When we go on a holiday we pretty much take everything with us. All the important stuff anyway. I mean ‘who you are’, ‘what you want’ and ‘what you give’. In that way we all, pretty much, travel light, though some of our inner luggage can be considerable.
“ White Lotus” is a mythical Hotel in Hawaii and guests arriving at its mausoleum shores are heavy laden. The staff, though smiling through, carry their own daily luggage. Only the islanders with their broad shoulders and gleaming smiles, paddling their outrigger canoes and skimming over the turquoise ocean seem free, if from a distance.
And that, for me, was the delight and devilry of this HBO series. I’m too stingy to pay for a streaming channel so we watched it on DVD, the old fashioned way.
At the heart is a glimpse of different lives. None perfect. None relentlessly horrid, if you exclude some of the staff. My they do earn their money. If you fall in love, despite your wiser self, with the quixotic Resort Manager don’t feel alone. I fell for him too.
And that’s it. An optimistic, depressing, surprising and, at times, completely shocking vignette of life as it is lived.
Going on vacation is no holiday.
At the End of the Day 