Denby Fawcett: “The White Lotus” does a lot of things right about Hawaii – for a change

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September 28, 2021

“The White Lotus” is a six-part TV series about rich, white people who come to a fictional luxury resort in Hawaii for a week and devastate themselves and the hotel staff.

I write about the series because it has been practically ignored by the media here, unlike many of the detective series and goofy reality shows that were filmed in Hawaii.

“The White Lotus” is a social satire that encompasses the harsh physical beauty of Hawaii while pinpointing many aspects of island life that bother local residents, especially now with plenty of time to reflect during the pandemic.

“The White Lotus” was produced at the Four Seasons Resort Maui in Wailea during the lockdown on Maui last year.

The mere hint of sarcastic taunts at wealthy tourists might be a mean deterrent, but screenwriter and director Mike White created a remarkable production for HBO – possibly the only TV series I’ve seen that explores Hawaii’s caustic economic dependence Tourism.

And White does it with empathy. His hotel employees are not extras in the background, but real people caught in their sometimes tragic missteps, just like the visitors they are employed for. In White’s writings, the wealthy tourists are obnoxious, enslaved by their sense of entitlement, but at times they appear surprisingly human.

Notable actors in the cast include Jennifer Coolidge, who is expected to win many awards for her role as a drunk, needy heiress, Tanya McQuoid; Connie Britton, Steve Zahn and Kamehameha Schools graduated from Kekoa Kekumano.

Managers and staff welcome wealthy, eligible guests to the luxurious White Lotus Resort for a week in hell. Courtesy: HBO

Their characters’ personal stories break out, like Kilauea, when they come to the resort to escape their daily worries only to get into trouble – much of it was caused by them – and then leave a trail of rubble when they go home, including a corpse and a native Hawaiian hotel worker ruined for life.

It is amazing that local Hawaiian media paid so little attention to “The White Lotus” when great minds like the New York Times published four separate reports about it and New Yorker magazine “White Lotus” was obsessed with three different ones gushing articles that called it “one of the best shows of the year.”

Maui Film Commissioner Tracy Bennett said local response to “The White Lotus” has been disappointing; some Honolulu news reporters didn’t even bother to respond to his invitation to a big party on July 5th for the series premiere.

“I wish more Hawaiian media had gotten involved. Maybe there was little interest in the premier party because it was on a bank holiday weekend during the pandemic. I was hoping it would be more popular locally,” Bennett said.

My intention in this column is to say why I admired “The White Lotus” so much, and not to spoil it for you by revealing the storylines.

First, one of the main reasons for seeing “The White Lotus” is because Hawaii is starring rather than being set in a setting like most of the shows like “Hawaii Five-0” and “Magnum PI” – Both mostly focused on crime fighters and their pals zigzagging through Oahu for a week to solve a murder instead of dealing with everything that could actually happen here.

In addition, “The White Lotus” amazes the local audience with its incredible soundtrack, a combination of pulsating, nervous flute and drum sounds, interrupted by tropical bird calls like Martin Denny, the creatively sung a cappella Hawaiian hymns from the 19th songs, loved by Halau Hula, such as “Nani Wale Lihue”.

The Hawaiian choral music in the series comes from the 2008 CD “Na Mele Hawaii: A Rediscovery of Hawaiian Vocal Music” by The Rose ensemble from St. Paul, Minnesota.

Many of the Rose Ensemble’s songs on “The White Lotus,” such as choral renditions of “Aloha Oe” and “Hawaii Aloha,” are familiar and comforting to the local audience, not the usual steel-guitar-dentist pop music found in others Filming hears about Hawaii.

In an email exchange, the group’s founder and artistic director, Jordan Sramek, said the Rose Ensemble was selected for the show after The White Lotus artistic team heard his CD. One of his songs was previously featured in an episode of “Hawaii Five-0”.

Actress Brittany O’Grady plays a hotel guest who falls in love with hotel employee Kai, played by Kekoa Kekumano, a graduate of Kamehameha Schools. Courtesy: HBO

Sramek said the 2008 recording was part of the Rose Ensemble’s “ongoing quest to unveil significant cultural treasures” of world music from many centuries in 25 different languages, including Hawaiian.

Sramek says the ensemble produced the CD after two years of research and three separate trips to Hawaii to meet local cultural experts, in collaboration with native Hawaiian musicologist Amy Kuuleialoha Stillman, an associate professor at the University of Michigan.

It is clear from the start that “The White Lotus” will be different when the opening credits roll over richly textured wallpaper dotted with images of a monkey with a hibiscus behind the ear, a tiger sleeping on an oversized nap Anthurium leaf, and stylishly perched on a palm leaf, an Apapane, the critically endangered Hawaiian honey tree.

Threatening, the credits continue, gliding over images of rotting fruit, three paddlers in a Hawaiian canoe about to be flooded, and a coiled snake ready to strike … symbolic of the dark plot encounters ahead.

The series was written and filmed at lightning speed under pandemic restrictions at the Four Seasons Resort Maui after HBO contacted White in early August 2020. White wrote almost the entire script after arriving at the hotel in September preparing the show. put the cast together and was ready to begin filming in late October; filming was completed by the end of the year.

“That’s fascinating. Talk about pressure,” says Hawaii film commissioner Donne Dawson.

White is best known for “Year of the Dog,” “School of Rock,” and the HBO series “Enlightened,” starring Laura Dern, some of which was filmed in Kauai. White later bought a house in Hanalei.

White’s story in Hawaii dates back to when he was a teenager in San Diego and his parents took him to the islands for a vacation. His father, a pastor, had friends from his seminary days who lived in Hawaii.

In one Interview with Hawaii Public Radio, he said the trips to Hawaii were his first encounter with a place that wasn’t his home, a culture that wasn’t his own, and he’s been trying to learn more about Hawaiian history and culture ever since. The crew took over the entire resort on Maui during the filming of “The White Lotus,” where the most lavish suites can typically fetch up to $ 17,000 a night – even modest standard rooms at the back of the hotel cost around $ 1,500 a night.

It was a blessing to the resort that was closed at the time. Staff were reinstated to take care of the cast and crew.

Following strict pandemic protocols, the performers were tested for Covid-19 three times a week and masked except for the exact moments when they were filmed. They were locked in a bubble with security guards to make sure none of them left the resort premises.

Honolulu singer and actress Loretta Ables Sayre, who plays a hotel housekeeper on “The White Lotus,” called her own month-long stay at the Four Seasons “wild and fun,” but a far cry from the pampered experience a guest would normally find in a fiver expected -star hotel.

Honolulu singer and actress Loretta Ables Sayre (left) plays a hotel housekeeper. Here she helps a hotel intern, played by Jolene Purdy, who unexpectedly goes into labor in the manager’s office. Courtesy: HBO

Sayre says they picked up their breakfast and lunch in plastic foam boxes that were distributed at the bar that she usually took to her luxurious room for dinner because there were very few socially detached tables to sit at.

Most of the cast was alone at dinner. She said she used to eat what she called “hurricane emergency food” with the kettle in her room, such as packaged Saimin. There was no microwave.

“The bad news was the food. The good news was I lost 10 pounds,” she said.

Sayre, a Radford High School graduate, was nominated for a Tony Award in 2007 for her debut as Bloody Mary in a Broadway production of “South Pacific” and has appeared on numerous television series.

Sayre said the maid she played on “The White Lotus” flew by the screen in seconds and only one of her lines made it onto the series, but she was grateful to be around stars like Molly Shannon and a paid actor during Covid when everything else was shut down.

Sayre, who has been a jazz singer at luxury Honolulu hotels for more than 30 years, said White got it right to capture the fate of many hotel employees.

“They spend their lives working so hard to give guests the experiences that the workers themselves cannot,” she said.

White made a mistake in just one sentence towards the end of the series when actor Fred Hechinger, who plays Quinn, the teenage son of the wealthy Mossbacher family, is in love with Hawaiian canoeing culture and decides not to return home with his family . He says he was invited to walk on “a” HōkÅ«leÊ»a instead of “the” HōkÅ«leÊ»a.

Hawaiian film commissioner Dawson, a native of Hawaiian, says she wished White asked about the relevant reference to the famous traveling canoe, though his misphrasing will likely escape most mainland viewers.

The series has been extended for a second season, in which a different group of actors play a new series of characters at a different resort of the fictional hotel chain White Lotus.

Too bad. I’d love to know more about Quinn and whether he’s really able to escape his clueless but well-meaning parents and some of the other tormented characters whose lives are sure to implode after they leave Hawaii.


Honolulu Civil Beat is dedicated to forming an informed citizenship all committed to making Hawaii a better place to live. We achieve this through investigative journalism and watchdog journalism, detailed corporate reporting, analysis and commentary that give readers a broad overview of topics that are important to our community.

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