The White Lotus Season 2: Relationships and Lies of Omission

 

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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