Mainstreaming class (dis)contents in popular film and TV series: HBO’s The White Lotus (S1) and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness

Journal of Class & Culture. 2024. Vol. 3. No. 2. P. 145–162.

Mylonas Y.

The empirical focus of this study is Season 1 of the popular HBO series The White Lotus (2020) and Ruben Östlund’s film Triangle of Sadness (2022), both of which achieved worldwide popularity and critical acclaim. The study draws on narrative analysis, to examine class relations and class subjectivities in these productions. Anchored in today’s highly precarious and competitive neo-liberal capitalist context, with its growing inequalities and crises, these productions tackle different classed selves, relations and circumstances, depicted in both realistic and metaphorical terms. The White Lotus (S1) focuses on the high consumerism, of the White upper-middle class in a lavish gated tourist resort in Hawaii. Departing from profligate consumerist practices the Triangle of Sadness develops a metaphoric setting where social hierarchies are briefly overturned. Humour as a central practice of upper-class exposure and ridiculing is deployed in both productions. The analysis demonstrates that although cynicism and egotism prevail across all class identities, the middle and upper class proves to be resilient to all crises and struggles that appear in the plot, at the expense of the working class. This suggests the lack of a political vision for the working class and the reproduction of middle-class hegemony.

Keywords: popular culture, social class, comedy, class cultures