White Lotus meaning: Unlike Taylor Swift and true crime, sometimes stories can be just that Loading 3rd party ad content Loading 3rd party ad content Loading 3rd party ad content Loading 3rd party ad content

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What do Taylor Swift, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and true crime have in common? Thanks to their massive popularity and monopolisation of the zeitgeist over the past decade, each is playing an increasingly unhealthy role in training audiences to view every new piece of culture as a Cluedo-esque case to be cracked by decoding Easter eggs and over-analysing microdetails – even when there is no mystery to solve.

Take the latest season of The White Lotus, for example, which concluded on Monday. The show’s creator, Mike White, has always been clear that the series isn’t intended to be a murder mystery, and the presence of a dead body in each season’s opening episode is basically a trick to hook a true-crime-addicted populace into watching. But even though he’s explicit about this, and even though the death in the first season ended up being an accidental tragedy, we couldn’t help ourselves when it came to round two.

Characters from season two of The White Lotus.Credit:HBO/Binge

We turned a sharp, social satire on the nature of class and sex into a kind of prestige Lost, hunting for clues that didn’t exist, making up outlandish theories and convincing ourselves that the most obvious outcome couldn’t possibly be the real outcome because it was too predictable. On one hand, it was all a bit of harmless fun and made for enjoyable water-cooler conversations and a series of increasingly deranged TikToks. But it’s also reflective of a very specific mode of cultural consumption where we strip away subtext and ambiguity in favour of “solving of the puzzle”.

The dominance of true crime is the most obvious culprit here. From podcasts to documentaries and dramatised re-enactments, the genre has swallowed up almost every medium in pop culture. And we don’t just passively watch, listen to or read true-crime stories any more. We create Facebook groups and Reddit threads to discuss theories and identify suspects. When there’s an actual mystery or murder case to solve, this kind of thing is understandable. Even if listeners are unlikely to actually figure out what happened to Serial’s Hae Min Lee, or if an owl really was the culprit in The Staircase, there’s a natural instinct to get together and debate. But now it feels like we can’t distinguish between the pieces of culture that warrant this sort of interrogation and those that don’t.

Enter Taylor Swift, the only phenomenon of the past decade who has come close to matching true crime in terms of cultural superiority. Swift has trained audiences to hunt for, and then decode, clues and Easter eggs scattered across her work. What does a dollar bill in the bathtub mean? Why is the throne made of snakes? Does the number of lines in the chorus relate to the release date of the next album?

This isn’t something fans just decided to do – it’s something Swift asks of them, and it has become as big a part of her art as the music itself.

Even if you aren’t part of the Taylor Swift Extended Universe, you have almost definitely stumbled into a similar situation with the biggest film franchise of all time: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After 30 films and half-a-dozen TV shows, Marvel has also trained its audience to be on the constant hunt of references, hidden messages and post-credit sequences that allude to bigger mysteries. Entire characters and story arcs won’t make sense unless you’ve decoded the second mid-credit sequence in a Marvel TV show only true die-hard fans watch.

Taylor Swift is renowned for leaving clues for her fans in her songs and music videos.

Taylor Swift is renowned for leaving clues for her fans in her songs and music videos.Credit:Getty Images

Again, this kind of audience-as-detective approach isn’t a terrible thing when it’s limited to music, film or TV that demands it. But after a decade of near hegemony from the axis of true crime, Taylor Swift, and The Avengers, it’s seeped into everything else. References to classic cinema are now interpreted through a lens of “What does this tell us about who is going to die?” Subtext and allusion is no longer about gaining a more profound understanding of character motivation, or what this particular TV show or film tells us about society, but is instead a clue in a mystery that doesn’t even exist.

The whole conceit of The White Lotus is an acknowledgement of how unable we are to process anything outside the frame of a crime mystery. We literally had to be tricked into watching it.

True crime, Taylor and Marvel can set up as many Agatha Christie-style puzzles to solve as they like. But we still need art that does something other than present a mystery. Engaging with themes, ideas and characters that challenge our perception of the world around can be as satisfying as playing Sherlock Holmes.