Mike White is not just the writer of The White Lotus. He is also its creator, director, and executive producer, and I'm surprised that he doesn't do the catering and animal-handling, too. This unusual level of control makes The White Lotus the polar opposite of, say, the Marvel films, which feel like they're written by one committee, edited by another, and marketed by a third. And what has White done with his unusual level of creative control' He has made the first great work of art in the post-'woke' era. He treats his characters as individuals, rather than stand-ins for their identity groups'and he insists on plot points that would unnerve a sensitivity reader. The White Lotus repudiates the 'peak woke' era of the late 2010s, which yielded safe, self-congratulatory, and didactic art, obsessed with identity and language, that taught pat moral lessons in an eat-your-greens tone. Instead, White has made a point of discovering our last remaining taboos'kink, scatology, marrying for...
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