Few TV series are as iconic as The White Lotus, and Jennifer Coolidge’s performance as the ridiculously exaggerated Tanya has to be amongst the most entertaining of all time. Despite her excessive wealth, outrageous outfits and appalling treatment of her personal assistant Portia, Tanya’s innocence is painfully endearing. This childish, sweet nature is shown most notably in a satire-laced breakfast scene where Tanya describes her “Italian dream” to her husband Greg, elaborately listing extravagant activities that she desperately wants to experience in her “fantasy day”. First, Tanya wants to look “just like Monica Vitti”. Then a man, specifically “in a very slim-fitting suit”, would come over to light her cigarette, which “tastes really good”; an image that oozes the elegance and glamour Tanya so deeply idolises. This man will then take her on a magical Vespa ride, and the day will conclude with a romantic sunset dinner and aperitivi by the sea, eating a huge plate of pasta with giant clams. But most significantly, she wants to feel “chic and happy” and beautiful; a touching and deeply saddening desire when we see Greg’s indifference to Tanya’s visible excitement. Tanya, as always, is dressed in a ridiculously patterned dress, overly made-up, with meticulously blow-dried hair. Coolidge’s intonations hit the right comedic note, and her enthusiastic but wildly incorrect pronunciation of “aperitivi” laughably highlights her as the stereotype of rich American ignorance.
However, and most interestingly, everything that Tanya lists off are material things to be bought and consumed; even the mysterious male companion is mainly defined by his “slim-fitting suit”. These are all objects that she can drive or smoke or eat or touch, and she believes that by absorbing their commercial nutrients into her very flesh, they will make her feel glamorous and elegant and, most importantly, happy. It is this materialistic focus that makes all the characters in The White Lotus so viscerally odious; their careless disregard for people and money — sometimes equating the two together — which ultimately leads to the deaths around which the series are centred. They seem to believe that money can buy their own happiness, but they instead seem to be deeply sad and troubled. With the exception of Tanya, of course; despite her tragic end we can find comfort in the fact that in the end she lived out her dream, and maybe for a second she did feel just like Monica Vitti in her own version of La Dolce Vita.
Illustration by Lucy Wellington @lucywelli