The White Lotus that Never Blooms

Don't ask for our attention if you're not going to do anything with it.

Aubrey Plaza, who stars in White Lotus, reading Sex at Dawn (or pretending to) in a previous show. (I don’t know which. Someone sent me this screenshot.)

(Don’t bother reading this one unless you’ve seen season two of The White Lotus. Definitely don’t read it if you’re intending to.)

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I’ve never paid a stripper for a lap dance. I don’t understand why anyone would pay for a lap dance. After watching The White Lotus, I felt like I’d been tricked into paying for a lap dance.

At this point, I’d insert a warning about “spoiler alerts ahead” but the whole point I’m about to make is that there’s nothing, really to spoil about season two of The White Lotus. It came pre-spoiled. The big reveal is that there’s no big reveal. The whole show is about accumulating tension around questions to be answered, subplots to be resolved, doubts to be addressed. But they aren’t. It just stops when time runs out, leaving you sitting there feeling like an idiot who’s just been played.

Here are a partial list of questions that the viewer was asked (over and over) to ponder:

• Why did sleazy couple invite uptight couple on vacation with them?

• Do sleazy couple really love each other, or is that an act that’s part of their hidden agenda?

• Do they have a hidden agenda? Is it about money? Sex? Blackmail? Something else?

• Was the pre-planned abduction of uptight woman by sleazy woman part of a plot to get rich boy to do something incriminating? If not, why did that happen?

• Why did sleazy guy wait so long to pay the hookers? He had the money. He risked having them expose his sins. Made no sense.

• Did sleazy guy fuck rich guy’s wife? Did rich guy fuck sleazy guy’s wife?

• Why did the two couples have dinner together after rich guy had tried to drown sleazy guy just a few hours earlier? How the fuck does THAT not come up over canapés?

• Are we really to believe that the billionaire heiress’s assistant just flew off and disappeared into the rest of her life after said billionaire heiress washed up on the beach and a yacht full of dead “gays” is found floating in the bay? No questions from the police?

• Why the fuck would overweight billionaire heiress decide to try to jump from the upper level of the yacht onto the speedboat when SHE’S RIGHT NEXT TO THE STAIRS leading down to the speedboat?

I keep reading about how brilliant and “unrivaled” the writing is on this show: “The writing is as dense and layered as ever, the plotting is immaculate,” according to The Guardian’s review. Say what, now? This is precisely the opposite of good writing. Viewers are asked for their attention on the promise that it’ll all be worth it by the end. But that turns out to be an empty promise. The show is all sales pitch, with no real product at all. Enjoy the commercial, cause that’s all there is. “Immaculate?” Please.

This is “Jaws” with no shark. Moby Dick with no whale. “Star Wars” without stars or war.

Maybe I’m triggered by this disrespect for and squandering of my time and attention because the modern world seems to be increasingly fueled by the gathering, harvesting, and wasting of human attention. The Twitter wars, what’s Elon up to now, comic-based movies, video games, cute kittens on Tik Tok, and excited anchors urgently declaring that “the walls are closing in on Trump….” Always closing, but never quite closed. All our screens are screaming: “Look! Listen! Danger! Warning! Check this out! Over here! Hey you!” but there’s nothing there but distraction.

The great Russian playwright Anton Chekov famously said: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.” In White Lotus, there are pistols everywhere, but they’re not loaded.

All tease, no strip.