
Carpet Cowboys
You might not have heard of Dalton, Georgia, but you’ve probably touched it. The “Carpet Capital of the World,” as this small town in northern Georgia is known, produces 85 percent of the country’s carpets. Initially it appears that “Carpet Cowboys,” the first feature documentary from co-directors Emily MacKenzie and Noah Collier, just wants to be about this odd industry and the odd artists, businessmen and scientists who populate it. But then it uses that as a jumping-off point to map out the deconstruction of the American Dream.
MacKenzie and Collier establish their setting with shots of intricate machinery the kind used to make these carpets by weaving thousands of threads together into those banal tapestries we walk all over every day. “It is the canvas on which all other art rests,” says Lew Migliore, one of many colorful characters who calls his living room carpeted world home. There’s also father and son team Doug and Lloyd Caldwell, who have helped run a family carpet business for more than 50 years. Sitting in front of one such bold-tinted swirls of red design himself, Lloyd chuckles. “This industry was really put together by north Georgia hillbillies and half of them couldn’t read or write.”
And there’s freelance textile designer Roderick James a Scottish expat with a love for country life (emphasis on “life”) and his partner Jon Black, a jingle writing musician. While MacKenzie and Collier weave all these story lines together in order to provide a full picture of an industry in crisis, Roderick and Jon’s story pops like the pattern above all other patterns in one of his carpets.
Early on in “Carpet Cowboys,” Jon takes the filmmakers for a drive, showing them where a corporation displaced 36 houses, including his mom’s family’s “cute little house” and a tree he used to climb as a kid that was literally poisoned to make way for a parking lot. But while this destruction took away homes, it brought jobs. “It’s just part of a cycle,” says Jon as the camera pans over an empty lot. What could be bleaker than a cycle that creates work but destroys houses? At least Arthur Miller’s Lomans had a job and a house.
Corporate consolidation and deregulation of monopolies puts small, family-run businesses like Doug’s out of work. (Doug is one of the few people in the movie who remains genuinely passionate about his craft, he can walk into his showroom filled with thousands of rugs and immediately pick out his favorite pattern.) With the small businesses go the camaraderie gone are the days when folks would sit around drinking beer in the parking lot after work. But there is no after work anymore, not for most people who still have jobs in Dalton: Most companies left are faceless corporations that care only about profit margins.
And then there are freelance artists like Roderick, whom we meet when he shows up wearing white Stetson hat and an American flag scarf (to photograph tree bark patterns that he wants to turn into textiles). Roderick is one of those larger than life characters with just enough melancholy beneath it all to make you believe in him; it would be hard not to love him even if he weren’t also as an immigrant from Scotland who came here in 1985 hoping to make it big in textiles such an embodiment of every last thing that has gone wrong with this country since then. “I really don’t know where America’s going right now,” says Roderick as he looks around at all the empty warehouse space in a part of town that used to be bustling with mills. “I thought I did.”
But what could be bleaker still than any of this is the footage we see of Philips’ 12 year old entrepreneur son, who invented a temporary glue and pitched it on “Shark Tank” as “for kids, by kids.” It’s chilling to see this footage now years later, after Philips has become such an outstanding character in this movie because you can already tell from watching him pitch his product like a sleazy used car salesman or Professor Harold Hill (he does a lot of pacing and sweating) that he’s got the capitalist bug but also some kind of undiagnosed economic melancholy or something.
Anyway, his company is now a moderate success, and when Jon catches up with him again years later (when Philips is grayer and fatter and even more fun to watch), he tells Jon: “My definition of success is whenever you can just kinda chill, and not a lot of people can.”
Roderick talks about maybe leaving Georgia behind for Asia; he has a girlfriend in the Philippines, and there might be work for him there. But it’s not clear whether Roderick really understands what that would mean for someone like Jon, who doesn’t have an exit strategy without Roderick around, without the jingles they write together, without somebody around to listen so intently as Roderick narrates his creative process over cigarettes outside while the sun comes up over yet another Dalton slum well. Without Roderick around, Jon just wouldn’t have anything to do.
After the American Dream dies for some people, they have no hope of finding it again.
In “Carpet Cowboys,” Mackenzie and Collier seem to embrace the western setting implied by the title toward the end of the film by shooting the sun set over a beach and then over a graveyard. Some characters follow new dreams while others mournfully recall old ones, haunted by “echoes of the past.” The film’s score, which is synth with an industrial tinge, sets up a tension between the humanist way MacKenzie and Collier present Dalton workers’ stories and the coldly efficient way they film machines that create what those workers produce.
As credits roll, we see a group of employees in one of many nameless companies walking endlessly around samples of carpets in a beige, cramped room lit by fluorescent bulbs. They are testing how much stress each carpet can bear. A previous scene indicated that 20,000 passes are required for these tests, it takes one person two weeks to complete them. These tests will be conducted again on new carpets in an infinite cycle of labor just as they are on those ensnared by today’s economy Artists and entry-level workers alike who find themselves caught in endless Capitalist destructions of community and culture, left alone to shoulder all this stress in silence until it drives them mad.
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