Deserted Beaches, Lost Souls: On the Beautiful Emptiness at the Heart of White Lotus

In the penultimate episode of the first season of Mike White’s HBO series The White Lotus (now in its third season), Armond, the manager of the Hawaiian luxury hotel, starts reciting poetry. Armond has been on the edge of a nervous breakdown all season. He collapses into a chair and gazes into the middle distance as he declaims the poem. It’s an apposite choice: Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters.” The poem refers to an episode in Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus’s men alight upon a strange island; its people are happy and gentle, blissed-out, carefree. They achieve this state through eating the flowers of the lotus plant. A powerful narcotic, it erases their memories, making them forget the struggles of life:

[Why] should life all labour be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?

The poem captures something about Armond himself, whose increasingly reckless behavior (including his worsening drug habit) begins to look like a desire for oblivion. But the reference to the lotus-eaters also seems like a comment on the weird unreality surrounding tourists and tourism. The atmosphere of the five-star hotel acts on its guests like a strong hallucinogen, keeping these lotus-eaters in a fantasy, away from the hard social, political and economic truths outside. After all, why should life all labour be? Let us alone: let’s stay at the pool, think about what we’ll eat for dinner, have another cocktail.

Each season of The White Lotus unfolds like a well-plotted novel. Indeed, The White Lotus sits in a literary tradition that uses the figure of the tourist to explore the tensions, anxieties and emotional blind spots in society at large. Like the lotus-eaters, these tourists are often escaping something—they are in denial, they refuse to confront emotions they’ve repressed, they run away from tasks they need to do (why should life all labour be?)

Yes, these novels can be problematic; who wants to see another group of privileged westerners traipsing through countries and cultures they don’t understand and don’t engage with? The books can perpetuate stereotypes (Asian spirituality as mysterious and unknowable, for example). Their settings can sometimes seem like picturesque backdrops against which the psychological dramas of their protagonists play out. But they can also highlight western selfishness and arrogance—the desire that the rest of the world provide rest and relaxation for its richest portion.

As it developed over the course of the twentieth century, the novel often used the tourist as a way of examining experience, and how it should be processed. Novelists like E.M. Forster alighted on the tourist guidebook as an encapsulation of these dilemmas. In particular, the Baedeker guidebooks, which began appearing in English in the mid-nineteenth century, epitomized this desire to order and structure experience. They would tell you which hotels were the cleanest, which restaurants to eat in; they advised you on the finest monuments to look at, which ruins were the best-preserved.

The aim of the Baedeker guidebooks was, in their own words, to make the traveller “as independent as possible,” “protect him against extortion,” and “aid him in deriving enjoyment and instruction from his tour.” Hotels and restaurants were graded for “respectability,” cleanliness and value for money. For example, Baedeker’s 1893 guidebook to southern Italy declares that “restaurants of the first class do not exist in Southern Italy”—but that travelers should be able to find good local trattorias, if “not always scrupulously clean.” A system of stars alerted travelers to which sights were really worth visiting (House of the Faun in Pompeii, one star; the Blue Grotto in Capri, two stars), and which weren’t.

In Forster’s A Room with a View, the English traveller Lucy Honeychurch wanders anxiously around Florence’s Santa Croce church, lost without her Baedeker: “There was no one to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs… was the one that was really beautiful.” Here the tourist is a figure who needs to be told what to do—what to think, what to look at, what’s beautiful and what isn’t. Miss Bartlett, a more experienced traveller in Italy, hopes to “emancipate” Lucy from Baedeker: “He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy—he does not even dream of it.” In its drive to order and structure, tourist guidebooks present a parallel to the colonial impulse: an impulse that Edward Said described, when referring to Orientalism, as an “intention to understand, … control, manipulate.”

But if an over-reliance on the guidebook represents a failure to present the reality of the world outside, the quest for a “true” experience of travel presents its own problems. Miss Bartlett’s rhapsodies about the “true Italy” with its “smells” and “life” are—at best—a little pretentious. Forster himself, for what it’s worth, liked guidebooks. “I have always respected [them],” he wrote. What is the “true Italy” anyway? In the second season of The White Lotus (set in Sicily) the flamboyant heiress Tanya McQuoid is determined to have her “Italian dream”: a fantasy which, for Tanya, involves riding a Vespa and eating “pasta with giant clams.” Yet, as the series makes clear, any quest for authenticity is also based on dreams: delusions, falsehoods. When the Di Grasso family, on vacation to find their Sicilian roots, visit the community where their ancestors came from, they are shouted at and cursed by the villagers. “Not quite what I imagined,” says Bert Di Grasso as the family beat a hasty retreat.

Forster’s A Passage to India presents a complex relationship between tourism, experience and the self. The book’s opening is written in a sort of parody of the travel guide style. Chandrapore, Forster’s fictionalized Indian town, “presents nothing extraordinary.” There are “no bathing-steps” by the river; indeed, there is “no river front” to speak of. Chandrapore’s Hindu temples are “ineffective,” its streets are “mean,” and there are no paintings for sale in the bazaars. In other words, there is nothing for the western tourist, nothing that a travel guide would urge you to see, no souvenirs to take home.

And yet the novel also presents India as a source of confusing desires, mysteries, strange rhythms. In the Marabar caves—which is either the site of a sexual assault or a hallucination, depending on how you read the novel (Forster himself didn’t seem to know)—the weird atmosphere and unique acoustics create “a terrifying echo.” The caves offer revelation—but a revelation that good and evil are fictions, that “nothing has value.” A tourist in India, warns Forster, might “find themselves,” but they might also find something else, something they won’t like. There’s exoticism (and Orientalism) here, but Forster was also deeply aware of the imperial context and its tensions. “Clear out, you fellows, double quick,” says Dr. Aziz to his English friend Fielding at the end of the novel.

In a post-colonial age, what role do depictions of tourists and tourism play? Thomas Pynchon’s interest in travel, for example, drew him back to the era of New Imperialism. In V., Pynchon used Baedeker guidebooks to reconstruct Egypt under the control of the British in the 1890s. By the time Alex Garland produced The Beach, his zeitgeisty novel about travellers in Thailand, the references that inform the book are to Vietnam war movies (the novel’s protagonist, Richard, is obsessed with them).

Again, Garland’s tourists are in pursuit of fantasies: a perfect beach that no one can visit, untouched white sand and coral reefs, impenetrable jungle. Or there’s Richard himself, with his visions of a Vietnam mediated by Platoon and Apocalypse Now: “Jimi Hendrix, dope, and rifle barrels.” The people and culture of Thailand are peripheral to The Beach, and the paradisal island at the centre of the novel is in a sense a bubble where westerners can indulge dreams of the self-sufficient good life—even if it does all end in tears (and gunshots). The book, Garland said in an interview, is “anti-traveller.” Yes, Thailand is presented in two dimensions, he admitted; but that’s because the people he wrote about only saw the country as “a huge theme park.”

In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, set in Kerala in south India, the perspective is reversed. Roy shows how tourism traps the communities that depend on it. A section of the novel focuses on Kerala’s kathakali dancers; kathakali is a kind of embodied, symbolic storytelling, usually based around Sanskrit epics or folk histories. But in The God of Small Things, the performers have been forced to bowdlerise and truncate their dances for tourist shows. The kathakali dancers, writes Roy, have had to lose their purpose and self-respect to keep afloat, becoming what she calls a “Regional Flavour.” They have become part of the scenery, part of the theme park. They dance for the lotus-eaters.

The author John Niven, writing of The Beach, comments that the novel’s tourists find nothing in Thailand, “only the things they have brought with them.” That’s true of The White Lotus, too; it’s often the secrets, problems and lies these travelers have brought from home that provide dramatic tension. In the first season of the series, Mark Mossbacher is confronted with the revelation of his father’s secret double life. In the second season, Dominic Di Grasso cannot escape the destructive consequences of his sex addiction, even amidst the beauty of Sicily. And yet, Mike White’s series makes a deeper point—what is that we demand of the places we go on vacation? Characters often seem unaware of the inequalities of wealth and power behind the tourist performance. On the island of the lotus-eaters, everything must be easy and everything must be pleasurable. Who wants to think about economic deprivation or the theft of indigenous land?

Tourism, in other words, keeps its complacent travelers away from the brutal legacies of colonialism, the destructive consequences of global inequalities. But these things are there, hiding beneath the surface. What are the disturbing scenes of violence doing in the opening credits of the third season? Why does every season begin with one, or more, deaths? As that theme tune begins each episode, we arrive in the Garden of Eden. But who are the snakes?