The White Lotus Review: I Was Bullied Into Watching By Multiple Friends. I’m Glad I Caved.

A review of the smash hit HBO series that skewers the rich and those who cater to their whims.

by Justin Philips

The White Lotus: Season 1

(I was bullied into watching by multiple friends. I’m glad I caved)

A dead body demands a lot of questions. The main one being: Who is it? This hotel resort series opens with that mystery. It immediately moves to less important stakes. Can the newlyweds get a better penthouse? Is that mustard on your shirt? Are my testicles symmetrical? Admittedly I wasn’t impressed with the mundane encounters these rich vacationers found themselves in. But there was always that dead body to remember.

The show presents as a typical class divide. The wealthy and those who serve them. But there is something rotten under the veneer smiles and faux ‘How can I help you’ customer service. When you’ve finished sorting out the good and bad guys a likable character will become trash with one conversation. You’ll no longer root for them, but you’ll be invested in their fate. It’s easy to see White Lotus as an attack on the privileged, but the hotel staff are also problematic.

The Hawaiian setting is crucial. Beautiful beaches. Perfect oceans. It’s the pettiness of humans that corrodes everything. Even the characters who attempt to do good have terrible aim. Like deodorant without bathing. A more obvious show would give us a soft landing. A happy conclusion. This hotel forgets to clean the sheets as a way to teach us to be better to each other. That dead body at the opening of the show is a metaphor for where we’ll all end up. Don’t be an asshole along the way.

The White Lotus: Season 2

Season two begins with the same question as the last; "Excuse me, who’s dead body is this?" We get a new cast and a new location. Sicily is so beautiful a saltwater bloated corpse can’t ruin the vibe. The set up is the same. Wealthy people check-in to a high-ball hotel resort (free bacon) and act like assholes.

Last season was a celebration of pettiness. Strangers crashed into each other over mundane circumstances. This new bunch have agency. They all want something. Sex, adventure, family, sex, success, distraction, sex. This gives the season more drive. Writer Mike White has a knack for creating layered characters you simultaneously love and hate. A husband is accused of cheating (he didn’t) but the way he defends himself makes you want to punch him. A bubble headed blond turns out to be the most philosophical person on the show. A scheming prostitute will make you cheer. Her friend, who isn’t a sex worker but uses it to get what she wants, wins the Oscar for most charming. And then there’s that dead body.

The privileged bring their problems on vacation. They use the locals and the locals use them. Liking these characters isn’t important. Seeing their perspective might challenge/solidify how you feel about your own relationships. Would you lie to your mom for 50k? Would you choose reckless/sexy over safe/vanilla? Can a guy have empty condom wrappers in his couch without getting the third degree, sheesh? Are woman better at misbehaving than men? Do you agree with the dad who believes The Godfather is the greatest American movie? (It’s Robocop by the way).

Season two is messy fun. So much that you forget that one of them will end up dead by the final episode. But hey, free bacon.

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Merry Christmas, Mom. I'm So Disappointed In You

"I would have assumed my father would have taken a baseball bat to Fat Larry’s skull after that. Instead, he tried to commit suicide."

by Justin Rosario

Wednesday, December 21 will mark 23 years since my mother died. Normally, I write a Facebook post to mark the anniversary; something funny about my mother or something about the kids to note how much she would have loved watching them grow up. There’s a good chance I will do that this year as I have every year. Probably.

I am, however, still pretty pissed off at my mother over the whole “questions about my paternity” thing and I haven’t quite resolved that in my head yet. Since writing is my therapy, you get to come along for the ride.

Well, how did I get here?

If you’ve followed my borderline soap opera of a life for the last 14 months, you will recall that in October of 2021, I was diagnosed with something called Muir-Torre Syndrome, a rare genetic condition which would vastly increase the likelihood of me developing a variety of cancers. Not a great phone call to receive. 

After some genetic testing, my MT diagnosis was revised from “You have MT” to “You do not have MT.” Hooray! But there was a good 4-5 months between those phone calls during which we had to deal with the very real possibility I was facing all-but-certain cancer.

Everyone responds to bad news in their own way. Some people panic, others calmly accept their fate. My wife Debbie and I reacted pretty much the same way we did when our son, Jordan, was diagnosed with autism: we mobilized for war, making multiple doctor appointments within hours and tearing through the internet and every doctor/nurse we knew personally for information about Muir-Torre. 

As part of this research, I started digging into my family medical history since Muir-Torre is almost always inherited. The Rosarios are a large and scattered family but I’m loosely in touch with enough of them that if cancer was a thing in our bloodline, there’s a reasonable chance I’d know about it. I definitely know addiction is sprinkled quite liberally throughout the Rosario clan but as far as I knew, only my Uncle Joe and my brother Matthew had cancer and Matthew’s was almost certainly from HPV. 

Shortly after I started making my inquiries, though, my father called me to tell me that he most likely wasn’t my biological father. My mother had had an affair and that information led to an entirely different telenovela of its own. I wrote about that last December if you’d like to refresh your memory. It is not a fun read.  

After getting my DNA results from Ancestry.com, it turns out that I was, in fact, not the product of an affair but that didn’t change certain realities. I dealt with the issues stemming from those realities regarding my father, but I have not yet dealt with the other side of that equation. There were two people involved in making my childhood a miserable shitshow and my mother’s hands are very far from clean.

Saint Janet? Um…no

It was suggested that no one told me about my alleged status as a bastard, even as an adult, because no one wanted to ruin my memory of my mother. I bit my tongue because I love my mother, but at no point did I put her on a pedestal. I knew who she was.

It strikes me as odd that anyone would think I would see my mother as a saint. This is a woman who broke up a marriage to be with my father. It wasn’t a happy marriage and no one twisted my father’s arm to end it but my mother knew what she was doing while she was sleeping with a married man (with kids).

Later, when her own marriage went south, she had an affair with yet another married man (also with kids) and broke that marriage up, too. Again, it wasn’t a happy marriage and no one twisted his arm, either. But when you get right down to it, my mother shows up and divorce follows. I am under no illusions as to who she was as a person.

For instance, she was overly fond of her Peach Schnapps and while she didn’t rise to the level of heavy drinking on the Rosario side, it was enough that I stopped drinking for a while in college. Having alcoholism run through one side of the family is not great. Having it on both is asking for trouble when you yourself are engaged in heavy social drinking. Her drinking never became a problem that I am aware of but I was aware of it.

How was she as a parent? I honestly can’t say. My childhood is mostly a grey fog from before she left, with only snippets here and there. She wasn’t abusive that I can recall other than that one time when I was very young and she hit me with a wire hanger, Joan Crawford style in the movie “Mommie Dearest”…

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