*Spoilers for The White Lotus Season 2
“Men love The Godfather because they feel emasculated by modern society. It's a fantasy about a time when they could go out and solve all their problems with violence, and sleep with every woman, and then come home to their wife who doesn't ask them any questions and makes them pasta.”
As season three of Mike White’s The White Lotus airs each week, I find my thoughts increasingly returning to the genius that was season two. Set at a luxury hotel off the coast of Italy, the characters in season two of the anthology series are nothing short of dynamic and scandalous. Two college roommates—one of old money and one of new—embark on a couple’s vacation with their wives—seemingly total opposites of each other, one a domestic housewife and the other a civil rights lawyer. The pitiable heiress Tanya McQuoid returns from season one with her new husband, Greg, and her young assistant. Two Italian hookers evade the watchful eye of the no-nonsense hotel manager. However, out of all these characters, I found myself struck by the most stagnant, mainstream narrative of all: Three generations of men—grandfather Bert Di Grasso, father Dominic Di Grasso, and son Albie Di Grasso—find themselves reckoning with patriarchy, masculinity, and intergenerational trauma as they investigate their Italian roots in Sicily.
The Di Grasso story in The White Lotus season two is raw and instantly relatable for anyone who has experienced infidelity in the family, especially at the hands of a father figure. Yet, it is the way that the three men handle their family situation, carefully marked by their generational divides, that highlights the smoke and mirrors belying the modern narrative of “masculinity under attack.”
Dominic Di Grasso is portrayed as a stoic, wealthy businessman; yet, it is revealed early in the series that he is a cad and borderline sex addict. During an early scene, he calls his wife alone in his hotel room, where she screams obscenities at him over the phone alluding to his infidelity, while he looks on silently and incredulously. Shortly after, he sleeps with one of the hookers and arranges with the suspicious hotel manager for her and her friend to “come visit him” throughout the week. Meanwhile, his father, Bert Di Grasso, outright sexually harasses young women around the hotel, seemingly with no self-awareness of his old age, repulsiveness, or perverted comments. Additionally, it is revealed later on that he not-so-subtly cheated on his wife throughout Dominic’s childhood.
Albie Di Grasso, on the other hand, is a Stanford-educated, stereotypical “nice guy” who is constantly preaching to his father and grandfather about how to be an enlightened man in the 21st century. Yet, upon pursuing Tanya’s young assistant Portia and failing to charm her—seemingly in his mind due to his “nice guy” demeanor—he ends up sleeping with the very hooker that his dad has been with throughout the vacation.
Albie Di Grasso represents the crux of masculine persecution complexes in our current day. As he stumbles through interactions with his romantic interests, regurgitates feminist theory, and navigates the Italian hotel with a sometimes endearing, sometimes annoying, naivety, the viewer cannot help but feel bad for him. It is clear that Albie even feels bad for himself, confused by Portia’s rejection of him in favor of a crude, misogynistic British frat guy. However, Albie’s “nice guys finish last” narrative is a smartly crafted deception.
For Albie, actions speak louder than words, and his actions, though mundane and presented as insignificant, reveal a portrait of a man of the same moral character as his father and grandfather in many respects. For one: Why does Albie come on this trip with his father to begin with? The Di Grasso men allude to Albie’s sister several times, revealing that she did not come on the trip out of loyalty to her mother and disbelief at her father. Albie, on the other hand, presents himself as “caught between” his parents in the situation, understanding his father to some extent (although the events of the season give little reason to feel empathy toward Dominic’s self-destructive, self-serving tendencies), yet still disappointed in him. However, Albie only confronts his father directly about his infidelity in sparse moments in the show, while the rest of their vacation operates on a “need-to-know basis.” As such, while Albie may appear a “pro-woman” enlightened man, his mere presence on the trip exposes that his loyalties, at the end of the day, do not lie with women—let alone the women in his family.
Albie’s immediate pivot, after being rejected by Portia for hooking up with Lucia, an Italian prostitute, further contradicts his “nice guy feminist” demeanor, even as he continues to justify his actions through a performatively empathetic “understanding” of Lucia’s unfortunate situation. Albie does not realize that Lucia is a prostitute until after they sleep together and she asks him for payment; however, he continues to pay her for additional sex afterward, all the while proclaiming that he is going to “save her” from exploitation. Lucia fully takes advantage of this, lying to Albie about a man who stalks her and takes all her money. Assuming that Lucia is falling in love with him because he is such a good guy, Albie begs his father to let him wire her a large sum of money. When his father—who also slept with Lucia—refuses, Albie tells him that he will “put a good word in with Mom” for him. His father allows it and, at the end of the show, receives a much more pleasant call from his wife, having successfully manipulated her despite sleeping with prostitutes throughout the entire vacation.
Albie’s actions, although being carefully masked under the guise of his naivety in helping a sex worker “escape her situation” (without accounting for any of her own agency), decidedly place him in the same camp of intergenerational misogynist as his father and grandfather. He abandons the women in his family for a woman who slept with him (for money) on a vacation in Italy. At the end of the show, it is clear to Albie, and perhaps unclear to some viewers, that he still thinks of himself as a feminist—as one of the “good guys.” Many Albies walk among us in today’s generation of performative feminist men who lack the empathy or emotional intelligence to be both feminist in their preaching and in their actions. However, men like Albie, perhaps on account of doing the bare minimum, remain at large with little pushback from society.
In one of the final scenes of the season, the three men leer at a pretty young woman at the airport, turning their heads in a slow-mo succession shot as she walks past. This is perhaps the clearest signal from the show’s writers that Albie’s subversive narrative was intentional and that they, too, recognize him as a scumbag, just like the father and grandfather. In a post-canonical epilogue of The White Lotus season two (that we will never get on account of the show’s existence as an anthology series), Albie might have become jaded by his “nice guys finish last penalty,” potentially morphing into the hoard of Elon Muskian incels that are being platformed today. However, if season two of The White Lotus succeeds at one thing, it is ingeniously calling attention to the hypocrisy of performative feminism among modern men in the 21st century.
