Let Them Eat Lotus Guy Webster Guy Webster is Resident Arts Tutor at St Hilda’s College. An academic and writer living on unceded Wurundjeri land, his work has been published by Overland, Kill Your Darlings, Australian Book Review and The Conversation. His play, Driftwood, has been selected as part of Theatre Work’s Queer Playwriting Showcase to be performed in January next year, and then as part of the Midsummer Festival 2022. He currently plays Plath in Eleven O’Clock theatre’s production of Breaths In Between, and The Dentist for Western Art’s production of Little Shop of Horrors. He is currently finishing his doctorate at The University of Melbourne. He tweets as @guytothewebster. ‘Let them eat lotus’ was originally published in Overland, and is reprinted here with permission. The original can be viewed at this link: https://overland.org.au/2021/09/let-them-eat-lotus/ The mid-season finale of HBO’s recent revival of Gossip Girl (2021) ends with a love triangle unironically staged in the middle of a protest for a housing crisis. Obie (Eli Brown) is a wealthy teenager with a penthouse apartment and some mother issues. Rebuked by his girlfriend and exgirlfriend for not standing up for himself in front of his family – the usual suspects: an aloof CEOmother and Rupert Murdoch-stand in grandfather – he makes the choice to attend a protest against them. Obie’s character-defining decision to stand up against a toxic family-run business conglomerate is a reaction to feeling ashamed of his past behaviour. Shame is the experience of being ‘witnessed in one’s failure’, Sara Ahmed writes in her 2004 essay ‘Shame Before Others’. As a result, it offers the shamed individual the chance to ‘reintegrate … in their moment of failure to live up to a social ideal.’ Obie is given just such an opportunity; to absolve himself of personal shame and so re-join the social group he values. Yet his actions – which are, in effect, an attempt to shame his family – elide his own, potentially shameful, complicity in benefiting from their injustices. When he kisses his ex-girlfriend in a back alley hidden from the police who are attacking protesters (I promise I’m not making this up), one wonders if he’ll return to the penthouse apartment they bought for him. It is telling that a revival of Gossip Girl stages an individual experience of shame-induced self-development against the backdrop of a public shaming
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(‘You People Are Evil’, one protest sign reads). Shame has a powerful capacity to promote self-development, the show seems to say. But, as Sara Ahmed asks, ‘What does it mean to claim identity through shame?’ This question is at the heart of HBO’s continuing investment in shows like Gossip Girl – what Marina Fang describes as ‘Shows About Rich White People Problems’. Mike White’s recent series, The White Lotus is the latest addition to this sub-genre that treats shame as one such problem. Similar to Big Little Lies (2017), Succession (2018 -), The Undoing (2020), and Gossip Girl, The White Lotus (2021) follows a group of wealthy, mostly white, people, this time as they holiday at the luxurious five-star hotel, The White Lotus. Its characters, writer Mike White tells us in a recent interview with The New York Times, ‘live in a bubble of money’. The show emphasises the fragility implied by this image – a threat that the ‘bubble’ might burst at any moment that the show’s characters feel as shame. ‘They’re so defensive’, White continues in his interview, ‘the culture has them on their heels.’ ‘People have been coming for me my whole life’, newlywed Shane (Jake Lacy) complains in Episode 3 after a long day by the hotel pool. ‘I’m just playing the hand I was delt’, he continues. ‘Like yeh, it’s a great hand, but that’s not my fault’. Shane, a white man from a wealthy family, feels that he is being shamed for his privilege, and seeks to absolve himself of it.
