White Lotus, HBO, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Lying, Lies of
Omission
The Reluctant Wife had watched the first season of White
Lotus without me. I was appreciative of
that. From what I had heard, there were
no likeable characters, it was a series about rich people with nothing better
to do with their money than to spend it on being pampered, and I, frankly, was
not interested in it. Don’t we live in a
world where this is the last thing that we need to be ogling?
Of course, a part of me thought – but wait, what if this
series is asking us to take a good look at ourselves and see if we have met the
enemy and they are us? Could it be that
rather than a vehicle for envy, which I assumed it would be, it might be a fun
house mirror that would expose us to ourselves.
But that part of me was actually pretty quiet. I mostly thought this was about the 1%, and I
have no fascination, at this moment, about knowing more about those who are
privileged and know not what to do with themselves.
Then she started watching season 2 and, tired one night, I
sat through one of the first episodes. Apparently
the first season is set at a White Lotus resort in Hawaii, and this second season is
set in a White Lotus resort in Sicily.
There was something about the vibe of the place that was intriguing –
that the 1% inhabit resorts that are cheek by jowl with the world that the rest
of us inhabit – and the beach resort did not feel that much different from some of the nicer hotels that we have
stayed in…
So, we went back and watched the first episode, and I discovered that each of the seasons have been told in flashback. The end of the week in paradise (in both
seasons) is shown first, and in each, a woman discovers a body of one the hotel guests floating in the
water, but we are not told who it is and we rewind to the beginning of the
week. The whodunit is really a who is it
that gets killed, and I was hooked. I wanted
to know which of these despicable characters was going to achieve their just
reward by the end of the week.
The characters, though played by familiar and sometimes beloved
actors, were, indeed, not likeable. The
central four characters are two couples – the classic American Quarterback type,
Cameron (Theo James) and
his blond and attractive wife, Daphne (Meghann Fahy). He is a graduate of Yale and married and had
kids while becoming a very successful (and rich) money manager, though it also
seems that he has come from money and has never wanted for anything. He is getting together (in the adjoining suite) with his college roommate
Ethan (Will Sharpe),
who is of indeterminant Asian descent. Cameron
“affectionately” bullied Ethan in college and, now that his roommate has
successfully sold his tech startup and is fabulously wealthy, he has arranged
for this get together. Ethan brings his
wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza),
a straitlaced lawyer who self righteously sues men who violate women’s right to
a safe work place.
Meanwhile, in the next set of rooms, we have three generations
of men – grandfather, Bert (F. Murray Abraham), father,
Dominic (Michael
Imperioli), and twenty-something-year-old son Albie (Adam DiMarco)–
vacationing in Sicily to find their roots.
The grandfather left Sicily as a very young child and wants to take
everyone back now that the family has made good and meet relatives he assumes
to be living in the little town his family came from, but who knows?
And just down the hall are the only members of the first-year
cohort who have come back to a White Lotus, the incredibly rich and incredibly
narcissistic and empty woman Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge)
who found her husband, Greg (Jon
Gries) in that other White Lotus. He
has insisted that they come on vacation together again. She brings her “assistant” Portia (Haley Lu Richardson)
with her, a young, clueless girl who is pretty fed up with assisting generally
meaning helping Tanya pull herself back together after a crying jag started because
she has been slighted by someone in yet another way. Portia is also an unwanted interference in Tanya's husband's eyes, so she is supposed to just stay in her room - which she does not do. We discover pretty quickly that Tanya’s
husband is as tired of his wife as the assistant is, and he jets off to a “business”
meeting that is actually some kind of rendezvous with a lover.
This mess is overseen by Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore)
the white gloves manager/ matron/ concierge/ front desk person overseeing the
White Lotus, who is constantly fighting with Lucia (Simona Tabasco) the
local sex worker providing services to multiple guests and Mia (Beatrice Grannò),
Lucia’s friend, a singer who enjoys being party to some of Lucia’s sex work.
While I thought this series was going to be a whodunit or
perhaps primarily about sex (and it is both of those), I think it is mostly
about lies and lying. We are introduced
to the couples at the center when they have breakfast together and are getting reacquainted/acquainted
with each other. Cameron and Daphne are
pretending to be deeply and comfortably in love with each other, but it is
apparent very quickly they are not particularly committed to or knowledgeable
about much of anything and it is hard to take them seriously as people. Ethan, who is a bit remote, and Harper, by
contrast, are dialed into various causes and concerns, they seem genuinely
invested in a better and more just world and – here is the tell – they never lie
to each other.
Even though Ethan and especially Harper are no fun and they
are altogether too earnest and judgmental, I am immediately in their camp. They are, it seems - and certainly by contrast with Cameron and Daphne, real. And they are struggling with how to manage
the changes that are occurring in their world when they, unlike Cameron and
Daphne who have always been obscenely rich, are suddenly discovering themselves
to be one percenters. Hmm… might they have what it takes to make the
transition without selling out? Could this
be a hiding place for good solid American middle-class values in a false and
insipid world? For just a moment, we
hope so.
There are no such hopes for our three gentlemen of Sicilian
descent. Bert’s wife has died, Dominic’s
wife and daughter have refused to come on this vacation because Dominic is such
a cad, and Albie, the innocent son, could help his mother and father reconcile,
but knows too much about his father’s infidelities to help them do that because he would be deceiving his Mom if he touted his father. And this is before we discover that Dominic
has hired Lucia to service him on this vacation. Bert tries to warn Dominic that he is playing
with fire to be playing with Lucia right under Albie's nose, but Dominic counters that he learned from
Bert to be a two timer – he grew up with it and the pain it caused his mother, while Bert refuses to imagine that his wife knew anything about his affairs and
insists that she loved him.
In this group, we are introduced to the lies of
omission. The form of the lie is: I will
not tell this information because it would only hurt you. It is in your
best interest for me to lie to you.
Being honest with you would only bring you pain, so why do that? Of course, this lie is also tremendously self-serving,
and contains within it a lie. If I told
you what would hurt you, I would be found out not to be wonderful, and you would insist that I
change my behavior, and I don’t want to do that. So this is a lie both to the other person,
but also to and on behalf of the person telling the lie - and the wonderful irony is that the liar is NOT lying - he is not saying anything at all.
This kind of lie has been showing up in my clinical practice
all of a sudden. I won’t tell him or her
this or that because it would hurt them.
Sometimes the person is struggling to tell the truth – they are being
forced to do that so that they can move on with their life – and sometimes when
they do that the feared outcome does not happen. The other person does not fall apart. Not infrequently, the other person realizes
there is a problem and pledges to work with the former liar to work on that
shared difficulty. They say, in effect,
thank you for broaching that subject. I,
too, have been afraid to do that because it would be disruptive to face and
address this central difficulty in our relationship, but if you are going to
put the cards on the table, so will I, and we can now play a productive game.
While I wanted this kind of “healthy” outcome to occur, I
was not convinced it would. Where is the
drama in that?
Lies of omission are not the only kind of lie. There are many different kinds of lies – and we
lie all the time – first and foremost to ourselves (this is the center of Freud’s
discovery of the unconscious – we keep things from ourselves – we defend
against thoughts all the time), but we also lie to those around us, and especially
those who are closest to us.
Tanya is consistently lied to by those around her. They don’t just omit things, they make things
up. Partly they do this because she is
so fragile that they have to in order to keep her from falling apart, but
partly they do this because she is so needy and clueless that she is drawn into
the lies that others tell her, pretending that she has protected herself
against her gullibility, but actually being used by others more and more
egregiously.
The pleasure in Tanya's subplot comes from the ways in which
Tanya, with Portia’s help, finally begins to see what is being done to her and,
in a kind of dimwitted but bullheaded self-protective set of acts, outwits
those who would take advantage of her.
Valentina, the front desk matron, who is trying to both
cater to these various entitled people and ride herd on them, is ultimately a
victim of the kind of lying that Freud warned us about – self-deception. She is uncomfortable with her sexuality –
something that stands out as a kind of naivete that is possible in a repressive,
Catholic community, even in someone who is servicing individuals whose sexual
more’s could not be more liberal and loose.
It is Mia, Lucia’s friend, who sees through Valentina’s horrible conflict
and helps her feel safe enough to grow into herself. Mia is not without cunning in doing
this. It is good for Valentina, yes, but
it also helps her cement employment at the White Lotus. This kind of open lie – Valentina is
personally naïve but aware of what people want from her – seems to be the least
concerning of the lies that are told.
It is the lies in the two couples that are most
alarming. It does not take long for Harper to suss out that
Cameron and Daphne’s loving relationship is a sham, especially when Daphne
kidnaps Harper, taking her to another city without telling her that she intends
for them both to spend the night there.
This leaves the boys, Cameron and Ethan, on their own. Daphne is punishing Cameron for former
misdeeds by withdrawing from him – and she knows he is too immature to manage
himself without her. True to form, he
enlists Ethan in escapades to manage his insecurities that sicken Ethan, but
these escapades take place in Ethan and Harper’s room and when Harper returns,
she thinks that Ethan is lying to her when he maintains that he did not engage
in adulterous behavior.
And here is the turning point for the lies. Harper knows that Ethan does not lie. He is rigid about that – it is written into
his character that he will not. So how
could he lie about this? Well, the
problem is that Ethan, who would never deliberately deceive Harper by telling a lie
of commission, engages in lies of omission all the time. Centrally, he has not directly told Harper
that he is no longer attracted to her.
He has not acknowledged that there is an important deadness at the
center of their marriage.
As I alluded to earlier, this would be a moment that could
go in very positive directions. Ethan
could confess, and they could work on this together and they could ride out of
Dodge (or the White Lotus) on the moral high road, having the marriage that
they want to have and that Cameron and Daphne could never dream of having. Without spoiling more than I already have,
this doesn’t happen. Instead, Ethan’s
lying is used by Harper as an excuse to engage in lies of her own, and this is
what reignites the passion in their relationship.
I think that the lie that is being told by the writer here
is that not knowing the other – being lied to by your partner – is what will
maintain the relationship. I get
this. Some mystery is required to keep a
relationship going. But it is my solidly
middle-class belief that we are so vastly different from every other human,
even those that we choose to spend the rest of our lives with, that there are
always mysterious elements to be plumbed.
We don’t need to manufacture them, they exist, and our efforts to
acknowledge them and work them out lead to moments of connection, but also
moments of disconnection, and these bring us back to the table to understand the mysterious gulf between us again and again and again.
I am beginning to think that the writer and I both agree
that love is, at heart, driven by anxiety. It is mysterious that someone else could love
us. We fear that, if they truly knew us, they
would not love us. For the writer, this is an
invitation to deceive the other, so that they will find us desirable. We are something that our lover cannot own, or we are desirable to someone else and therefore we are desirable to our lover.
Ironically, the writer includes a much more hopeful – or pedestrian
version – of love in the resolution of the family men drama. Albie, the naïve son, falls for Tanya’s
assistant Portia, but Portia is drawn away, in a parallel fashion to Harper, to
a bright and shiny object. Albie finds
solace in Lucia, who, as he says, plays him.
His father indulges Albie in a lesson about being played, Albie thanks
his father by working to patch things up with his mother, and Albie and Portia
are able to have a rom-com moment.
OK, I said I wasn’t going to spoil things further, but I
did. I wanted to make the point that if
the writer wants to hang onto us, the audience, he has to throw us some slop. There has to be the hope that, even amidst
all this wealth and our own attraction to bright and shiny objects, we also can
discover that having a direct and honest relationship contains within it ample
rewards.
I think that the complications must be soothing to those who
don’t believe it is possible to come clean.
There is an alternate way to stay attached. It is a dangerous and volatile way, but
attachment through deception is possible.
On some level – thank God for the ability to have a stable relationship based on deception, for we can never be truly honest with
ourselves, much less with others. At the
same time, though, I think we are likely to have a better relationship when we are striving to minimize deception even if we can't eliminate it.
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