In the crew: airman Garzone, flight controller and single mom Clapp, ordnanceman and worried husband Altice.
Carrier: a virtuoso mural of characters aboard
Originally published in Current, April 21, 2008
Critique by Louis Barbash
The first thing that should be said about Carrier, which will premiere on public TV Sunday, April 27, is that it is very good.
The second thing is that its advance publicity is only partially accurate. Largely as advertised in press materials, it is “a character-driven immersion in the high-stakes world of a nuclear aircraft carrier . . . follow[ing] a core group of film participants . . . as they navigate personal conflicts...”
Contrary to the press release, however, the series shot aboard the U.S.S. Nimitz is not “a raw and personal look at the Navy’s role in this controversial war [in Iraq].” And it is not “Top Gun as Frederick Wiseman would have directed it” or a “floating variation on Wiseman’s High School,” as a public TV executive and a producer enthused in Current reports.
Much of Carrier’s virtuosity is attributable to its 10-hour length and its fast but never-rushed pace. It takes full advantage of the 500 or so minutes at its disposal, but the programs never drag.
Well, hardly ever. The ninth and tenth programs, “Get Home-itis” and “Full Circle,” could be accurately renamed “The Long Goodbye.” Yet even these last episodes are punctuated with affecting moments as Nimitz crew members complete their six-month deployment and leave their seaborne home.
I say “home” because the glimpses we get of their lives with their families and friends suggest that, for many crew members, their life away from the carrier is the fleeting and temporary experience, while the Nimitz is the place to which they return.
Only such an extensive series would have room for what is one of Carrier’s best-crafted and most exciting passages: a 12-minute sequence (without a dull second) in program 7, “Rites of Passage,” in which Nimitz pilots try again and again to land their jets on the carrier’s violently pitching deck in a choppy sea, at night, as their fuel is running out, only to have to pull up at the last minute, overfly the deck and come around to try again.
This mural of a series has time for numerous closely observed and finely paced sketches of continuing characters — and for further illumination in return appearances. We meet, for example, Chris Altice, an enlisted man whose girlfriend learned she was pregnant just before he went to sea; he spends the cruise oscillating between elation about his impending fatherhood and worrying that another man has already replaced him in her affections.
Another enlisted man, Christian Garzone, appears frequently, using his own video camera to create and star in a video within a video about life on the Nimitz. We get to see Ensign Susan Clapp, 20 years in the Navy, as the Nimitz’s unflappable air traffic controller and also as a mother who frets about having to leave her three young children with her ex-husband, who uses his temporary custody of them to push her buttons.
We meet other Nimitz crew members we’d gladly see more of: an enlisted man from the South professes his own racism, frequently and at length, although he seems to get along well with his African American shipmates. The Navy finally takes him at his word and gives him a less-than-honorable discharge, and he flies home quite happily.
Another enlisted man’s superiors build him up as having a great future in the Navy, but that future apparently sinks out of sight after he and a female shipmate are discovered — we’re not told how —i n flagrante during a liberty. We never see them again. On a ship with 4,000 men and 1,000 women, can this be the only incident of fraternization during the six-month cruise? Another enlisted man talks movingly about having to hide his sexual orientation in the don’t-ask/don’t-tell Navy. We never hear from him again, either. And whatever happens to the pilot who almost ran out of fuel flying over Iraq and is placed on desk duty? Does he ever get to fly again? Even a 10-hour series has room for only so many characters.
The producers of Carrier might have found room for more character sketches by reducing or eliminating the video-music-and-graphics sequences, which are as upbeat as recruiting videos, that punctuate the series, especially near the beginning.
- “There’s zero tolerance for racism,” intones an off-camera voice in program 4, over smooth jazz reminiscent of Kenny G or Spyro Gyra. The music continues under a series of shots of shipmates-from-different-walks-of-life working together, and other off-camera voices continue: “You have to take that part of you and leave it back there in the civilian, because you’re here to do a bigger job; you’re here to defend your country. . . . The camaraderie and the bonds that you build with people is unmatched.”
- “Teamwork,” “teamwork,” “teamwork,” repeat four boxed talking heads that fly onto the screen to form a neat square. “If there wasn’t a team atmosphere here,” says one of them, “there would be anarchy all over the boat.”
Carrier imports to a PBS documentary the conventions of TV drama made for adults 25-34 by opening and closing its episodes with evocative montages set to a wide variety of popular music, almost always well-tuned emotionally.
There’s nothing wrong with this convention as long as the producers intend the effect they achieve — putting their authorial stamp of approval, not only on the scenes they are showing, but on the institution and culture they are reporting on.
This is one of a number of ways in which Carrier is different from anything Frederick Wiseman has done.
There are similarities on the surface. The title Carrier is short and generic like Wiseman’s High School, Primate, Welfare, Zoo and so many more. Like Wiseman films, Carrier has no narration and required months of shooting in the setting that is its subject.
But at its root, Carrier is very different from Wiseman’s films. It is in color; almost all of Wiseman’s films have been in black and white. Wiseman adds no music; Carrier uses so much that an “executive music producer” rates a credit on the DVD. Carrier is, by its own description, character-driven. Wiseman’s films show people, of course, but he doesn’t let characters take control; he pursues his desire to understand institutions and their effects on people involved with them. No one speaks to the camera in Wiseman’s films; produced to-camera testimony is a staple of Carrier.
In Wiseman’s films, the absence of these production elements strips away much of the artifice that obscures the institutions from viewers—to the degree possible, anyway, in a film that runs shorter than life. Carrier, by contrast, uses artifice freely, skillfully and to great effect.
Similarly, and despite its claims, Carrier does not deliver on its claim to be about the Nimitz’s “deployment to the Persian Gulf.” Nor does it take “a raw and personal look at the Navy’s role in this controversial war.”
The war in Iraq is not absent from Carrier, but it’s not the series’ subject, either. The Nimitz does indeed travel from its home port in San Diego to the Persian Gulf and back again, and it does spend two months in the Persian Gulf. But its sailors see no combat; the closest they come to the war is to rescue Iraqis whose small boat capsized. Nimitz pilots fly sorties over Iraq, but none requires dropping any bombs, which frustrates a number of aviators. (In this respect, Carrier comes closest to Wiseman’s approach, by chronicling not the great or tragic days but the day-to-day lives of institutions and people.) Members of the Nimitz crew appear on camera to express support, skepticism or opposition to the war, but their comments feel more like casual man-on-the-street expressions than heartfelt insights that emerge in foxholes.
The differences between Carrier and Frederick Wiseman’s films are rooted in the kinds of people who made them, and the eras when they came to public TV. Maro Chermayeff, Carrier’s director (and e.p. with Mitchell Block), studied film in college; Wiseman graduated from law school. Chermayeff is a highly skilled filmmaker, whose range includes an American Masters film about Juilliard, a feature-length HBO doc about organ donations, the PBS reality series Frontier House, and a number of A&E productions. Wiseman basically applied the same template over and over again to different institutions.
Carrier is kind to the institution and the people it shows the viewer — not an uncommon attribute in an age when public TV documentaries must earn their funding by endearing themselves to audiences.
Wiseman made his iconic films in an age when public TV was home to documentarians who saw their mission, to borrow Mr. Dooley’s description of newspapers, as comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable—the comfortable sometimes including the film’s audience. Wiseman was neither kind nor unkind, but unblinking.
The impact of a Wiseman film recalls Harry Truman’s retort when he was asked about his slogan, “Give ’em hell, Harry.” “I never gave anybody hell,” Truman would reply. “I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.”
In fact, several of Wiseman’s subject institutions sued to keep his films off the air.
Comparisons are often invidious, and comparisons between works of art from different eras doubly so, but they are unavoidable given the outward similarities between Wiseman’s approach and Carrier’s.
When I think about how Wiseman himself might have approached Carrier, what I miss is not so much that Carrier doesn’t take on the Iraq War, but that it doesn’t take on the Navy. It doesn’t zoom in, as Wiseman would have, on the gap between the Navy’s image of itself and what Wiseman’s camera would see. It takes the Navy pretty much on its own terms and decoupages that self-perception with music and flattering glimpses of the ship’s commanders.
Would I have preferred Wiseman’s Carrier to Chermayeff’s? Yes, but that’s partly because I grew up on Wiseman’s work. Yes, but that isn’t the film Chermayeff made. Yes, but it may not be a film she had the option of making today.
If the Navy had expected Wiseman-like scrutiny, it’s hard to imagine it would have granted the access that is essential to Carrier’s authenticity. Indeed, it is hard to imagine Wiseman himself being allowed to shoot without restriction in mental hospitals, high schools, meatpacking plants and other institutions in today’s image-conscious environment.
Even if such a series could be made, today’s PBS — and today’s PBS viewers — probably would not give it 10 hours.
Carrier is a very good series produced for a different kind of public TV and an audience with different expectations. It is a testament to Maro Chermayeff’s artistry that neither the Navy nor Carrier’s viewers will be disappointed.
Louis Barbash is a Current contributing editor, a former pubTV producer and CPB program officer. He writes the political blog Connecting the Dots.
Web page posted May 7, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
