![]() Because if we can’t intellectually engage people on how critical theory is palpably wrong in its view of the world, we can sure show how brutal and callous it is - and must definitionally be - toward individual human beings in the pursuit of utopia. It sees the unique drama of the individual and how that can never be reduced to categories or classes or identities.Īnd this step toward humaneness is what interests me. The miniseries doesn’t look away from the staggering social inequality we now live in and gives us a classic white, straight, male, rich narcissist in the finance jock. Even the sophomores seem more naïve and callow than actively sexist and racist. “The White Lotus” is not an anti-woke jeremiad. And the only character one can bond with, and root for, is indeed this young white American male, awkward but genuine, whose story ends with a new bond with his dad, an escape from online addiction, and a newly revitalized human life. Someone who cannot be reduced to a demonized version of his unchosen race and heterosexuality. Someone she might even love, if such a thing were within her capacity. She leaves her wreckage behind, gliding away, with impunity, to another semester of battling racism.Īt one point, in a memorable scene, as the white daughter expounds about the evil of white straight men, her mother points out that she is actually talking about her brother, sitting at the same table. You watch as they casually abuse and denigrate their brother - a young man consumed by living online you see how they mock anyone who doesn’t meet their exacting standards of youth or beauty you watch them betray and lie to each other you see them condescend to someone still struggling to pay back student loans (see the clip above) and you witness the co-ed of color, Paula, act out her antiracist principles, with disastrous real world results for a Hawaiian she thinks she is saving from oppression. Some of the most attractive and sane characters are among the least privileged - such as Belinda, a beleaguered, overworked black woman who runs the spa, or the native Hawaiian men who perform dances for money and go on canoe races across the sea.Īnd the most repellent characters are two elite-college sophomores, Olivia and Paula, packed to the gills with the fathomlessly entitled smugness that is beginning to typify the first generation re-programmed by critical theory fanatics. Wealth is unjust but it can also be immiserating. They cannot be reduced to a single class, or an ethnic group. What Mike White is careful to see and understand is the humanness of every individual. And that’s the first clue we’ve moved past 2020. The white privilege here is real - and it’s often miserable. There’s the super-uptight gay manager, hanging on to sobriety, as he performs for his clients the mega-wealthy, overweight lost soul, played by Jennifer Coolidge, whose life is a pampered abyss of emotional desolation and an aspiring young journalist who reconciles herself to money and indolence over a mindless career of clickbait snark. There’s the beta male, married to the mega-rich corporate CEO wife, worried about the condition his balls. There’s a blithe, unthinking finance jock, with a worked-out bod, an uneasy new wife, and a shitload of money, who can muster misery at the slightest ruffle in perfection. Mike White’s “ The White Lotus ” is a tragicomic exposé of our current moneyed elites and the psychological dysfunction they labor so mightily under. ![]() ![]() I watched an HBO Max miniseries that mocked some aspects of wokeness. ![]() An unlikely thing happened to me on my two weeks’ off. ![]()
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