The White Lotus review: Rich people suffer again in this grim yet glorious tale of depravity

In a scene from the second season of The White Lotus, Quentin, played by Tom Hollander raises a toast to the perennially mopey Tanya, (Jennifer Coolidge). “To beauty,” he says, with the kind of studious grin that hints at insincerity. The White Lotus has always been full of people who understand that it’s probably as artistic to impress your adjacency to art than to actually re-appeal its intellectual worth. Which is why the show has always been littered with books, music, paintings and people casually dissolving into conversations that name-bomb artists like common folk. Season 2 of the White Lotus, unlike the first one, sends this group of rich and elite to the gas chamber. The suffering, this time, is punctuated by desire and while not everything adds up in an uneven finale, the show reinstates itself as a scathing critique of entitlement.

Watching the rich suffer is probably a genre now, but what the White Lotus has done so incredibly well over the course of two different, but fairly similar seasons, is introduce a sense of gnarly jeopardy. We know someone will die, and the series casually casts a net of gloom wide enough to tease us into thinking it could be anyone. Death therefore is always lurking, despite the glitter, the grandiosity of it all. The second season is set on the Sicilian coast in Italy. The guests this time around include an awkward assembly of three different generations of the DiMarcos, two hunky tech-millionaires (how timely) on vacation with their better halves, the returning Tanya and a new assistant she will hound, quite literally, into a kind of oblivion.

On the hospitality end of things this time around is Valentina, a rather rude host played by an excellent Sabrina Impacciatore. Add to the mix, a couple of prostitutes who have made the The White Lotus, their playground of sorts. Worlds and words collide in this mismatch of intent and source, as the show does its usual thing. Coolidge is spectacular as the somewhat dim but also perceptive Tanya. While the men at the hotel are served a generous dose of depravity, the women, are left to the fret the what-ifs. That is, until, push comes to shove. This second season is lighter on the details of the hospitality side of things and instead dives straight into the odd chemistry between the DiMarcos, the brewing friction between Ethan and Cameron, played by Will Sharpe and Theo James, respectively. A highlight of this second season is Aubrey Plaza as Harper, a woke, over-thinker who, together with Valentina, together the moral centre of a show that wastes no time in slinking to one side or the other.

The second season doubles down on desire, as possibly the cornerstone of all malaise that afflicts the human mind. Horny fathers and perverse uncles abound in this second season where its actually the prostitutes who seem to redeem their humanity to an extent. Everyone else, as is expected, leaves with a little less. But then these are the kind of loaded equivalences the show has seamlessly drawn to cut across lines that separate the ones who have from the ones who don’t. These divisions, in creator Mike White’s mind, are as fluid and as indistinguishable, in a moral sense at least, as milk and cream.

This second season is far more explicit and brutal compared to the last one. While the first gradually ascended to a state of discomfort, here hell ensues from the get-go. No conversation feels comfortable or even remotely enjoyable and despite the golden tint of the setting Italian sun, there is a smidgen of blood, in everyone’s eyes. Is there even such a thing as contentment, the show will make you question. The White Lotus isn’t here to give you answers but simply excavate what we presume to be sophistication, as the greatest cover-up of our lives. The smiles, the clothes, the perfectly quenched throats and the evocation of vague mission statements like “we’re gonna party” as euphemism for sex and drugs, feels eerily revelatory despite the simplicity of it all.

Season 2 of the White Lotus is far more provocative than the first, but that quite possibly was always the natural step up. With entitlement comes a more creative imagination, and this second seasons illustrates that beyond the ornamental qualities of a entitled life, men and women alike, are savages. They desire the same things, and fight the same battles of insecurity and self-worth. They desire, through sex even, similar powers of objectivity that their privilege otherwise guarantees. It’s almost a kind of resistance against vulnerability, essayed most affectingly by Tanya, a rich woman travelling the globe, seeking a ‘fix’ rather than the lens that will rescue her from the depths of uncertainty. Even if it has to, for the sake of clarity, throw her off cliff first.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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