Totalitarian Gigantomania

Tim Brinkhof explores the poetics and politics of the cruise-ship essay.

By Tim BrinkhofAugust 24, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Politics

IN THE SPRING of 1995, on assignment for Harper’s, David Foster Wallace spent seven days aboard the MV Zenith, a 47,413-ton cruise ship operated by Celebrity Cruises, Inc. The magazine asked him to report on everything he saw, and Wallace saw everything: flared lapels, rubber thongs, conch fritters, projectile vomit, pre-melanomic lesions, potbellies, cellulite, “1,500 professional smiles.” The only thing he didn’t see was his cabin maid Petra, who—to the author’s amazement as well as distress—managed to fully tidy up his room each time he left, even when it was only for a minute or two.

Most of what Wallace saw he did not like. He immediately caught on to the massive class divide aboard the ship, where white Americans are—often to their delight—pampered by underpaid workers from the Global South. When Wallace insisted on carrying his own bag, he realized that he had put his Lebanese porter “in a terrible kind of sedulous-service double bind, a paradox of pampering: The Passenger’s Always Right versus Never Let a Passenger Carry His Own Bag.” The landlubbing Illinoisian also disliked being in the middle of the ocean, a place that—courtesy of teaching Stephen Crane’s 1898 shipwreck story “The Open Boat” at Emerson College—he could not see as anything except a “primordial nada, bottomless depths inhabited by tooth-studded things rising angelically toward you.” The Zenith itself was consumer culture incarnate, providing passengers with food, drink, and entertainment to the point of infantilizing them. “The fact that adult Americans tend to associate the word ‘pamper’ with a certain other consumer product,” he said of the term, which he had encountered over and over in Celebrity’s brochures, “is not an accident.”

The now-iconic essay, originally published under the title “Shipping Out” but better known as “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” not only gave birth to a vibrant genre of nonfiction writing but also laid out that genre’s central conceit—that this supposedly fun thing isn’t actually that fun at all, if you stop and think about it.

Largely dormant during the 2000s and early 2010s, the cruise-ship essay is currently riding a second wave—one generated, perhaps, by shows like HBO’s The White Lotus (2021– ), which casts a critical eye on the leisure industry of the obscenely rich, not to mention by media coverage of the rampant culture of sexual assault aboard many of the world’s most prominent cruise ships. Although some of the more recent essays in this genre—including Lauren Oyler’s “I Really Didn’t Want to Go” (2023) and Gary Shteyngart’s “Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever” (2024)—borrow heavily from Wallace’s pioneering work, they also diverge from it in important ways. To some extent, these divergences can be attributed to the unique style and experiences of each writer, but they are also indicative of changing times. If the cruise ship is, as almost all of these essays note, a microcosmic distillation of American culture, then studying these texts in chronological order should reveal how that culture has developed since 1995.

Nearly 30 years later, Wallace’s shadow still looms large over the genre. “To journalists,” Oyler writes in her own piece, which documents her stay on a megaship chartered by Gwyneth Paltrow’s controversial lifestyle brand Goop, “a ‘cruise piece’—in addition to being a free vacation you’re paid to express all your darkest thoughts about—is a career achievement,” placing the assignee in the same imaginary category as the late author of Infinite Jest. And surely, several themes and thoughts expressed in “A Supposedly Fun Thing” reappear in both her essay and Shteyngart’s. Each of these writers assumes the role of an undercover reporter, passing themselves off as an ordinary vacationer in order to mingle with the other cruisers. All relate their experiences in a deeply ironic tone, using cruise lingo and giving people nicknames like Mr. Dermatitis, GP, and Duck Necklace, imposing a degree of separation between the narrators and the late-capitalist dystopia in which they find themselves. “No,” Shteyngart wants to tell an “old Rastafarian” on the US Virgin Islands who calls him a redneck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry.”

The most obvious difference between “Shipping Out” and later cruise-ship essays is in their emphasis on the political orientation of the passengers. Wallace, despite being remembered as a champion of postmodernist writing, channels the spirit of classic literature as he attempts to ascertain fundamental elements of the human experience, such as loneliness and existential dread. Oyler and Shteyngart, by contrast, treat the cruise ship as a mirror for a very particular segment of American society, one that has grown increasingly threatening to the future of democracy. On Paltrow’s Goop cruise, tailored to wealthy alternative-healing afficionados whose limited knowledge of real-world medicine borders on the superstitious and conspiratorial, Oyler runs into a “psychological astrologer” who claims that someone’s teenage son’s tinnitus “might be due to effects from the ‘hot lava, do-not-go-there topic’: the COVID vaccine.” Toward the end of Shteyngart’s cruise, which took place on the planet’s biggest vessel yet, Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, he describes the way many of the passengers “shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE” attire for “caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: ‘The constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.’” Shteyngart notes that,

[w]ith their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts.

Though Wallace’s cruise also had its share of proto-MAGA followers—participating in a clay-pigeon shooting class, the author squares up against guys with military backgrounds who go hunting with their papas and have their own range in their backyards—those in Oyler’s and Shteyngart’s essays appear much more threatening. “Both of them had a look I have never seen on land,” Shteyngart writes of two such individuals, “their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large.” A third, in the elevator, announced, seriously rather than jokingly, that someone on board ought to kill one of the Filipino employees, and do so as brutally as possible.

It makes sense that Floridians would be overrepresented on cruises that leave from cities in South Florida, just as it makes sense that passengers with an interest in guns would be attracted to a shooting class. Still, one wonders if there could be a more poetic reason why so many cruise-ship lovers seem to lean starboard on election days.

Research suggests that there is. Drawing upon various surveys, Andrew Van Dam of The Washington Post discovered that in 2020, 26 percent of Trump voters reported going on at least one cruise before the pandemic, compared to only 17 percent of Biden supporters. While 32 percent of Trump voters said they would be “very comfortable” going on a cruise after the pandemic ended, 48 percent of Biden’s said they would be “very uncomfortable” doing so.

Cruise-ship essays can help us understand why this is the case. On a cruise with GOP organizers, pundits, and lobbyists shortly after the 2012 presidential election, New York magazine’s Joe Hagan overheard one disgruntled supporter of Mitt Romney propose that they all burn their passports and “stay on this boat forever,” implying they should live a pirate’s life in the Bermuda Triangle, where they would be free to decide which government policies they obeyed and which they ignored. Shteyngart muses that it’s the cruise ship’s “totalitarian sense of gigantomania” that appeals to folks such as the Rands, a Florida couple nicknamed after their favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand. He goes on to describe an ice-skating show as having the “style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un.”

Perhaps it’s got something to do with socioeconomics—both Wallace and Shteyngart point out that cruise vacations are popular among middle-income families: people affluent enough to afford a bit of luxury but not affluent enough to shed their status anxiety, a well-documented force of conservative discontent.

Or maybe it’s about following the leader. As Tim Murphy discusses in a 2020 Mother Jones essay, it’s no coincidence Donald Trump has been longtime friends with Carnival Corporation’s former CEO Micky Arison. Both are billionaires in the hospitality industry, in charge of businesses they inherited from their fathers. Carnival has hosted cruises themed after Trump’s TV show The Apprentice (2004–17)­ and sponsored one of its season finales. Trump, in turn, used his presidential powers to soften pandemic restrictions, lower tax rates, and loosen workers’ rights, a process he is expected to resume should he win back the White House this fall.

Let’s also not forget the cultural impact of the cruise-ship essay genre itself. With so many prominent, almost exclusively left-wing writers deriding both the cruise vacation and cruise vacationers, it’s not surprising that cruises have become even more attractive to conservatives than they already were, granting them a political significance they did not initially possess. Nowadays, booking a cruise is almost like making a political statement. Cruises are political rallies on water: places where both the silent majority and not-so-silent minority can share their opinions knowing that pretty much everyone around agrees with them. (Tellingly, The Washington Post’s inquiry began in response to a conservative newsletter that “characterized Democrats as ‘snobs’ who look down on anyone who ‘goes on cruises or to all-inclusive resorts.’”)

If you think about it, the right-wing appeal of cruise ships isn’t all that surprising. If conservatism is defined, as many historians and political theorists argue, by resistance to change and, on a deeper level, by mistrust of the unknown, then a cruise really is the perfect vacation for a conservative person. It’s travel for people who hate travel, who want to enjoy nice weather and exotic locales without needing to come into contact with different cultures. When cruise ships like the Icon of the Seas dock at foreign ports, the passengers enter not a foreign country so much as a resort, a commercial colony operated by the companies that own the ships themselves.

Returning to shore, Shteyngart reaches the harsh but—in light of all he has suffered—understandable conclusion that it is simply “unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship.” Writers, he continues,

typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

It’s a conclusion that, despite the essay’s overtly political nature, hearkens back to Wallace’s mostly apolitical focus on infantilization in “Shipping Out.” “How long has it been since you did Absolutely Nothing?” he asks the reader.

I know exactly how long it’s been for me. I know how long it’s been since I had every need met choicelessly from someplace outside me, without my having to ask. And that time I was floating, too, and the fluid was warm and salty, and if I was in any way conscious I’m sure I was dreadless, and was having a really good time, and would have sent postcards to everyone wishing they were here.

In the final paragraphs of “Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever,” Shteyngart shares words of sympathy he received from other writers, who congratulated him on making it off Icon of the Seas alive and opined that, after publication of his essay, “it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” They have a point. Cruise-ship essays can be as perversely entertaining as the trashiest reality TV, but like trashy reality TV, they also tend to repeat the same point, one originally expressed by Wallace: that this supposedly fun thing isn’t actually fun at all. Now, it’s also politically incorrect.

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Featured image: Joseph Mallord William Turner. Whalers, ca. 1845. Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1896, The Met Museum (96.29). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed August 21, 2024. Image has been cropped.