Criticism of Capitalism as Cringe Comedy – the series “The White Lotus” – media

The American director and screenwriter Mike White is the master of “cringe comedy” with his sharp eyes. This is the kind of comedy of being ashamed of others that lives from the fact that you hardly want to look at how embarrassing the characters are and thus create their own misfortunes. That’s why there is hardly a more enjoyable form of criticism of capitalism than his HBO series The White Lotus. Whereby it stands less in the tradition of Karl, but very clearly in that of Groucho Marx. He knew as early as the thirties that the corruption of the so-called One Percenters was nowhere better observed than in their paradise.

White’s series is named after a fictional hotel complex in the island state of Hawaii that has many stars and even more swimming pools. VIP guests who have booked suites are brought in on a boat that looks like the luxury yacht from the days when billionaires wore panama hats and white suits. Then arrive: the honeymooners Shane and Rachel Patton, the Mossbacher family with their two children and their daughter’s college friend and Tanya McQuoid. Three parties representing the three dominant incarnations of capital in America today. Shane works for his parents’ real estate empire. Mother Mossbacher runs a search engine company. Tanya McQuoid has an inexplicable wealth of family wealth.

Hotel manager Armond and the employees are already waiting on the bank, to whom he clearly describes their role in the pecking order of the upscale service industry. “Wave like you’re serious,” he instructs her. “But don’t be too specific in your presence. We have to disappear behind our masks as pleasant, interchangeable helpers. This is tropical kabuki.”

With such sentences Mike White writes and stages his wickedness and social criticism in a virtuoso manner behind a varnish of tropical wallpaper, precious woods and five-star courtesies. A little later in the first episode he formulates the psychogram of the upper class of our time with just as few lines of dialogue. The first conflict is developing in a very friendly manner. The honeymooners Rachel and Shane were booked in the wrong suite, which spoiled the groom’s libido and lastingly the mood. Armand brushes him off and then explains to a trainee how these VIP guests work: “You have to treat these people like sensitive children. They may say that they care about the money, but that’s not true. It’s not even about the room . They just want to feel like they’re being seen. They want to be the only child. The hotel’s chosen baby boy. ” No, the rich in the White Lotus suites are not bad people. They are just like that and cannot help themselves.

Mike White’s characters make the wrong decision in almost every situation in life

They even want to do everything right. Shane tries hard to give the understanding husband, even if he demotes his intellectual wife to a trophy. The Mossbachers want to be good parents to their teenage children and even engage in politically correct discussions with their daughter Olivia and her school friend Paula, even if they ultimately defend their hard-earned privileges. As the Person of Color, Paula wants to support the oppressed Hawaiian natives, whose land was stolen for hotel construction, and yet she remains the rich daughter. And Tanya McQuoid wants to overcome the grief over the death of her mother and is looking for honest love. There is a lot of emotional baggage on the island. In the case of Tanya McQuoid, quite literally. She has her mother’s ashes with her in a box to throw in the sea. Which gives the terrific comedian Jennifer Coolidge a precipice for brilliant nervous breakdowns that chill the chills of foreign shame coldly down your spine.

Mike White’s high art of cringe comedy is that his characters make the wrong decision in almost every situation in life and thus derail the actually perfect vacation and a little bit the perfect life. This consistent self-dismantling may be the basic pattern in the genre of foreign-ashamed comedies, which at the beginning of the noughties with Ricky Gervais’ The Office and twelve worldwide versions like the German one Stromberg established and one final high point with Phoebe Waller-Bridges Fleabag would have. The quality of these series is usually a script that is characterized by a brilliantly malicious knowledge of human nature, as well as an almost casual, semi-documentary staging. Mike White, however, takes this to a new level with a courage to remain silent.

His sense of timing, i.e. the precise placement of the anti-punchlines in his genre, seems to manifest itself in his person. In Hollywood, White first established himself as a screenwriter for Jack Black, for whom he wrote “School of Rock” and “Nacho Libre”. His first cringe comedy was the HBO series Enlightened, for which Laura Dern received the Golden Globe for her grandiose role as Amy Jellicoe, a mentally unstable employee who, after visiting a holistic healing center in Hawaii, wants to reform the company she works for. Mike White himself had a role – he usually plays a classic loser. In his awkward body language you can observe his sense of time. As a director, too, he knows how to always take a little too long, to let scenes stand for exactly those seconds that make them so difficult to bear and thus steer the cringe effect into over-revving.

The White Lotus is a chamber game that takes place exclusively on the hotel grounds and on the beach. The series is also, first and foremost, a character study. Which does not mean that the acceleration mechanisms of the new television are neglected. Due to the barrage of wrong decisions, there is even a terrific, rapid chain of “plot twists”. Because the rich one percenters are largely isolated from the consequences of their actions in real life, too, they all leave in the end. Whether and who has been damaged or changed is concealed here, even if a spoiler is due to the cringe factor of The White Lotus could not take the edge off.

The White Lotus, 6 episodes on Sky Ticket, Magenta TV, Amazon Video, Google Play and Itunes.