White Lotus & Whither Wokeness?

Revisiting the first season, post-Trump restoration

I watched the first season of White Lotus a few years ago with my mom, and I watched it again a few weeks ago with my wife and son. It hits differently now, harder, after the Trump restoration and amid the debate about the role that wokeness (a word I’ll use for lack of a better alternative) played in it. 

As many of you will recall, the sad rich vacationers at the White Lotus include Nicole and Mark Mossbacher, a middle-aged couple fed up with wokeness. They’re presumably both Democrats – she’s a Hillary/Sandberg lean-in liberal – and they’re just so tired of being made to feel bad about their wealth and their whiteness. Nicole, a corporate CFO, has made it big in a male-dominated world and doesn’t take kindly to talk of her privilege. She’s worried about their awkward teenage son Quinn, not because of his depression or his phone addiction, but because of the alleged hostility facing white guys these days. “He is a straight, white, young man,” she says. “And nobody has any sympathy for them right now…they’re the underdogs.” What does she mean? Well, for one thing, it would be “impossible,” she claims, for her company to hire a young white man. 

Mark worries only about himself. Although he would no doubt contend that he believes in female equality, he feels emasculated by Nicole’s success. In some ways he’s a familiar type, a mopey white guy who’s not the swashbuckler he expected to be but just another schmo with a soft body and a desk job. He’s going through a midlife crisis featuring a swollen-testicle cancer scare, the discovery that his dead father had a secret gay life, and an affair that has devastated Nicole and nearly destroyed their marriage. He feels regret but not remorse. In the midst of a bender, he tells Quinn about the affair, half-justifying it by saying he failed to tame his inner “monkey.” What Mark yearns for, above all, is respect, but it’s not forthcoming from his son. Or his wife. Or his daughter. Or himself. Or the woke world, which is lumping him in with all the bad white men, the actual racists. “I used to be the good guy in the room,” he says. What the hell do the wokesters want from him? Actually, he knows what they want: his privilege. “No one cedes their privilege,” he says. “That’s absurd.” It’s easy to imagine him threatening to vote for Trump if this shit keeps up. 

All in all, WL’s first season is a penetrating satire of upper class anti-wokeness – it predicts the Trumpism of formerly Democratic billionaires from Silicon Valley to Wall Street – but Mike White is no less hard on wokeness, which is embodied by Olivia, the Mossbachers’ daughter, and Paula, the friend she’s brought along from college. The sophomores sit by the pool, reading (or just holding) their philosophy books, looking out and down on all the less evolved humans. These include a newlywed with a working class background, whose mention of her modest alma mater, SUNY Potsdam, mystifies the lounging radicals. Olivia and Paula are deeply compassionate in their politics but cruel in practice, particularly to Quinn, whom they force to sleep in a closet. Mark and Nicole’s retrograde, self-justifying pronouncements are more than they can bear. Olivia and Paula know their beliefs are correct, and they are, for the most part. But in their contentious exchanges with Nicole and Mark, they resort to quips. Most of the time, they don’t feel a need – or lack the ability – to make actual arguments.  

I’ve been speaking of Olivia and Paula as a unit, but there’s a divide between them that deepens as the show progresses. No less rapacious than her parents, Olivia takes what she wants, and this includes a man Paula likes, and Paula herself. They come from different class positions, though just how different is unclear. Paula is a nonwhite woman (of indeterminate race) who believes Olivia is using her for the cred. We believe it too. Paula’s politics, unlike Olivia’s, aren’t a pose, or they aren’t only a pose. When Mark tells them that imperialism is unfortunate but unavoidable – it’s the way of the world, girls – the anger in Paula’s eyes is pure. 

What Paula does with her anger is the pivotal event in this storyline. She starts sneaking out at night to have sex with Kai, a Hawaiian who works at the resort, doing traditional dances, playing native for the ruling class. He tells her with tears in his eyes that the resort sits on his family’s stolen land. While she feels for him, she also judges him for working for his colonizers, unlike his brothers, who’ve chosen to resist. She hatches a plan: she will supply Kai with the code to the safe in their suite and Kai will steal Nicole’s $75,000 bracelets. He’ll have money to pay a lawyer to bring legal action against the resort (and Paula will be able to stop looking down on him for appeasing the enemy.) Kai refuses at first, not buying Paula’s argument that he would be taking money from those who’d stolen from him. “They’re not the same people,” he says, the liberal squish. Unfortunately for him, Kai has fallen in love with Paula and fears, one senses, that she could never love him back if he doesn’t steal the bracelets. The plan goes awry, of course. Nicole, who’s supposed to be on a boat, returns to the suite to find Kai. Mark arrives and, believing Kai poses a danger to Nicole, tackles him, “saving her,” before getting punched by Kai, who flees. We hear later that he’s been caught. Kai is sacrificed for Paula’s political ideals. He’ll go to prison while she’ll go back to college. 

In a perfect resolution, the altercation with Kai pulls Mark out of crisis as he finally gains the respect of his family. “You’re a stud, Dad,” Quinn says, admiring his father’s shiner, and even Olivia is impressed. Not as impressed, however, as Nicole, who sees her man anew, as a man, and the two of them have a rousing fuck, their groans echoing through the suite. Paula, meanwhile, seethes and weeps. Mark’s liberation emerges from Paula’s devastation, and Kai’s incarceration. Wokeness can’t touch the ruling class.

As a satirist, White is obligated to go after both sides of the wokeness debate; how well he executes the dual takedown is the surprise. At the White Lotus, the rich exploit the purported threat of wokeness to guard their power while their ostensible antagonists play a played-out part that’s ineffectual at best and harmful at worst. It would’ve been easier to make Olivia and Paula ridiculous. White could have had them police everyone’s word choices and hold forth on cisheteropatriarchy over brunch. But their opprobrium is usually aimed at targets meatier than language, like U.S. imperialism. They and their ilk infuriate Nicole and Mark because they draw attention to the exploitation and violence that uphold their immensely privileged life. But the Mossbachers shouldn’t have to feel bad about that, or even to think about that. They’re not the problem! They support DEI. They give to charity. They voted for Obama. So leave them alone and let them live in luxury. Olivia and Paula’s politics feel like a rebuke to the Mossbachers, and if this be wokeness, it’s the good kind. But they’re also purveyors of the bad kind, characterized by arrogance, cruelty, and a preference for being good over doing good. By the end of their stay in Hawaii, there’s not much, if anything, left of the sophomores’ moral high ground. 

Wokeness is a broad and amorphous term that doesn’t lend itself to an easy definition. But, as Freddie DeBoer often points out, just because it means many things doesn’t mean it has no meaning. And just because the right depicts it as a mortal threat doesn’t mean the left should defend it. And just because prominent voices are overstating the role it played in Trump’s victory doesn’t mean it didn’t play a significant role. 

Society-wide, the influence of wokeness has receded, but it largely persists in liberal and left spaces. There’s long been denial that it’s a liability, along with the belief that criticizing wokeness aids the right, validates the premise of its anti-woke crusade. This line of argument has taken a turn after Trump’s win. Speaking with an acquaintance, I raised the idea of trying to rid the left of academic jargon, and she couldn’t believe I was thinking about such a trivial matter while Trump destroyed the government. An interesting inversion; suddenly I was the one unduly fixated on language. Our energies should be directed outward, she said, and was I really so naive to think the right could be appeased? Of course not! What I have in mind is a politics with appeal broad enough to defeat Trumpism. To that end, the left should alter its relationship with this far-reaching tendency.

Maybe in a subsequent post, I’ll propose guidelines for such a reset. For now, I want to make clear that what I envision is totally different from the craven triangulation of some Democratic politicians.