Television usually but needn’t depict the zero-sum game
Season One of The White Lotus is a farce of a farce, and The Last of Us (finally) pleasantly surprised me.
I’m way behind on my television watching, so perhaps my spoilers aren’t so bad but watch out for them.
The White Lotus is supposed to be a comedy of manners exploring the goings on at a luxury resort in Hawaii, bringing upper and working classes together. I see it more as a farce because many scenes were absurd. The series depicts a sad version of the workers: either obsequious, hoping for a handout, or outright criminals. Armond, the hotel manager, steals a bag of prescription drugs from a pair of teenage girls and plots against an annoying guest. The subplot ends with the manager defecating in the guest’s luggage and the guest defending against the intrusion with a sharp pineapple knife. No surprise that the rich killer is let off, but why are we supposed to expect a frustrated hotel manager would go so far?
Spa worker, Belinda, grovels to an emotionally troubled guest because she hopes to get financial backing for her spa and self-help wellness center. When it doesn’t pan out, and everyone, including Belinda, should have known it wouldn’t, she throws her business proposal in the bin and starts up with another affluent and distressed guest. One would think her self-help rituals would give her a sense of self-worth to take her business proposal to a bank or crowd funder. Or, maybe the quantum energy was too busy radiating the land around Chernobyl to shoot her dreams and wishes to a gifting universe.
That second distressed guest pouring her anxiety out on Belinda is the wife of the knife-wielding guest. It finally dawns on her that she’s a trophy wife of a privileged and annoying man, arm candy with no career prospects. She resolves to leave him before she realizes her options are limited as she wasn’t rich or connected before the marriage. Ultimately, the money and security are too seductive. She resigns herself to an unhappy but financially secure (or so she thinks — she did sign a prenup) life, telling her husband, and herself, that she’ll be happy.
A pretty girl destroys a bright and hard-working young man, convincing him to reclaim land belonging to his indigenous people by stealing jewelry from the guests who gifted her the trip to Hawaii. Now, why would we have to suppose that a bright and agreeable young man, by all accounts, would throw away his life to steal? It reminds me of the law and order blather of conservatives and liberals defending abusive police. Thus, The White Lotus writers force the bleak, threatening working class cliche on us. It’s no different from the saintly cops in an appalling number of crime shows where the criminals force, yes, force, the cops to ignore Constitutional rights to protect the good citizens. The only unsurprising part of the jewelry theft subplot is that the girl got off despite lots of evidence she was in on it, but they never gave the young man the nobility of not snitching on her. They granted that honor to her wealthy friend.
Teenage girls are skewered, too —a trope that should have ended with Mean Girls. They do drugs, betray each other, and attack the teenage boy and the parents, the latter for their privilege and consequent attitudes while enjoying privilege themselves. The sole sympathetic character is the teenage boy who throws off technology and dumps everyone to join the indigenous people and canoe the islands. Girls bad, boys good — sounds like my elementary school in the 1960s when the teachers called on and showered resources on the boys and ignored the girls.
I think The White Lotus missed the mark of a good satire because it most effectively satirized people not in power. What’s the point of criticizing people who are already beleaguered? This is not the stuff of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Jane Austin. It’s more Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Fox News, and, sadly, MSNBC.
In contrast to The White Lotus’ skewering of a supposed morally bankrupt proletariat while mostly exonerating the hoarding class, The Last of Us pleasantly surprised me earlier this week with a little dose of truth — that functioning societies can emerge from the devastation through caring and sharing, cooperative living. The protagonist’s brother is living in a thriving cooperative community. While acknowledging it works and is providing him with his best possible life under the circumstances, he denies he’s a communist. His wife sets him straight. “This is a commune. We’re communists.” Before the infection, the character was likely steeped in the capitalist rhetoric of hate radio and television. He was, to say the least, surprised that the society of his manufactured nightmare saved him. I laughed.
Finally, the series acknowledges that the only way to recover is to work together, share, and not hoard. The sainted hoarders of Episode 3, Frank and Bill, did no one any good but themselves. The fascist FEDRA created a rogue authoritarian murderer state sharing the wealth with collaborators and pissing off the rest leading to another sort of authoritarian murder government. However, as it turns out, the truth must emerge: the commune is the basis for resetting society.
Before this latest episode at the commune, I had wondered why a guy like Pedro Pascal, whose family escaped the killing stadiums** of Pinochet, wanted to headline a series that depicted regular people as predators to be controlled or put down by authoritarian rule. Pascal has already portrayed a religious cult member and authoritarian-leaning trainer of baby soldiers in The Mandalorian. He’s finally somewhat redeemed, but I imagine he’s oblivious to the social harm of bad stories or the money and sudden fame mitigated the pain — why we shouldn’t overly admire celebrities or politicians.
**something Republicans want to bring to the USA
Stories we tell each other matter. They can help create empathy for strangers and people from different backgrounds, help us work out our sense of right and wrong, create expectations, relieve anxiety about world events, and impact our emotions. I hope more series follow the lead we witnessed in Station Eleven and now The Last of Us, depicting the truth that The White Lotus ignored, that “national divorce,” “divisive racism, misogyny, and bigotry,” and resource or wealth hoarding aren’t the logical or natural requirements of humanity. We don’t live in a zero-sum game. Regular people will recover and succeed only when we band together to build and share.