Nothing is certain except death and taxes
The White Lotus, white privilege, Mike White, and wealthy woes
“The customer is always right.”
This axiom is not true nor has it ever been true, but that hasn’t stopped workplaces and privileged snots alike from weaponizing it against underpaid, beleaguered workers who politely refuse to cater to their every whim and desire. Protecting the bottom line often also means protecting the wealthy, white customers who are deeply generous with everything but their ability to see and treat customer service people as actual people. Or if they do treat them as people, there’s always a passive aggressive reminder of not just the wealth gap between them but the balance of power. They are right, you are wrong, and everyone smiles politely with cold, dead eyes.
Writer/director Mike White’s new hit HBO limited series, The White Lotus, examines these pesky, pernicious interactions between staff and uber-privileged guests in a searing, sometimes unsettling, and consistently hilarious satire of a posh Hawaiian resort and its demanding, wealthy (and mostly white) clientele. Set over the course of six days at The White Lotus Resort & Spa, the limited series kicks off with a death. Just whose death is the question that propels the series. In this way, The White Lotus becomes something like Rian Johnson’s 2019 hit Knives Out: a classic, starry whodunit/whodied (in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie adaptations) that simultaneously lays bare the awfulness of white privilege and the grotesque ways white people often co-opt the language/behavior of wokeness in order to hold onto that privilege.
By starting the series with a future death—i.e. a body in a crate being loaded into the cargo hold of a plane—White immediately puts the audience in a state of anxiety and curiosity that doesn’t let up for the course of each successive episode. As we learn more about these wealthy, “woke” white people and the harried staff who are pushed to their limits (and sometimes past them) in serving them, it becomes clear that anyone and everyone could be the body in the crate. The deranged deliciousness of the characters White has written makes it easy to imagine—and in some cases, wish—nearly all of them were dead. The characters don’t know someone will die, but we do, and that context—or lack thereof for the characters—makes all the difference in how we view what’s going on versus how they view it. And so White gives us the one privilege these very privileged people do not have: the knowledge of certain and imminent death for at least one of them.
In White’s world as supposedly in our own, Benjamin Franklin’s famous idiom is proven true:
“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
Except that in our current world, taxes for the wealthy are not certain. In fact, the only thing wealthy people try harder to avoid than death is taxes. Our entire economy has been reorganized to support that goal, entrench it, and make sure the ever widening wealth gap continues long after the people responsible for it have died and had their bodies loaded into crates on planes set to depart the luxurious islands where they have lived and vacationed as holy, white terrors for most of their lives. These people have turned the entire world into their own personal White Lotus Resort where the rest of us are left to bow, scrape, smile, and cater to their every ridiculous whim and tantrum in the hopes they might suddenly decide to throw any of their money and empathy our way.
No relationship makes this more clear than the one between genuinely kind-hearted, black spa manager Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) and ditzy, grieving alcoholic Tanya (the glorious Jennifer Coolidge). Tanya is at the White Lotus to spread her abusive mother’s ashes at sea and strikes up a strange friendship with Belinda, who offers her real kindness and empathy during their spa sessions; something Tanya clearly needs and is willing to pay a lot of money for. In the midst of one of their awkward dinners, Tanya enthusiastically offers to give Belinda the money to start her own spa, but when Belinda tries to actually present her business proposal a couple days later, Tanya brushes her off saying she hasn’t looked at anything because she’s too wrapped up in her own [insert numerous excuses here].
Tanya’s dismissal is a sharp re-drawing of class and race lines between them, reminding Belinda that no matter how nice or interested Tanya seems or how nice or empathetic Belinda is toward Tanya, they are not equals or even really friends. Tanya is the customer and Belinda is the staff she pays extra to take care of her needs, hotel-related or otherwise. She will always prioritize herself and her own comfort over Belinda’s hopes and dreams. No matter how it appears to either one of them, their relationship is ultimately a transactional one.
The same can be said for newlyweds Shane (a never-better Jake Lacy) and Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) who are honeymooning at the White Lotus but not exactly doing so in perfect bliss. Rachel is a middle class, struggling freelance writer (drag me, Mike White!!!) who is slowly drowning in an existential crisis about her career and her new marriage into a very wealthy family. Shane doesn’t understand why Rachel feels the need to work at all nor why she isn’t upset they aren’t in the luxurious Pineapple Suite his clingy, meddling mother (the perfect Molly Shannon) booked for them. He spends his days tormenting Armond (the amazing Murray Bartlett semi-channeling Tim Curry in both Clue and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and perhaps John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty of Fawlty Towers), the hotel manager who is having a nervous breakdown of his own, because he expects the best. On the surface, Rachel and Shane are the picture perfect young white couple, but Rachel seems to have only just realized by marrying someone wealthy, she’s essentially made a Faustian bargain where the price is her soul.
For this mismatched pair, marriage is a transaction. Shane gives Rachel a comfortable life, and she gives him happiness and her beauty. He probably really does love her, but they’re both very aware there are class gaps between them, and now that he has given her entrée into his far more elite world, he expects her to look and behave in a certain way. Her discomfort and unhappiness confuse him, so he tries to just throw more money at her—hiring a private boat for a sunset dinner, hassling Armond for the Pineapple Suite—all in the hopes she’ll transform into the perfect trophy wife he thought he was getting. The problem is that Rachel never realized that was the deal to begin with.
The Mossbachers are a different breed altogether. Matriarch Nicole (Connie Britton) is a Sheryl Sandberg-esque tech baroness who is the epitome of a White Feminist, spouting “you go girl” ideology while clearly having thrown other women under the bus to get where she is today. She and her emasculated, doofy husband Mark (Steve Zahn, hot), who not only thinks he’s dying of testicular cancer but discovers his dad was closeted and actually died of AIDS, are having problems. Their spoiled, “woke” teen kids—college sophomore and Scorpio terror Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) and socially awkward if mostly harmless Quinn (Fred Hechinger)—have no problem pointing out their parents’ various sociopolitical and cultural faux-pas to their faces despite the fact they too benefit from the same privilege.
The Mossbachers are self-aware in many respects, but they—like so many other self-described “woke” white people—consciously or subconsciously still weaponize their whiteness and “wokeness” as a means of upholding the status quo. Oh sure they see and understand there is systemic racism, sexism, etc, can use all the correct buzzwords, and even acknowledge white people are the problem, but that’s as deep as their interest goes, much to the increasing visible disdain of Olivia’s black, best friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady). They believe their awareness is enough; far more focused on the surface-level optics of “good white person” rather than doing the actual work to be one. After all, that would involve giving up many of the privileges—systemic and otherwise—that have given them all such a charmed life. When even gently confronted with their own privilege, they deflect. Yeah, White People Are The Problem, but what the Mossbachers really mean is, “other white people are the problem. I don’t know why we’re included in that.”
Which is, of course, hilariously deluded.
***
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all the jobs I’ve worked over the last decade since I moved to New York with a few suitcases and without much money to my name.
I’ve been thinking about being paid $12 an hour to have entitled white people yell at me and a bunch of other 22 year-olds working 12-hour shifts at trade or art shows in the Javits Center—before the 7 train went all the way over there, mind you—because we wouldn’t give them VIP badges and/or treatment. I’ve been thinking about getting sunburned from standing outside in the blazing June heat all day basically babysitting rich white people drunk on $125 bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne at the VC Polo Classic who occasionally verbally harassed me and loudly complained about walking 1000 yards to shuttle buses that would take them back to wherever they came from in the City. All of that so I could make $250—the cost of two bottles of Veuve Cliquot—that would keep my bank account from being overdrawn yet another time.
I’ve been thinking about tennis superstar Novak Djokovic’s parents—and their plastered-on smiles—who came into the Ralph Lauren Polo Store at the U.S. Open one hot summer day when I was an assistant manager there. I think about how they expected all of us to fawn over them despite how clearly busy we were with customers, and how cold they were when we ultimately didn’t give them the special treatment they felt they deserved. I’ve been thinking about having to pull my female team members aside to tell them our uniforms—short white tennis skirts and tight polo shirts—were not a license for wealthy male customers to sexually harass us and to report any instances to me or the senior Ralph Lauren managers. $15 an hour for the “glamour” of selling luxury sportswear at a Grand Slam tournament where we were treated more like store mannequins than real people by the wealthy clientele.
I’ve been thinking about the luxury watch repair center in Rockefeller Center where I’d sometimes temp at the reception desk and the customers wearing Versace or Gucci and Chanel No. 5 spritzed on their wrists who’d come in to have their watches—that cost more than the house I grew up in—repaired. I remember how they would sigh when they had to wait more than two minutes to meet with one of the repair agents. Or sometimes how they’d throw a tantrum because they’d been late to their appointment and no one was available and so they’d direct their ire at me, who had to just smile and take it and say, “I apologize. I understand” over and over again until they calmed down. $16 an hour to have people with accessories that cost 6000 times that act nice to me until I couldn’t give them what they wanted right that second.
I’ve been thinking about how most of my jobs have, in some way or another, involved me babysitting the upper echelons of New York; making sure their feelings and needs were met as quickly and efficiently as possible. Me playing Mr. Salt to their petulant Verucas who don’t care how, they want it now. I have felt their entitlement radiate through their phony smiles and seen how quickly those smiles disappear when they hear the word “no.” I have heard them berate and belittle the same people who they rely on to serve them in some way; more generous with complaints and insults than actual tips. “The customer is always right” was the refrain playing over and over again in my poor singer’s brain.
I have been both Belinda and Armond at various points. I have buttered up celebrities and CEOs in the hopes of maybe keeping them happy enough to get a generous tip or commission. Sometimes, it’s worked, but mostly it hasn’t. I’ve also been on the verge of a nervous breakdown, running around event spaces and offices, teetering under the weight of demands from wealthy customers and guests. I’ve ducked into bathrooms to cry, hid behind shady trees in Flushing Meadows Park to let out my rage so I don’t unleash it on the people I’m supposed to be helping. There’s no secret formula for keeping them happy except just tacitly saying “Yes” to everything they want even if it kills you.
What I find so relatable about Mike White’s series is how he builds a sense of dread into every interaction between staff and wealthy guest. The White Lotus understands any and every customer or guest can turn into the one who will make your life hell for as long as they want or deem necessary until they are satisfied. It’s not a general awfulness these characters display, but a specific kind of perversion of “the customer is always right,” one where they cruelly exact punishment through emotional manipulation and negging. The balance of power must always be tipped in their favor.
Cyndi Lauper was right when she sang, “money changes everything.” We all make our own Faustian bargains in hopes of getting more of it, selling little pieces of our soul to survive and/or thrive. I remember eating endless grilled cheese sandwiches in my first two years in the city, begging God or the Universe or my temp agents to get me more money so I could afford to eat something else and stop crying every time I saw red numbers in my bank account. I mostly quit auditioning because it was either have money and eat or sing for no supper. I guess that was my bargain.
This year, I waited nearly four months to receive my federal tax return; money I rely on each year to give me some breathing room on bills and expenses. Because I live in New York City, I not only have state tax but local tax as well, and it adds up. I would refresh my IRS app every day to no avail while reading about billionaires like Bezos getting richer and paying next to nothing in taxes. I do okay-ish these days, but the amount of money I was waiting on is still a lot of money to me, and there were people like me waiting and relying on even more. I remember reading one woman was missing $4000+ in tax returns for her family, and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could stretch her family’s budget until it arrived. And then the billionaires went to space in phallic-shaped rockets, and it’s like oh I guess these guys have figured out yet another way to not pay their taxes: go into space or die trying.
The White Lotus exposes the ugly truth: when faced with a choice between using their privilege for good and/or giving it up, most wealthy white people will choose to protect their own interests every time. They’ll do what looks “good” rather than what is good. The White Lotus asks the question: is there such a thing as a “good” wealthy person? Or are all of us corruptible, waiting to be bargained with so we can have even the tiniest bit of privilege, wealth, and power? And is death the only way to even the playing field?
Maybe so.
*The White Lotus is currently streaming on HBO Max.
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-Emmy