We Need to Talk About Armond

I rarely give a damn about any white male characters on a given TV show (or in just about every other form of media I consume). Right now, the only white men currently on TV I truly give a damn about are:

1. Joe Lo Truglio as Sgt. Charles Boyle on Brooklyn 99, the purest encapsulation of Weird Friend Energy ever put to screen.
2. Kentucky’s Own Michael Shannon as Napoleon on Nine Perfect Strangers, who was previously perfect as the Prohibition Agent Nelson Van Alden on Boardwalk Empire and as well as literally everything else he’s ever been in.
3. Brett Goldstein as Roy Kent on Ted Lasso (runner up: Jeremy Swift as Leslie Higgins the Comms Director, mainly because his character is an unabashed Wife Guy, but in an adorable way)
4. Andrew Rannells as Blair Pfaff on Black Monday (Okay, okay, literally everyone on that show is perfect.)

And always, of course, my legacy TV faves David Duchovny as Fox Mulder, Patrick Stewart as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, and Jonathan Frakes as Cmdr. Willam Riker, and Rod Serling. (Do I have a type? Who can say?!)

So if I’m being honest, The White Lotus, a show about white people on a resort written and directed by a white guy didn’t really pique my interest until I learned the criminally underrated (and adopted Kentuckian!) Steve Zahn was in it along with Everyone’s Queen Jennifer Coolidge. I begrudgingly put it on to mitigate my post-Olympics comedown slump and less than halfway through the first episode I was completely hooked.

While there is so much to unpack in this show (Racism! Colonialism! Classism! Workplace Sexual Coercion! Unpaid Emotional Labor! Teenage Girl Friend Jealousy and Drug Mixing! Revenge Defecation!), I definitely did not anticipate to find myself so intrigued by all these white men in the lead roles. They’re all played by actors who give universally stellar performances, and all of the characters are completely inept douches. After we blazed through the first six episodes and caught up in time for the finale, I still could not stop thinking about these goofy-ass white guys and could not figure out why, until it dawned on me:

The White Lotus resort is a basically prison of Toxic Masculinity, where the White Men who traditionally should be in power are exposed as having no real power at all.

Just… hear me out. And suffice to say, spoilers ahead…

First we meet Armond (Murray Bartlett, who should get every award and then some) the trim, handsome hotel manager with a dazzling smile that takes up half his chiseled and bescruffed face, who ostensibly runs everything, except he truly has nothing within his actual grasp. Armond is sooooooo close to meeting the True Masculine Ideal standard that the White Lotus embodies, except for one tiny problem: he’s gay. He’s clearly constantly striving to achieve that vintage mustachio’d vision of The Man Who Has It All, but his lack of heteronormativity keeps him from having any real power or control, especially when it comes baby-man Shane Patton (Jake Lacy) and his eternal quest for the Pineapple Suite.

Technically, Shane is the first White Lotus White Guy we meet, brooding in the airport as well-meaning Boomers make small talk about honeymoons and dead bodies before he cuts them off to wear his sunglasses indoors, gazing out at the mysterious human remains being loaded onto the plane he too is about to board.

Once again, Shane is ostensibly the Gold Standard of the White Male Heteropatriachy: rich, jacked but not too jacked, salmon short-ed and recently married to a wide-eyed waif journalist with impossibly jiggly boobs named Rachel (Alexandra Daddario, whose boobs truly do defy all laws of nature). Despite also being a Man Who Has It All, Shane still manages falls short of the Ideal Masculine in that he is aggressively dependent on his mother for everything and throws weeklong temper tantrums when he doesn’t get the suite he knows his mom paid for.

And then there’s my personal fave, Mark Mossbacher (Zahn) of the Rich White Tech LadyBro family, who on the outside, really does appear to have it all: oodles of disposable income, a hot, successful, age-appropriate wife and two gorgeous blonde children. His problems are threefold, however: an infected set of testes, a wife who is far more successful than he is, and the recent discovery that his long-dead idolized father was gay. He gets to deliver the ultimate White Guy’s Lament near the end of season, as a luau performance over dinner reaches its apex behind him:

“Nobody cedes their privilege. That’s absurd. It goes against human nature. We’re all just trying to win the game of life.”

In any other narrative, all of these guys would be in comfortably in control, in charge, no-nonsense masters of their respective domains of work, marriage, and family. But we learn within the first hour that none of these men are actually in control of anything.

Armond is fully clueless to the fact that his new employee is in labor, Shane is clueless as to how miserable his new bride and her boobs are as a direct result of him being a jerk, and Mark’s kids think he’s corny and his wife thinks he’s ineffectual. The hierarchies of which they should perched atop are crumbling beneath them, despite their best efforts, even though none of them really expected to need to put any effort into in the first place. They thought the control would come naturally to them, just like they were always told it would, like it always has been before.

As his own perceived power is proven to be a fiction, thanks to Shane’s bitchassness, Armond goes on a bender that leads him to try to set his whole hierarchy on fire. If he can’t have control over his domain, no one can, and in the end it is the structure itself that crumbles down and crushes him.

Ultimately, these three White Men are fully trapped by Toxic Masculinity but wholly unaware of it, and the rot has already reached many of the unsteady layers beneath them, the people they thought they had control of.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about the White Guys who aren’t on top of any given hierarchy: Mark’s son Quinn Mossbacher (Fred Hechinger) and Dillon (Lukas Gage), a cute surfer employee who lets Armond coerce him with purloined ketamine and more flexible shifts in exchange for analingus that ends up woefully interruptus. In an effort to try to get his own bit of power back, Dillon attempts to mirror the similar extractive coercion Armond lays on him, but only ends up with a barely-eaten booty and still has to come in early the next morning, so womp-womp on Dillon.

And then there’s Quinn, Mark’s son who is alluded to as neurodiverse, but who I think is more likely just a regular teenage Zoomer adrift among screens. There’s been some controversy over Quinn’s escape and entry into Full-Time Island Life, whether that’s a happy ending for him, but I don’t know that it necessarily goes that deep. Quinn sees the wobbly hierarchies he is supposed to inherit start crumbling all around him and simply says, fuck that.

Maybe that’s why I got so drawn into this show — finally, someone showed what the rest of have known for ages: that these goofy ass dudes who are supposed to be in charge of literally the entire world have no idea what they’re doing. The schadenfreude was so good at first, until I realized it’s just sad and ultimately unsurprising.

By no means is The White Lotus a perfect show. There are no men of color on this show who aren’t essentially props or boytoys. There are no real consequences for many of the main White characters in the end; almost all of them wind up on a plane either back to their regular lives of privilege, or hopping islands to another fantasyland designed to cater to them.

Even though it seems like Quinn gets off easy, with his escape from the everyday false hierarchy awaiting him back on the mainland to hang out and row with his new island bros in paradise, he (a Zoomer) still gives me (a Millennial) a little sliver of hope in demonstrating that these hierarchies can rarely ever be changed from the top down. As Mark himself states so plainly, no one cedes their privilege. It’s those on whom the system relies who must be able break out in order to destroy the rotten frameworks and build new ones.

But even that isn’t the whole story — its up to those who have the means to escape to make it easier for those left behind to get free, too. In my head canon, Quinn completes his journey with his row bros and uses that absurd Mossbacher money to work towards indigenous rights organizing and land back for his bros, working quietly in the background and supporting them as they lead. Rachel also stays married to Shane and gets a therapist and uses Shane’s money to finance an investigative exposé on corruption in local school boards that leads all the way up to the Department of Education. And Belinda finally gets her own goddamn spa, and hires on dozens of former Lotus employees with full benefits and paid vacation days.

Usually I hate when shows or movies leave endings too ambiguous or up for interpretation, but for The White Lotus, it works. It has to.