‘White Lotus’ & The Plight Of The American Man

What the hell happened to the great American man? How did he go from swashbuckling hero of his own story to tragicomic villain in everyone else’s? One minute, he’s Superman, Steve McQueen, Sylvester Stallone. The next, he is everything wrong with America.

Man, does that hurt.

And with plenty of other cultural concerns to tend to, nobody much seems to care, either.

But that guy’s plight could use a little attention, and Mike White, apparently, is listening. Just as the first season of his mordant and intensely gratifying TV show The White Lotus cast its sunglassed glare on the discomforts of class, this time it bears down on sex, specifically heterosexual sex and very specifically, the travails of what some might disparagingly call the cis-het American male. Homo noxius himself.

It’s no accident that whereas the first season took place in a luxury resort in Hawaii, with its history of colonialism and socioeconomic stratification, here we are in Sicily, home of machismo and Godfather central.

I mean, take a look at these characters. We have the alpha and beta husbands in a pair of vacationing couples: Cameron is a finance dude who surfs across the surface of a collapsing society (“I’m just so over the whole news cycle”); sensitive male Ethan is the kind of guy who uses a financial windfall to help out family members and immediately owns up to masturbating when his wife walks in on him.

Things aren’t going to go well for Ethan or the other decent guy here, Albie Di Grasso. Shadowed by his father, Dom, and grandfather Bert (“Nonno”), played by Michael Imperioli and F. Murray Abraham, 20-something Albie enters looking guilty by association. In this trio of travelers, we see the edifice of manhood deconstructed in three generations.

Fittingly, an early scene brings the Di Grasso family — whose women have refused to come along, for reasons that become clear — to the home where Michael Corleone saw his beautiful young wife explode via car bomb. “The Godfather,” Bert declares, is “the best American movie ever made.”

Ah, the three ages of man. For 80-year-old Bert Di Grasso, manhood is physical, biological and irrepressible. It’s all about testosterone. Happily married — so he says — for 53 years, his frequent indiscretions were mere “peccadilloes.” He flirts with whichever woman crosses his path, regardless of age, to the chagrin of both son and grandson, whose scruples he brushes off with a smile of implacable pleasure. “I’m still a man. I get older and older, but the women I desire remain young. Natural, right?”

His son Dom shares those urges but is flustered and flummoxed by the outcomes, which include a decidedly aggrieved wife. Dom explains away his behavior by citing his father’s poor example (“You know the reason I am the way I am is because of you”) and via another facet of the human condition: psychology.

“I have a problem with sexual addiction,” Dom laments. “It’s a real issue.” These proclivities don’t square with his intentions or his ideals. As he says to his son, “I have always supported women. I have always promoted women. I’m a feminist. I mean, I didn’t marry some subservient wife.” He is trying to do the right thing. “I can change,” he tells Albie.

Albie, by contrast, is the change. Albie’s the kind of guy who carefully interrupts the moment by asking for permission — and apologizes when he kisses Portia after failing to do so. “I just don’t ever want to make anyone feel uncomfortable,” he tells her.

Causing discomfort or excitement of any kind is precisely the male inheritance he is trying to dismantle. “Men are socialized into liking The Godfather,” Albie, who surely knows better, declares. “Gender is a construct. It’s created.”

The frustrating question for his generation is: Have things changed all that much? Will they ever? Notably, neither of our evolved men is able to recognize what everyone else at the hotel bar sees clearly: which women are being paid to pay them attention. And the intractable question for all the men in The White Lotus is: What is the price men must pay in order to win over a woman, and is that a price, in terms of financial or emotional investment, they’re willing and able to pay?

With the exception of Bert, the men in The White Lotus find women bewildering and unpredictable, with motives that should be entirely clear yet frequently unsettle. Portia, who confesses she just wants someone who is “not nonbinary” and possibly “a cave man,” takes a hard turn from Albie toward the danger. Bert has to remind the enlightened new generation, “Women aren’t all saints, Albie. They’re just like us.” Or, as The Godfather put it, “In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.”

The Godfather isn’t the only ominous mythology looming over these characters. “Hades raped Persephone right here in Sicily,” Bert cheerfully recounts. Her mother, Demeter, forgave Hades, and Persephone grew to love her abductor. Meanwhile, according to local legend, a Moor came to town long ago and seduced a young girl, who then found out he had a wife and children back home. Because he lied to her, she cut off his head.

At one point, a female character who says she refuses to be a victim expresses relief in being a woman. “I feel sorry for men, you know. They think they’re out there doing something really important. But really, they’re just wandering alone.”

Lost, threatened, vulnerable to loneliness and disoriented by societal expectations that tell them to do one thing and individual human beings who often want the opposite, the men here tread on shaky, ever shifting ground; an active volcano rumbles in the distance.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Pamela Paul

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