Chermayeff's 10 part series documents the Nimitz deployment from May to November 2005. The USS Nimitz is the paradigmatic symbol of US superpower status, costing more than 4.5 Billion Dollars to build (there are 10 such carriers in the class).
3,200 men and women live on the ship during a six month deployment. The ship's crew is predominantly in their 20's. The majority of them have left failed, disturbed, and alienated conditions to join the Navy for a better life. The recruitment dovetails squarely with the failure of US civil society. The Navy's regimented and autonomy-disabling culture is paired with an ideology of perfect performance and spotless adherence to codes of conduct. The sheer aesthetic and sensual mastery necessary to produce split-second cooperation between the hundreds of specialists needed to keep this technological genius functioning is surreal. Even the slightest error anywhere in the system could mean failure, disgrace, injury or death.
And yet one cannot avoid the fact that this intensity and immediacy is anchored by the failures that brought them there. (The class of officers and airmen work as hard, but their path is often so different that I will exclude them here). The voiding of their expectation to decide what values their efforts are applied to is a necessary pre-requisite for their perfect functioning. The military industrial complex has collected untold wealth from the machines that the crew operate. The purpose of the machines is to be determined by that complex together with whatever political irrationality is currently being reproduced by and through it. The wealth is created by depriving each of these individuals of adequate public goods, creating the basis for their voluntary functionalization. Whatever they actually are permitted to earn is garnished as part of this circle implicating them.
In the sum, the crew find themselves, replete with their human needs for recognition, belonging, and desire for sacrifice, on "Old Salt". Once there, they grow up socialized into a grand identification with their own substantive evacuation. They become great Americans, displaying truly virtuous characteristics, yet having been never allowed to decide what outcome these sacrifices and efforts are applied to. The pain and ambivalence of facing the failures of the civil society around them are superbly blocked by immediacy and physicality.
Carrier embodies a society that has downloaded (privatized) economic and societal failure onto its underclass. The ideology of self-loathing and violence that marks the backgrounds of the crew are sublated and put at the disposal of the very forces that have wounded them. They are all disparate members of an empire whose purpose is its own reproduction. Their sensual perfection marks the moment where they actually become one with themselves in that alienation. The Hegelian moment is unavoidable. By not-being they are reproducing the empire, which is more than they could ever be alone. It is however missing the crucial dialectical pole of having the freedom in consciousness and context to decide when the relinquishment of that subjective moment is just. Chermayeff's film captures this subtly but effectively. The film's aesthetics don't turn away from the tremendous power and majesty of the end product, while taking the time to explore the lives of simple crew members. It's this juxtaposition which exposes the Nimitz as the symbolic centerpiece of American societal oligarchy.
3,200 men and women live on the ship during a six month deployment. The ship's crew is predominantly in their 20's. The majority of them have left failed, disturbed, and alienated conditions to join the Navy for a better life. The recruitment dovetails squarely with the failure of US civil society. The Navy's regimented and autonomy-disabling culture is paired with an ideology of perfect performance and spotless adherence to codes of conduct. The sheer aesthetic and sensual mastery necessary to produce split-second cooperation between the hundreds of specialists needed to keep this technological genius functioning is surreal. Even the slightest error anywhere in the system could mean failure, disgrace, injury or death.
And yet one cannot avoid the fact that this intensity and immediacy is anchored by the failures that brought them there. (The class of officers and airmen work as hard, but their path is often so different that I will exclude them here). The voiding of their expectation to decide what values their efforts are applied to is a necessary pre-requisite for their perfect functioning. The military industrial complex has collected untold wealth from the machines that the crew operate. The purpose of the machines is to be determined by that complex together with whatever political irrationality is currently being reproduced by and through it. The wealth is created by depriving each of these individuals of adequate public goods, creating the basis for their voluntary functionalization. Whatever they actually are permitted to earn is garnished as part of this circle implicating them.
In the sum, the crew find themselves, replete with their human needs for recognition, belonging, and desire for sacrifice, on "Old Salt". Once there, they grow up socialized into a grand identification with their own substantive evacuation. They become great Americans, displaying truly virtuous characteristics, yet having been never allowed to decide what outcome these sacrifices and efforts are applied to. The pain and ambivalence of facing the failures of the civil society around them are superbly blocked by immediacy and physicality.
Carrier embodies a society that has downloaded (privatized) economic and societal failure onto its underclass. The ideology of self-loathing and violence that marks the backgrounds of the crew are sublated and put at the disposal of the very forces that have wounded them. They are all disparate members of an empire whose purpose is its own reproduction. Their sensual perfection marks the moment where they actually become one with themselves in that alienation. The Hegelian moment is unavoidable. By not-being they are reproducing the empire, which is more than they could ever be alone. It is however missing the crucial dialectical pole of having the freedom in consciousness and context to decide when the relinquishment of that subjective moment is just. Chermayeff's film captures this subtly but effectively. The film's aesthetics don't turn away from the tremendous power and majesty of the end product, while taking the time to explore the lives of simple crew members. It's this juxtaposition which exposes the Nimitz as the symbolic centerpiece of American societal oligarchy.