The White Lotus is, by far, with few exceptions, the best writing on television and has been for all three seasons. It takes us places we never thought we’d go. It takes care to listen and observe human nature—we are animals, after all. It is particularly sympathetic to men navigating masculinity. It’s not afraid to write complex and flawed characters without following the typical binary of the Left (white people bad, non-white people good).
At the same time, because we’re living through a Civil War right now – with the fight over territory being all of this new frontier online, which includes all institutions, corporations, culture, etc — there is a desire to claim Mike White to a particular side. The Right would never claim him because they wouldn’t dare. They have gotten used to the idea that culture has been taken from them. They are to be depicted as villains and that is that.
So, it was a little jarring to see Mike White go there in Episode 3 of The White Lotus. I don’t know exactly where this storyline is headed, but I did see how TikTok users reacted to it. Immediately, they launched into their accepted reality that Mike White is prepared to use one of his characters as a delivery device for yet more hatred of the other half of the country.
Turns out, it’s a little more nuanced than that. Clarence Moye, on The Contending, wrote a bit about this, how this scene might be what wins Mike White the Emmy. That might be true, but he would deserve it anyway for being so brilliant.
The trick is to get Emmy voters to stop repeating themselves year after year after year after year.
The actors, however, lent some insight into this scene:
Mike White is what some might call an “Alpha Voice” of the pendulum swing. He is someone who has always been a critical thinker and who doesn’t just accept or follow the status quo. He is willing to point out hypocrisy on the Left and the Right, which has always made his work stand apart.
I first noticed Mike White with the wonderful film Beatriz at Dinner. I felt like the only person in the universe who loved that movie, how all of those well-meaning people sent out those lanterns into the night where they were bound to kill so many animals by accident. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I have always found in Mike White a kindred spirit. He worries, frets, and sympathizes with animals as much as I do. This runs all through his work in beautiful ways, like the bull elephants in White Lotus Season 2 and the primates now, not to mention the snakes, in Season 3.
Mike White is empathetic more than anything else. I should know. It is the kind of empathy that ruins a life. You feel bad clipping the leaves off of basil plants. I have a double dose of it, thanks to both of my parents. My dad was so empathetic he refused to castrate his favorite cat, Freddie, and that cat went out into the night, impregnating untold amounts of wild cats. Freddie died when he was hit by a car, and my poor dad’s life was wrecked.
My mom felt so bad for her laying hens with no roosters to fertilize their eggs – they would just lay on the eggs for days. So my mom went to the pet store, bought fertile eggs, and put them under the hens. So then, naturally little chickens came. But she had so many roosters now they were fighting and killing each other. So she gathered them and took them to a property that she owns. Now, it was like a male prison. What a mess.
There is a guinea fowl lost on my mom’s street right now. It hangs around the two cars in the driveway because it sees its reflection in the hubcaps. My mom feeds it and no one seems to know what to do with it. If your heart aches for the poor creature, you are cursed with empathy.
Mike White is the only writer/director I have ever seen who wades into this territory: humanity, we try, we fail. We are the ones that don’t seem to belong here. And yet, here we are. We must live with ourselves and with each other, not to mention all of the other wildlife.
The idea that Hollywood can separate itself from half the country is suicide—not just in terms of profits, but the work is not funny, honest, or even interesting. I am hoping that we can thaw out little by little. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m just hoping something will change. I keep hoping that art can shine a light, and yet, all I see is Hollywood not doing that but instead continuing to wall themselves off in their doomsday bunker.
The only alternative for the Left now is, quite simply, gulags. That was Stalin’s solution, which is why Orwell wrote 1984. You get rid of the people you believe are thought criminals. That’s no way to run a country and it’s certainly no way to live.
What I do know is that this is great writing, no matter where the storyline goes. It is honest and will stand the test of time because it isn’t just telling the same story repeatedly. It is dissecting it, analyzing it, and thinking it through.
Mike White wrote this scene a month before Trump won the election. He’s doing what all great art and artists do: taking a macro-view and looking at all of us, not separating us into the “good” and the “bad” people. As he’s shown so often throughout his work, even when you think you have attained the highest form of purity and goodness, hypocrisy will always follow you like toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe.
Bravo, Mike White.
