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‘The gays are trying to murder me’—Jennifer Coolidge shines in season 2 of The White Lotus

Behind the farce and humour of The White Lotus is a grim message on the futility of relationships.

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The seduction, the sex and the secrets among the elite and the working class that drove the second season of the Emmy-award-winning series The White Lotus peaked and shuddered to a gloriously unpredictable end. Mark White’s tragic-comedy on Disney+ Hotstar has rightly been described as television’s gift to the world. The guests and staff of White Lotus, a resort in Sicily whose follies and foibles we followed for six episodes, did not fail us in the finale.

Hapless, clueless and selfish heiress Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) with her pink Valentino bag alone generated memes that will make us laugh on the bleakest of days. It was only in the final episode that she realised that a cabal of “high-end gays” was working with her husband Greg (John Gries) to kill her for her money.

“These gays! They’re trying to murder me!” is perhaps the best line in television history. Mark White twists the well-dressed, party-loving, straight woman’s best-friend gay man stereotype into a darker, greedier character. One who will kill for beauty, or rather to maintain their palatial Sicilian house.

Though trapped in a yacht, she vanquishes the murderous gays, but in true Tanya style, she mucks it up in the end.

Exposing farcical relationships

But behind the farce and humour of The White Lotus is a grim message on the futility of relationships. Their transactional nature, the power play and the push and pull between two people who have to spend the rest of their lives with each other.

Take the golden couple, Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and Cameron (Theo James). They have a rollicking sex life and embrace public displays of affection like two teenagers. But theirs is a don’t look-don’t tell relationship. Cameron has the looks and the money to back his roving eyes and hands. But Daphne, with her Barbie-doll-like perfection, gets her revenge by seeking pleasure from her trainer and playing passive-aggressive games like planning a day out without her husband. Infidelity is the success of this marriage.

Her inane conversations and vapid facade are masks, removed for a brief few minutes in a powerful scene. “You don’t have to know everything to love someone,” she tells Ethan (Will Sharpe), a straight-laced college nerd who is now part of the elite high-rollers club. “You just do whatever you have to do not to feel like a victim in life,” she says, with the wisdom and knowledge that would put the Matrix’s Oracle to shame. The two walk away together. Did they do it? We don’t know.

But it’s a happier Ethan who returns to his wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza), a lawyer who may or may not have slept with Cameron. Their transgressions may have saved their sexless relationship where the physical proximity of marriage had eroded passion.


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Envy, pride, anger

Not so nuanced are the desires of Stanford student Albie (Adam DiMarco), who is still young enough to see himself as a romantic knight in shining armour to Lucia, a local prostitute who sees him as a mark. He is a naif looking for love but willing to move on even when conned of thousands of dollars by the woman he wanted to save.

Albie is at the White Lotus with his sexually addicted father, Dom, and his grandfather, Bert, who seems to have the same weakness for beautiful women. “Our Achilles heel is our Achilles cock,” Bert declares. It’s easy to laugh it off, but it’s an easy excuse to cheat and lie.

Lucia and her friend Mia, an aspiring musician who sleeps her way to the White Lotus’s piano bar, are joyous in their pursuit of money and success. Sex for them is a currency,  love a luxury.

And perhaps this is true for all the guests and staff at the White Lotus.

The pursuit of love in The White Lotus is doomed from the start. It is neither patient nor kind. Instead, it is brimming with envy and pride and is easily angered. It is tainted. And when you’re done laughing at the characters or even with them—and making memes—all that’s left are the tears.

Anjali Thomas is Deputy Editor, Opinion and Features at ThePrint. Views are personal

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)

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The seduction, the sex and the secrets among the elite and the working class that drove the second season of the Emmy-award-winning series The White Lotus peaked and shuddered to a gloriously unpredictable end. Mark White’s tragic-comedy on Disney+ Hotstar has rightly been described...‘The gays are trying to murder me’—Jennifer Coolidge shines in season 2 of The White Lotus