We are now nearing the end of the third season of the black comedy masterpiece that is The White Lotus, and the wheels are coming off our guests and staff alike. I have to say, I relate.
Not because I am stupendously wealthy or because I love a good wellness retreat; in fact, quite the opposite. I have been a travel journalist for more than a decade and among all the decadent perks of reviewing the world’s most lavish hotels, I’ve endured countless characters like those found in this series – from vapid heiresses on private Caribbean islands to actually quite likeable prostitutes in Cannes – and let me tell you, their portrayal, and that of the resorts, is pitch perfect.
I’m glad there’s such a focus on new-age spa culture in this season. In my experience it is where you will find the very worst of the worst when it comes to a clientele with too much money and too few redeeming qualities. Most of them, alas, tend to be women with personality disorders who are comically rude to staff given how much they preach their left-wing ideologies. The wellness industry – projected to be worth $7 (£5.4 trillion) this year by the Global Wellness Institute – knows this only too well. Narcissists are drawn to such facilities like Meghan Markle (who would, incidentally, make for a great cameo here, playing herself) is to her bees.
The White Lotus’s Thailand outpost is indeed, as Piper Ratliff – the trust-fund daughter on a quest for Buddhist enlightenment – describes, “a Disneyland for rich bohemians from Malibu in their lululemon yoga pants.”
From the very opening scenes, in which guests are ushered into the resort by a faux-serene welcome army of staff who (understandably) can’t stand their jobs, it is a race to see who is going to come unravelled first. It’s not a good start when the breathy manager in the foyer offers up a drawstring bag for everyone’s electronics. This is a “digital detox area” states health mentor Pam (Morgana O’Reilly), preaching the hotel’s “focus on being present”.
My own mother happens to work at a no-nonsense meditation retreat in Devon (I would rather spend a week working in a raw sewage plant than ever participate, but she seems to find it peaceful) where phones really are banned, but you won’t find this sort of draconian approach in a five-star getaway. “It’s optional,” Pam reluctantly concedes when the minted North Carolinian Ratliff family responds to her bag-waggling with abject horror. As it later transpires, it will take the threat of financial ruin and a suicide mission for Timothy (Jason Isaacs), the patriarch, to surrender his iPhone.
Some characters, notably Chelsea (the fantastic Aimee Lou Wood) are wide open to the notion of some for-profit spiritual healing – “Come on, it’s good to talk about things with a wise Indian,” she tells her long-suffering, much older beau Rick Hatcher (Walton Goggins). But it’s the inimitable Parker Posey who plays the only sort of woman I tend to get on with at these retreats, Victoria Ratliff. She reminds me of the Eton-educated gentlemen I once met who smuggled rum into an alcohol-free retreat in Wiltshire, or the politician’s wife who cracked out some magic mushrooms after dessert at a health spa in Switzerland.
An old-money, unapologetically snobbish, benzodiazepine-popping wasp, Mrs Ratliff does not, at least, pretend to be anything else. “Sometimes with massages I can get very stressed out,” she informs her therapist upon swallowing yet another chill pill – and she’s right, being pummelled for an hour in total silence isn’t actually comfortable for those with neurotic inclinations. In a later scene, having misplaced her much-relied-upon stash, she laments: “I don’t even have my lorazepam. I’m going to have to drink myself to sleep.”
As someone who admittedly used to have a substantial drinking problem, I was bound to commiserate there. I once reviewed Cal-a-Vie, a health retreat in San Diego that bills itself as “a gorgeous self-care hideaway designed for the mind, body, and spirit”, following a week-long bender at the Burning Man festival in Nevada. Not ready, as had been my earnest intent, to go cold turkey upon checking in, I was relieved to discover that Cal-a-Vie – which was swimming with Lululemon-clad Stepford wives – is also nestled between fields of grapevines, so I sacked off the yoga sessions and spent two days getting sozzled on their Californian wine in a fluffy dressing gown, to the thinly-concealed dismay of the PR manager. If you are reading this today, Bethany, I am sorry – I’m a changed woman.
This is not to say I’m a convert to the world of wellness. Victoria’s son Saxon, played to perfection by none other than Arnold Swatzeneger’s offspring Patrick, may be gauche, ghastly and destined for unfulfillment, but I have to agree with him when he sneers that “Buddhism is for people who want to suppress life” – those who are too “afraid”, he reckons “to get attached”. In another gloriously blunt proclamation from his mother, upon discovering that her daughter Piper actually dragged the family to Thailand so she could go and live with monks for a year, she wails: “But we want her to fear poverty! Like everyone else we know.”
Bang on, too, is the portrayal of the resort’s owner Sritala (Patravadi Mejudhon), hailed by her employees as a “visionary” and architect of the “best wellness program in the world”, who couldn’t be more icy, egotistic or unlikeable. “I have an autoimmune disease,” she boasts, “I even wrote books.” If I had a penny for every time a hotel like this (they’re always at their most eager to pander to journalists) has wheeled out an owner like Sritala to give me a lecture on their qualifications as a health deity – well, I’d be rich enough to check into the White Lotus on my own dime.
Perhaps the most consistently comical banter, though, comes from the trio of so-called “best friends” – actress Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), corporate lawyer Laurie (Carrie Coon) and Texas trad wife Kate (Leslie Bibb) – whose every conversation is laced with effervescent tension behind bleach-white grins. They all start off with virtuous goals, nibbling on fruit salads and attending biometric health assessments, but Coon, who has likened the women’s dynamic to a classic Greek tragedy, plays a closet alcoholic; Jaclyn betrays her friend (and of course her husband) by having a fling with Valentin – the Adonis-looking ‘health guru’ – and Kate, most unforgivably of all as far as her Democrat pals are concerned, is heavily implied to be a secret Trump supporter. The “girls-only getaways” I have (semi) willingly endured since my teenage years have been hen parties, all of which have been dreadful. Indeed, I haven’t trusted the notion of sex-segrated spaces in any scenario since attending the vipers’ nests that are all-female schools.
By the time we’ve reached the series’ mid-point, tentative order has descended into all-out debauchery with the Full Moon party; a legendary monthly rave on the Thai island of Koh Samui that I attended in my late teens and appears, based on the show’s portrayal, to have not changed at all since. In a diary I found, I wrote at the time (and I honestly don’t think I was trying to be satirical) that my friends and I had worn body paint and “clothes befitting of Asian tradition to show oneness with the locals”, and witnessed a beach “littered with the bodies of overdosers”.
As for our White Lotus characters, everyone, including Valentin – the hotel’s poster boy for clean living – gets hammered, illicit drugs are consumed, incest is alluded to, the concept of “health is wealth” has left the building, and we’re inching ever-closer to the revelation of our murder victim.
I’m a 38-year-old white woman with a double-barrelled surname. Many assume I would love nothing more than a visit to somewhere like season three’s iteration of The White Lotus. Yet I have reached a point in my career where I am well-known within the industry to despise any trip with so much as a sniff of “Eat, Pray, Love” to it. “What is the one angle you would never pitch to me?” I just asked my long-time associate Li Boatwright, head of luxury travel PR agency Storrington Collective, as a test. “A wellness resort,” she responded, despite representing several of them.
As far as I’m concerned they are, at best, dull, smug and vacuous; and at worst, a cesspit of insufferable pilgrims – I find Southeast Asia particularly rife for these sorts of places, which is why it’s off the travel map for me – convinced they are practising “self-care” when actually they are bathing in self-centredness. Mike White, the show’s creator, has captured their essence with such a keen eye, I have no doubt he’s endured about as many of them as I have.
The final episode of The White Lotus will air on Sky/Now on Monday April 7