If Mike White hasn't already ruined holidays for the occidental tourist, he has surely changed them irrevocably.
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While the vacationers in the American writer-director's The White Lotus chain may not wake in a bath of ice minus a kidney or blinded in an alley after a night on the domestic turps, they still tend to have a pretty awful time resortside, begging the question: why not just stay at home and stop inflicting ourselves on the locals?
The answer, unfortunately, is those poor locals depend on the tourist dollar to survive.
This uneasy and inequitable symbiosis is again on display in season two of The White Lotus, now streaming on Binge, although perhaps not as acutely as it was in its more eviscerating HBO template. The change in location dulls the Upstairs Downstairs trope to a degree because you get the feeling the hotel staff of Sicily are a flintier bunch than their thinly drawn counterparts in Hawaii and, for the past several decades, Europeans have honed sneering at Americans into a certified art form.
Chevy Chase this new, sophisticated species of guest is definitely not, but they still wield the American passport, meaning in 2022 they're free to irritate the inhabitants of up to 188 lucky countries (Aussies can annoy only 186).
And as much as White is preoccupied with the post-colonial parasitism of high-end travel, under his gaze paradise is also a kind of purgatory, a place where semi-formed souls are forced to confront their uglier truths before they can move on to the next level.
In this way, White's award-winning series shares much in common with the silly cult 1980s series Fantasy Island or even 1946 British fable A Matter of Life and Death (upon which Albert Brooks based 1991's Defending Your Life). All these urge the pilgrim to take Virgil's hand and witness all facets of the human condition so they might evolve.
Some weary travellers may never achieve such enlightenment and are doomed to loll forever by the pool, sipping hand-delivered cocktails, salvaging g-strings from their buttocks and wondering what's for dinner.
Could be worse.
Luckily for us, White has burdened Jennifer Coolidge with this task and her blithe, spineless heiress, Tanya, returns from season one of The White Lotus. This time, however, Tanya is not alone; she brings husband Greg (Jon Gries), who she met back in Maui, and her assistant, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson).
Put-upon Portia is probably even more abused than the hotel staff this season, being banished to her room by her boss within seconds of stepping through the foyer.
We also have three generations of Italian-American men mounting a Who Do You Think You Are? kind of family tree fact-finding mission and a pair of couples who have made the crazy-brave decision to holiday together.
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White was feted for the first iteration of The White Lotus, a series shot under the strictures of COVID. The result was a restive, prickly experience for guest, hotelier and viewer alike. We were all trapped together for a week under a flat, grey sky, harbouring the knowledge we'd simply transplanted our troubles from home to somewhere else, the killer of any expensive break.
If lightning hasn't quite struck twice with season two, it has struck close by. We still have a mystery body, a grab-bag of deplorables and a vehicle by which we, as a pampered speck in time and place, must consider our ever-expanding footprint on a doomed planet.
White, a true white ant of a filmmaker, is the reigning expert in this field of sedition. He undermines established conventions, roles and beliefs; he digs slyly away at foundations.
Through The White Lotus, he is doing for international tourism what he did for corporations via his criminally unheralded 2011 HBO series Enlightened. That series starred Laura Dern (and her mum) in a career-defining role as an unhinged sinkhole of an employee flirting with personal and professional catastrophe while challenging our understanding of good, evil and the heavily populated area in between.
For all the cultural jack-booting of the United States as personified by the creature that is its globe-trotting tourist, the country still produces worriers like White whose purpose in life seems to be to remind his fellow Americans that something stinks.
It's thanks to the Whites, the Wilders (an immigrant, granted), the Kubricks and the Lees, at least one of the superpowers keeps itself somewhat in check.
A rare privilege these days.
