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The White Lotus season 2
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Anonymous
Incredibly unlikely but yes that would be nice. |
Anonymous
I also loved Quentin's "yes". I felt like you could see the wheels turning in his head and he's just like "I'll go for it" |
Anonymous
I think the show asks you to question why you root for someone like Tanya. She is not a good or kind person. She is a broken person though. I think the show likes drawing these very multidimensional characters to force you to question why you have soft spots/root for some. How Cameron can be so terrible but the fact that he's so incredibly handsome can really make you forget for brief moments. How a pp on a different page can feel so deeply for Daphne when she is admittedly both not a victim and devious herself (in addition to being vapid in the same ways Cam is with the not voting no global awareness). Why you feel so deeply for Tanya after watching her build up and dash a woman's dreams and ticket from poverty to marry the same man who is now likely plotting against her. I think the point is that we all have bad inside us, and when we see bad in others that we recognize in ourselves or could see ourselves replicating we minimize it. So someone who could see herself cheating and plotting to deal with tolerating their cheating husband is sympathetic to Daphne. People who may have experienced childhood trauma or abusive parenting have a hard time holding Tanya accountable for her behavior etc. It is why Ethan tells Harper she should be happy about the rager story. He sees it as a moral victory, overlooking the bad to focus on the good. We all do it, but the show highlights the bad just enough to make you very uncomfortable about these sympathetic feelings you have. |
Anonymous
I feel there is no way this happens, which is too bad because I agree that would be nice. However, I think it's interesting that Mike White, who is bi, has given us a number of pretty unlikable gay and bisexual characters over two season. Both seasons have a hotel manager who is gay and behaves unprofessionally/inappropriately with subordinates plus appears to be unprofessional in their work at times (Armand much more so on both points, but still). Plus if it turns out that Quentin and his crew are pulling one over on Tanya, that's just a lot of pretty awful gay characters for one show. That said, it doesn't bother me. I think sometimes gay people are still portrayed in kind of two dimensional ways in film and television, and I like that the gay characters on this show get as much depth and skewering as the straight characters, who are portrayed as awful as well. I also think that if you've spent any time at all in LGBTQ+ communities, you are well aware that there are plenty of messed up, selfish, dysfunctional queer people in the world, in part because many have experienced trauma in their early life but also in part because that's just how the world is. In any case, I don't think Mike White is trying to make some point about gay people other than "look how messed up and dysfunctional all people are, regardless of sexual orientation!" I think on a broadcast show or one where the creator had less creative freedom, the network/streamer might ask him to tone this down. I'm grateful he's got the freedom to tell these stories in what feels like creative integrity, and not to soften the edges to avoid upsetting someone. |
Anonymous
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Tanya’s not hurting anybody. She just floats around.
She’s probably overpaying the personal assistant, but nothing terrible is going on there. I’m sure other PAs or Annie’s if billionaires are sometimes treated terribly. Being told to be on call during a $100k trip to Sicily…BFD. Don’t be a PA if you’re not available once in awhile. |
Anonymous
There's only 3 episodes left. |
Anonymous
She was exceptionally cruel in season 1 to the masseuse. Casually cruel in a way a wealthy person might not even understand just how cruel they were being. |
Anonymous
I noticed that as well, the timing of the show is off and i think her husband is the lover of the guy who invited her to the opera |
Anonymous
Three is a few. |
Anonymous
Google says there are 9 episodes wasn't last night #5? That would make 4 left |
Anonymous
I don’t think she understood at all. And I’m not even sure I would call it exceptional cruelty. She was toting her dead mother’s ashes around, trying to process her own grief and childhood trauma. Is trauma an excuse for bad behavior only if you’re poor? |
Anonymous
Ha, both wrong -- there will be 7 (according to HBO website for the show). So there are two episodes left. There's a lot to wrap up! I expect we're getting some conflict and, yes, some punishment of one kind or another. |
Anonymous
Bad behavior is relative to the power of the people involved. It's not about rich/poor, it's about whether the person behaving badly has power for their bad behavior to harm others. In Season One, Tanya's behavior hurts Belinda. Yes, this is partly because Tanya is wealthy and Belinda is not, and part of Tanya's bad behavior is to offer money to Belinda and then withdraw that offer in a pretty immature way. But it's also because Belinda is employed by Tanya, which is more about their relative position than their wealth. But on the other hand, Belinda could be seen as taking advantage of a clearly not-all-there client in order to get access to her money. The reason she isn't is that Tanya initiates every aspect of their relationship, and Belinda is initially very reticent specifically due to the power dynamic. Tanya's betrayal thus feels particularly harmful because she's successfully convinced Belinda to let down her guard. Whatever Tanya's reasons for behaving this way, it doesn't change the fact that Belinda is suffering the consequences. There are other examples of power differentials on the show that aren't about money and have similarly complex circumstances. For instance, Mia's interactions with Giuseppe, in which the power might lie with Mia (because Giuseppe desires her) or with Giuseppe (because he's older and more established). In the relationship between Lucia and Albie, it is Lucia, not Albie, who has the upper hand because she is savvier and more self-aware, even though Albie has more wealth and privilege. How you perceive the parties as victims or villains in these situations depends on the degree to which one person can be seen to be taking advantage of the other, which depends on who has more power and how that power is wielded. I agree what Tanya did to Belinda was not exceptionally cruel, and is mitigated by the fact that Tanya is so divorced from her own feelings and awareness due to whatever happened to her in childhood. But I also don't think you can just write it off as no big deal because Tanya is a sympathetic character -- she still has a lot of power and thus has much more opportunity to hurt others than someone with less power. And she's accountable for that no matter what. |
Anonymous
Lol no. I just binged this series so it’s fresh in my mind. They make a point of mentioning that Rachel went to a SUNY school (compared to Shane who went to Cornell and the teen girls who presumably go to an expensive SLAC) and was a writer for a lowly online magazine where she was asked to make dumb listicles and puff pieces. Shane is outraged that she’d want to take time out of their honeymoon to do a trash piece like this for $200. The whole point of her various interactions with Nicole, Shane, her MIL, and Belinda is her coming to the realization she’ll never be the respected journalist she wants to be and realizing she should stay with Shane for the money. |
Anonymous
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Ethan’s comment towards Cameron about mimetic desire and indicating he has higher status was BOLD, loved to see it.
Also loved Harpers scenes this last episode, the first scene re discovering what happened and then her comment about her husbands porn habits. |