To someone who has their disbelief suspended, who can passively enjoy life's many pleasures, a cruise ship is paradise. To someone cursed - I know, I know, and blessed - with a relentless faculty of analysis, which compares and contrasts inner systems with the connected outer systems, cruise ships appear incredibly weird.
A cruise ship appears weird like a classic American suburb appears weird, or Disneyland, which is to say, that it is not intrinsically weird - of course these things are nice ideas on their own, with the suspension of disbelief and a light-hearted air of play - but weird in the sense of it persisting as a constructed experience that is existing simultaneously embedded within a rapidly degenerating outer system, which by its juxtoposition makes a mockery of said construction, so that underneath the carefully constructed and groomed fantasy imagery, there is a wide range of unfortunate human behaviors which directly contradict - and functionally explode - the constructed image.
For all practical purposes, cruise ships exist as extreme spatial concentrations of power, cleanly broken off, to share with the wealthier middle class, a state of affairs that, unsurprisingly, perfectly reproduces the power imbalances of global society in miniature.
As floating cities they accomplish this with their nature as isolated entities which travel and accumulate a labor force from all over the world. As entities of extreme concentrated wealth, they can attract workers from lands of extreme impoverishment, and retain them, feeding them steady trickles of wealth that are vast in comparison to what they are used to. This is what capital has been accomplishing for some time, with its free trade agreements and its offshore manufacturing, but with a cruise ship, you get to see it in person, concentrated in space.
There is even a caste system that develops on the ship itself, which relegates lighter-skinned, relatively richer-country crew to officer and executive positions, while darker-skinned crew members, and crew members from stressed countries occupy serving and cleaning positions, which often depend on tips, as they are below minimum wage in many lines.
Apologists for this imbalance are quick to seize on some incredibly "kind" thing that the cruise line does for the servers, or that the servers' lives are better than what they would be if the cruise line never took them on. Superficially this is true: servers get to see the world on their breaks - which are not nearly numerous or long enough - and they are paid more than they would be at home, which they can bring back to their families. This same line of logic is often extended to sweatshop workers.
But let's ask the question: can these servers afford the same caliber of cruise themselves, as well as the time off without gaining an income, so as to reverse the power relationship, at least temporarily? What does their home look like? What do their families and friends experience? Their communities?
And what does it mean to temporarily put one's life on hold for months on end, and resign oneself to living within a virtual dictatorship, what with its carefully constructed mythology, and its Morlock-like concealment of the crew, relegating them to cramped bunks in the rumbling belly of the ship.
Discipline is rigidly enforced with constant customer feedback and game
theory-inspired punishment systems that play different members of the
crew against each other, while the fear of losing one of the better jobs possible in one's country does the rest of the work, contributing to an internalization of the rigid rules of conduct.
Also consider the dimensions of the crew quarters, people who are paid, as opposed to the quarters of the customers, the people who pay. This is a perfectly designed and executed mechanic marvel, all of it imagined for taking, extracting human energy.
David Foster Wallace had it all covered some time ago in a superb essay on the subject.
As Wallace hilariously but painfully noted briefly with his example of the luggage handler, there is a brutal double bind located in the exchange between customer and worker, expressed in the twin dictums of the customer being able to do whatever the customer wants, and the workers' necessity of making the ship and customer experience as comfortable and pleasant as possible, which often means overriding the customer's sphere of autonomy. There is the existence of an over-pampering which breaches this double bind, and considering the primacy of the customer in the power relation, results in the crushing of the worker. This would be hideous enough if it happened merely once, but as it happens, this occurs perpetually all over the ship. As Wallace put it, it results in despair for the sensitive person. And who knows what it results in for the worker?
One wants to relate to these people on a human level, but one is constantly reminded that they are forced to smile - indeed their lives depend on it. Nevertheless, there are wonderful human moments, and many of these people go about their lives with an impressive degree of dignity and grace, but if one breaches that precarious customer-server relationship, they must recoil in fear. One is not to join them as one interacts in a community, one is to play a role, a role which implies greater power over the other, so that two entire cultures are held in constant tension to each other, which inflicts profound psychic violence daily and systematically, its distorting effects disfiguring both worker and customer alike.
That is before one gets to the absurd expenditures of energy and resources for generating this experience. As Wallace put it, the engines are basically the size of bank branches, and there is a fast ocean of fuel sloshing within the ship's belly; an ocean sloshing within an ocean, one could note. This hulk must be manufactured, as well as all of its supporting equipment and infastructure. This particular ship had lawns right there on the deck that had to be watered...a feature that nearly had me burst into laughter every time I passed it. And the food...buffets are open daily that have platters of platters of food, which uneaten are dumped into the trash by servers who could very well hail from food insecure communities.
And one of the stranger things about these ships is that they are manically cleaned day and night. There is always someone cleaning. Every surface. They even paint these things mid-cruise.
There's always much more to say and comment on, but I'll leave it at that. Wallace's essay paints an excellent picture itself.
