Every Sunday, you turn the volume up on your television all the way and grind to the absolute bop that is season two of The White Lotus’ opening credit theme. You’ve been so lost in dance during the opening credits that you probably haven’t even noticed that they contain clues and subtle hints at what’s to come in the very horny and very good season.
The credits, designed by Katrina Crawford and Mark Bashore of the creative studio agency Plains of Yonder, have three parts, or chapters, that tell their own story and mirror the season. The beginning is just like the beginning of the season: idyllic Italian art. Then as the music escalates, the images get more menacing. When the music escalates even more the images get even more graphic and weird. Here’s how it was described to Fast Company:
“The first chapter paints an idyllic portrait of Italy set against an operatic voice singing over a harp. Then gears shift and a digitized version of the familiar White Lotus theme song kicks in, bringing some illustrations to life, like feathers being plucked off in a bird fight, or ominous shadows slowly rolling over the paintings. Then the soundtrack bursts into a ‘sweaty dance beat,’ as Bashore puts it, and any sense of politeness is thrown out of the picture. There’s a blow job scene on the beach, two goats mounting, a man stabbing a boar, and a representation of a naked woman being mounted by a swan, much like in Greek mythology, where Leda is raped by Zeus disguised as a swan. Not what you’d expect from a Renaissance painting, is it?”
The designers, who read the scripts for the entire season and therefore know how it ends, told Fast Company that the images that appear on screen with the actors’ names also have meaning. For example, Aubrey Plaza’s name appears next to a pair of fighting birds, which suggests that there’s tension within her marriage. Simona Tabasco’s name appears alongside a cat with a dead bird in its mouth, which Crawford says depicts her as a “gorgeous predator [who is] also hunting to survive.” Meghann Fahy’s name is beside a painting of two babies, representing her character Daphne’s two children. In the first season’s opening credits, Jennifer Coolidge’s name appeared with a monkey. This season she’s still a monkey, but it is chained to a blonde woman trapped in a castle. So if you look closely enough, you might be able to figure out exactly what happens in season two of The White Lotus, or at the very least, get a sense of every character’s essence.
(Via Fast Company)
