You have to give it to Mike White: he’s a sicko who knows how to read a room. The most telling news about season three of The White Lotus came a few weeks ago, when news emerged that after the election last November he cut a key early scene in which Carrie Coon’s character, a New York single mom/lawyer, tells her friends about her nonbinary child and the awkwardness of they/them pronouns. “Now, there’s a vibe shift,” he said. “That’s not the kind of attention I want...The politics of it could overwhelm whatever ideas I’m trying to talk about.”
God forbid any of us should be overwhelmed by politics. But that’s not my point! You can’t fault White for not being a polemicist; that’s never been his thing. The White Lotus, like a lot of supposedly-highbrow television, surfs the zeitgeist, picking up stray material from the news and discarding it the minute it feels stale or played out or overdone. It’s all supposed to serve the larger purpose of the story: in this case, a carefully counterpointed, excruciatingly detailed satire of rich Americans (and a few international guests) on vacation, each family or friend group a ticking bomb of resentment and dysfunction, on the verge of imploding—
Only they don’t.
The end of the third season, with its shower of themed merch, seals the deal: The White Lotus, the show, is functionally identical to The White Lotus, the resort, which offers its core group of guests an exhilarating week of conflict, misadventure, hurt feelings, drunken rants, but then in the end ties all their problems up in a bow and sends them home spiritually refreshed and renewed. In other words, it’s not satire at all; it’s sincere hedonism-as-therapy, like The Love Boat, wrapped in fancy ironic wallpaper.
When I teach the basics of satire to my undergraduates, as I do almost every semester, I start by asking them to describe the difference between The Simpsons and South Park. This distinction—between a relatively gentle, humane, affectionate depiction of society and a caustic, bitter, scabrous, bloody one—is the key to understanding the two dominant modes of satire, sometimes called Horatian and Juvenalian or, as Max Eastman puts it, “teasing” versus “biting.” Lately I’ve been thinking I have to give up this exercise, and not just because fewer and fewer of my students every year have seen The Simpsons AND South Park (or, for that matter, either one). I’ve started to think Horatian satire, in the present moment, has more or less ceased to exist. Juvenal still walks among us—caustic satire is one of the great art forms of our age, and particularly of the 2010s Black Art Renaissance. (Think Paul Beatty, Donald Glover, Jordan Peele, Colson Whitehead, Boots Riley, just to name the most obvious examples.) But the warmer, more affectionate, less bloody kind, which holds out the possibility of comic reversals and unexpected redemption? I can’t think of a single good example.
Instead, in the mode of The White Lotus, we have deliberately failed satire, a kind of reverse deus ex machina in which the show creator arrives at the last minute to spare the characters the consequences of their actions. If you haven’t watched the last episode of season three and still for some reason want to, stop reading now. The two family or family-like groupings of white American tourists at the heart of the season’s storylines both seem to be headed for a disaster. In one case, three middle-aged women, former childhood friends on a “girl’s trip” paid for by the richest of the trio, have been sniping, competing, and generally regressing to their school-age selves for a week. In the other, a wealthy family from North Carolina (stressed financier dad, Ativan-addled mom, three neurotic almost-adult children) is facing ruin because of the dad’s financial crimes back home, only they don’t know it, because the “wellness-themed resort” has encouraged them to lock up their phones. The dad, amiably played by Jason Isaacs aka Lucius Malfoy, attempts suicide, loses heart, and then, in a South Park-cum-Aeschylus touch, decides to poison his family with a tropical smoothie laced with seeds from a toxic fruit growing outside their villa.
Nope. Nothing. Full retreat. I won’t detail the nails-on-a-chalkboard way White reverses course in the last fifteen minutes; suffice to say he sacrifices every shred of narrative credibility to send his white characters happily home—an ending so bad the New York Times wrote a story about it. (The NYT’s wall-to-wall, consensus-culture coverage of TWL has been so thorough it almost defies their treatment of Succession two years ago, which I wrote about here.)
What’s the word for this? There should be one, because deliberately failed, self-thwarted satire is one of the hallmarks of our era, even if most of it is achieved more elegantly and less openly than The White Lotus. You could almost say it’s HBO’s stock in trade. Whenever you find yourself feeling queasy in the middle of some TV show, novel (Ottessa Moshfegh, for example), movie (The Menu), art show, etc, wondering if you’re supposed to despise or envy the people you’re looking at, it’s likely you’ve wandered into the realm of failed satire-that-is-really-flattery, or what I’ll call “flattire.” Yes, you could say this is a mode that goes back to the origins of satire itself (which always has to do with an ambivalent attitude toward the lives and mores of the rich and powerful), but the seamless nature of art and commerce today, the synergy between What-a-horrible-person and I-want-to-buy-his-shoes, lifts the genre to a new and special level.
So there you have it: flattire. (You could also write “flatire,” but that sounds like an idiomatic French verb for flatulence.) It’s the kind of story where, to paraphrase Banksy (who nailed this convergence ages ago), you know you’re going to exit through the gift shop. Whether you can actually escape the gift shop, though—that’s another question entirely.