The White Lotus has been one of the pleasant surprises of the last few years, in particular, for the Italian public, with its second season set in the marvelous and evocative places of Sicily. The HBO series written by Mike White immediately took on a particular and fascinating character aura of sensualityboth through the use of referential and musical elements hit the spotand for an indisputable quality that is often forgotten in the serial field, and on which we want to focus in this article: the plot.
The White Lotus it is a chessboard where the pawns move through the chaos
The White Lotus it makes you look at it all in one breath for several reasons. One of them it definitely is the strength of his characters, carefully designed and detailed, able to attract the viewer and capture their attention. Most of the interpreters have a strong and credible personality, some more or less, but each of them has a story to tell and the authors are very skilled at moving the pieces of the chessboard by creating situations of all kinds and managing to make to interact practically all of them. Although they are empty and immobile characters, belonging to one frivolous and cold bourgeoisie, each of them adds something to the plot and collaborates to make it work better. The really useful detail to understand how skilled the work done in the writing phase is given by the immediate discovery, in the first bars, that a crime takes place at the end, of which absolutely nothing is known since the characters are yet to be discovered. To tell the truth, in the first season, set in a magnificent Hawaiian resort, curiosity remains constant, because in fact it is really difficult to understand who could be the victim, at least until the end. In the second chapter of The White Lotus, instead, the answer can be guessed in advance, for how things are going. In any case, everything fades into the background, and we immediately forget what the final purpose of the series is, because from the moment the souls in purgatory we are dealing with are presented to us, we feel attracted to them and their personalities, their stories. So much so that the really important and interesting thing is to find out who among the characters wears a mask and who, on the other hand, we can trust.
Seductive bourgeois boredom
In the second season of The White Lotus a very useful expedient is used for the purposes of the plot, namely the theme of prostitution. Mia and Lucia, played by the talented Beatrice Grannò and Simona Tabasco, are the two fundamental pawns of the chessboard, capable of moving between the various cores and intruding into practically all the subplots, going first of all to collide with different worlds than the one to which they belong and, secondly, to create utter confusion with a tactical hit and run that gives rise to the general chaos on which the series feeds. The story of these two girls would be the deepest and most interesting to analyze, but in The White Lotus there is no room for any work of redemption, everything is in favor of total disorder, seasoned with the excess and the picturesque splendor of a real world in which the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie has never died out and, on the contrary, has strengthened and evolved. Lucia sleeps with three different characters for the simple sake of living as long as possible inside the White Lotus, and ending up taking advantage of Albie’s sweetness and naivety, who really sees something in her. Or so it seems, because any character thus constructed would have ended up in depression or, at least, would have suffered the discovery of having been deeply betrayed, and instead he, despite seeming the most human of all, he doesn’t care and, as if nothing had happened, he asks for Portia’s phone number, picking up where he left off and demonstrating a sad indifference total against the cruelty of mankind. This is the bourgeoisie narrated in The White Lotusmotionless and passive, deeply bored and unhappy, dissatisfied, as in nineteenth-century novels.
The one constant throughout the two seasons is the character of Tanya, the superb Jennifer Coolidge, at the dawn of a bubbly new part of her career. The choice to keep a reference between the two chapters of the series is certainly not trivial or casual, but the fact is that Tanya herself lives two completely different, albeit united, stories. In the first season she is a flower ready to bloom, while in the second the transformation takes place definitively and a splendid butterfly emerges, a victim of its extreme trust in others and its inability to react to external stimuli. Once again passivity reigns, and the characters do nothing but undergo the plot, living day by day with new plots and implications, without worrying about the consequences of their actions or their sad and unacceptable condition. It is not only the appearance that deceives us, it is not only the colors and the splendor that attract the attention of the beholder, but that sad light-heartedness caused by a simple and comfortable lifefrom which we are all attracted but that no one would really want to experience, not even for a second.
