White Lotus's My Fair Lady Ending

"White Lotus" reminds us that fiction's fixation with class hierarchy is not dead

Some attitudes should sail off into the sunset (Source: Piqsels)

Because my spouse and I love to watch cycling, we were forced to buy the streaming service called "Max." I'll briefly complain about the Warner Brothers corporation buying and killing Eurosport Premium and moving the cycling coverage to an add-on to Max (formerly HBO). Thus, for what we were paying $60 a year, we now have to pay $150 a year. Corporatism.

Anyway, though we bought Max only to watch the cycling, it does give us access to the HBO back catalog. Very little of that is of any interest to us, but my spouse was curious about the show White Lotus, and I had heard some good things about it, so we gave it a try.

Spoiler alert. For those who haven't watched the show, you may want to skip this paragraph. We just finished Season 1 last night. The show has been billed as a social satire, and it made clear from the very beginning that it was a morality play looking at the gap between the rich and the working class with some added treatment of attitudes toward women.

Honestly, the conclusion of the show disgusted and angered me. The show ended with a very clear message: rich people win and can get away with anything, including ruining other individuals' lives and even killing them, without facing any consequences, while working people can only hope to please the rich enough to not get hurt too badly. This endorsement of class hierarchy was hammered home by the starkly different fates the show creator/writer meted out to the main female characters at the end of Season 1 - -the rich women getting what they wanted, the working women getting manipulated and used.

Two Eliza Doolittles

The ending of White Lotus reminded me instantly of the whitewashing that My Fair Lady inflicted on Pygmalion. George Bernard Shaw wrote the play Pygmalion in 1913 as a social satire on class and attitudes toward women. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote My Fair Lady as a Broadway musical in 1956. The musical adopted the same characters and basic plot of Pygmalion, adding songs of course, but drastically altering the ending of the story and the fates of the characters.
Spoiler alert. The central character in both the play and the musical is Eliza Doolittle, a working-class flower girl in 1913 London. In both the play and the musical, she falls in with two upper-class gentlemen, Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering, who originally treat Eliza as the object of a bet as to whether Higgins, a phonetician, can teach Eliza to speak and act like an upper-class lady. Higgins does teach her how to speak like a lady, but he turns Eliza into his personal servant and treats her with condescension and disregard.

To make a long story short, Shaw ends the play, Pygmalion, with a scene in which Eliza stands up to the abusive, condescending Higgins, refusing to remain his servant. She has found refuge with Higgins's mother, who is appalled by her son using Eliza for his own vain pursuits. Pickering also has come to condemn Higgins's treatment of Eliza and sides with her, the three of them confronting Higgins. The curtain falls on Eliza, accompanied by Higgins's mother and Pickering, walking away from a stunned, chastened Higgins.

In sharp, stark contrast in My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe rewrite the scene at the home of Higgins's mother. Eliza makes only a muted complaint to Higgins, receives much less support from Higgins's mother and Pickering, and it is Higgins who walks away and goes home, vowing the Eliza will come back to him. Lerner and Loewe then added a new scene in which Higgins has returned to his home and we see Eliza come back to him. Higgins hears her enter the room and simply says, "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?"

Going Backward

Eliza becomes an independent woman in Pygmalion but a servant in My Fair Lady. It's a disturbing regression of the status of class and women from the 1913 play to the 1956 musical.

There are, in 2021's White Lotus, characters somewhat analogous to Eliza and Higgins. The 2021 TV show ends with a My Fair Lady plot line. That would be bad enough but with every single character in White Lotus, there is a similar move by the writer toward using that character to tacitly endorse class hierarchy.

Perhaps Shaw's 1913 Pygmalion reflected and endorsed the women's suffrage movement of that time. Perhaps the 1956 My Fair Lady reflected and endorsed the feminine mystique of woman as homemaker asserted in that time. Perhaps 2021's White Lotus reflects and endorses the "anti-woke" backlash of our time.

Indeed, White Lotus makes multiple swipes at progressive attitudes and subtly ridicules those who desire a less hierarchical society. True, the show does portray some of the rich people as self-absorbed pigs, but it also portrays those working people who want more respect as misguided, overly idealistic fools. At the end of Season 1, the rich people are all better off and the working people have each lost something important to them.

All in all, I was pretty disgusted by the regressive classism and sexism of the show, at least in Season 1. Maybe things get less awful in Season 2, but I'm no longer interested. If I want to see such condescension and tragedy, I'll watch the news.