He’s deeply flawed, but he’s our man: Armond. His inner world is missing, but in his emptiness he’s like our world: our monde, our relativized and reactively improvised interior terrain.
There’s interference here from the actor’s outrageous charisma; for reasons that lie beyond the details of Armond-the-character, it’s delightful to see this man wearing these suits, existing in these settings, given these responsibilities, managing these situations. Because of the actor’s stupendous independent appeal, one has the feeling of watching the person inside Armond, of enjoying the performance of Armond by another. Which is, after all, the character’s true situation: when guests interact with Armond, they interact with inner-Armond’s performance of outer-Armond, and what they enjoy (or do not) is the extent to which inner-Armond himself is enjoying his performance.
Amazing: Armond is an addict, which we don’t generally judge any longer but rarely admire; Armond sexually harasses a young employee and bribes / pressures the young employee into sexual contact; Armond makes a mistake and then lies, lies, lies to a guest he seems to consider less intelligent than himself to hide his error; once they are in conflict, Armond attempts to sabotage a romantic excursion for the guest, who is on his honeymoon; and ultimately Armond shits in the man’s suitcase.
I don’t know anyone who isn’t nevertheless rooting for Armond the entire time.
It’s true that the man he harasses —Shane— is highly unlikeable. It’s true that the young employee seems like a tripped-out party dude down to clown. It’s true that mistakes happen, that we’re all prone to the occasional peacekeeping deceit, that we all struggle with compulsions and addictions and vices and temptations. But still!
Art restores the density and ambiguity and irrationality of the real word (against the false clarity of the intellect’s incessant projections and moralizing); it makes judgement secondary to relation. Armond is the most successfully portrayed character in the first season, almost a tour de force of this principle.
Returning to the confounding issue of the actor’s charisma: it’s not hard to imagine someone playing this role more villainously, as a tinpot authoritarian, a sleazy, boozy wretch, a creep. This draws into relief what exactly this actor chose to do: he smiles a lot, and effectively; if the smiles are fake, it’s only detectable in their automatic deployment and the way they hold for a beat too long in many cases. He beams a kind of joy through his eyes, a joy of unclear provenance. His face is an excellent mask. He is fit, with admirable posture, and he’s well-styled. When a moment called for compassion, he seemed both legitimately compassionate and aware of the necessity of managing his expressions: performative sincerity that comes close to real sincerity.
What does this depiction —the character as written and the acting— “mean”? Armond seems alive, competent, decent, funny, and rather physically healthy. His final dinner service, drug-fueled, is balletic; it made me feel happy to have a body, to be able to move (although I of course remained seated on the sofa). The way he seems to inhabit himself is pleasing. He’s comic, and he doesn’t seem like he’d ever object to prompting amusement. Armond has a kind of non-self, but it is not the result of meditation on anatman; it is because he prefers to rely on a repertoire of techniques to keep things “copacetic” rather than to experience or express a self. So Armond gets a shallow form of blissful nonexistence, which is only truly joyous when he’s intoxicated.
But who was he? Where was he from? What did he think about it all? The man with no identity is killed in a case of mistaken identity; he was hiding, was somewhere he was not supposed to be, and someone misunderstood his presence and purpose. Shane stabs Armond opposite his heart, because nothing reaches Armond’s heart and no one ever really finds him. They’ll have to be content with smiles, solicitude, and joie de vivre.
My wife Abby said that Armond reminded her of me: “A people pleaser seething with inner rage who just wants to get fucked up all the time.” This accords with who I think I am and I’m pretty happy with it, among my available options. (In this comfortable willingness to sort of suck, I am probably more like Mark, whom I certainly look like! Like Mark, if I cannot be good, I will try to be honest: a cheap shortcut, a lazy hack, a cop-out).
Paula and Olivia are a study of power, not beliefs; their politics are a trailing reflection of their power, an elaboration of their power. I think of The White Lotus as being concerned with forms of power that escape high-minded culture’s capacity to explain, channel, contain, reduce. Chief among these is the power of sex; near to it, however, is the power of youth.
When Paula says to Mark that, “It's someone else's turn to eat,” both she and he think she is discussing politics, colonialism, the restorative justice of achieving non-white dominion. But Paula, however many college books she reads, is no real friend of the working class or the marginalized. Her background is not discussed, but everything about her behavior suggests comfort and ease with luxury, with power, with wounding the weak for sport; it’s nothing to her to join in tormenting Quinn, for example, or to toy with the life of an island boy. No: it’s not the oppressed’s turn to eat; it is youth’s turn to eat, it is Paula’s turn to eat. “To eat” can mean, of course, to thwart starvation with adequate nutrition; it can also mean to feast, to savor, to devour. It is always youth’s turn to devour; they have the hunger and they are hungered for, whereas all the old have is indigestion. Paula is telling Mark that he’s begun dying while she is still becoming. He’s rot; she’s growth.
Paul and Olivia positively radiate superiority. On the one hand, their superiority is fictional: they are weak, nervous children surrounded by rich, powerful adults, utterly in a family’s tow. While they may sneak off to do drugs or have sex, they return to the family den to be indulged in the way that only the harmless are. But one of the most mysterious elements of superiority is that it can sometimes be achieved through belief alone. Many a schoolyard confrontation has turned on the capacity of one or another child to summon a possibly mistaken but persuasive confidence in their own superiority. The one who laughs, wins. The one who sincerely feels victorious is victorious. So if Paula and Olivia feel superior, why wouldn’t they be?
There are limits to how much one can project and thereby achieve superiority. At some point, it becomes pathetic and delusional, mere “cope.” Paula and Olivia, like many children, are on the knife-edge of delusional and actual power because of the simultaneous weakness and vitality of youth. The show isn’t especially subtle about this. Their concentrated youth is made ostentatious in contrast to the heavy, if luxuriously supported, adult bodies all around them. Everyone else is sad, hopeless, compromised, dorky, wrinkly, and lonely. They are vital, aware of how the world should be and what could make it so, and they seem to have a real and ennobling friendship, although this, too, winds up dissolved in ambiguity and complexity (as do many youthful friendships). Their dominion is real, but contingent and fragile.
What would happen if Paula and Olivia laughed at someone who didn’t give a shit?
What will Paula make of what she’s done to Kai? It’s a demonstration that our actions escape us; that we can be very well-intentioned and do great harm; that reality exceeds our reasoning. But she might just as well say: “This only underscores how entrenched evil power is. If it weren’t for the damn police…” Meanwhile: Kai’s life is probably ruined, and she’s flying back home with the family she “hates.” She has absolutely no moral courage. It would be easy for her to confess her role; she almost certainly wouldn’t get in much trouble and it would likely help Kai. She chooses not to. She extracted what she needed from him —a story of herself as a moral revolutionary— and when it all went to hell, she abandoned him to his fate. She ate.
I am going to say some horrible things about Rachel. Shane is far worse than Rachel —and worse than season 2’s Cameron, incidentally— but Rachel is a cautionary tale: someone whose lack of self-understanding has led to inexplicably awful decisions, followed by egregiously confused handling of their consequences.
Rachel is always bringing her rawest inner emotions into the most inhospitable environments. At other times, when the moron Shane is trying to be sincere and present, she’s confrontational and unyielding or indifferent, as her own interlocutors tend to be (the mother in law, Belinda, her own mother). In other words, when the world is hard, she’s soft; and when the world is soft, she’s hard.
What is she doing?! What can account for this routine reaction against context? I think many viewers would say: it’s because her environment is a hell. Shane is scum, her mother-in-law is insufferable, and the entire resort, despite being lovely, might as well be one of Dante’s circles. This is all true. But there’s a pragmatic element to how we feel, too; we tend to like people who have things we want, for example. Rachel isn’t simply weak and wounded; she is determined to be weak and wounded, whatever the cost, ruminating constantly on whether she should “be” more than she is; to paraphrase Gombrowicz, she is “intoxicating herself with legends” instead of “letting facts create [her].”
One focus of her rumination is her profession. Not everyone is talented, and it appears that Rachel is not. Perhaps she’s tormented by an inner awareness of what she could be if she —not her circumstances— were truly different. When Paula and Olivia clown on her, she takes off her clothes —which were shapeless and plain— and, in her bathing suit, seems to flaunt her body; the show practically makes a runway of her path into the pool, and Paula and Olivia audibly react: they no longer feel so superior. Maybe Rachel feels that within her formlessness, her automatic reactivity, her thrashing to free herself of what she has constructed, there is something special, something that would overpower others, something dominant. But what?
I was telling Kellyn the other day: I’ve always hated the Marianne Williamson poem that says: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” I used to hate it because I thought it was idiotic and mistaken; now I hate it because I think it might be kind of true sometimes, and I don’t like that and I still don’t like how it’s put. But Rachel feels she’s in danger of extinguishing her light. If the show means anything by equating her body and her power, I’m not sure what it is. Something about an innate energy, an embodied vigor? I don’t feel I fully understood Rachel.
Rachel ultimately reunites with Shane after Belinda walks out on her teary confession. A very critical read: when Rachel realized no one would sympathize or care or give her status for her problem —she married a handsome rich guy whom she doesn’t love; his mother is obnoxious— she decided to recommit to the marriage; in other words, the crisis is a failed gambit, an unsuccessful attempt to gain something like “meaning” or “standing.” This feels a bit unsupported to me, but the show does take some pains to portray her as an absolute mess: it represents her journalism “career” as totally pathetic, but that’s the least of it. More egregiously, Rachel always seems to be pattern-matching in the wrong areas, a symptom of her lack of self-knowledge. Rachel wants to have an independent career and to be successful in media. But why? Does she have any passion for, or even interest in, journalism? Does she appear to be observant, interested in others or the world? Or does she merely like the idea of being a passionate, career-oriented journalist, the vibe of it, the way it portrays her? After the things she’s said to Shane, it’s unimaginable that she’d return to him unless we take her as someone for whom deep elements of identity are casually and shabbily assembled en masse rather than emerging from constituent elements like “attention” and “belief” and “commitment.” She was a wife, then wasn’t a wife, then was a wife again; she was a journalist, then wasn’t a journalist, and maybe she will be a journalist again. The cycles don’t end. She’s playing at life, and she hates it, but she’ll need to disentangle a lot of her inner apparatus to do anything more. She just doesn’t think effectively
I don’t know why I have less to say about Mark and Nicole and Quinn. I liked them all, as silly as they are, and wish them the best in their future endeavors; I’ll think about Mark often, I’m sure, as I do relate to some of his attempts to find the proper attitudinal relationship to being fucking ridiculous while also doing occasional real harm.
I found the scene of Mark and Nicole on the boat moving. Mark, who has cheated on Nicole, tells her that some of his imbecilic exchanges with his son flow from his desire to be respected; he implies it is her lack of respect that animates this need. She crumbles, weeps, objects to “always being the punching bag,” and storms off.
Relationships are often like this: how one partner feels, which is largely beyond their control, hurts the other; the hurt of the other, which is how they feel, hurts the first partner. I worry for couples who try to legislate their way around this inevitable reality, seeking processes and formats (for conversations, for sex) and expert interventions to “correct” it. There will come a day, for example, when you are unlikely to be attracted to one another anymore. Perhaps it will not come until late in life, but when it arrives, what will you do? One of you will be really hurt; the other will feel attacked for someone they cannot control, or obliged to falsify themselves to placate the demands of the other. I’m not aware of any easy answer, but I do think reducing the degree to which we need others to feel things about us in order for us to be happy (and to feel good about them) is probably important!
I found it very hard to watch Tanya and Belinda. There’s something about dashed hopes that upsets me more than death; I’d sooner see someone shot than their small business fail (or: never launch). I don’t know what this means.
Am I right that we never see Armond leave the hotel? I think for various reasons he always ends up sleeping somewhere on the property overnight. Fits with the mystery of never having access to himself outside of his professional performance.
Our Monde, damn