Black and white world
Increasingly, we’re shoved down various rabbit-holes in our interactions with the world. Things that are supposed to be luxuries or human improvements fail to satisfy us, and sometimes don’t even make any sense. Say you go to an expensive, exotic resort, and within a few days, there’s a pile of dead bodies scattered all over the docks. Or you try out a new health app and it makes you sleep longer every night while it harvests your human battery life.
Two popular series that focus on that tricky rabbit-hole dilemma are back, or have just concluded, and we find they’re kind of opposite sides of the same coin: humans just a few careless thumb flips away from becoming beasts. Or possibly something much worse.
The White Lotus, Mike White’s perverse inversion of Fantasy Island, just finished its third season on HBO with a bang (or several bangs), while Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror returns to sturdy form in its seventh season on Netflix. It’s worth noting even the marketing strategies at play here: While White Lotus teases out each episode, building audience attention and social media memes, Brooker drops the whole season in classic binge fashion, ready for post-season discussion in an instant.
Worst. Resort. Ever.
There’s one thing we can agree on after viewing three seasons of The White Lotus: This luxury resort would not still be operating by now, not with TripAdvisor reviews and all the dead bodies they’ve piled up since Season 1.
Take Fyre Festival and add Shakespearean bloodbath tragedy, and you get this season’s flavor: an exotic locale in Thailand, attracting more rich, pampered people ostensibly searching for inner truth, but displaying only outer vulgarity. And yes, a few characters do come out with their souls (and bodies) relatively unscathed.
While both shows look at power dynamics and privilege, Black Mirror has a more dystopian purview based around our ceaseless desire for wish fulfillment. White’s characters hardly know what they're after when they arrive at White Lotus; they’re either running away from something, or towards something tragic. It’s a slow-burn look at humanity, with shades—and shading—aplenty.
Did we say slow-burn? The first few eps take their leisurely time, but by the finale White Lotus 3 ratchets up three separate story lines to their predictably bloody conclusion. (White likely got his share of pampered resort a-holes after joining a season of Survivor long ago.) Social relationships are revealed to be thin threads of silk, easily frayed. Then all the coconuts fall and the monkeys let loose with their chattering.
Privilege is a given at White’s resort. Perhaps no character this season captures this quite like Southern-belle-from-hell Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey), who blithely cops to her lux addiction in an outrageous drawl: “We’re lucky, it’s true. No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have—even the old kings and queens. The least we can do is enjoy it. If we don’t, it’s offensive. It’s an offense to all the billions of people who can only dream that, one day, they could live like we do.”
(Just… Eww.)
Setting the season in Thailand seems like a no-brainer, contrasting Buddhist ideals with Western values, and some scenes do this, but it must be said the focus on Thai culture rarely goes beyond surface level, straying into cliché at times, like the relationship between resort employee Mook (BLACKPINK member Lalisa Monabal), who urges her meek boyfriend (Tayme Thapthimthong) to be more ambitious and bloodthirsty. Some tangents don’t quite hit the mark (the frenemies played by Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb, and Carrie Coon at least avoid actual bloodshed). And we are reminded that, unlike some series, people of modest means don’t always take the noblest path, as they often do in fiction, because their options are so much more limited. People are just people, after all. But the pairing of Walter Goggins (Justified) and Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education), as improbable as it sometimes is, does achieve moments of enlightenment and tragic loss, often within the same episode.
Betting on black
Even dark tech observer Charlie Brooker needs to return to some comfort level. Season 7 resets the game a bit, hewing to classic Black Mirror parameters. Opener “Common People” encapsulates several overlapping modern fears at once, while still observing the need for humor and comedy. For Amanda (Rashida Jones) and Mike (Chris O’Dowd), it’s the anxiety of paying for health care when your loved one falls ill. The rabbit-hole leads, naturally, to a technological advance (upsold by Rivermind consultant Tracee Ellis Ross). It’s a grabber the way last season’s “Joan is Awful” pulled us into the matrix by the lapels. Sad, funny, deeply serious, all in one awful, recognizable package.
Then there’s the ambitious “Hotel Reverie,” plunging stalled actress Issa Rae into an AI-regenerated version of a ‘30s Hollywood romance, with a gender switch and expected levels of sadness that recall Season 3’s “San Junipero.” An imaginary return to an imaginary place where all is free from the omnivorous suck of… the black mirror.
Several episodes serve as auto-pilot links, hors d’oeuvres in the dimension of the macabre, but some are seasoned with shavings of regret, like the wistful “Eulogy,” in which embittered Paul Giamatti can’t bring his mind to reconstruct the face of his former lover, even after persistent prompting from an avatar funeral assistant.
And the season ends with a return to the USS Callister, a big-budget sequel to Season 5’s “Space Fleet” episode that brings back Jesse Plemons, Cristin Milioti and Jimmi Simpson on a mission to stop digital clones embedded in gaming software. It’s a power narrative spawned by, among other things, that Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life” in which a reckless, cruel orange-haired child wields god-like control over a rural Midwestern town. Can’t imagine something like that ever happening in real life, can we?
While White Lotus takes a more satirical approach to examining our social decay, Black Mirror works from the premise that technology—that great time-saver and soul eraser—is decaying us from within, update by update. In the end, both anthology series demonstrate what stares back at us when we look into the abyss, which is always our own reflection.
