This post contains spoilers for The White Lotus (season one).
I recently watched season one of The White Lotus and I’ve been curious how it fits into what I’ll call “hotel art”. In art, hotels can represent a variety of things. As liminal spaces and access points to new worlds, they can be sites of growth, of engaging with new people and ideas (as in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View). They can be places to fall in love (as in Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog”). And sometimes they can be vestiges of old glamor, representing nostalgia or an attempt to project normalcy in an eroding world (as in The Grand Budapest Hotel). One of my favorite tropes, however, is the idea that a hotel is for spirits. In this post I’ll discuss three of my favorite examples of this trope and then try to apply it to The White Lotus.
One of the first places I came across the trope is in the Eagles’ song “Hotel California.” In the song, the traveler narrator finds the titular hotel the picture of excess, with “mirrors on the ceiling/the pink champagne on ice.” Yet an ominous feel pervades the song, and ghostly imagery abounds: the first sight of the hotel as a “shimmering light”, a chorus of disembodied voices, and the image of the narrator following a nameless woman through dark corridors. The traveler finds the hotel after driving on a “dark desert highway” when his “head grew heavy and his sight grew dim”—suggesting at least the potential for death behind the wheel. Fittingly, when the traveler encounters the hotel as a sort of light at the end of a tunnel, he observes, “‘This could be Heaven or this could be Hell’”. All the ghostly imagery finally culminates in the sinister conclusion, “‘You can check out any time you like/But you can never leave’”. The listener is left with the impression that, at least in some sense, the hotel has devoured its guests, that they are, as the nameless woman claims, “just prisoners here.” Don Henley, founding member of the Eagles, said the song is basically about “the dark underbelly of the American dream and about excess in America.” Depending on your inclination, you can read the hotel as a literal purgatory for people who have undergone spiritual death, or as a metaphor for the soullessness of American excess and the structures that feed on and enable it. Personally, I love the ambiguity, and Henley’s hotel has always haunted me.
Listen to "Hotel California" by the Eagles
Of course, one can’t talk about haunted hotels without talking about The Shining. In Stephen King’s horror masterwork, the aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance moves his family into the Overlook Hotel after accepting the job of winter caretaker. The hotel is geographically isolated and, during its off season, empty—or it appears to be. However, Jack’s son Danny soon begins seeing ghosts and frightening visions of former guests and caretakers. As the story evolves, the hotel itself begins to possess Jack, who eventually attacks his family. Jack’s wife and child escape, but Jack is essentially devoured by the hotel.
The hotel in The Shining is more overtly haunted than the hotel in “Hotel California,” but even in The Shining there is some degree of ambiguity. How much of Jack’s descent into violence is due to the hotel’s malevolent influence, and how much is due to his alcoholism, his frustrated ambitions of being a writer, and his desire to control his family? At the outset of the story, “Torrance is clearly what alcoholics like to call a “dry drunk,” someone who has stopped drinking without changing the dysfunctional thinking and behavior of alcoholism, eschewing programs and support groups because he thinks he can make it through willpower alone. From the beginning, Jack is operating from a place of selfishness and insensitivity, subconsciously acting aggressively against his own best interests and his family’s” (Nathan Rabin, The Dissolve). At a turning point in the hotel’s control over Jack, Jack goes to the hotel bar after an argument with his wife and finds it magically restocked. He relapses, and it is at this moment that the hotel, speaking through the ghost of the hotel bartender Lloyd, suggests that Jack murder his family. It is when Jack gives into his addiction that the hotel’s control over him becomes complete.
“In serving the Overlook and Lloyd—who implicitly posits homicide as a reasonable price to pay for an unlimited bar tab and unlimited bourbon—Jack is really serving his alcoholism and his addiction. In his ghost-assisted delirium, Jack’s most important relationship is with alcohol. His addiction tells him that this is the only relationship he needs and will ever need, and that he must destroy anything that gets between him and his passionately re-committed love affair with booze” (Nathan Rabin, The Dissolve).
The hotel has taken on the ‘shine’ of an alcoholic like Jack Torrance. It is “a dry drunk, a booze-saturated place that has managed to eschew alcohol for whole seasons at a time while retaining the toxic air and creepy vibes of a whiskey-addled pleasure palace of über-perversity” (Nathan Rabin, The Dissolve). Even the precise nature of the apparitions Torrance sees suggest this theme, such as the moment Jack encounters a ghost in room 237 in Kubrick’s famous adaptation of the novel:
“‘That scene beautifully embodies the horror of addiction… At first, she’s a beautiful naked woman whom Jack embraces joyfully; then suddenly mid-kiss, she turns into a horrifying, rotting hag, putrid and laughing. Emotionally it is similar to how alcohol first appears to the alcoholic: a lovely and beautiful panacea that can fix all ills, then, somewhere along the line it shifts into a hideous poison that destroys your mind and body’” (Justin Lockwood, Fangoria).
In other words, there is a case to be made, as in “Hotel California,” that the real villain is excess, that excess is itself a malevolent force that can contaminate people’s spirits and trap them in a kind of a purgatory.
The third haunted hotel I’d like to discuss is in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. This film largely takes place at a bathhouse, a spa hotel of sorts, for spirits. The protagonist, Chihiro, finds herself in the spirit world by straying with her parents into an abandoned amusement park. After partaking of food at a seemingly empty restaurant, Chihiro’s parents are transformed into pigs, and as day becomes twilight, Chihiro sees that the park is full of spirits. In order to stay in the spirit world with her parents, she eats of the spirits’ food, then begs for a job at the bathhouse where she can keep an eye on her parents and hatch a plan to save them.
Part of what makes Miyazaki’s work so charming is that in many of his films, the villains become less villainous as the protagonists grow, and this is the case in Spirited Away; the cruel witch that runs the bathhouse ends up not being so cruel, and when Chihiro ultimately triumphs against her, she also thanks her for the opportunity to work for her. Additionally, several workers in the bathhouse are sympathetic to Chihiro and aid her on her quest. But even this more benign iteration of a haunted hotel isn’t entirely so; as a condition of her employment there, Chihiro loses her name and is warned that she will be unable to return to the world of the living without it. The other workers at the bathhouse seem to be similarly trapped; Lin, one of Chihiro’s allies, expresses her desire to “get out of this place” and later marvels at a train ticket that seems beyond her purchasing power.
Interestingly, the theme of excess is also present in Spirited Away. From the very beginning, Chihiro’s parents find themselves trapped in the spirit world because of their gluttony. Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse, can be interpreted as a metaphor of capitalist greed. When we first see her, she is counting money. Her opulent penthouse apartment sharply contrasts with the bare room in which Chihiro and her other employees sleep, and by stealing their identities and not paying them enough to afford a ticket out, she is clearly exploiting her workers.
The allure of money also causes problems for Yubaba when the spirit No-Face arrives at the bathhouse. No-Face attempts to fill his own emptiness by first attempting to buy Chihiro’s friendship, then by trying to fill himself with food, and finally by beginning to eat the workers. Nothing seems to fill him, and the futility of his excessive consumption could easily be captioned with a line from “Hotel California”:
“In the master's chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can't kill the beast.”
Chihiro helps No-Face expel the people he has eaten and convinces him to leave the bathhouse, the influence of which Chihiro says is “bad for him.” The hotel in Spirited Away, like the Overlook, contaminates souls and encourages them to indulge their own worst instincts.
And so we return to The White Lotus. On the face of it, there are no spirits in The White Lotus. Yet as I watched the first season, I could not shake the impression that there was something vaguely purgatorial about the hotel. The guests whose stories we follow all arrive at the hotel after being transported by boat across a body of water, evoking Charon and the River Styx in Greek mythology. All are, as Don Henley would say, prisoners of their “own device”; despite their idyllic surroundings, they’re all utterly miserable. When their struggles resolve, they resolve in such a way that does not appear to indicate real growth. Mark, who has attempted to heal the breach between him and his wife caused by his past affair, reopens it by divulging the affair to his son without his wife’s consent. Eventually, he and his wife become closer after he saves her from a burglary attempt, but there is no resolution of the issues at the root of their marital dysfunction—such as his infidelity. Tanya, who claims that she drives all men away by being needy, eventually meets another man and quickly spirals into an emotional outburst. Although he does not push her away afterward, his reassurance (“I still wanna fuck you”) is shallow and does not bode well for his ability to give her the peace and acceptance that she craves. And Rachel, who becomes disillusioned with her marriage during the trip, eventually reunites with her husband at the airport and saying unconvincingly, “I’m happy. I’ll be happy.” (Almost) none of the guests attain escape velocity from their doomed trajectories.
The staff of the White Lotus are rendered more sympathetically, but appear even less able to escape the purgatory of the hotel. “That place exploits you,” the spa manager Belinda’s son says to her over the phone. But when Belinda attempts to strike out on her own and bring wellness to people other than “rich white ladies,” she only ends up more beholden to one of these rich white ladies, and when Tanya discards her, we are left with the impression that Belinda believes in her dream even less than she did before. When Kai, who’s been forced to work for the hotel after it illegally evicted his family, attempts to burglarize some of the hotel’s rich guests to get money to fight the eviction, he is caught and only further entrapped in the criminal justice system. And Armond, under pressure from the hotel, relapses into his addiction, ultimately dying in the hotel that has already sucked away his whole “fucking life.”
Although the hotel is not literally haunted, it seems to devour as effectively as if it was. When Kai performs a dance from his culture for the white guests, is that any different from Yubaba stealing the identities of her workers and forcing them to make her rich? And when a bag full of drugs appears in Armond’s office and sends him on the bender that eventually takes his life, is that any different than the Overlook’s bar magically restocking itself in order to possess one more soul?
As with Hotel California, the Overlook, and the bathhouse, excess appears to be at the root of the White Lotus’s malevolent influence. The consequences appear to be more severe for the staff—the hotel kills Armond—but the souls of the guests, with their self-involvement and lack of empathy, are more tarnished. One thing seems clear: it’s impossible to avoid feeding the hotel, either with your soul or with your body. Of course, the guests eventually escape the hotel—or do they? At numerous points, characters observe that the guests are “the same people,” suggesting a Sisyphean scenario in which the same souls return to the White Lotus again and again. Is the White Lotus, like the Hotel California, a place where you can check out but never leave? Perhaps it’s because, as in the other examples of hotel art we’ve considered, the White Lotus is a symbol of excess—capitalism, colonialism, and simple annihilating greed—and true liberation from this malevolent influence is difficult to achieve.
In this interpretation, the only character to truly escape is Quinn, who at the very end of the show runs away from his family. He is the exception to prove the rule. Like No-Face, his escape depends on his giving up his excessive consumption—of porn, the Internet, and his ultra-rich consumerist lifestyle—for real companionship and service. His reward is paddling into the sunset away from purgatory.
But even this decision has a considerable amount of privilege baked into it. Quinn is not responsible for anyone, he is healthy, and he most likely has his family to fall back on if his fantasy eventually clashes with reality. It’s not impossible to imagine that Quinn’s escape will be short-lived. “Where does all the pain go?” he asks earlier in the season. By running away from the pain that the White Lotus feeds and feeds on, he—and the show—has not exactly answered that question.
Maybe there isn’t an answer. As these haunted hotels tell us, our attempts to soothe our pain often lead us to excess and our entrapment within that excess. We can try to liberate ourselves with companionship and service, but true escape might not be possible with our flawed selves. Life, like a hotel, is a liminal space. Our time on this mortal coil is brief and contaminated by the ghosts of the past—colonialism, capitalism, our own addictions and base greed.
And the hotel is still hungry.
This was an interesting perspective and read! Your argument also made me think about how hotels are also literally fake homes we live in for short periods of time, and how in these works the characters are often seeking a feeling of “home” and safety, but trying to find home and take refuge in things like addiction, wealth, etc turns out to instead be destructive.