The White Lotus gives us a heady dose of male and female bonding

There is an elegance to the construction of every episode of The White Lotus: Sicily. As with his first season, writer-director Mike White has made it so that each new hour of his series takes us through one full day in the lives of the guests at the namesake hotel. This allows every new entry to have a contained quality to it; there’s no stretching or compressing of time, just its gentle march forward. This also means we always begin anew. It’s morning after all, a time for new beginnings but also a time to reassess what’s come to pass.

Wanting to wipe her slate clean, for instance, Harper (Aubrey Plaza, the show’s MVP this season) decides she’s going to be good. Really good. Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and Cameron (Theo James) won’t know what hit them when she’s becomes, quite suddenly, all sunny. And it does throw them off. But mostly because Ethan’s opinionated and arguably snobbish wife can’t really do vapid chit chat in any kind of natural way. Seeing her try is entertaining enough—especially once she entraps herself into spending the afternoon (and the night!) with Daphne over at Noto. It’s all a cage of her own making and one which allows the show to finally let the two women bond as the two men are left to their own devices.

As the thematic echoes of the season become ever clearer, this episode further zeroed in on the “battle of the sexes” rhetoric that has pervaded its previous installments. We’ll get to Daphne’s admission that she knows Cameron’s friends are basically sociopaths, that she lashes out in order to maintain some balance in her relationship, and her whole “I feel sorry for men” monologue (which: oof!), not to mention Harper’s “I think I was tripping out on being a woman” memory of being high—all moments which acknowledged the way they each have vexed relationships with their own gender. But that’s because we have to first talk about the intergenerational conversation around “modern masculinity” that Bert (F. Murray Abraham), Dominic (Michael Imperioli), and Albie (Adam DiMarco) have while on their day trip through famous locations seen in The Godfather.

Did I cringe when Albie outright told his grandfather that he loved that Francis Ford Coppola film because he was “nostalgic for the solid days of the patriarchy”? Maybe. But then again, both he and Portia have this way of talking in “discourse-speak” that I eventually let myself, instead, be awed by the thorny conversation the three men engage in. Or rather, that Bert and Albie engage in, all while Dominic, bashful and shameful in equal measure, mostly keeps to himself. And they distill a question that The White Lotus clearly wants to excavate: are those “male fantasies” The Godfather and the like depict “natural” (all men want this!) or are they designed to socialize men into doing so?

The schism is presented here as a generational issue, what with Albie seemingly being on his own against his set-in-his-ways grandfather and his cheating father (who, as we’ve seen, has had all the fun with Lucia and Mia while on this trip alone). But then White lets us see how this plays out between Ethan and Cameron. The two college friends don’t explicitly chat about these same concerns, but the subtext of their wild, raucous night without their wives similarly leaves us wondering whether all men want to live out the fantasy Cameron gives himself permission to indulge in—namely, as Dominic had before him, spend a lovely evening with Lucia.

Even hearing Daphne explain how she knows Cameron’s cheated on her but that she refuses to see herself as a victim—that she somewhat understands his predicament—suggests that the two of them subscribe to this notion that men, maybe, can’t help themselves (“Cameron’s naughty like a little boy,” as she puts it, infantilizing and excusing him in equal measure). Or, as in Cameron’s most laughable attempt to excuse/validate/explain his urges, they understand that monogamy was invented to control the middle class…which would be a better argument if Daphne were somehow privy to the ways her seemingly monogamous marriage is being broken apart in the name of some fanciful radical politics against bourgeois life.

Harper wouldn’t dream of making such pronouncements. Not when Ethan is such an open book. (He’s honest to a fault, she says.) That is, of course, until all of her calls remain unanswered and the hedonistic ways of Cameron threaten to unravel the strong if rather unsexy bond the two have been building for years. Will Harper let her suspicions get the best of her? Will Albie’s nice boy shtick land with Portia after all? Is Tanya ready to face what may well be the inevitable end of her marriage? And, perhaps more importantly, will we see more of Valentina in the episodes to come? We’ll have to wait ’til morning to find out.

Stray observations

• When do we think directors realized they could shoot scenes with televisions in them using green screens and insert later whatever they aimed to have playing there? I know it’s relatively recent (and it goes hand in hand with green-screened smartphone screens, too!) and yet it always drives me insane. There’s a flattened look to the entire thing; no graininess, no reflection… just a pristine image being emitted from a lifeless appliance. I hope one day we dispense with it altogether, continuity and petty filmmaking workarounds be damned.
• Am I alone in thinking Tanya’s storyline is a bit… thin this season? Maybe there was no way of topping last season’s juicy bits. And Coolidge does make the most out of every scene she’s in (seeing her interact with the tarot reader alone gave us plenty to enjoy), but I keep wanting to spend more time with these other characters instead. But maybe there’s a slow burn to her arc this time around that may well come to pay off. Greg’s bound to be back soon enough.
• I can’t decide whether I love Portia’s entire wardrobe (those bucket hats, the “stussy” shirt, her “PROBLEMO” sweatshirt, her sleeveless pop art dress) in earnest or whether I love it as an ironic bit that makes me feel just slightly hip to Gen Z’s brazen disregard for the kind of minimalist chic I so tend to gravitate towards (see: Harper’s A+ wardrobe). But you have to admit the costuming choices made by the show’s wardrobe department are as eye-catching as anything else.
• Speaking of below-the-line folks who deserve their flowers: Cristobal Tapia de Veer and Kim Neundorf’s score has just been deliciously sumptuous. Operatic and intimate in equal measure, their music has given the new season a distinct flavor from season one, even as it clearly exists within the same aural universe. Just divine.
• Of course Cameron wouldn’t bat an eye when discussing insider trading (“next time!” as he tells Ethan); the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.
• F. Murray Abraham mouthing “prostitutes” will live rent-free in my head. As will the sight of Coolidge’s Tanya crying, and of Meghann Fahy’s Daphne putting on her sunglasses in tacit dissent.
• Line of the week? “Let’s fun!”