Is this how it ends?

The White Lotus, the lotus eaters - and the American nightmare

Jon Gries in "The White Lotus" Season 3, courtesy of Warner Bros.

It ended with a blood bath. After weeks of mounting tension, it ended with bloodied bodies floating in a river. They were not, as far as one could tell, the bodies of anyone’s enemies. They were just people caught up in a drama. We knew from the opening scenes that there would be blood, and there was.

These past few weeks have been quite the ride. We had some idea what to expect because we have been here before. We have seen what happens when very rich, very spoilt, not-very-bright Americans are thrown together in luxurious surroundings and surrounded by sycophants. It didn’t end well the first time. It didn’t end well the second time. And it didn’t end well the third time. Yes, there was a third season. No one was sure at first if there would be, but there was.

It was gripping from the start, this spectacle of Americans with too much money and too much time. The skies were blue, the sun shone and the service was impeccable, but nothing was ever good enough for these coiffed creatures with perfect teeth and plastic smiles. They wined, they dined and they whined as they sipped their margaritas, nibbled their lobsters and balanced their chakras in designer bikinis or trunks. The settings were spectacular, each a mini-Paradise, with smiling lackeys there to service every whim. But these rich people, these greedy people, these careless people, poisoned every paradise. It was always just a matter of time.

The first White Lotus was filmed in 2020, the year we thought a virus was going to destroy the world. It was first shown in July 2021. By this stage, at least four million people had died of the virus that had kept us locked away for months on end. We were all quite tired of the view of our walls and gorged on palm trees, super-luxe and beach-toned bodies stretched out on recliners. (My pandemic uniform was several pairs of Karrimor leggings and yes, by the end of it, they did.)

It was strangely cathartic to watch these masters of the universe unleash their petty grudges on partners, fellow guests and staff alike. Who knew that people used to getting everything they want might not always be pleasant? When the hotel manager tried to take his revenge on one of them, by shitting in his suitcase, my feelings were certainly mixed. Oh my God. He didn’t actually do that, did he? The character, and the actor who played him? (I’ve just checked and apparently it was done by CGI. Phew!) But also: hooray! The guy’s a shit. Literally a shit. This is what he deserves. It didn’t turn out well for the hotel manager, but then this is not a world of happy endings.

The second season, set in Sicily, was my favourite. I could gaze at the landscape of Sicily all day long, with no need for characters or action, but of course there were was plenty of action and a whole carnival parade of seductively ghastly people. My favourite was Quentin, a wealthy gay British expat played by Tom Hollander. The now ubiquitous Leo Woodall was also mesmerising as Jack, a cocky wide boy from Essex whose sexual tastes appear to be extremely wide-ranging. And then, as always, there were the whiny Americans, preppies in finance set on climbing ladders and scaling peaks. Their goals are simple: money, sex and power. That, essentially, is what The White Lotus is about.

The lotus, by the way, is meant to represent spiritual enlightenment.

Photo by he zhu on Unsplash

Lotus eaters are something else, but we’ll get to that later.

The third season of The White Lotus, which finished on Monday, is set in Thailand. The music is so ominous and the opening credits so long that you feel nervous even before each episode starts. It opens with the sound of gunfire, so you spend the next eight episodes wondering which of the repellant guests will be sent home in a body bag. There were times when I felt like marching in with a Kalashnikov and getting it all over with. But in the end, most of the nastier ones escaped. The sweetest person in the whole series didn’t. But hey, that’s life. Bad things happen. Get over it. And anyway, it’s all entertainment.

The latest dose of The White Lotus has, of course, been like Teletubbies compared to what’s been happening in The White House. These whiny, entitled Americans may have been indulging their whims in a slightly unattractive manner. They may have even planned the odd murder. But they haven’t been upending the entire global order, crushing democracy or crashing the global economy. And for that, one has to be grateful.

If there were theme music to the current series of The White House, I’m not sure what it would be. The theme music to Psycho? I’ve just listened to it here and it seems a bit too harmonious. I can’t think of any music that would match the horror show unfolding before our eyes.

It’s hard to keep track of it all and that’s the point. No one is talking now about the war plans shared on an insecure platform to a group that included a journalist. No one is talking about the people who were illegally shipped off to a concentration camp in El Salvador and left to rot. They are talking about the fact that their pensions have been obliterated or shrunk. They are talking about the fact that the small businesses they have built up over decades are about to be wiped out. They are talking about the prospects of a global depression and the fact that major global financial institutions are in peril.

This isn’t abstract. If a bank fails, and isn’t bailed out, you lose everything that’s in it. Just ask my friends who had their life savings with Lehman Brothers.

We know that Donald Trump has surrounded himself with crackpots and conspiracy theorists. We know he has an anti-vaxxer as a Health Secretary. We know children are already dying of measles as a result. We know he has a Fox News presenter as Defence Secretary who seems to conduct his policy largely through emojis. We know he has a Director of Intelligence who appears to be a Russian asset. And now it seems he has a trade advisor who was found for him by his son-in-law after Trump asked him to find him an economic advisor who would make him “look tough” on China. That advisor, a crackpot called Peter Navarro, whose books are peppered with references to a made-up expert called “Ron Vara” (an anagram of his name), has certainly made him “look tough” on China, with his mine-are-bigger-than-yours tariffs of 125%. He has also made him look like a lunatic. Which isn’t hard.

First, there was the gameshow in the Rose Garden, with a policy dreamt up on Chat GPT that targeted penguins. Then there was the collapse. The gameshow host was perfectly happy to see about $10 trillion wiped out, much of it from American pensions. What made him blink was the bond markets. If things had continued as they started on Wednesday, that could have led to total collapse.

I nearly wept with relief when Trump announced his “pause” and declared it had been the plan all along. It wasn’t, of course, and it is only a pause. None of us is safe. We are already poorer, as a nation and as individuals, and all the predictions are that we will be much, much poorer by the time this mania ends. If it ends. Because no one seems at all interested in limiting his power and he has said he is very much up for a third season.

Some people, of course, are much richer. Many member of Trump’s family and social circle appear to have made millions in a single day. It’s insider trading. Of course it’s insider trading. Will anyone investigate? Probably not.

It’s China that will win this race. As he launches his own Cultural Revolution, the failed businessman is doing an excellent job at making China Great Again. The United States of America is now a banana republic. President Xi has a much cooler head. He will take the long view. He knows he’s playing with a rank amateur. So does Putin. Trump loves the idea of being a strong man, but flabby nepo-babies who have never had to earn a penny of their own are no match for the real thing.

We are now seeing what happens when a maniac gets the keys to the White House. Nothing he has done has surprised me all that much because his character, and his personality disorder, has always been clear. What I can’t get over is the enablers. The men around him – mostly men. And the voters. (Just over half the people who voted, but that was enough. How the hell did they look at this man and say: yes, this is what the world needs?

Perhaps it comes back to the lotus eaters. In Greek mythology, they were people living on an island in a state of dreamy forgetfulness and idleness after eating the fruit of the lotus plant. This is certainly what it looks like from the other side of the pond. A catatonic nation bloated on consumption: of pills, processed food, algorithms and Fox News. A nation, in other words, no longer able to think.

China has made a similar point, forcibly and cruelly, with this AI-generated video of obese Americans on a factory floor.

The tragedy, or one of them, is that America is home to some of most talented people in the world. It has brilliant writers, philosophers, historians, scientists, artists, film directors and thinkers. Many of them are leaving the country. They know what’s going on. They know where it’s leading.

It’s the world’s tragedy that the lotus eaters, or the power mongers who created them, seem to have won. Stupidity rules. Mania rules. This is a world in which only the super-rich win. They are breaking their country. They are trying to break the world. I hope it doesn’t end with a blood bath, but I certainly wouldn’t bank on it.