No Spoilers Ahead
The Call Her Daddy podcast and Mike White’s HBO show The White Lotus are two of the pre-eminent cultural touchstones in my life. I think about both daily. On Wednesday, when ‘Daddy’ Alex Cooper announced her ostentatious wedding to the world via a Vogue exclusive, a connection between the productions dawned on me. For those who lead a more sheltered life, I will begin by explaining both phenomena.
The Call Her Daddy brand was launched in 2018. In the early days, it was a sex-oriented comedy show hosted by Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn. The girls fast-tracked to podcast stardom with controversial maxims like the ‘cheat on him!’ chant and ‘If you’re a five or six you’ve got to die for that dick’, trailblazing a brand of college girl vulgarity. In the past six years, Alex Cooper has undergone a monumental rebrand, booting out her co-host for the ‘single father era’ and transferring from Barstool Sports to Spotify (for $60 million) to become a ‘serious’ celebrity interviewer. Her recent guests range from Jane Fonda to Jack Harlow. Previously renowned for a string of athlete boyfriends Alex met the film and TV producer Matt Kaplan in 2020. After a very public engagement, the pair shared their wedding festivities on Wednesday.
In other news, White Lotus writer Mike White recently told Vanity Fair that the third series of his social satire will be “longer, bigger, crazier.” Seasons one and two charted the interactions of guests at two different all-inclusive White Lotus Hotels. Both begin with a dead body floating in the sea before cutting back to the guests’ arrival a week prior. Infidelity, status, flaunted wealth, and a sinister relationship with the setting are consistent themes across all episodes.
With each season, Mike White focuses on a mode of power transactions compatible with the new holiday location. Season one honed in on class divides, examining the staff-guest relationships and the desecration of Hawaiian traditions at the Kihei resort. The second season, set on a glamorous Sicilian coastline, emphasised sex and intimacy as instruments of control. White has teased that the “supersized” third season which was filmed in Bangkok, phu*ket, and Koh Samui last year may centre around religion and the occult. Fans have been primed for surprises, celebrity appearances, and bumper episodes but will have to wait until mid-2025 for the new series to stream on HBO. I propose that they might satisfy their impatience by joining me in an analysis of why the Cooper-Kaplan wedding is so White Lotus coded that it could be mistaken for White’s long-awaited third season.
“We wanted to choose a destination that was private, romantic, and felt like a vacation for not only us but all of our guests”
The destination wedding in Mexico’s Maya Riviera is an ideal premise. Despite his 5-star formula, White has insisted that a third season won’t solidify the narrative pattern of the first two. The collision of friends and family for the ceremony adds a new dimension without disturbing the show’s foundations. White has explained that the energy of his show stems from “self-created problems” adding that “romance is the definition of a self-created problem.” Alex Cooper and her fiancé have amassed enough wealth, fame, and status to keep organic problems at bay for a lifetime, making the underbelly of their first-world wedding week an ideal linchpin to the third season. Matt Kaplan is a first-marriage divorcee (he served his ex-wife separation papers the day before their first wedding anniversary) which lends a cynicism and impermanence quintessential to The White Lotus brand.
Guests of White Lotus Hotels do not bother themselves with their destination’s culture. Having flown from their home state to Hawaii or Sicily they will happily laze by an anonymous pool and dine in the same hotel restaurant every night. Engagement with the locality is a redeeming quality that Mike White reserves for choice characters in his deeply unlikeable ensembles. This is a show about image-oriented white people who carry their worlds around the globe in monogrammed luggage. To draw the comparison succinctly, Alex Cooper and Matt Kaplan brought their golden doodles with them to be ring bearers. It is a camp detail but indicates how easily they shaded Mexico with their Beverly Hills home life. Even a performative engagement with Mexican culture (such as fish tacos and tequila-based co*cktails at the reception) was avoided. As Alex told Vogue “We served our favorite, espresso martinis, featuring our initials.”
In the interview Cooper bangs on and on about wanting to wear off-white rather than pure white, oblivious to the irony of her reformed virgin status. Having planned an “intimate family wedding” she walked down an aisle that was oriented towards her guests (“like a runway!”) flanked by a Vogue photographer. White Lotus characters embody dichotomies. Alex Cooper’s image is the engine of her media empire and her well-documented transition from self-fashioned slu*t to Vogue bride opens up a world of contradictions that befit a Mike White heroine. If the essence of each season rests in a different, irony-inducing power-based theme then media, and the assets it can attract in the influencer space, would be a logical development for season three.
The focus on media and its power also offers up a meta aspect. Cooper has credited her husband for planning the entire wedding, insisting that “As a producer, Matt’s specialty is planning and visualising and bringing things to life.” The wedding trip was orchestrated with the camera in mind, every shot prepared professionally for the fans’ gaze. Kaplan becomes a producer and a character at once, straddling a strange real/nonreal divide much like Mike White’s decision to include his surname in the title of his fictional hotel chain. This breaking of the fourth wall is in line with season three’s promise of “longer, bigger, crazier.”
I was only expecting a few friends to join in, but to my complete shock almost the entire wedding took charge to the ocean. Parents, grandparents, family and friends.”
The final Vogue slides show the newlyweds and their guests drunkenly charging into the ocean in celebration, their designer clothes flung calculatedly for the photographer. It is as if we are watching the final moments of Alex Cooper’s life before her Madonna/whor* body is found floating in the waves of an episode one flashback. Kaplan’s permeation of the fourth wall only intensifies this perverseness; it is hardly a spoiler to note that when staying at a White Lotus, marriage means very little and husbands are not to be trusted. This crossover offers exactly what Mike White wants from his third season of The White Lotus, perhaps what he doesn’t even know he wants. Or, to reign it in a little, the Cooper-Kaplan wedding would function as the perfect subliminal publicity parallel if White were to hire Kaplan’s production team for the Thailand season.
A Letter from the Editors:
We would like to inform our readers that we have suffered a very destructive fire in The Mundaneum Offices which we are currently treating as arson. This accounts for the current sparsity of publications and the descent of this piece, which was at one point meant to be amusing. We considered launching monetised content to address the fire damage but then our chief journalist took work elsewhere as an unpaid and unacknowledged intern for Mike White.
