run downhill. White is less interested this time in the upstairs–downstairs dynamics between guests and staff—only the resort manager, Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), emerges as a significant character in the five of seven episodes sent to critics in advance. And apart from Harper’s quip that she and her husband are Cameron and Daphne’s new “white-passing diverse friends,” he largely steers clear of race altogether (which, considering how broadly the first season dealt with its native Hawaiian characters, is probably for the best). Even wealth plays a lesser role, since almost all of the major characters this time are rich, with the exception of Portia and two young Italian women: Lucia (Simona Tabasco), a prostitute, and her friend Mia (Beatrice Grannò), whom Lucia is coaching on how to make quick money sleeping with tourists while she works on her singing career. What he’s really interested in is sex, the thing that holds relationships together and breaks them apart, that can lead us towards heaven or send us plunging earthwards (a pop song in the first few minutes evokes “l’amore sacro e l’amor profano”), a currency that holds meaning even for the rich, and—not least—one of the most powerful ways to make us feel alive even in the midst of death.
Although the mock-baroque score would have us believe otherwise, there’s not enough screwing in The White Lotus to qualify it as a sex farce (premium cable or not, HBO is too puritanical for that). But there’s a lot of talk about it, the sex people have had or shouldn’t have had, the things they’ve done to get it and the ruin it’s wreaked on their lives. Even Lucia, who starts off liberated and sexually forthright, ends up hastily making the sign of the cross after one encounter, lest anyone overlook that this season is set in a Catholic country. In the first episode, Tanya coaxes her husband (Jon Gries) into having sex, only to physically throw him aside because she’s having a dissociative vision of him with eyes as lifeless as a shark’s. (Their marriage is not, let’s say, in great shape.) Surrounded by memento mori, all they want to do is forget.
In the first weeks of the pandemic, there was a brief spurt of interest in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which a group of wealthy revelers try to wall themselves off from a plague but end up dying hideous deaths. We don’t know how The White Lotus’ victims will die, but the chances are it won’t be pretty, and no amount of pleasure or privilege can save them from their fate.
