The White Lotus, The Menu, and Andor and political praxis
The lives (and deaths) of the 1 percent, plus the backlash against the Star Wars show
Hello!
On this week’s episode of Criticism Is Dead, we discuss The White Lotus season 2 and The Menu, two works highlighting the relationship between those who serve and those who take from the silver platter.
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02:39 The White Lotus’s second season, streaming on HBO Max, is even better than the first, poking with a sharper, slyer stick at sex, power, and gender dynamics.
The White Lotus is many things, but it is, above all, fun as hell. This season is no different, although perhaps even more fun than the first. There is a greater sense of place, between the larger roles of some locals and the various guests’ forays out from the resort. The messiness of the characters’ relationships with each other is also more finely tuned, dialed up to a level of prestige soap that is so salacious to watch.
23:01 The Menu, currently in theaters, sufficiently skewers foodie culture and fine-dining fetishism, but fails to cut as deeply elsewhere.
The Menu is not a bad film. It’s funny where it needs to be, makes you jump in your seat at least once (if not at every single sound of a clap), and is certainly entertaining enough to watch with a chuckling, gasping crowd. But there is a kind of toothlessness to its particular brand of class-resentment satire, dulled by broadness and storytelling shortcuts. Still, the cast — Ralph Fiennes as an all-commanding chef, Hong Chau as his steely deputy, and Nicholas Hoult as an annoying food obsessive — is mostly fantastic. (Just wish the same could be said for its lead! oop)
37:58 Plus, culture notes about Andor, which has found itself in the middle of a squabble on the left about mass-culture art and revolutionary politics.
We say some stuff about it in the episode, much of which can be summed up as:
This, by Van Jackson, is a good write-up about the conflict and how it relates more broadly to different strands of leftist thought when it comes to pop culture and cultural consumption as part of the strategic political playbook.
Bonus links
Great Tony Gilroy interview about Andor and its influences in Vulture.
tbh I have not been reading or doing much else in the past week, so please forgive me for the lack of links. We’ll try again next time. Thank you and see you next week!
— Jenny
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Some credits:
Music: REEKAH
Artwork and design: Sara Macias and Andrew Liu