Parenting in the slipstream of popular culture
And what The White Lotus tells us about marriage, monogamy, and modern masculinity.
Since having kids, I rarely feel on top of things. I’m in constant battle with a to-do list that feels like the hairs growing inside my nose—where are all these things coming from? And why do they continue to multiply, no matter how much time I spend hacking away at them? Life is a never-ending index of boxes to tick, even in areas that once gave us immense pleasure. Are you closer to what you loved before you had kids? Or further removed? There’s a sense of inevitability—in order to be a present parent, you’re required to step away from the beating heart of culture, a relegation of your participation in the now to prepare for a future then. Attempts to stay abreast of everything—the way you once did, before you invited these tiny humans into your life—prove futile.
Ever watch a live sports game at home, and realise you’re a few seconds behind a broadcast a neighbour is tuned into? Every tense moment, every penalty kick, every home run, is foreshadowed by screams from the future. That’s how it feels trying to stay connected to culture as a parent. We exist inside of an artistic delay, in the slipstream of hype, hearing reverberations of praise showered towards the current hot shit; attempting to stay plugged in enough to maintain cultural fluency, but with enough distance to stop the whole thing from being ruined before we’ve found time to experience it. You might be a few hours behind. Sometimes it’s days. Other times you can measure the lag in weeks, months and eventually, I’m sure, years. “I used to be with ‘it’, and then they changed what ‘it’ was,” a middle-aged Abe Simpson tells a teenage Homer. “And it’ll happen to you.”
You find yourself pleading with the zeitgeist, begging it for patience. “I know, yes,” you offer up to the universe “I can see Beyoncé has dropped a new album, and everyone is saying it’s not just good, it’s great, it’s spectacular. It has a history of queer black house music running through its DNA, and has been done with the level of care and the stratospheric quality bar she brings to everything; not like when Diddy started taking MDMA and stumbled into his techno era, but more like Missy dropped that same drug and then dropped an album we’re still feeling the aftershocks from two decades later. Like that good.” You beg the world to wait, because you and your wife can’t listen to it yet, even though everyone on the internet is going nuts, because you’re visiting family, you’ve got two kids to wrangle, and the opportunity to escape to a mental dancefloor for 62 minutes in the company of Mrs Carter—including four of those in tribute to the queen of disco Donna Summer, and her partner-in-dance Giorgio Moroder—can’t simply be summoned from nowhere. (You will, mercifully, find that hour together in a rental car, volume close to the maximum, whilst driving through the New Forest, the kids in a car somewhere ahead, entertained by their grandparents.)
It wasn’t always like this. The pre-kid you managed to stay abreast of all the great shows, saw all the Best Movie Oscar picks, and had an opinion on the current critically acclaimed books. When writing this essay I brought up The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 list, to see how I fared, judging my own list against the cultural barometer. I hadn’t read a single one. I embarrassingly scrolled to the bottom of the page, hoping to find a sliver of overlap, some connection between what I’d read and what had been deemed as worthy. 2022 wasn’t a bad year for reading, by all accounts, as I ended that circle around the sun forty-four books wiser than I started it. But there isn’t enough time. There are too many great books to read. Albums to listen to. Shows to see. And at the end of a day parenting, there isn’t nearly enough left in the tank—be it money, time, energy or desire—because parenting is fucking exhausting, and the idea of a weekend spent binging a series is as much of a fantasy as riding through Westeros on the back of a dragon .
I can stay on top of one show, at a maximum, a few times a year. Andor was the last one I watched week in, week out, reading the recaps, sharing theories with friends in the group chat. (What were they building in there?) Please don’t talk to me about The Last of Us. Not yet. I have a three-year-old kicking me in the back almost every night. That’s bleak enough. I adored the original, the first video game to use fatherhood as a narrative device to propel you through its memorable 15-hour story. I’m currently months behind the curve again, feeling my way around the early stages of another “dad simulator,” God of War: Ragnarok, which places the murder of Norse Gods an equal struggle with raising good kids. “It’s next on my list,” I will offer as a consolation to other dads watching TLOU in our community. It feels like a lie I tell myself to keep a grip on that final strand of cultural competency.
Honestly, I will start that next. I just needed to finish The White Lotus first.
I’m going to keep talking about season 2 of The White Lotus, share some thoughts on what I think the show is trying to tell us about marriage, monogamy, and the pursuit of pleasure, and share some of the best commentary I’ve found. If you haven’t watched it, now is a good time to say goodbye and leave yourself a mental note to come back when you’re ready. No judgement here—we’re all parents, and popular culture isn’t a race! We will still be be here when you’re ready.
And for those who have fully delighted in the splendours of the second season, and are already planning a trip to Italy, well. Spoilers ahead, if that wasn’t already clear.
Between Succession and The White Lotus, Prestige TV is bathing in the misery of wealthy elites. We’ve spent two seasons in sumptuous locations—on the islands of Maui and Sicily—with characters battling demons of their own making. The promise of paradise offers time away from your problems, but like Jon Kabat-Zinn memorably told us, “Wherever you go, there you are.”
Real life presents real problems—jobs to keep, mouths to feed, purpose to find, wondering how to make it all work. But when your survival, or your family's thriving, becomes divorced from your ability to earn, your problems become more existential. Mike White was interviewed on Fresh Air and explained why sex became the primary focus of the second season.
“Originally, I was totally going in a different direction. And then we went scouting for hotels. The original idea was more like heavy hitters in business and about power. And we went to the hotel that we ended up choosing, which was intermedia Santa Monica Palace … and then we got there and I was like “This feels like this is not the right place to for that kind of topic.” And it just kind of gave me the idea to focus more on sexual jealousy and adultery and infidelity in an operatic kind of bedroom farce.”
Infidelity rears it’s head from the very first episode—quite literally. We learn of the Testa di Moro, a Sicilian story passed down through generations, behind the beautiful vases proudly displayed throughout the hotel. In the tale, a young, lonely woman is wooed by a man who appears below her balcony and professes his love for her. Overwhelmed by his declarations of love, and the promise of freedom from her solitude, she falls in love with him. But before long, she learns he has a wife and child at home, and he will soon abandon her and return to them. Unable to deal with his deception, and wanting to keep him close, she cuts off his head, and turns it into a vase. These ceramic decapitations can be found across the island of Sicily, a stark warning to men to remain faithful to their wives.
These deterrents fail to make an tiny bit of difference to tech bro Cameron, who continues what is clearly a long-running habit of cheating on his wife—first with Mia and Lucia, and later with Harper. The back and forth between the two couples forms the dramatic centre of the entire season. Ethan and Harper are initially filled with disdain for how Cameron and Daphne live their lives—disconnected from the suffering of the world, embroiled in self-fabricated drama—before eventually becoming consumed by what they previously loathed, a transformation cemented with the destruction of the Testa di Moro that holds pride of place in their bedroom.
In the end, the wives prove to be the most fascinating characters of the show. Daphne, armed with the understanding that her husband is a serial cheater, refuses to play the victim, and takes matters back into her own hands. “Maybe you should get a trainer,” she tells Harper, her intentions clear. The show leaves enough breadcrumbs that we can piece together this trainer is the father of at least one of her children, if not more; Cameron’s grimace when being asked to FaceTime with his son comes off at first as a dad who would rather ignore the kids he has left behind, but armed with this knowledge can be seen as a man being asked to play the role of a father to a child he knows is not his. This is a marriage filled with deception, but with a tacit acceptance of the deceiver, and the games being played. “You don't have to know everything to love someone,” Daphne tells Ethan, faced with the reality of Cameron and Harper’s betrayal. These are not ostriches, with their heads in the sand—but intentional navigators, pulling levers in a struggle for power where you do whatever is necessary to stay happy; sex as one of many weapons used for oneupmanship, knowing no viable alternative exists.
The spectre of infidelity looms so heavily over the season that Jeniffer Coolidge’s Tanya is still consumed by it, even when reeling from an attempt on her life. She surveys the the carnage of a failed assassination plot from the “high-end gays,” stepping over dead bodies towards to Tom Hollander—who was phenomenal in the second half of the season—who is bleeding out with a bullet hole in his chest. And what does she ask him? She doesn’t care if Gregg was involved in the convulted plot. All she wants to know is whether he remained faithful. Her final words on the show and in her life: “Was Gregg having an affair?”
Sex is a source of both pleasure and pain for three generations of Di Grasso men, on a trip to connect with their ancestry. Bert, the patriarch and grandfather, remains in denial about how his old-school thinking impacts the opposite sex, and how his cavalier attitude towards women has been passed down to his son. “Our Achilles’ heel is an Achilles’ cock,” he tells his descendants, “it’s like a Greek curse.” Albie, the grandson, provides the woke counterpoint to their old-school views, in one scene memorably dissecting why The Godfather is overrated:
“Men love The Godfather because they feel emasculated by modern society. It's a fantasy about a time when they could go out and solve all their problems with violence, and sleep with every woman, and then come home to their wife who doesn't ask them any questions and makes them pasta.”
The pursuit of carnal pleasure, and the consequences of it, eat away at Michael Imperioli’s Dominic, who arrives in Sicily with sex on the brain, having planned (or, more probably, having asked his executive assistant to arrange) to meet Lucia there. His Achilles’ cock has led him to be estranged from the mother of his children. His wife—played offscreen by Laura Dern, whose past collaboration with showrunner Mike White is probably the best show you’ve never seen—refuses to play the same game as Daphne, and to retaliate with an affair of her own. The show makes strides to show us neither party are happy with this situation.
So what are we to make of the closing scenes of this show, and it’s exploration of sex and the damage we do—to ourselves and those around us—in pursuit of it? What is Mike White trying to tell us, contrasting the fates of the various men and marriages in the show? Waiting to check in, all three Di Grasso men ogle the belle donne that floats by them. Society evolves, but men don’t; Albie is as doomed to loin-first thinking as the generations of men that have come before him; Domonic returns to LA having repurchased his way into the graces of his wife, a $50,000 payoff to his son and an equally expensive piece of jewellery deemed a fair price to pay. We pan across the airport gate, where Ethan and Harper are more at ease with each other, and themselves, than any time we’ve seen them; the suffering of the world removed from their shoulders, but the seed of distrust planted firmly between them. Daphne and Cameron are nearby, seemingly recovered from the trauma of finding Tanya’s body floating in the glowing hue of the Mediterranean Sea.
Our perspective of the world colours whatever we encounter in it, and it’s impossibly to dissect this show without keeping this in mind. This memorable ride was always entertaining, artistically shot in a way that had me pining for a return to Italy, but left me asking as many questions as it answered about marriage, monogamy, and modern masculinity. But enough about me: what did you think?