Spoiler-Free 'The White Lotus' Season Finale: Beautiful Locales and The Writing Life
"What do you have to write about? You're not oppressed, you're not gay! [Writers] are all poor, I can tell ya that!" - John Lithgow, 'Orange County' (2002)
The White Lotus season two finale aired this past Sunday, and I’m going to keep this free of spoilers, don’t worry. The White Lotus’s first season is an incredible exploration of contemporary upstairs/downstairs relationships, colonialism, moneyed privilege, and the quiet brutalities of all-inclusive vacations (of which, I am regrettably a huge fan. Food and drinks and pool and beach! You ever been to a swim-up bar, bro?!) The White Lotus’s second season is a gorgeous, haunting, operatic bedroom farce—a genre that is very good at raising my blood pressure and forcing me to watch some scenes anxiety-scrolling through my phone. Oh, and Jennifer Coolidge. The White Lotus very much features Jennifer Coolidge, and we’re all better for it.
Mike White, creator of The White Lotus, is a fascinating person and has been effusive in interviews. He sounds like a writer who’s been working endlessly for 20 years, is suddenly commanding absolutely everyone’s attention, and is stoked to talk about his work. I don’t go for identifying with celebrities too much, but I feel a certain kinship with Mike White. There’s his unpretentious name, for starters, speaking as a writer who has never had any interest in heavy-scare-quotes “writerly” pen names, like “Christopher Corlew” or “C. James Corlew” or worse “C.J. Corlew.” The time of Ernest and William and F. Scott has passed, let us enter into a literary era of Mikes and Chrises.
There’s also his eclectic credits, signifying a Dude Who Wants To Do Cool Stuff with his career. You know how Tarantino’s all like, “my career’s gonna be defined by 10 films, man, that’s like the Tarantinoverse, ya dig?” Mike White wrote School of Rock because Jack Black is his friend and Mike thought the scripts Jack was getting sucked. Mike White went on Survivor and The Amazing Race because wouldn’t you, if you had Hollywood connects and it sounded like fun? He’s open about narrative tricks, saying of White Lotus’s dead body prologues:
“if I’d put a dead body at the beginning of Enlightened, maybe people would’ve watched Enlightened. You realize these kinds of hooks do actually get viewers.”
I’ve never watched Enlightened. I probably will now. Be cooler if it had a dead body at the beginning.
Anyway, let’s talk about my favorite movie, Non-Actual Top 5 List Division: Orange County!
Mike White’s first film turned 20 this year, an anniversary probably celebrated by no one but Mike White, me, and whomever cashes Phantom Planet’s royalty checks. But I love this movie. The working title of this column was originally called “I’m Not Letting 2022 End Without Writing About Orange County.” This MTV Films-ass film holds a really important place in my heart: namely, that Shaun Brumder realizing he wanted to be a writer made me realize I wanted to be a writer.
Yes, this film was made when Crazy Town’s “Butterfly” had enough cultural cache to command a full-on cheerleader dance break, and yes, Jack Black does pitch an idea for a hat “…like a fuckin’ hat that goes beee-ooo-reet!” There’s a lot in this movie you can’t defend to the Criterion Collection Board or whatever.
Shaun Brumder (played by Tom Hanks’s good son) is an Orange County surfer, son of a rich real estate asshole dad and drunken, gold-digging mom (the history of the state of California in that marriage, right there). He spends his days partying with his friends (“let’s get lit and go jump off the roof of my house?”), has a supportive, animal-loving girlfriend who wants to be a marine biologist, and he really likes this one book. Based on the strength of that book, he decides he wants to be a writer, which in his mind, means going to Stanford to study with Marcus Skinner, author of that book he likes.
I was not an OC surfer, but I was a skatepunk guitarist with college rapidly approaching and firm knowledge that neither skating nor music was going to pay my bills. Leaving my hometown meant my band was breaking up. Genuine low point in life. I knew I wanted to create, I always liked storytelling, but crucially, I was jaded with music. I knew that was always going to be a side thing. Why not, like Shaun, try writing?
Is it silly to have your life’s dreams crystalize while you’re watching an MTV Films production? Yes, undeniably. But, like Shaun, I wanted to get the hell out of my hometown, with its ridiculous people, and go to a Named University and study with Serious People.
Shaun eventually decides not to go to Stanford—good call—because all he needs to write are the people who inspire him. What if James Joyce had left Ireland, you know? Me, I’ve adopted a new hometown, but I still write about Tennessee. I went to a Named University—Loyola University Chicago—and it did a lot of good for my writing. Introduced me to the contemporary writing scene, allowed me to take a ton of workshops, and featured various writers’ hallmarks like a massive library, an adjacent large body of water, and numerous neighborhood dive bars. But was Loyola specifically necessary to my writing development?
It’s not the institution that makes the writer. Loyola’s Creative Writing faculty was like 2-3 profs plus a few adjuncts. It felt like an accident. I lucked into being able to study with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, passionate educator and author of a million books, and David Michael Kaplan, a guy who literally wrote a book called Revision. So yes, Loyola was a very good place for me, but it doesn’t feel like that’s the University’s doing? Maybe a writing lesson is take advantage of the good situations when you luck into them.
Shaun Brumder decides to stay in Orange County at the end of Orange County. The end sees him rescuing his dead friend’s surfboard from a “In Memorium (feat. So Many M-80s, Dude, Like the 4th of July)” and going surfing with his friends. Presumably, he finishes his novel and goes on to write more (never a guarantee with writers, to be fair). He’s maybe not found his bliss in life, but he’s realized how to reconcile his lived experience with his ambitions. In Shaun’s mind, writers are not surfers. Writers exist with many leather-bound books in rooms that smell of rich mahogany. But that’s not true, you can write just as well in a swimsuit as you can in a tweed jacket with elbow patches.
Something I’ve learned about myself is I actually write better in the summer. It’s easier to think when you’re not shivering, and a good morning kayaking session really gets the fountain pen flowing. Yet I live in a city where the beach is unusable nine months out of the year, because no other city in the world inspires me quite like Chicago. It’s a weird combination, I acknowledge, but I genuinely think a good city and a good body of water are my ideal places to write. Something I learned about myself a long time ago is I’m probably never getting an MFA, because packing up my family to spend two years in Boise or Boulder or Syracuse doesn’t sound appealing to me. Chasing adjunct gigs in the woodchipper of academia doesn’t sound appealing to me. Compromising my quality of life for any kind of prestige-chasing doesn’t sound appealing to me.
There’s lessons to take from Mike White’s circuitous route to fame/professional respect. There’s lessons to take from the ending of Orange County, the “life tenuously goes on” wrap-up to the Harper/Ethan/Cameron/Daphne storyline in The White Lotus, and even the “make art at all costs” lesson of School of Rock. Chase your bliss as a writer. Find personal happiness even if you’re writing about pain. Sit near a large body of water while you empty your arteries into a college-ruled notebook. And if, like Mike White, you have to smash-cut to crashing waves to make it all seem profound, do it.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
LINKS!
W Magazine profiled Jennifer Coolidge, almost didn’t play Tanya because she spent the pandemic eating pizza and once pretended to have an identical twin so she could date two guys at the same time in Hawaii.
Loved this The Ringer piece on Daphne as White Lotus’s hidden depth
Remember that movie The Descendants? Your parents probably saw it. Well that screenplay, adapted from Kaui Hart Hemmings’s novel, won an Oscar! The writing credits are: the director of the film, the dean from Community, and Kip from Orange County, who must’ve abandoned his TV show that’s about vampires, ostensibly, but underneath is really about the reunification of Germany.
While Twitter still exists, please read Taco Bell Quarterly’s feed for more “Live Mas” writer inspiration. Genuinely good advice for living under the capitalist climate apocalypse. Oh, and make sure to read Taco Bell Quarterly, too.
We didn’t have enough time to talk about how wonderful Catherine O’Hara is, how anyone who doesn’t appreciate Jack Black is a bore, the fact that Shaun and I are the same height and that is neat, or how Brian Wilson is the jewel of a star-studded soundtrack in Orange County. So here’s Jack Black taking off his socks:
