The White Lotus is so good at making you love the super-rich people you should hate.
We don’t make excuses for the rich. We don’t forgive them, and, even if we love them, as I love Parker Posey’s White Lotus character and the three friends played by Leslie Bibb, Michelle Monaghan, and (the perfect) Carrie Coon, we wouldn’t want to go on vacation with them, would we? But we do happily judge them.
That’s one thing that Mike White seems to definitely understand: Every time we see a character on his show, we’re going to have opinions about them—from their wealth to their personality to how they look. It’s that latter point to which he’s especially attuned. He knows that every time a character appears, we’re going to judge how they look. So he often incorporates details about characters’ and therefore actors’ appearances into the plot.
Let’s start with the worst best friends group.
In the first episodes, the ladies have a conversation about what work they’ve had done. Instead of letting the audience speculate at home, “Wow, what work have they done to their faces,” Mike White writes our questions into the script and lets his snarky characters do the judging for us.
Bibb’s Kate says of Monaghan, “Did she sandblast her face or something?” The irony is not lost on Coon’s Laurie that Kate has also had work done. Coon’s character is painted as the less attractive of the three, but we in the audience might disagree. She’s the most authentic looking and also acting, which is a commentary on the values White Lotus characters hold versus the ones we poors watching at home might value.
Then there are the natural attributes of some of the actors/characters. The running joke is that old, balding men are getting the hot, young girls because they’re rich. We don’t try to pretend that Rick (Walton Goggins) is some hottie (Wait, is he? I’m confused by him)—we know Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) is into him for his money and his access to places like The White Lotus. Similarly, Greg (Jon Cries) seems to attract young models because of his money, his house, his yacht, etc, not his grumpy old man persona and looks.
That they happen to be balding is written into the dialogue. Even Rick’s insecurity over being called out for losing his hair makes it into a scene.
It’s not just the older men whose looks are called out. Lochlan (Sam Nivola), the youngest Ratliff, has to endure his family constantly commenting on his appearance. His d-bag bro Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) seems desperate for him to bulk up, and, instead of getting a massage like his brother and mother, he has to go to a posture-correction course. His slumped shoulders are a symptom of the youngster’s electronic-bound lifestyle, likely, but also, more symbolically, of his lack of self-confidence.
Less often the show comments on a character’s appearance as a way to compliment them. When they meet in the first episode, Greg’s ex-model girlfriend, Chloe, (Charlotte Le Bon) compliments Chelsea on her buck teeth. Wood has previously spoken about how her teeth have impacted her confidence. However, her “model-esque” uniqueness, relationship with Rick, and friendship with an ex-model communicates to the audience that she belongs among the attractive elite, despite her Manchester accent and lack of veneers.
Belinda (Nathasha Rothwell) is meant to be an audience surrogate, someone not from the wealthy class, who can marvel at the beauty of The White Lotus and judge the rich for their vapidness. As such, she might be the only character enjoying her stay. When her spa colleague/crush Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul) arrives for a spa treatment in his underwear and, surprise, is ripped, she gasps, as we all do at home (I audibly said “hello, sir” at my TV).
Belinda and us at home would not expect a sweet, lamby guy like him to have a Sexiest Man Alive body, and the show doesn’t let that moment pass by. It reminds me of when Chidi (William Jackson Harper) on The Good Place turned out to be “surprisingly jacked” as Eleanor (Kristen Bell) says, and the characters, press, and internet at large discussed the “twist” of the nerd being hot.
OK, so why does Mike White say what we’re all thinking? I think one reason is that he’s getting it out of the way so we can focus on the story. If he names what we’re judging or reacting to, we can stop thinking it. Plus, if we’re forming opinions about the actors’ looks and saying it at home, of course people in the world of The White Lotus would talk about each others’ appearance, too—especially behind their backs. It’s thorough character writing on White’s part.
A deeper narrative reason is that, to the characters, appearance is a form of currency. For the men, if you don’t have money, you need to be hot. That’s why Saxon is obsessed with his looks—he wants to score with one of the young women currently in the company of the bald men, but doesn’t have a yacht to offer them.
For the women, whether they have actual money or not, attractiveness is a currency more valuable than net worth. The bald men’s lovers don’t need jobs, education, or even personalities (though they do have them); they need to wear tiny bikinis and look good in them.
Regarding Jacyln, the TV star, Parker Posey’s character says “actresses are all basically prostitutes,” meaning they make money based on their appearance. Jaclyn is married to a younger man back home, so she needs to look young to be loved, both professionally and personally. Kate similarly feels she has to look a certain way to succeed as the wife of a well-known businessman.
Kelefa Sanne wrote in The New Yorker, “White specializes in characters who leave viewers unsure of how to feel about them, or about themselves.” While we look down on the women for their plastic surgery and interest in rich men and roll our eyes at the men obsessed with their protein shakes and hairlines, we don’t know what we’d do if we had to look a certain way to survive in the world we so desire to be a part of…or do we?
I certainly know many peers who get Botox, and lots of men who talk endlessly about how “food is fuel.” I obsess about what to wear to a networking event or even a social function with friends. The lower stakes of our lives give us the opportunity to judge the actors and characters on The White Lotus, but if we’re being honest, wouldn’t we love to live in their world, if, like Belinda, only for a little while?
White seems to be telling us not “judge not lest ye be judged” but rather, “Go ahead and judge. Judgment day comes for us all anyway.”
