Much Ado About Money (contains vague spoilers about The White Lotus)

Watching a scene in White Lotus season 3, where one character describes a human life as the journey of a drop of water and death as return to the ocean of consciousness, brought up a tear, or maybe more than one, for me. It helped spell out some of my own sense, in my journey or journeys in more mystical territories of Catholic Christianity that I find very much in dialogue with some Eastern beliefs and practices.  

In that season and the previous 2, I have found a compelling sort of orchestration among the multiple characters and storylines that has made their interactions seem both fresh and static to me, with a kind of inspired inevitability. The mode of characters gathering in a place and time outside of their daily lives is of course a very old one; I have been wondering if it could be called Much Ado About Money, since it combines some of what Shakespeare did in that play (Much Ado About Nothing) with some of the problems of wealth and its attendant privilege.    

Some of Western drama's roots are in sacrificial ritual, and this season of White Lotus may invoke those more than a lot of drama. The convention of reversal (that may be the most-used one in Western drama since it was articulated by Aristotle, the unities following close behind--including the one of place in each season of The White Lotus) gets used over and over. A character's life gets upended, and that gets presented, in my watching of the show, as a kind of dark justice. There's a combination of shock, comedy and satisfaction I am guessing I am supposed to feel--then I am supposed to wonder about myself, what it says about me if I got satisfaction from what a character got, and what I might or might not deserve.  

To me it gets tired, it's a lot less clever than I am guessing the writer or writers may believe it is, and it ends up brutalizing characters the writers may not intend it to. Obviously, the wealthy heterosexual WASP characters represent the most privileged people in the history of the world, so their coming out of the show looking bad is not a problem. But there seems to me to be the belief driving the writing that the less privileged characters in the show are mostly there to show the flaws in those elites--and that that does those less privileged characters justice. Meanwhile, I find they get very little in terms of character development, their cultures are misrepresented, and too often their own reversals seem intended to show me "see, they're just as bad as everybody else." That's not really a moral or aesthetic stance to me; it just shows a lack of time, research and empathy.  

Absolute depravity, the Augustinian view of human nature as essentially and irrevocably entwined with sin, has maybe been undercutting art since a millennium before Shakespeare's. Oddly, to me, it seems to do the worst of that sort of work among some artists who seem on the surface to be representing diversity in "edgy" ways. They may genuinely be trying to do it justice. But those artists tend to come from overwhelming privilege themselves, and perhaps not even research can substitute for lived experience in the development of empathy.  

So I hope The White Lotus gets a different showrunner, who's not an angry wealthy white dude; I believe that was the best thing that happened to True Detective in its run. The one who's running it currently might be in a position to provide structure and art direction; I have found the visual explorations of each season's settings captivating and sometimes transcendental. Setting a broad framework for the human stories within it, he might then turn that work over to someone who can write with more humanity.  

Eternity matters to me, but I'm not in it yet; I hope to learn more about, and love more, the other drops of water flowing with me here.