Satires like White Lotus backfire: They make us want to be rich too

In two short, fabulous seasons, The White Lotus has become the first legitimate cult classic TV franchise of the 2020s. The HBO show sets a new high bar for noir comedy by playing a clever sleight of hand. Set amidst ludicrously luxurious holiday resorts – first in Hawaii, now Sicily – it catches the highest earning one per cent at their tensest, in the summer fortnight they should be most relaxed.

Flashing barely-thumbed, intellectually-approved paperbacks on sun-loungers, peering over Tom Ford sunglasses, quaffing daytime cocktails and dining in exquisite splendour beside perfect orange sunsets, the residents of The White Lotus are aspiration itself. Look what money could buy us! This gorgeous confection of chic service, matching Goyard luggage, spa services and sex on tap is the ultimate, irresistible holiday package. If only we, too, were brushing shoulders with billionaires.

As each season progresses, a smartly observed, psychedelic tension builds, cameras distorting the beautiful people slowly into grotesques. Neurotic nerves jangle. Impotent businessmen talk dreary dick-swinging shop. Perfectly lovely children reveal themselves to be dope-dependent sociopaths. Doormen get harassed, sex workers abused, concierges left to clean up appalling messes. Money categorically cannot buy love, is the message, but it could buy you this fiasco.

The White Lotus is not the first contemporary art to satirise the super-rich, though it may yet turn out to be the best. As the wealth chasm expands in full, unpoliced view, it is very much a 21st century trope. The sweary media baron smash, Succession became a temperature gauge for the gene pool. This year’s independent summer cinema hit, Triangle of Sadness, placed high-grossing influencers next to arms dealers at the same dinner table of a six-star yacht, before setting storms and piracy to do their dirty work against them. Frank Ocean’s laconic takedown of Super Rich Kids is a decade old. In the same time, Drake has fashioned a niche as the most popular rapper on the planet by musing mostly about how awful life is at the top.

From the cheap seats, this is comfort viewing. We get to laugh at the people we presume, correctly, are sneering at us. Yet while enjoying every one and waiting with bated breath for The White Lotus finale, I wonder how much depth of purpose this satire really serves, beyond entertainment?

Why do I watc them wishing I was wealthier? Frankly, the closer a comedy gets to skewering the lives of the rich, the more surface attractive their lives look. After The White Lotus, I idle through flashy websites for holidays in Sicily.

These characters might be ghastly but wouldn’t we do wealth a little differently? The Machiavellian madness at the top still looks like a safer bet than the unique sadness at the bottom. The conundrum of laughing at the super rich is ultimately the same as before these brilliant dramas. Given the chance, I still harbour the tiniest of hopes of swapping places with the whole deplorable lot of them.

Stanley Kowalski, that blueprint for toxic masculinity in A Streetcar Named Desire, is soon to come back to the London stage in the form of Normal Person, Paul Mescal. The Irish actor has moved gently in the past year from highly promising newcomer, in the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, to one of his generation’s brightest young hopes, after his tearjerking turn in another holiday drama, Aftersun.

An actor of Mescal’s acute sensitivities taking on Tennessee Williams’s handsome brute is a tantalising stage proposition. The cult of Kowalski, set in stone by Marlon Brando in the screen role which first sparked his phenomenon, never really dies. The character Williams drew to make flesh the idea of being attracted to the thing we most despise needs a great actor. A tenner says Mescal slays it.