On Mike White’s Primitivist Posthumanisms: Animality, Coloniality, and Racial Affect in The White Lotus

Introduction

Airing several years before the success of the first season of writer-director Mike White’s anthology series The White Lotus (HBO, 2021–), White’s previous series, Enlightened (HBO, 2011–2013), created by White and Laura Dern, tells the story of Amy Jellicoe (Dern), who, after seeking treatment at a New Age holistic rehabilitation center in Hawaii, following a public nervous breakdown at her corporate workplace, returns to work seeking a higher purpose through increased socio-political and community engagement. In the first episode, we see a montage of the therapeutic activities of her treatment in Hawaii. The sequence draws attention to the touristic visuality that has been accorded to filmic and televisual depictions of the Hawaiian Islands. This globalized image of Hawaii, infused as it is with numerous symbolic and material strata of coloniality, capital, exotic desire and fantasy, is propagated primarily through the global reach of visual media and manifests in Enlightened, perhaps anticipating The White Lotus in such a way as to exemplify the Hawaiian Islands’ status as what Camilla Fojas calls “the colonial gold standard" in the cultural imaginary of the United States; and, accompanying this, moreover, is the emergence of “tourist fantasies and desires for redemption from mainland social unrest” (Fojas 2014, 191).

In Enlightened, the clearest distillation of this touristic fantasy and redemption is perhaps seen in Amy’s numinous encounter with a sea turtle in Hawaii. As she explains, recounting the experience to her ex-husband Levi (Luke Wilson): “I decided to get in the water, and this sea turtle just passed by. Big, beautiful sea turtle…I felt this presence all around me.” Fighting back tears, she continues: “It was God. Or it was better than God.” This encounter with the nonhuman in Hawaii is presented within the series as the foundation upon which Amy begins her new life as an “agent of change,” eventually deciding to become a whistleblower against her corrupt employer. The sea turtle becomes a recurring motif throughout the narrative, later manifesting as an apparition to Amy in the precarious and corporate neoliberal spaces of her workplace; and, as we see in the series, the sea turtle becomes charged as the cathected locus of the change Amy wishes to see—greater environmental and ecological consciousness, and an elevation of the earthly in resistance to the neoliberal. Here, the positionality of the sea turtle reflects the wider symbolic economies of the nonhuman in White’s work, such as his 2007 film Year of the Dog, his screenplay for the film Beatriz at Dinner (directed by Miguel Arteta, 2017) and, as I examine here, The White Lotus. In these works, the nonhuman is presented not simply in paradigmatic opposition to, or as the earthly anti-thesis to, corporate neoliberal greed, but is figured as offering recourse to a utopian ideal that is predicated on posthumanist modes of coexistence with the nonhuman world. In The White Lotus, for instance, the figure of the sea turtle, and the nonhuman more broadly, returns to gesture to an imagined posthumanist otherwise, or the potential for alternative worlds following the inevitable, as White’s work often prognosticates, fall of neoliberal capitalism.

In the case of Enlightened and The White Lotus, that this utopian posthumanism finds a privileged locus in the exotic location of Hawaii speaks to the islands’ attraction for tourists arriving in their millions each year, as Rob Wilson notes, “looking for that special something out there in the remote-yet-near Pacific” (Wilson 2000, xv). For Americans in particular, such as the fictional tourists of The White Lotus, this contrast between distance and proximity is fundamental to Hawaii’s appeal. Following Hawaii’s statehood in 1959, the increased accessibility of air travel was promoted by the US tourism industry to enact a “domestication” of the islands, enticing mainland citizens to experience Hawaii’s “exoticism” with the comfort of knowing that they were still in “American” territory.¹

Yet more decolonial thinking has pushed against the forces obscuring the complex manner in which the tourism industry has profoundly shaped the economic, social and political realities of the state and its residents. Hōkūlani K. Aikau and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez write that while the islands are indeed beautiful, Hawaii’s residents “struggle with the problems brought about by colonialism, military occupation, tourism, food insecurity, high costs of living, and the effects of a changing climate” (Aikau and Vicuña Gonzalez 2019, 1).

The White Lotus, as the tagline on its poster—“Paradise is no vacation”—suggests, thematizes many of the problems enumerated above by Aikau and Gonzalez. Premiering in the summer of 2021 to critical acclaim and extensive media discourse, the series charts the crisscrossing exploits of the staff and wealthy (and predominantly white) guests at a luxury hotel resort in Maui over the course of a week. Marketed by HBO as a “social satire,” the series’ engagement with questions of wealth and class, capitalism, race, and colonialism and its afterlives, offers up a more critical probing of its locale than Enlightened’s seemingly more idealistic portrayal of Hawaii. Yet despite this, the series bears an ambivalence—characteristic of White’s work writ large—in that it encourages viewers to consider how the operations of its aesthetics and narrative machinations can be read as a decolonial critique of whiteness and the continued modes of exploitation occurring in Hawaii, subjected as it is to colonial domination on the part of the US government, military, and corporations.

Indeed, over a century after the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893 by US naval forces, the effects of the United States’ colonial and imperial domination continue to manifest in numerous ways for Hawaiians, including culturally, linguistically, and economically. As Haunani-Kay Trask outlines, for instance, the sole language of several generations of Hawaiians is English due to the US government’s banning of the Hawaiian language in 1896 (Trask 2000). Furthermore, as Trask writes, “Our lands and waters have been taken for military bases, resorts, urbanization and plantation agriculture” (Trask 2000). It is important to note that the colonial dimensions of the capitalist tourism industry intersect with the housing crisis faced by many Hawaiians today (see Bussewitz 2015). In recent years, the property purchasing activity of American billionaires in Hawaii, such as Mark Zuckerberg, has also been characterized as an example of “neocolonialism” (see Letman and Wong 2017). Beyond their resistance to the tourism industry’s displacement of Native Hawaiians, various Hawaiian sovereignty movements and activist groups are also seeking to resist these forms of (neo)colonialism by working to “promote land stewardship, provide education and training for Hawai‘i’s peacemakers, and speak out against the American military and prison industrial complexes" (see Rigg 2022). As I discuss later in this article, the series touches upon the ways in which the large-scale tourism developments in Hawaii have resulted in the displacement of Native Hawaiian communities.² At the same time, however, the series itself, both on diegetic and extratextual levels, indulges in and reaffirms a number of colonialist tropes, as I think through critically here—particularly regarding posthumanism, animality, primitivism and race.

Discussing the temporal implications of the “post” in posthumanism, Austin Lillywhite notes that although it is often understood to refer to “what comes after the human,” such as our ongoing sixth extinction event, the increased interest in artificial intelligence, or new materialist discourses which position the human as one subject enmeshed within numerous networks of agential nonhuman others, it is important to remember that posthumanism not be seen exclusively in futural terms (Lillywhite 2018, 101). In White’s work, the symbolic valence of the nonhuman world comes to gesture to pre-industrial and pre-capitalist ontologies of existence in which, as Anat Pick discusses in reference to John Berger’s famous essay “Why Look At Animals?,” the relations between humans and animals “embody unity and authenticity” (Pick 2015). If the rupture of this putative authenticity “can only be viewed through the prisms of alienation and loss” (Pick 2015), then perhaps what is engendered as a result is a nostalgia that resonates with discourses of “primitivism,” understood here as the aesthetic idealization of a return to idyllic, prelapsarian locations unsullied by the social and cultural developments of modernity. And this nostalgic desire, as seen throughout the fraught histories of imperialism and colonialism in the Pacific Islands, manifests paradoxically through regimes of violent appropriation, as I discuss later.

As Lillywhite notes, “Although the curious dynamic in which the afterlife of humanity is represented as a nostalgic return to primitive forms of life has long been apparent in post-apocalyptic works in popular culture, the question remains as to what realms of posthuman theory might also be touched by this dynamic” (2018, 101). If part of posthumanism’s appeal is thus rooted in primitivism, then the futural temporalities presupposed by the former are disrupted, as I examine in relation to the representational and temporal ambiguities of the nonhuman animal in The White Lotus and the symbolic economies within which it circulates. Yet if we are to explore the resonances between posthumanism and primitivism, such an undertaking cannot be performed in isolation from questions of race and colonialism, for, as Lillywhite continues, “imagining the posthuman, in many of the forms it presently takes, participates in certain racial structures, such as drawing an autochthonous sustenance from the fetishized racial body of the primitive, while nevertheless disavowing the relevance of race to its politics” (Lillywhite 2018).

The critical parsing of posthumanism in relation to primitivism and its racialized contours here resonates with critiques of the recent “ontological turn.” In The White Lotus, White’s ambivalent thematization of Hawaii’s exotic locale as an opening to a pre-capitalist, pre-industrial and primitivist rendering of the nonhuman world chimes with Jordy Rosenberg’s critical analysis of the ontological turn and its vectors which seek to enact dehistoricized visions of the world in such a way as to evoke “New World-style fantasies about locations unmediated by social order” (Rosenberg 2014). Rosenberg ultimately goes on to forge connections between this ontological turn, neoliberal forms of settler colonialism and financialized capital accumulation, all of which are thematized in The White Lotus.

In this article, I seek to examine the tensions inherent in the series’ engagement with a kind of “primitivist posthumanism,” primarily as it pertains to questions of animality, coloniality, and race. If we are to view the series as perpetuating fantasies of transcendence from the cultural by its attending to the nonhuman—as seen principally through the character of Quinn (Fred Hechinger) and the shift from his fixation on technology to the “natural” and nonhuman world—then this is a fantasy of transcendence that is ultimately inextricable, I discuss, from settler colonialism and its concomitant racial dimensions with which White self-consciously engages. First, this article probes the series’ engagement with the nonhuman world of Hawaii, particularly the nonhuman animal, whose function in the narrative is enmeshed within a nexus of animality, settler colonialism and primitivism. I consider how the symbolic purchase of the nonhuman is bound up in an anthropocentric logic of domination and capitalist extractivism.

Secondly, I explore how this reproduction of capital is coterminous with the afterlives of slavery and settler colonialism. I look at the decolonial thinking of Hawaiian scholars to examine the series’ depiction of Hawaii as a “primitivist” arcadia. Yet I also probe how The White Lotus draws attention to the material reality of the legacies of settler colonialism in Hawaii, as the series mediates and articulates Hawaii’s positionality as a bearer of America’s colonial sensibility. I consider further the racial dimensions of this critique of America’s colonial sensibility in relation to current discourses in affect theory. Finally, I examine how these questions of race are freighted by White’s positionality as a white writer-director and situate the series’ status as a media object within a contemporary television landscape that is continually being reshaped by pop-cultural discourses pertaining to diversity and representation.

The Colonial-Capitalist Machinery of the Nonhuman

In Enlightened’s second season, Amy’s ex-husband, Levi, travels to Hawaii to seek rehabilitation treatment for his substance abuse. In a letter to Amy, Levi explains that his attempts to locate any sea turtles have been futile due to the reality of tourism-fuelled pollution, whose deleterious effects on marine ecosystems continue to be felt. Likewise, The White Lotus gestures to the adverse material conditions with which marine ecosystems must contend. When Quinn and his father, Mark Mossbacher (Steve Zahn), enquire as to the water-based activities on offer at the hotel, the hotel manager Armond (Murray Bartlett) recommends scuba diving and notes that “a few of the reefs are still thriving,” obliquely signaling the ways in which the endangered status of the nonhuman has become commonplace. Indeed, citing the marine conservation biologist Callum Roberts, Stacy Alaimo draws attention to how the pollution of marine life is now such that “we come to accept the degraded condition of the sea as normal” (Alaimo 2016, 111). Owing to the three-day training course mandated for scuba diving, Mark and Quinn opt instead to go snorkeling in the bay, and Armond assures them that although they are not likely to see many fish, they will “definitely see something.” Unlike the pristine, aqueous spaces of the pools at the White Lotus, where Mark and Quinn eventually complete their scuba training, the sea and its ecosystems are subject to the harmful processes of toxification enacted by capital.

As Shukin notes, animal life’s subjection to capital is such that “disruptions in animal capital have the potential to percuss through the biopolitical chains of market life” (2009, 24). The commodification of an exotic marine visuality through the touristic activity of scuba diving, for instance, ultimately disrupts its own profitability as the increased precarity of marine ecosystems, precipitated by their exposure to pollutants caused by the very presence of visitors and other subjects of capital in Hawaii, results in an ironic rupturing of capital’s lucrative enterprises. That these biopolitical entanglements of capital lead Quinn to temper his expectations of “[seeing] something,” however, makes his eventual sighting of a whale, an event which triggers his obsession with the “natural world,” all the more resonant.

After his older sister Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) and her friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady) forbid Quinn from sleeping in the same room as them, Quinn decides to sleep alone on the beach. Quinn sets down his phone and looks out at the sunrise on the horizon as the camera homes in on his face, blinking with incredulity at a figure in the distance. When the camera cuts to Quinn’s view of the sea, we witness the spray of water from a whale’s blowhole. We alternate between shots of the whale in the distance and further close-ups of Quinn’s stunned expression as he witnesses the whale’s lobtailing and other surfacing behaviors (Figure 1). Finally, the whale breaches as the episode fades to black. Quinn, characterized in the narrative as an impassive teenager addicted to the mediated pleasures of his various screen devices, is awed by the unmediated sight of the nonhuman animal in its natural habitat. Yet, the symbolic resonance of the scene, whose shot-reverse-shot pattern implies a moment of unmediated, intimate exchange between the human and the nonhuman—spurring Quinn’s obsession with the natural world—is troubled by a multitude of extratextual factors pertaining to questions of capital, technology, coloniality, and the nonhuman. And ultimately, these factors exemplify the ways in which animal signs and metaphors become what Shukin calls “key symbolic resources for capital’s reproduction” (2009, 12).

Figure 1. The nonhuman animal encounter in Hawaii (The White Lotus). Copyright: HBO.

Discussing the diachronic changes of animal visuality in Western culture, Berger notes that the rise of industrial capitalism is commensurate with the increased precarity of nonhuman animal life, which proliferates instead through visual representations (Berger 1980, 2). Yet if these visual representations are to be understood as bearing the traces of the primitive and originary encounter between the human and the nonhuman, then what they ultimately signal, as Pick puts it, is “the ghost of an encounter” or a simulation which “[diminishes] both modern man and the modern animal” (Pick 2015). While Quinn’s whale sighting is presented as a recapturing of this lost encounter, the whale itself is likely constituted digitally through computer-generated imagery, recalling what Akira Mizuta Lippit, building on Berger, describes as the nonhuman animal’s existence “in a state of perpetual vanishing” (Lippit 2000, 10). In our modern era of human advancement, what this results in is the appropriation of the animal by technological media for “the symbolic and actual powers they represented” (Lippit 2000, 23). In relation to cinema specifically, the medium accords a spectral positionality to the animal in the sense that the power of preservation that cinema possesses is such that it comes to embody a logic of revivification: “while animals were disappearing from the immediate world, they were reappearing in the mediated world of technological reproduction” (Lippit 2000, 25).³

The contradictory semiotics of the nonhuman animal are displayed further in a later sequence depicting Quinn’s enchantment by the nonhuman world which, as with the above whale sighting, appears to be positioned as a line of flight from capitalism’s mediated technologies, yet is nevertheless predicated on a metaphoricity whose proliferation in visual media, and reception in Western cultural imaginaries more broadly, is trafficked through capital. In the final episode of the series, Quinn and his father, having finally completed their requisite training, charter a boat with the rest of the Mossbacher family and dive into the waters. An extra-diegetic score of serene New Age music plays as Quinn, along with his father, swim over reefs and shoals of fish. Cutting between the divers and the marine environments they swim through, the scene’s articulation of the nonhuman world beneath the sea resonates with the familiar tropes associated with mainstream nature documentaries, such as those of David Attenborough, whose “palatial rendering of nature” is evoked here (Pick 2013, 24), particularly when the camera cuts to a sea turtle.

Much like the sea turtle in Enlightened, divine associations are evoked by the framing of the turtle against the sunlight above as the camera tracks the animal’s spectral gliding from a low angle position (Figure 2). This otherworldly abstraction of the turtle is followed by shots in which the camera follows from behind, situating the turtle within its underwater environments; unlike the CGI whale on the horizon, the proximity of the camera enables the viewer to discern the animal’s material authenticity and thus illustrates how cinema and the moving image have long attempted to articulate, and profit from, the animal’s corporeal presence. Yet the tranquility of both image and sound comes to a premature end as the camera abruptly cuts to Paula at the edge of the boat, vomiting profusely into the sea—perhaps to some extent a self-conscious critique of the excessive idealization of marine life we have just witnessed. Conversely, while read by Quinn and Olivia’s mother, Nicole Mossbacher (Connie Britton), as seasickness, Paula’s vomiting is also implied to be a somatic manifestation of guilt following her botched attempt to enact reparations of sorts for her Native Hawaiian love interest, Kai (Kekoa Scott Kekumano), by providing him with the opportunity to steal jewelry from the Mossbachers’ unoccupied suite.

Figure 2. Animal symbolism in The White Lotus. Copyright: HBO.

When Quinn and his father return to the surface, effusive in their joy, they share their underwater experience with Nicole, who remarks, “We are so lucky to be here all together as a family.” As Nicole Starosielski writes, human exploration of the subaquatic constitutes “an escape from the social and cultural processes that characterize everyday life: the constraints of the nation, the progression of history, and racial and territorial conflict” (2013, 149). The utopian underwater environments, and their nonhuman inhabitants, thus offer a curative power for the Mossbachers. The logic of metaphoricity undergirding the originary human-animal relation, per Berger (1980, 7), is evoked here as the metaphorical resonance of the presentation of the subaquatic nonhuman encounter signals a site of healing, chiming with the manner in which undersea environments, Starosielski notes, have come to be defined “in opposition to terrestrial human environments: they are timeless spaces of ‘anti-civilization’.” (2013, 149).

Yet White sets the reharmonization of the white nuclear family against the destruction of the Native Hawaiian’s; as we hear Nicole’s above words off-screen, the camera is trained on Paula as she sits away from the Mossbacher family, contemplating her role in Kai’s apprehension by the authorities following his theft of Nicole’s bracelets in order to pay for legal representation to fight against the colonial forces which have resulted in the illegal dispossession of his family. Paula throws a handmade necklace, given to her by Kai, overboard, with the moment drawing attention to its own symbolic intelligibility; as the necklace disappears into the sea, the curative, utopian dimensions of the subaquatic are spoiled by a marker of the layers of coloniality to which Native Pacific Islanders such as Kai and his family are subjected. “While there is significant potential in imagining the subaquatic as a subversive site where new discursive possibilities can be generated,” Starosielski suggests, “this conceptualization of undersea environments as existing beyond the social, as a domain solely of nonhuman Others, has often masked the racial, cultural, and gendered dynamics which have historically unfolded across the ocean” (2013, 150).

Indeed, when considering the whale sighting in relation to questions of imperial politics, it is the colonialist dimension of the animal that is perhaps obscured by White’s emphasis on metaphoricity. Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani write, for instance, that whaling “in the Atlantic and Pacific tells discrete histories of the animal’s significance in Indigenous cosmologies and Anglo-imperial economies and imaginaries” (Burton and Mawani 2020, 9). Furthermore, although the decline of whaling in the mid-nineteenth century was a result of numerous industrial developments, including the excessive harvesting of whales, its lingering history illustrates the ways in which American imperialism and conquest resulted in “devastating consequences for Indigenous communities and animal habitats” (Goldberg-Hiller 2020, 200). White’s figuration of the animal here, therefore, although pushing against what Shukin (2009, 37) calls the “capitalizing machinery” within which the nonhuman is bound, may—as Shukin notes, drawing out a critique of Berger—“[risk] obscuring how the rendering of animals, both metaphorically and materially, constitutes a politically and historically contingent, rather than a primal or universal, relationship” (Shukin 2009, 33–34).

It is here, then, that I wish to move on to a broader discussion of the colonial politics of The White Lotus, examining how its interrelation with questions of animality may lead us to probe the series’ critical (and humorous) engagement with the primitivist fetishization of Hawaii and its Indigenous inhabitants. As Shukin writes, animal capital’s productive ambivalence enables the animal sign to “[vacillate] between economic and symbolic logics of power” (2009, 5). The racial and colonial dimensions of these logics of power are tied within the series to position both the nonhuman world and Native Hawaiians within a nexus of colonialist instrumentalization. Yet, as I examine, the primitivist affect conjured by White through this relation ultimately reflects the crumbling integrity of the increasingly fraught power structures of whiteness in the twenty-first century.

White Savagery, Primitivist Fantasy

“It is essential,” Jinthana Haritaworn suggests, “to interrogate the nonhuman alongside the dehumanization of ‘Man’s human Others’ and to understand what disposes them to becoming animal’s other (or object’s other)” (Haritaworn 2015, 212). Due to its putative “desire for an ‘Other that doesn’t talk back’” (Haritaworn 2015, 212), the animal turn within the humanities can thus be scrutinized in relation to questions of race. In The White Lotus, the animal encounter, as I have discussed, ostensibly constitutes a line of flight from late capitalism; yet if we view the animal as a “perfect Other” by dint of its inability to speak back to the human, these escape routes from capital embodied by the nonhuman are freighted by their problematic negotiations of race and the ongoing material legacies of settler colonialism. What the broader posthuman turn casts into relief, therefore, are the processes by which Eurocentric transcendentalism, rather than being disrupted, is effectively reintroduced, particularly, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson notes, “with regard to the historical and ongoing distributive ordering of race” (2015, 215).

The series’ engagement with a primitivist human-animal relation risks concealing how this relation is uniquely tied to a disavowal of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian cultures and is both predicated on and constitutive of capitalist empire. Kapulani Landgraf, for instance, notes that the bones of Native ancestors are, in accordance with Native Hawaiian burial traditions, interred on the beaches throughout the islands (Landgraf 2019, 38).⁴ However, the construction of hotels, such as the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua resort in 1989, resulted infamously in the exhumation of over one thousand Native Hawaiian skeletons; and, although legislation has since been passed to protect Hawaiian burial grounds on the beaches, there is continual pressure to develop tourist attractions, threatening Native Hawaiian communities to this day—as Landgraf writes: “Na wai e ho‘ola i nā iwi? (Who will protect our bones?)” (Landgraf 2019). That the development of Hawaiian beaches also has deleterious effects on the nonhuman ecosystems, such as turtle habitats, draws both the human and the animal together in a nexus of expropriatory capitalism. We might say, then, that the earnest presentation of the spiritual encounters with the nonhuman experienced by Quinn in The White Lotus (and Amy in Enlightened) perhaps overlooks the material realities of both Native Hawaiian communities and the nonhuman ecosystems that are threatened by the capitalist circuits of the tourism industry in Hawaii, in which Quinn and his family participate.

Yet if The White Lotus, and Enlightened before it, engender a fetishization of a relation to the nonhuman and natural world beyond logics of capital, it is a fetishization that is self-consciously filtered through the ironic tonalities of White’s characteristic ambivalence, at once reaffirming colonialist tropes while critiquing them through the use of humor, a tonal balancing act that has proved to be the source of the polarized reactions to the series. Indeed, Mitchell Kuga (2021), offering the perspective of a Native Hawaiian, draws attention to aspects of the series which conform to numerous tropes pertaining to Hawaiian culture and its image proffered within visual media. The use of Native Hawaiian folk songs at various points throughout the series, for instance, signals a key tension: “how Hawaii is often both revered and erased when interpreted through a foreign lens” (Kuga 2021). In the aforementioned scene of Quinn’s whale sighting, for example, an a cappella version of “Hawai‘i Aloha” plays, the famous Native Hawaiian anthem that Kuga describes as a “declaration of what it means to be local” (Kuga 2021). Yet by setting this music against Quinn’s nascent obsession with the natural world, the series’ ostensible satirizing of white privilege is, for Kuga, muddled. As Kuga writes, “was using Hawaiian music to soundtrack the spiritual epiphanies of entitled tourists meant to be ironic? Or was it intended as a meta-commentary on the continent’s consumption of native land, culture, and people?” (Kuga 2021).

Through this critical lens, the sincerity of Quinn’s whale sighting is charged with an ambiguity, one which perhaps risks falling into the tropes associated with what Renato Rosaldo calls “imperialist nostalgia,” a peculiar desire for colonized cultures in the “traditional” state in which they were first encountered by the colonizer: “agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed” (Rosaldo 1989, 107–108). We might also characterize tourists as agents of colonialism due to their reception and appropriation of this nostalgia, instigated primarily through the channels of Hollywood and its function as an ideological state apparatus. If imperialist nostalgia, as Ronaldo suggests, relies on an “innocent yearning” both in order to “capture people’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination” (Rosaldo 1989, 109), then The White Lotus can be situated within a lineage of film and television whose implementation of imperialist aesthetics draws on tropes of nostalgia in the idyllic portrayal of the Hawaiian Islands. Indeed, Fojas writes that the rise of tourism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, following Hawaii’s statehood, was in part bolstered by Hollywood studios and the increased production of films centering on Hawaii, changing the perception of the islands “from a foreign and distant land to a domestic paradise” (Fojas 2014, 102).

Yet, if The White Lotus indulges in imperialist nostalgia, it simultaneously troubles and deconstructs the normative power dynamics and subject positions enacted through the series’ aesthetic engagement with questions of animality and savagery. Kuga (2021), for instance, notes that the aforementioned Native Hawaiian folk songs serve as “release valves” from the propulsive score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who discusses in interview the music’s function to heighten tensions amongst the main characters. Characterizing his score as a kind of “Hawaiian Hitchcock,” Tapia de Veer reveals that the music employs unusual methods to create a sense of “tropical anxiety,” such as tribal chants and Tapia de Veer’s own mimicry of various animal vocalizations (see Blake 2021; D’Souza 2021). The simmering tensions between the hotel guests, therefore, are heightened by the music’s evocation of tropical animals: “there is some toying with making these people feel like a bunch of chimpanzees” (D’Souza 2021). However, White’s engagement with zoological themes here reveals, I suggest, a self-consciously playful reversal of age-old associations of Indigenous peoples with savagery—associations which have been used historically to justify imperialism—in such a way as to draw attention to the dehumanizing processes of white, colonizing subjects. Tapia de Veer’s theme music in the opening credits is accompanied by images of a number of exotic animals, equating the predominantly white main characters of the series with animals enmeshed within networks of colonialism. Indeed, Katrina Crawford and Mark Bashore, the artists who designed the opening sequence, note that many of the animals and plants depicted, such as a pineapple fruit, leopard, and a Jackson’s chameleon, are not in fact native to Hawaii: “we were sort of playing with that idea of the introduction of things and colonization” (see Nguyen 2021).

The destructive processes enacted upon Indigenous peoples and land by agents of colonialism, thematized through the series’ economies of animal metaphoricity, are foregrounded here to illustrate the so-called “boomerang effect” of colonization outlined by Aimé Césaire, whereby it is in fact the colonizer who, in justifying brutality by dehumanizing the colonized subject through a process of animalization, ultimately comes to assume a position of animality himself: “colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it” (Césaire 2000, 41). Within the narrative, the character of Mark Mossbacher explicitly vocalizes the series’ interest in these themes of animality following his shock at the discovery of his late, closeted father’s AIDS diagnosis, leading Mark to liken himself, his father, and other humans, to monkeys “driven by base instincts.”⁵ At the end of the third episode, when alone with Nicole in their hotel suite, Mark indulges in a simian regression, beating his bare chest and mimicking monkey vocalizations.

Yet although Mark articulates an awareness of his base instincts, and references the hierarchies within which he participates, he and the majority of the series’ white characters nevertheless appear either oblivious or indifferent to the zoological and imperial dimensions of these hierarchies in relation to the Native Hawaiian characters; while the series figures the white characters as zoo animals, it simultaneously demonstrates the ways in which marginalized Native Hawaiian characters are put on display and forced to perform their indigeneity for hotel guests, so as to uphold the colonial-capitalist structures of the tourism industry. In the fourth episode, Armond announces that the local staff will be performing “traditional Hawaiian entertainment” for the guests while they dine. We then see a Lūʻau ceremony begin, featuring traditional Hawaiian music and hula dancing. While Kitty (Molly Shannon) initially expresses her enjoyment of the Lūʻau ceremony (“There’s live music and handsome men in grass skirts—I’m loving this!”), she and the majority of the white characters pay little attention to the performance, and the Hawaiian dancers ultimately serve as background entertainment to the hotel guests’ dinner conversations.

As the scene intercuts between the various, and often heated, conversations of the main characters, who discuss topics such as capitalism, gender, and race, the satirical humor of the sequence arises from the white characters’ obliviousness of the numerous ways in which their topics of discussion are intertwined with the imperial conditions to which the Native Hawaiian dancers in the background are subjected: Kitty stresses the importance of money to the newlywed Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), while Olivia broaches the contemporary cultural imperative for straight white men to cede their position from the center of “the narrative,” to which Mark responds that such a view constitutes “the same old tribal thinking, replacing the old hierarchies with the new ones.” For her part, Nicole disparages contemporary activists, claiming that rather than wishing to dismantle systems of exploitation, they “just want a better seat at the table of tyranny.” As the sequence progresses, the camera cuts at regular intervals to the dancing Hawaiians, including Kai (Figure 3), whose prominent role in the Lūʻau ceremony leaves Paula visibly perturbed.

Figure 3. “Traditional Hawaiian entertainment” for touristic consumption in The White Lotus. Copyright: HBO.

While the sequence draws attention to, and simultaneously participates in, the objectification and fetishization of Kai’s body, as well as those of his fellow Native Hawaiians, it also critiques the attendant tropes associated with Hawaiian tourism, as expressed in cinema and television. Fojas notes that Hawaiian characters in tourist films “remain trapped in their colonial conditions as props on a visual tour of the islands, or are otherwise sidelined as performers, servants or sexualized objects” (Fojas 2014, 116). When discussing the Lūʻau ceremony over breakfast the next morning, Olivia tells her parents that Paula was “disturbed by the entertainment.” The ensuing responses by both Mark and Nicole are perceived as insensitive by Paula, fueling her decision to provide Kai with the opportunity to steal from the Mossbachers. Mark flippantly responds, “Look, obviously imperialism was bad. We shouldn’t kill people, steal their land, and then make them dance. Everyone knows that. But it’s humanity. Welcome to history. Welcome to America.” Nicole remarks, “I think [the hula dancing] is just a way for them to honor their culture, and they seemed to be having a really good time.” Nicole’s characterization of Hawaiians here conforms to received stereotypes of Hawaii as a “paradise full of happy natives offering visitors the bounty of the islands”—an image ultimately employed ideologically within visual media representations to “justify colonialism and to deepen its complex relations of capital through tourism” (Fojas 2014, 110).

On the contrary, the reality for many Native Hawaiians is far removed from such representations. Likening Native Hawaiians’ expected performances of hospitality to “cultural prostitution,” Malia Akutagawa writes that tourism, for Native Hawaiians, “means being on display and looked upon with fascination” (2019, 153). What this insight reveals, therefore, is the way in which filmic and televisual stereotypes regarding Hawaiians, and their relation to tourism, obscure the harsh realities inflicted upon Native Hawaiians through the workings of the neocolonialist tourism industries. At the beginning of the fourth episode, Kai reveals the effects that the construction of the White Lotus has had on his family, telling Paula that the Native Hawaiians—including his family—who owned the land upon which the White Lotus stands, had their lease illegally terminated by the government; Kai then laments the necessity of his employment at the very hotel whose owners displaced his family. Here, we might see the depiction of Kai’s plight as a gesture to the “obscene hidden reality” of contemporary colonialism that is not often thematized in American visual media (see Fojas 2014, 201). Yet taking issue with Kai’s characterization, Kuga (2021) writes that Kai’s revelation to Paula serves as a “CliffsNotes synopsis of how Hawaiian land was stolen” and that Kai’s situation ultimately functions in the series as a “clumsy and lazy symbol of colonialism in a moment that could have taken greater care to humanize what it means to be Native Hawaiian living in modern Hawaii.”

The series’ gestures, however superficial, to the colonial conditions experienced by Hawaiians, raise important questions regarding the ethics of travel to Hawaii, questions whose dismissal by the Mossbacher parents illustrate White’s satirical probing of white privilege. Mark, for instance, insists that it would be “absurd” to cede one’s privilege and facetiously asks, “Should we give away all our money? Should we wear a hairshirt and not go on vacation?” Yet, taking into account the broader ecological dimensions of tourism and decolonization, foregoing travel to Hawaii is precisely what is recommended by many Native Hawaiian communities: “Sometimes the best way to support decolonization and Kanaka ʻŌiwi [Native Hawaiian] resurgence is to not come as a tourist to our home” (Aikau and Vicuña Gonzalez 2019, 2). In Aikau and Gonzalez’s view, both natives and non-natives alike “need to (re)learn how to live here in radically different ways if the ʻāina and wai (land and water) are going to be able to support po‘e (peoples, beings) into the future” (Aikau and Vicuña Gonzalez 2019, 2). One of the central tenets of this decolonial positionality is a refusal of the infrastructure that engenders a tourist imaginary whose operations serve primarily to cater to the comfort of visitors (Aikau and Vicuña Gonzalez 2019, 2). Considering the series on an extradiegetic level, these ecological appeals to decolonization bear a particular urgency when considered in light of the devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although filmed under strict safety protocols, the production of The White Lotus during a global pandemic speaks to the wider extractive economies of capitalism existing in the film and television industries, whose commodification of Hawaii’s tourist imaginary persists even while Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are some of the hardest-hit populations by the pandemic. Various government officials, for instance, have urged tourists not to come to Hawaii during the pandemic and have lambasted tourists for their “entitlement” and spread of the virus through a lack of adherence to COVID safety measures (see Delkic 2021).

In the aforementioned scene of the Mossbacher family’s heated discussions at the hotel restaurant, Quinn draws attention to the ecological degradation resulting from capitalist modes of exploitation, including tourism, characterizing everyone as “parasites of the earth.” In a marked deviation from his laconic demeanor, Quinn claims: “There’s no virtuous person on the earth when we’re all eating the last fish and throwing our plastic crap in the ocean. A billion animals died during the Australian fires. A billion. Where does all the pain go?” Echoing this sentiment in interview, White remarks that it “doesn’t matter if we have virtuous thoughts—by the nature of existing now, we’re part of the extinction” (see VanArendonk 2021). If the lived experience of humanity today is marked by an increasing awareness of one’s complicity in the ecologically destructive processes of global capitalism, what such a view ultimately capitulates to, as scholars such as David Harvey point out, is the logic of human sovereignty, which serves to “[repeat] in negative form the hubristic claims of those who aspire to planetary domination” (Harvey 1998, 328). Thinking through these ideas in relation to the neocolonialist conditions experienced by Hawaiians discussed above, we might therefore consider Quinn’s words—designating all of humanity as equally parasitic—as obscuring the asymmetries of power enmeshed within the capitalist processes to which he objects. Furthermore, in relation to colonialism, discussions of the Anthropocene, as Burton and Mawani posit, have a “presentist focus” such that the historical effects of European and US empires, and their concomitant extractivist operations, are often ignored: “imperial powers have violently altered local ecologies in ways that we are only seeing with clarity now” (Burton and Mawani 2020, 19). Circling back to the earlier discussion of primitivism’s ties to posthumanism, Quinn’s harnessing of an idyllic vision of the natural world onto the nonhuman animal, in his encounters with the whale and the sea turtle, effectively occasions an ahistorical fantasy—a relation to the nonhuman as an escape route from a material confrontation with what Rosenberg (2014), discussing primitivism, calls the “horrors of instrumental reason (with its attendant racist, eugenic, and exploitative logics).”

For Quinn, the fetishization of the nonhuman world is, however, mirrored by his objectification of Native Hawaiians, specifically a local canoe team, whose members he befriends. Gazing desirably at them in the fourth episode, much like his longing gaze at the whale, Quinn’s acts of looking figure animal and Native Hawaiian bodies alike as the “projected spectacularized image of the primitive,” which, in Lillywhite’s words, “attaches to bodies that do not look like one’s own, [and] is reclaimed as the inversion of one’s own image. It is the desire to see oneself inside out, participate in a self that is its own outside” (Lillywhite 2018, 114). As discussed earlier, if this primitivist projection also constitutes a voyeuristic gaze whereby the Other becomes a colonial object, the queer dimensions of this primitivist gaze are worth consideration, particularly in the context of White’s positionality as a queer filmmaker. For Bilal Qureshi, for instance, White’s “distinctively queer gaze is so tangible in each frame and word of [The White Lotus]” (Qureshi 2021, 83). A fetishization of the Native Hawaiian body—specifically the male body, as seen in the objectification of Kai, or the canoe team (Figure 4), whose muscular and athletic bodies and relation to Hawaii’s natural environments are perceived as desirable by Quinn—intersects with the queer dimensions of ontological primitivism, as discussed by Rosenberg (2014), who elucidates queer whiteness’s appropriation of “fantasized forms of primitive indigeneity.”

Figure 4. The fetishization of the Native Hawaiian body in The White Lotus. Copyright: HBO.

Both Quinn and Armond—the series’ main homosexual character—bear out White’s portrayal of exclusively homosocial communities as the privileged sites of resistance and divergence from the chrononormativity attendant with capitalist labor demands (Rosenberg 2014).⁶ In the final episode, for instance, Armond, knowing he is soon to be fired, defies his superiors by assembling a number of his white male colleagues, inviting them to his office to indulge in an episode of debauchery, consuming alcohol and recreational drugs—a scene of euphoria which, along with Quinn’s escape from the heteronormative nuclear family and accession to the homosocial community of the canoe team, is positioned as the only moment of collective joy seen in the narrative.

Yet Quinn’s triumphant ending—an aerial shot of Quinn paddling away with the Native Hawaiian canoe team, which closes the series—has been critiqued in relation to its colonialist undertones. VanArendonk (2021), for example, characterizes Quinn as a “tourist who co-opts [Hawaii] for his own ends.” Responding to such critiques, White acknowledges that the ending “plays into the trope of the magical locals, this pastoral life. It’s a fantasy; it’s definitely a fantasy” (VanArendonk 2021). Critiques within online discourses surrounding the series have drawn particular attention to the contrast of Quinn’s ending with that of the nonwhite characters. For Brooke Obie, the ending of the series underscores how the “Black and Hawaiian characters—the ones actually best suited to critique their white oppressors through the lenses of race, class and gender—are sidelined to focus on The Real Story: the humanity of rich and powerful white people” (Obie 2021).

In the final section of this article, therefore, I wish to consider the ways in which the Black character Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), spa manager at the White Lotus, serves as a counterpoint to the “fantasy ending” given to Quinn, thus signaling the connections between Native Hawaiians and other peoples adversely affected by the expropriatory logic of colonialism and its afterlives.⁷ Following a massage session with the wealthy white guest Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), Belinda is encouraged by the latter to draw up a business proposal for her own wellness spa, for which Tanya offers to serve as benefactor. However, the capricious Tanya ultimately withdraws the offer, leaving Belinda devastated. As the final character to be seen before Quinn’s triumphant voyage, we see a close-up of Belinda’s disaffected face as she musters a fake-smile to greet a new set of guests at the hotel. The fates of Quinn and Belinda, therefore, are counterpoised in such a way, I suggest, as to signal questions of racial affect and coloniality; yet, such questions are marked by contemporary discourses of race and representation within the current US television landscape, to which I now turn.

Authorship, Affect, Race

In relation to the conventions of US television production, The White Lotus has been critiqued within online pop cultural discourses on the grounds of its handling of questions of race and white privilege. One such critique centers on the series’ divergence from the Hollywood convention of the “writers’ room,” particularly at a time of increased awareness surrounding issues of representation and diversity in the television industry, both in front of and behind the camera. As Jason Mittell outlines, narrative television is a “highly collaborative medium, with dozens of individuals participating in the production process of each episode, thus making the ascription of authorship a difficult process” (2015, 87). In the case of The White Lotus, however, White’s singular authorship has been broached in critiques of the series’ engagement with Native Hawaiian and Black subjectivity from a white perspective. As Obie (2021) writes: “[The White Lotus] is a six-episode story about white people for white people, created, written and directed by one white man, (pun inherent) Mike White.” Yet the shifting dynamics of the contemporary American television industry are such that we witness the ways in which the televisual medium has become more “aesthetically valued” since the twenty-first century, leading to renewed discourses surrounding auteur theory (Mittell 2015, 96).

The historically white and androcentric notion of the auteur, diffusing from cinematic discourses into the television landscape in the case of The White Lotus, is thus probed by television’s increased emphasis on diversity and inclusion. The series’ thematization of colonialism in Hawaii raises the question for television critics of whether the series might have benefited from Native Hawaiian and other nonwhite writers. In interview, pressed on his decision to write the series alone, White admits that it is a “thorny topic” and draws attention to the importance of the increased distribution of opportunities to all creative voices, yet also characterizes the creation of art as “a call to empathy and imagination and being able to really see ourselves in everyone”—a position that he suggests should be maintained alongside increased diversity rather than eschewed wholesale (VanArendonk 2021).

Discussing the concept of the “operational aesthetic,” Mittell outlines how the concept facilitates an engaged and metareflexive mode of viewership such that spectators derive a pleasure from “unravelling the operations of narrative mechanics,” a process that is further enabled by social media discourse (Mittell 2015, 43). In an era of “complex TV,” Mittell suggests that we watch television series not simply for their narratives but also to “watch the gears at work, marveling at the craft required to pull off such narrative pyrotechnics” (Mittell 2015, 43). In the context of The White Lotus, I suggest also that the singular authorial positionality of White, established across his film and television work, facilitates this operational aesthetic, enabling a more nuanced viewer engagement with the racial and political dimensions of the series’ dramaturgy.⁸ For instance, critiques of the marginalization of Hawaiian locals in the series, such as Kai, whose arrest occurs off screen, or Lani (Jolene Purdy), a nonwhite hotel trainee who gives birth at the hotel and subsequently exits the narrative, perhaps overlook the narrative intentionality of their disappearances within the series; and indeed, as White confirms: “my hope is that the critique of it is built into the DNA of it” (VanArendonk 2021).

Yet the “romantic notion” of the auteur—a point of contestation within film scholarship for decades—in the context of television, can similarly “oversimplify the creative process” (Mittell 2015, 95). The singular focus on White’s author function, or on the writing credits of the series, I suggest, obscures the nuances of the collaborative process between writer-director and actor. Rothwell, who portrays Belinda, reveals in interview her collaborations with White, including writing sessions between the two where Rothwell’s previous experiences in various service industries were fed into the development of the character, as Rothwell notes:

[White] agreed to meet with me and talk about the role because it was written from the perspective of a queer white man and not that of a Black woman […] And so he really allowed me to develop Belinda […] It was about understanding the quiet storm that Black women carry inside us, when we have to be in those situations where privilege and your paycheck are at risk if you were to act out of pocket (see McKenzie and Willen 2021).

I thus want to conclude this essay by considering further the character of Belinda and her function within the nexus of themes examined thus far: posthumanism, coloniality, animality, race, and questions of resistance in relation to recent scholarship on racial affect. If, as noted earlier, a nonhuman turn reinforces Eurocentric transcendentalism and its “distributive ordering of race,” it is important to recognize how this might ignore the nonnormative “praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people” (Jackson 2015, 216). Jackson posits that in light of the appositional processes by which “animality, objecthood, and thingliness” have been cast in a relation with “modern racial blackness,” posthumanist and new materialist discourses’ lack of sufficient engagement with questions of race is conspicuous in that “blackness conditions and constitutes the very nonhuman disruption and/or displacement” invited by such discourses (Jackson 2015, 216). In The White Lotus, as I have explored, the primitivist and posthumanist dimensions of Hawaii’s figuration are, in White’s words, a “porthole to thinking about natural beauty, a different way of living,” as seen in the fetishization of the nonhuman as well as Native Hawaiians (VanArendonk 2021). Yet for Jackson, this figuration of the nonhuman is marked by a “gendered racialization” such that the “terrestrial movement toward the nonhuman is simultaneously a movement toward blackness, whether blackness is embraced or not, as blackness constitutes the very matter at hand” (Jackson 2015, 217).

As we see in the narrative, the “different way of living” hinted through the series’ posthumanist engagement, in contrast to Quinn, is not an experience readily available to the Black female character, who is instead required to facilitate and mediate such experiences for the wealthy white characters at the hotel. It is Belinda’s assumption of this mediating role, I suggest, that positions her, alongside both the Native Hawaiian characters and nonhuman animals, within Hawaii’s colonial entanglements. In Belinda’s initial consultation with Tanya, Belinda recites a Hindu mantra while performing a “cathartic” craniosacral massage on the latter, who subsequently becomes obsessed with Belinda, breaching staff-guest etiquette by inviting her to dine with her at the hotel restaurant. Tanya’s catharsis is figured as a kind of spiritual jouissance, articulated visually by the slow dissolve to the next scene: a shot of sunlight refracting through the water (Figure 5), much like the divine framing of the sea turtle mentioned earlier. In this way, both Belinda and the nonhuman are positioned within the series’ logic as bearers of enlightenment for their white subjects.

Figure 5. Tanya’s spiritual enlightenment in The White Lotus. Copyright: HBO.

Belinda’s appositional relation to the series’ interest in primitivism chimes with the racial contours of the ontological turn. Lillywhite, for instance, wonders whether this turn can be understood as race-neutral or whether there exists an “appropriative penchant for the primitive as blackness within this return to networks, animistic ontologies, and a posthuman self” (Lillywhite 2018, 102). Belinda, functioning as an emissary of ancient Eastern philosophies through her massage work, represents a commodified exoticization of primitivist fantasies of enlightenment, the broader dynamics of which speak to what Lillywhite, drawing on Fanon, describes as “an over-mechanized whiteness turning to blackness as a sort of salt of the earth in order to request a reanimating sustenance” (Lillywhite 2018, 111). These fetishistic dynamics are subtended by an erotic disruption serving to “suspend the self through dissolving the boundaries between the inside and the outside” (Lillywhite 2018, 113). This eroticism is also connected to numerous racialized tropes in film and television media, such as the figure of the “mammy” and its contemporary iterations.

In reference to Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996), Matt Richardson writes that the mammy role still circulates in cinema and analyzes Dunye’s film and its depiction of the ways in which the mammy’s “structural subordinance to white female economic power demands that she prioritize the white woman’s feelings and pleasure in order to secure her own material survival” (Richardson 2011, 105). While the mammy is often understood as a desexualized figure, Dunye’s film examines the mammy’s erotic undertones, suggesting that this eroticism is shaped by power dynamics in which “white women function as the aggressors in their relationships with black women” (Dunning 2009, 104). Similarly, in The White Lotus, the homoeroticism of Tanya’s massage sessions leads to Tanya’s persistent demands of Belinda’s labor—emotional, material, and physical in nature. The mammy figure, dating back to the dynamics of care between enslaved Black women and the white children of their enslavers, as Aisha Harris notes, manifests within contemporary film and television in mutated form as the trope of the “Black Lady Therapist,” as seen in recent series such as You’re the Worst (FX, 2014–2019) and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW, 2015–2019), amongst others (see Harris 2018). Black women, Harris observes, exist “in these narratives for the sole purpose of listening to the woes of their white patients” (Harris 2018). While not a certified therapist or counselor, Belinda is called to take on numerous forms of unremunerated labor outside the purview of her job as spa manager of the hotel, stemming from the disproportionate threat of job precarity experienced by Black women. Rothwell notes that Belinda exists “in a position of power with a lot of these guests because they need her, but at the same time she’s supposed to be servile” (McKenzie and Willen 2021).

The question of possible resistance to the affective demands of this role thus arises. Recent scholarship in affect theory by Xine Yao, building on work by Sianne Ngai (2005), examines the intersection of race and affect, illustrating the ways in which marginalized peoples are mandated to act within a restrictive and normative affective schema for the purpose of survival. With regards to sympathy, for instance, marginalized identities do not have the privilege of being unsympathetic, for not only would this foreclose the “provisional acceptance of their capacity for affective expressions,” Yao suggests, but also the “conditional acceptance of their humanity” (Yao 2021, 4).

Yao then asks: “how does unfeeling operate as the constitutive outside to that totalizing system, and what challenge can disaffection pose?” (Yao 2021, 5). In The White Lotus, the fault lines of Belinda’s performance of sympathy are exposed in the final episode as a result of Tanya’s act of withholding regarding Belinda’s business proposal. In addition, Rachel’s marital troubles with Shane (Jake Lacy) lead her to seek out Belinda as a listening ear; in a scene at the spa, Belinda observes from the background as Rachel sobs in the foreground of the shot (Figure 6), a visual composition encapsulating the power dynamics within which Belinda routinely operates. Yet before comforting Rachel, Belinda is seen briefly rolling her eyes, revealed in interview with Rothwell as an unscripted gesture—“a subtle sign of defiance” (see McKenzie and Willen 2021), perhaps further underscoring the limits of auteurist primacy.

Figure 6. Belinda’s fleeting disaffection in The White Lotus. Copyright: HBO.

For Yao, resistance necessitates a rejection of the dominance of “white feelings”: “No more business with white sentimentality. Withhold from those colonial intimacies. Refuse to feel according to the hierarchies of the biopolitics of feeling. Be disaffected” (Yao, 2021: 2). Belinda’s expressions of this disaffection are on display later in the final episode when she decides to perform an act of withholding, not dissimilar from the disregard of her humanity exhibited by Tanya. Seeking advice from Belinda regarding her marriage, Rachel tearfully laments her prospects as the “trophy wife” of a wealthy white man. Belinda endures Rachel’s sobbing until finally exhibiting the disinterest, coldness, and insensitivity she herself has been subjected to by Tanya and presumably numerous white guests before her: “You want my advice? I’m all out.” Belinda exits the room, leaving Rachel bewildered. Belinda’s withholding is figured here as a refusal of the “expected cues of deference that maintain and structure biopolitical hierarchies of oppression” (Yao 2021, 7).

Yet, as we see in the final moments of the series, liberation ultimately eludes Belinda. As discussed earlier, the contrast between Belinda and Quinn in these final images is foregrounded to gesture to a racialized dialectics of emancipation and oppression. Quinn—whose flattened affect throughout the series remains unchallenged by the biopolitical inscriptions of affect by which Belinda is governed—paddles away, as Belinda must put on a smile to greet another group of white guests (Figure 7). Belinda’s short-lived act of defiance is recuperated into a performance of hospitality that, as Rothwell articulates, conceals “the quiet storm within.”

Figure 7. The “quiet storm” within Black women in The White Lotus. Copyright: HBO.

Conclusion

In this article, I have sought to examine the political tensions—both narrative and extratextual—of Mike White’s introspective and satirical examination of whiteness in The White Lotus, mining specifically the series’ engagement with questions of posthumanism—a broader thematic in White’s body of work—whose primitivist dimensions are bound in intricately racialized webs of coloniality and animality. The location of Hawaii offers the white characters the fantasy of Hawaii’s “natural beauty,” yet this touristic visuality, predicated on decades of cinematic and televisual tropes regarding the exoticization and fetishization of the Pacific Islands, is one that is inextricable from colonial and expropriatory circuits of capital.

As I have discussed, the figure of the nonhuman in Hawaii constitutes a pivotal component of the series’ symbolic economies. The White Lotus and its phantasmatic gestures to what White describes as a “different way of living,” trace a posthumanism that looks to a pre-capitalist past, thereby fetishizing the “primitive” and its imbrication with the nonhuman, as I have examined through an analysis of the symbolic function of the animal—particularly marine life—which projects virtual imaginings of resistance to capital while still being entangled within it. Thinking alongside critical engagements with the nonhuman turn, I have considered how the posthumanist dimensions of the series, as explored through Quinn’s obsession with Hawaii’s environments, perhaps bespeak a broader tendency within materialist ontologies to obscure the fraught dynamics of the social and cultural.

What the voices of Native Hawaiians may tell us is that colonialism serves as “the ultimate breach of guest protocol” (Aikau and Vicuña Gonzalez 2019, 8). If decolonial thinkers such as Fanon “charged Native intellectuals to write for the people, toward political ends” (Aikau and Vicuña Gonzalez 2019, 5), the series’ marginalization of Indigenous and nonwhite voices, both narratively and in its production, appear to suggest the foreclosure of a politics of Native Hawaiian emancipation. Yet as I have explored, the complex operational aesthetic of the series elicits a mode of viewership such that we might discern a decolonial reckoning—albeit not without its ambiguities—of the power structures of whiteness, a demand that resonates more potently now amidst a US television landscape in which series depicting the exploits of wealthy white characters are in no short supply (e.g., HBO’s Succession [2018–]). Examining these racial and class dynamics in relation to one of the series’ main Black characters, I have demonstrated how The White Lotus reflects the manner in which Black and Indigenous populations, albeit in different ways, are subjected to oppressive practices against which affective (and effective) resistance is either fleeting or thwarted entirely.

And although the series bears a multitude of ironic ambivalences and tensions, I suggest that its imperial sensibility (and self-critique thereof) asks us to consider how cultural works, such as screen media, may engage with the complexities of locations and situations freighted by networks of colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism, ultimately enabling us to question how resistance to colonizing practices might be occasioned. Indeed, as Fojas reminds us, “to resist the imperial story is to take one step toward ending or reshaping it” (2014, 204).

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr Laura McMahon for her invaluable guidance in writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

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Karim Townsend

Karim Townsend is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Film and Screen. His research interests focus primarily on questions of ecological relationality and the politics of community in the Anthropocene, as mediated in contemporary film and television.

Notes

1 See Fojas (2014, 102) for more on how Hawaii came to be positioned as alluring in its status as “the newest U.S. appendage.”

2 See also Cachola (2019) for more on the ways in which the US military presence in the Hawaiian Islands is also intertwined in these histories of Native Hawaiian displacement, although this is not addressed specifically in the series.

3 In The White Lotus, the figure of the animal also recurs through the series’ use of props—such as the turtle figurine seen in Armond’s office, or the turtle-shaped item of furniture in the Tradewinds Suite, where the Mossbachers stay. As the production designer for the series notes, “there is a lot of turtle art in Hawaii,” hence its incorporation into the series as a motif (see Tangcay 2021).

4 See also Christine Donnelly (1989).

5 The fact that Mark’s discovery of his late father’s AIDS diagnosis leads him to associate homosexual sex acts with animality perhaps also serves as an implicit gesture to the zoonotic origins of AIDS. See, for example, Shukin (2009, 205–206).

6 See also Puar (2007).

7 As David A. Chang notes, for instance: “It is a heritage to act upon through solidarity with antiracist movements such as Black Lives Matter and in solidarity with other colonized and dispossessed peoples. After all, the colonialism that occupied Hawaiʻi is inseparable from the colonialism that occupied the lands of other racialized people” (Chang 2019, 360).

8 It would go beyond the scope of this essay to outline all the resonances of The White Lotus with White’s previous work; however, part of the operational aesthetic at work, for those with foreknowledge of White’s oeuvre, lies in the unravelling of thematic commonalties across The White Lotus, Enlightened, and Beatriz at Dinner, in relation to posthumanism, animal rights, New Age thought, capitalism, race, and so on.