Tropical Kabuki? Considering the production of The White Lotus’s assumed vernacular

HBO’s The White Lotus (2021), is a six-part series, written and directed by Mike White, set amongst the guests and staff of an upmarket tourist resort in Hawaii. At the beginning of the series the white American hotel’s manager tells a Native Hawaiian trainee to blend into the background and not be a distraction – to perform “tropical kabuki”. This chapter considers how composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score refuses to perform that kind of disappearing act. De Veer draws on aspects of Hawaiian music as well as Ba-Benzélé Pygmy music to construct a provocative, distinctive “assumed vernacular”, to use ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin’s phrase. If, as Slobin suggests, composers are like ethnomusicologists of the human societies represented on screen, de Veer is one with a wry approach to issues of representation and ethnomusicological accuracy – the unusual music, constructed from pitch-shifted singing voices, African and Latin percussion and guttural chants, seems to taunt the pampered, entitled guests and mock their existential crises. In this chapter I consider how having to work fast and spontaneously within a tightly compressed production schedule can be advantageous (in contrast to the more commonly heard complaints made by screen composers about not having enough time). I also discuss how de Veer originally created the distinctive sampled vocal hook of the title sequence by accident for Kanye West – the brief from West had nothing to do with Hawaii but something to do with a Nike sneaker. I conclude by considering how the resulting narrative work performed by the music is enriched and complicated by its production origins, and what it all reveals about contemporary screen music approaches.