The White Lotus: The Banality of Evil 1
I am writing these words right now under a downpour of emotions. On one hand, moments come to mind where, when I am very hungry, after taking one or two bites of food, it makes me say ‘Aha! this is wonderful,’ only to say seconds later, ‘but it’s a bit unsalted.’ Yet still, quite sincerely, I want to say that this meal was a masterpiece. First of all, my warning to the reader is that since I will be giving spoiler upon spoiler here shortly, and if you are someone who would say, ‘Oh, I heard the ending, I won’t watch it,’ I suggest you do not continue; on the other hand, I am striving not to spit out the words that have stuck to my throat like phlegm here — if you felt any contempt, I sincerely request you to be sure that I have definitely pasted it on another wall.
After the final episode of the second season that I watched about 1 hour ago, following the flavor left behind as I gently separated its soft meat from the bone, tearing it off and slowly crushing it between my teeth with its thoroughly caramelized fat remaining on my palate, I found myself not scraping the bottom of the medicine drawer to find an antacid with regret frozen on my lips left over from its last bites, but on the contrary, still turning those bites over and over in my mind. So as not to let these bites be swallowed absentmindedly and get lost, abandoned to the flow of life inside the fierce acid foaming like a volcano in my stomach, I will try to express my feelings here and try to make an analysis of power networks through White Lotus here. I will try.
I can say that the second season is a masterpiece, at least from my own perspective. The reason it affected me so much is actually that it grips the power networks by their capillaries.
Reception
First of all, I would like to state that instead of doing character analyses one by one here, I will try to convey my thoughts in a more abstract context.
The White Lotus is a highly luxury hotel chain where the wealthy — although to me, the characters do not consist of the ultra-wealthy, but of course, it can still be said that they are petty or even middle-bourgeois. Petty-bourgeois morality is probably the thing that gets beaten up the most in the art of cinema — stay. The series treats the habitat formed here just like a marine ecosystem that has emerged on cliffs. A rich menu carried by a sea current of tourists feeds this habitat and allows it to multiply. Everything is so natural that you find yourself in an underwater documentary watching animals chew bites they have torn from each other while still alive. The atmosphere of the film is like a light romantic comedy: Calm, understated. However, its subject matter is as if the characters in a Haneke film have politely taken the hotel guests hostage.
Not Man Dominated But the Deconstruction of Phallic Aesthetics
The subject matter reveals a cross-section of a network from the management of the hotel to its lowest level, from parents to children, stretching from its sprouted cute, colorful mushrooms to the mycelium network extending beneath the ground.
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Here we see that phallic power is not actually a male-dominated cult, but a collective work of all kinds of ordinary people: male, poor, prostitute, rich, female, child, adolescent, homosexual. How has the network of relations come to life and how is it developing within such an ecology?
The film offers an alternative perspective on power networks: Power networks are not actually just a conscious organism; starting from organized networks, they have also included characters who have randomly (naturally, ordinarily) taken their place in this food chain into this menu. It has lined everyone up side by side like appetizers on the table, from a homosexual power network to an ordinary impotent male musician, placing them as accompaniments right in front of the white plates where the main dish — grilled octopus tentacles — is adorned with olive oil and various sauces.
Amid the hysteria attacks of our wealthy woman character who falls into the trap of an elderly bisexual gigolo in the first season — we sense this in the first season and learn it in the second season — we see that this is actually a very detailed death plan carried out by an organized homosexual Italian mafia to seize the woman’s money. This might seem a bit postmodern; it is normal because postmodernism is less an organized, planned ideal and more the condition of ordinary post-modern society. Here, a very entertaining, incredibly warm, and sincere homosexual group draws the woman into their group for the final act of the game they started in the first season. We learn that the gigolo, who slowly digested the woman in the organization’s web in the first season, is actually also the lover of the character who appears to be the leader of the organization — a descendant of nobility whose money we learn is about to run out.
Our woman character is completely vulnerable in the psychosis she enters after being abandoned by her husband (the Gigolo). Knowing this, the group settles into the woman’s heart through parties, drugs, art, etc., just like a mushroom spore, and penetrates from her widest veins down to her capillaries to deliver the final blow.
The proactive one of our new characters, the two married couples, is actually the most well-known example of phallic obsession. Our character who tries to overcome the feeling of castration through the validation of every woman he encounters, and our woman character who uses him as her own phallus. Phallic obsession is a castration syndrome. The way out of this situation is condemned to the validation of the woman (the other); therefore, this character has a woman partner(s) who turns a blind eye to or even sets the stage for what generally goes on. In a phallic partnership, both the woman and the man[1] share the feeling of castration and lack in order to achieve a whole. The woman (not as a female, but as the other) is a validation of phallic completeness for the man (as a male, as a holder of power); he cannot do this without her validation[2]. Phallic castration should evoke a lack of power as much as sexual inadequacy. The man, on the other hand, is the key for the woman to take place in the phallic power network. Since these power networks are formed mostly among male individuals who hold the gateways — we must also include female individuals here, even if their numbers are not as high as the others — this can sometimes be the only tool for a woman. Just as we see in the Epstein and Adnan Hoca[3] networks.
[1]Here, the concepts of woman and man point to power relations rather than sex. Here, the man can be not only male but also female. Man is the desire to possess a phallic idea, namely the Phallus, the Lacanian "desired but unattainable completeness." Woman, on the other hand, is not a female individual but the other. I will elaborate on this further in a subsequent topic.
[2]Concepts of social gender also define social roles and relations; therefore, they should not be thought of as identical to natural sex, that is, male and female.
Translated from Turkish version by Gemini:
