This time it's all about westerner's all-inclusive getaways—and the ideological baggage the characters as well as the viewers bring with them. But does anybody care about the places they visit and the workers?
In our third English podcast episode, we travel to The White Lotus Season 3 (US 2025) and revisit the early-2000s Austrian cult comedy Poppitz (AT 2002), each set in a more or less luxury holiday resort, each revealing just as much about its vacationers as it does about the place and the viewer it/him/her/*self. But what exactly lies beneath the beach towels and palm trees? With a focus on gender, whiteness, and class, we unpack the fantasies, projections, and power imbalances embedded in these two very different, yet surprisingly resonant, resort narratives.
Our analysis builds on diverse-feminist film readings and digs into how The White Lotus and Poppitz render masculinity in crisis, exoticize their local contexts, and reproduce—or subtly question—privileged perspectives.
Key questions in this episode include: What does it mean when white, Western characters escape to the Global South—or to a fictional place similar to Tunisia, in the Austrian imagination? What labor remains invisible in these glossy resorts, and who is allowed to desire, to complain, to act out?
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We are sorry for the bad sound quality of Bianca's track!
