The Leisure Class Always Wins
Midway through The White Lotus, Mike White’s acerbic satire on HBO, the socialite mother of a guy on his honeymoon pays her son and new daughter-in-law a surprise visit. The drop-in is partly the result of her inability to stop meddling in her son’s life. It is mostly the result, however, of her desire to see the newlyweds installed in the room she booked for them: a suite with a private patio and a plunge pool. The so-named Pineapple Suite occasions an escalating rivalry between Shane, the indignant honeymooner, and Armond, the resort manager who mistakenly assigned the room to another couple but refuses to admit his error. The space—Shane’s drive to occupy it, Armond’s need to squelch Shane’s desire—quickly adopts almost mythic proportions. And last night’s finale revealed the ridiculous room to be both the setting and the cause of the death that loomed as a mystery from the show’s first episode: Shane, with the carving knife, in the Pineapple Suite.
In The White Lotus, architecture often works as its own strain of satire. And one of the jokes about the Pineapple Suite is how undeserving it is of all the melodramatic Darwinism. Shane’s mother is right: The place is lousy with สล็อต pineapples. It is furnished with pineapple throw pillows and pineapple lamps and pineapple curtains. It is decorated with a hot-pink portrait of a pineapple. The bathroom features a porcelain pineapple placed
