White Lotus Season 2: American Delusion

Henry James would definitely approve.

The deviously delicious finale of “The White Lotus”: Season 2 cemented this HBO series as some of the most—if not the most—satisfying television of the past year. Smart, dark, steamy and scabrously funny, ”The White Lotus” is an endlessly perceptive probe into desire, class and disillusionment by the show’s gifted creator, Mike White, but the ghost of Henry James is everywhere. 

The Sicilian paradise of season two might glisten under a golden Italian sun, but the dreams of its American vacationers wither into despair and disenchantment quicker than you can say Palermo. James’s own Isabel Archer might as well be an amalgam of all of ”White Lotus’s” denizens. The specter of James’s most famous protagonist from “The Portrait of a Lady” can’t help but loom large among these frolicking American one percenters, who like Isabel, can’t help believing in “a kind of rapture, in which she felt herself sinking and sinking.” 

When Tanya, embodied with airheaded brilliance by Jennifer Coolidge, is struck with the sudden(if obvious to the viewer,) realization that she has been played by Quentin( Tom Hollander) and his pals, she exclaims “The prenup, the prenup, the prenup.” “White Lotus” seemingly makes everyone a victim of some kind—of their desire— and certainly their own privileged lives. 

Yet Tanya’s gilt-edged existence hasn’t simply siloed her from the hoi-polloi; it’s siloed her from reality. And by the time she realizes the jig is up, she thinks her bloody shooting spree will save her from her doom. But she is, in the end, a victim too. Or what Daphne( a superb Meghann Fahy,) calls ‘a victim of life.’ Tanya may not want to be a victim of anything, but she gets played, she gets had, and in the end, she clumsily leaps overboard only to bash her head in on a dinghy. And it’s Daphne, arguably the least Jamesian of the cast, who soon thereafter finds her body floating in the Ionian Sea.

Mark Twain allegedly said “history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.” So does culture, and particularly American literature, where the leitmotifs endemic to American life often recur, and reanimate our national mythology. Henry James once observed that “it’s a complex fate to be an American.” In “Portrait,” James is far more gimlet-eyed, even foreboding about the idea of possibility. “I like my liberty too much. If there is a thing in the world that I am fond of, it is my personal independence,” Isabel Archer declares, in spurning Caspar Goodwood’s (initial) offer of marriage. 

Yet James does more than just depict a narrative of a young, delusional woman who has seen her “independent spirit” foreclosed upon by a stifling marriage to the oppressive Osmond. If the novel’s end both ruptures Isabel’s illusory idea of freedom and reveals her own naive susceptibility to manipulation (by Osmond and Madame Merle), James is dramatizing Isabel’s end of innocence by troubling the distinctive American notion that the world is reserved for each individual’s reinvention. When late in the novel, the Countess Gemini reveals the extent of Osmond and Madame Merle’s treachery, James describes Isabel as facing the “staring fact that she had been a dull un-reverenced tool.” It’s in this crucial moment that Isabel takes a flight from fantasy toward the real—that is toward an awareness of the inescapability of her circumstances. 

Like Isabel, Tanya has an epiphany that she is worldly, but not savvy about the world—in this case the Old World. “Portrait” derives much of its shivery resonance from Isabel’s realization that she has never been any more free from her past than America itself. Indeed, Isabel is a delusion in microcosm, and she finally succumbs to the idea that shehas to belong to something other than herself. Tanya has succumbed not just to her garishly cloistered lifestyle, but ultimately to her bogus marriage to Greg. Deceit for Isabel, ruefully enough, is her awakening. For Tanya, by the time she wakes up, it’s too late. 

“White Lotus” orbits around death( Season one did also,) and both seasons have been veritable whodunnits, albeit trapped in gilded cages. Season two is distinctly  European in its environs. The posh Sicilian hotel which surely sets its guests back by the thousands is the hub for the show’s jaded Shangri-la. Its American tourists move with swagger, while the locals, like cheetahs stalking their prey, lie in wait. 

James’ “Portrait,” like most of his novels aren’t about death per se, but they often are about the death of an ideal. Or the death of innocence. After all, the Anglican apostates who settled on the Eastern seaboard of North America had set out to find their own “city on a hill.” It was to be their “New Jerusalem,” and it was to be their utopia in vision, however repressive in practice. Indeed, myths die hard. 

Take Albie( Adam DiMarco) and Portia( Haley Lu Richardson.) Portia falls for Jack, a high priced British hooker who is cosplaying as the nephew of Quentin. Portia is Tanya’s beleaguered assistant, who like her boss, is ripe for the swindle. Portia falls for Jack and she gets hoodwinked. Albie wants Lucia( Simona Tabasco,) a prostitute, who as it happens, also slept with Dom, Albie’s dad ( the understatedly sublime Michale Imperioli,) also there with his father, Bert, as played by the indelible F. Murray Abraham. 

Lucia gets Albie all sweet for her and pleads for money to help her escape her ostensibly evil pimp. But is he her pimp? And does Lucia simply guilt the doe-eyed Albie for the €50,000( wired by Dom, no less,) after several days of passionate sex and emotional manipulation. But why sweat it, right? It’s a “karmic repayment,” as Albie assures his father. But for Lucia, the swindle is her currency. By the show’s end, she and Mia are seen taking what seems like a victory lap, strolling and rollicking along under the sun. 

And Europe wins too. Or in this case, the victor is the enticing allure of the Old Country, where America’s elite go to bask in the rays of Mediterranean sunshine and to flaunt their noveau riche lucre. And Europe is watching . 

“White Lotus” is about death and fantasy , but it’s also about dreams deferred. It’s isn’t uniquely American to dream, but dreaming and yearning are more than hardwired into America’s socio-political DNA. In the end, even cockeyed optimism dies hard as New World flights of fancy prove no match for the durably cunning Old World of “White Lotus.” Henry James would definitely approve.