Okay. Take a breath with me. In. Out.
If you’re like me, still settling into the sadness that is the end of Season 2 of the White Lotus — take my hand. Let’s go for a cerebral retrospective tour across all our major characters and what we’ve learned from them over the past seven episodes.
Ethan and Harper and Cameron and Daphne
We were most invested in what would happen to Ethan and Harper — because heck, we are all familiar with the sunless stupour that can encroach upon any relationship.
We wanted to know how these two socially responsible adults were going to revive their stale marriage.
Sprinkle in a dash of adultery? That seems to be the lesson.
After the girls’ return from Noto, the crack in the middle of Harper and Ethan’s marriage is given the space to open, and open into a chasm it does!
Harper doesn’t trust Ethan’s version of events regarding the night the boys’ spent in the hotel. Harper then proceeds to enact her revenge (and hurt) by flirting with Cameron (the most unlikeable douche, but we all know a Cameron, right?) and letting him touch her leg at the dinner table one evening.
After Harper and Cameron disappear to their rooms for ten minutes alone, Ethan begins the tortured process of imagining what happened between them. Did they do it? Or was it just a kiss, a “nothing”, as Harper insists?
“It was nothing,” she tells him when he confronts her. “And I was drunk. And I’m not even attracted to him anyway.” (The most reliable excuse to employ!) “But it was nothing, okay? It was a drunk, dumb nothing. It was less than nothing.”
What to do? First it was the wife not trusting her husband. Now it is inverted, and the husband does not trust the wife. How to resolve?
Open yourself up to the wife of the man you suspect your wife has had relations with. In fact, why not dip your toes into their world of adultery in the meantime and call it even?
The lesson to repairing a broken relationship where trust and attraction have fallen to the wayside, it seems is — sleep with other married people. Or, as Daphne likes to twist it adding “A little mystery. It’s kind of sexy. Just use your imagination.”
“We never really know what goes on in people’s minds or what they do, right?” She tells Ethan on the beach, in one of the most heartbreaking, yet profound scenes in the finale.
“You spend every second with somebody; there’s still this part that’s a mystery. You don’t have to know everything to love someone.”
Meghann Fahy’s face (the actor who plays Daphne) is exquisite in this scene. In under ten seconds, we watch as she assumes the despair of learning yet another infidelity enacted by her husband — then snapping immediately to a jovial, c’est la vie kind of woman.
“You just do whatever you have to do not to feel like a victim of life,” she teaches Ethan.
Recall in episode 3, when she tells Harper how she handles being cheated on by her husband: “Don’t feel bad for me. I figured out how to handle it. I do what I want. So, I’m not resentful.”
Is this the lesson Harper takes on in episode 6, where she decides to go back to her room with Cameron, and does what she wants? We don’t know if Harper did anything with Cameron. She says it was just a kiss, but do we really believe her?
We don’t know if Ethan and Daphne did anything on that far-off island they walk to. It’s suppose to be opaque. Director and writer Mike White left it open for us to use our imagination.
The intelligent viewer (ie. the cynical, realistic viewer) might well deduce that yes, something did happen between them. Because that night, we see Ethan and Harper finally have sex. It seems that Ethan himself needed to succumb to his own mimetic desires to find his wife attractive again.
Recall in the fifth episode when Ethan accuses Cameron of suffering from mimetic desire.
“You have a bad case of something called mimetic desire,” Ethan says. “If someone with higher status than you wants something, it means it’s more likely you’ll want it too.”
“You did not have higher status than me,” Cameron retorts.
“Not then, maybe. I mean, I was smarter than you. Maybe you thought that f***ng women I had a connection with would make you smarter.”
Even though Harper said of her husband about the possibilities of him cheating: “Ethan would never do that. He’s not like that. He’s… He’s honest to a fault,” it seems like cheating was inevitably what brought him back to her.
In the end, Harper and Ethan were not any better than the couple they spent the whole vacation criticising. Perhaps all the while, they wanted to be just like Daphne and Cameron. And Harper turns into the vile, disdainful kind of person she hated at the beginning of the season. Boo! But also, I guess that’s reality?
Albie and the patriarchs
The same can be said of Albie and his father and nonno.
The slow unravelling of Albie’s true nature was also somewhat of a tragedy to witness. In the first two episodes, I (along with all the other young, feminist female friends of mine) could not help but swoon every time he came on screen. Ah! At least, a hot, tall man with good politics and who knows how to treat a girl.
When we see him interact with Portia, we see a man who is willing to be different to the men who have come before him – he doesn’t objectify women, he asks for consent before embarking on a kiss, he is aware that gender is a construct. He seems kind, compassionate, respectful. It appears noble that he had joined his father and grandfather on this trip to find long lost relatives.
And yet the moment he is snubbed by his love interest, he is happily swept off his feet by a sex worker, Lucia. Sure, he doesn’t know at first that Lucia is a sex worker, but the effort he goes to keeping this sexual fling sustained is a bit over the top.
Asking his father for $50,000 to help “save” her? More like an excuse for Albie to feel like he’s being some sort of Prince Charming, hey? And manipulating his own mother to getting what he wants? Misogyny runs through his bloodline.
I wanted to see him suffer. I wanted to see the consequences of him being duped by a very clever woman, who knows how to do her job well. But all we see is Albie’s beautiful naked self, waking up to an empty bed, and slapping the pillow beside him as if he’d forgotten to hand in a uni assignment.
Fifty thousand dollars. I guess money really is ‘nothing’ to these rich folks.
Tanya & Greg
Did your heart also break when you saw Tanya’s lifeless face shadowed in the dark sea? Confused as to why she wasn’t opening her eyes?
The real tragedy is that our beloved character Tanya was the one who dies, and by her own hands too. (Stairs, Tania? And maybe, take off your heels first?) I did not see this coming. And it was truly, truly devastating.
It’s sad because she was the only one who believed in love. The other characters were all driven by their libidinal desires.
Tanya was the most innocent character, someone who, despite being one of the oldest in the cast, had the most child-like sense of wonder and youthfulness. She was a dreamer. She believed in Happily Ever After. She wanted to recreate scenes from classic Italian films. She wanted to live in them. She is the tragic heroine of an opera.
I guess Mike White has a message for us innocent dreamers — this world does not belong to you.
Also, did Greg even have a heart-condition? If he’d gone to all that effort to hire these elaborate ‘gays’ to kill his wife, maybe he didn’t even have a heart-condition to begin with. A con man, no less. And now, set to inherit Tanya’s wealth.
Portia and Jack
This relationship was extremely triggering to watch. I could see myself in Portia. I too, was once young, lost, morose about the world, my future and absolutely abyssal at choosing the right man. It was a skill I completely lacked.
The final chapter of her love story with Jack was dreadful to watch – not dreadful television writing (in fact, the season finale is one of the most compelling and brilliant episodes of television I’ve ever seen) but full of dread to watch – in every scene, I felt my chest heat with brewing anxiety; I thought Jack was going to pull out a knife or something and stab Portia.
On another note, it was surprising to see how many online think pieces hating on Portia, attacking her for her ‘ungratefulness’ because she was in a five star hotel and being sad. News flash – wealth, or adjacency to it does not immune you from sadness.
Sure, she picks the wrong guy, and she gets out alive (thank God!). And I’m glad she comes to her senses and realises he is ‘deranged’. But then to have her reunite with Albie at the end (wearing that inconceivable scarf over her hat? What?). These two deserve each other.
Mia and Lucia
These two girls were the winners of the show, no doubt. They also had the healthiest relationship of any pair in the season. Lucia was my favourite character – she doesn’t deceive Valentina, our closeted hotel manager, being open and upfront with her about what she can offer her and what she can’t (“You should get a real lesbian lover. I can help you find one.”) and she was also the most driven when it came to her artistic pursuit. She wanted to be a singer. She wanted to perform her songs. What could be more basic and pure than that? The genuine emotional bonds seemed to emanate from Lucia and Valentina.