“You make [terrible] money. They exploit me. I exploit you,” the manager of the White Lotus resort tells an underling in Season One.
HBO’s White Lotus is the latest entry in a formula line which includes HBO’s Succession, HBO’s Big Little Lies, and HBO’s Gossip Girl remake: Irredeemable, upper-class social climbers use less wealthy people, often minorities, for their own games, to the benefit of no one. There is no hero’s journey, only bleak, zero-sum power struggles devoid of any greater purpose, in which the only outcome is power reinforcing itself.
What makes White Lotus an aberration is that the show’s ruling class doesn’t seem to hold meaningful power outside the resort environment where they degrade service workers. Whereas the characters in Succession and Gossip Girl are transformed into quasi-Shakespearean, though hollow, titans moving entire financial markets and industries, the guests in White Lotus derive their power from proximity to power, and their roles in pre-established hierarchies. They are authority figureheads who resemble the “professional managerial class” who do not even control their own time.
Nichole Mossbacher embodies the “girl boss” who climbed the rungs of corporate America, only to shut the barricades for other women behind her, remaining a figurehead anchored to a corporation which can disregard her at will—she is forced to Zoom into company calls during a family vacation. Shane Patton derives money from a philanthropic mother whose money isn’t attached to anything other than vague notions of charity (the money is given freely away to those who ask for it in exchange for some modicum of respect), while his finance writes journalistic puff pieces on those higher up the value chain. The manager of White Lotus, Armond, remains in his place by the resort’s unseen owners—a “Big Other” superstructural presence dictating the very conditions which frame each character’s desires, motivations, and insecurities.
The irony is that the class depicted on White Lotus, millionaires but not multi-millionaires able to deploy capital in any legitimate way, are thwarted by the “Big Other” at all levels, bouncing between management levels containing a combustion of class and racial resentments.
As a focus point for a television series, the notion of a professional managerial class is not a new one. Although the term itself was officially coined in 1977 by John and Barbara Ehrenreich to distinguish white-collar professionals with higher-than-average salaries, writer James Burnham is accredited with first recognizing a managerial class. As far back as 1941, Burnham published the Managerial Revolution, which argued that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies were preparing “the minds of the masses for the acceptance of the managerial social structure.” As a former Marxist who became a leading conservative figure via National Review, Burnham incorrectly predicted that capitalism would give way to statism following a revolution led by those responsible for “the tasks of the technical direction and coordination of the process of production.”
Despite Burnham’s poor track record of predictions, his notion of a professional managerial class has been revitalized by many libertarian and right-leaning thinkers. As Vox notes, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreesen has called Burnham’s work “the best explanation for the current structure of our society and politics,” while conservative policy intellectual Julius Krein wrote that Burnham was “enjoying something of a revival” because “David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Matthew Continetti, among others, have recently pointed to his work as essential to understanding the current political moment.”
While it is mostly conservatives who are defining the professional managerial class in their own terms, in order to tie the group to liberal ideology and coastal elitism, thus framing the class as an existential threat to the United States for their own political motivations, the group contains distinct properties which make it resemble its own class: A higher-than-average place up the value chain, dependence on “Big Other” organizations and individuals for the ability to exercise power, and a unique language containing codes to signal to one another.
In its depiction of this class, White Lotus also melts into code, language, and reference point, functioning the same role in society as the zero-sum struggles portrayed on screen: Reinforcing power.
