◎ Liu Qipeng
The second season of "White Lotus Resort" (hereinafter referred to as "White Lotus") ushered in the finale this week. Because the first season received super high word of mouth and praise, almost swept last year's Emmy Awards, everyone's expectations for this season are also rising. Fortunately, the second season, both the writer and the production, have maintained the same high standard as the previous season, and even have more commendable points in terms of character portrayal and character relationship shaping.
As in the first season, the story takes place in a palatial, exotic resort – from Hawaii in the United States to Sicily in Italy - the story still opens with the death of a customer as a suspense, whetting the audience's appetite, while the characters still focus on the upper class and the little people who serve them. If the last season was a mockery of the hypocrisy of the rich, the scarcity of the spiritual world, the fragility and pathos of emotional life, and the relationship between oppression and exploitation between different ethnic groups and classes, this season focused deeply on family, sexuality, intimacy and the resulting power relations. If last season was a comprehensive CT examination, by this season, director and screenwriter Mike White has begun to take a shiny scalpel and shoot at more precise parts, and he shows the audience a richer and more bloody character world.
1
It is no coincidence that the choreographer chose Sicily as the setting for filming: a slightly more attentive audience will probably find that many of the bridges in the play are inextricably linked to the famous Italian director Antonioni's film "Adventure". From the play's character Tanya deliberately imitating Italian actress Monica Vitti, riding an electric car for a ride, to the trepidation of female lawyer Harper being watched by all men in Aubrey Square, it is a tribute to Antonioni. Even the ending of the rich woman Tanya's death is the same as in Vitti's movie - sinking from the yacht to the bottom of the sea. The theme that the second season of "White Lotus" wants to explore also has some kind of fit with Antonioni's film, and Mike White once did not shy away from borrowing from this film in an interview: "'Adventure' is about the desperate search for the meaning of life, just like the search for missing women." "White Lotus" also tells the story of anxious rich people who search for meaning as they hang out by the pool. ”
In the second season of "White Lotus", it seems that all male characters are anxious because of their desires and the deviation of family, morality, and traditional concepts. Three generations of three men, the journey to find roots in Sicily is more like some kind of male self-confirmation journey, but full of irony and comedy. A grandfather who is still unable to control his desires in his twilight years, a father who is trying to control sex addiction because he has repeatedly cheated and is disliked by his wife and daughter, and a simple son who is not deeply involved in the world and thinks that he can save a prostitute with money.
In the third episode, the dispute between the three grandchildren about "The Godfather" is the most interesting. Both grandpa and dad said it was the best movie America has ever made, and Stanford-graduating son Albi said: "Men love 'The Godfather' because they miss the good times of patriarchy, because they feel emasculated by modern society." "Albi, as a man educated by the American left in the new era, it is very normal for Albi to feel natural disgust for such toxic masculine films; Grandpa Burt represents a deep-seated group of men who believe that men's desires are natural and uncontrollable. In the whole play, his father Dominic is the only male who has achieved some kind of transformation during this trip. Later, along with Albi, he constantly affirmed: "I have always supported women... I'm a feminist... I've changed, I'm changing... I can change. "Screenwriter White, as always, only presented calmly, and did not make a very clear position prediction, which is the most valuable part of "White Lotus".
Antonioni once wrote in "The Story of a Director": "In every film, I look for traces of men's emotions, and of course women's. My work is like digging, doing archaeological research in the barren materials of our time. And this is obviously one of the themes that the writers of this show are trying to explore - to tell the complexity of human emotions, to tell about the crisis lurking in all human intimacy. The former is full of despair about the love of men and women in modern relationships, and the erotic provocations and violent aggression that male-dominated society will always inflict on women are all nightmares. And Mike White's portrayal of the relationship between the sexes, although not so extreme, is obvious, he seems to have the same pessimism. At the same time, the female characters he portrays seem to have a more sober understanding of the world than the male characters.
2
I have to say that the female characters portrayed this season are fuller, and the most dramatic tension in the whole show is the inconspicuous character Daphne at the beginning. All viewers thought she was just a silly, full-time wife who lived a carefree life and didn't care about the world — as evidenced by her conversations with Harper, a lawyer by training, who doesn't watch the news or care about important social issues. In the eyes of Harper and her husband, and even in the eyes of the audience, Daphne, like Rachel in the first season, is a vase of a rich family, a brainless woman who only wants to marry a rich man.
But as the plot unfolds, Daphne seems to show a certain wisdom in life that surpasses Harper, a woman who seems more independent.
Describing an experience she had with her husband, Cameron, on a safari, Daphne said that in elephant herds, it is women and children who form meaningful and supportive communities, frolicking in puddles and raising their cubs like human villages. At the same time, growing male elephants will at some point be driven out of the herd in order to learn to fend for themselves. "I feel sorry for the men," Daphne said, "they think they're doing something very important there, but they're just wandering alone." Daphne has a hidden feminine power that makes her seem calm and calm in all relationships. In the show, Daphne seems to be someone who truly understands how everyone is in trouble in marriage, family, and intimacy, and she encourages everyone to take back their rights—in fact, she helps Harper and her husband achieve balance within the family. Honesty is overrated, and appreciating the mystery of yourself and your loved ones may be a sexier solution. "It doesn't take knowing everything to love someone," she told Ethan, "don't let yourself be a victim." This should also be her own secret to inner peace. At the end of the play, it is Daphne who drags Ethan to a beautiful island in the distance. And Ethan and Harper spend their final nights at the hotel, breaking the mysterious vase, the Moorish head that symbolizes jealousy, revenge and betrayal.
In the second season of White Lotus, Mike White spends a lot of energy and space showing the division of people's public spaces and private selves. "Part of my impulse to write has always been to make fun of that gap and show people who they really are — complex, mean, flawed," he said. That's why I always refuse to create likable characters. Because we're basically animals, we're monkeys at heart. In religious communities, people like to claim to have a connection to a higher spiritual level, and that's how they want to be perceived. But there is always this undercurrent of humans and animals that pulls us apart from all this. ”
In the second season of "White Lotus", White is more tolerant of characters and shows a wider human world. If in the first season you can still have obvious likes and dislikes for the characters in the show, by the second season, you can hardly feel the obvious tendencies of the writers. In the first season, the inequality of class and ethnic group is only manifested through the behavior of each individual individual; In the second season, the screenwriter guided the audience to think about certain propositions through a large number of dialogues between characters, changes in relationships, and descriptions of inner emotions. It is difficult to define the quality of characters through simple gender and identity, such as the sex workers and hotel lobby managers who appear in the show, their relationship between each other's rights and the rights relationship of hotel guests, and the relationship between them and the rights of hotel guests, do not appear in the same overlook perspective as in the first season. Who is more naïve than sexual exploitation or deception? These are all places to play.
Volcanoes gushing out at any time, tides constantly colliding with the seabed, in conjunction with the Italian opera "Madama Butterfly", White in the second season of Sicily's resort, created a revolving door for the audience - behind each hotel door, is the face of human desires and emotions. And the moment you enter, you may be able to see yourself in the mirror of the revolving door.