Inside the revolting story of the infamous ‘poop cruise': ‘Complete media bloodbath'

The Guardian

4 days ago

Elevator pitches don't get much more captivating, and possibly revolting, than 'poop cruise' – a modern day Gilligan's Island tale that's almost too good to be true.
For those who may have missed the headlines in 2013: a two-day transit from Galveston, Texas, to Cozumel, Mexico turned disastrous when an engine room fire struck the Carnival Triumph and stranded its 4,100-odd passengers and crew in the Gulf of Mexico. The fire devastated the Triumph's electrical nerve center and crippled the auxiliary systems aboard the ship, from the wifi to the toilets – which literally backed up into cabins and spilled into the hallways. After three days adrift, the Triumph was towed to Mobile, Alabama – but not before the limits of socially conditioned behavior approached a breaking point.
To widespread relief, however, the saga ended with passengers kissing the ground and laughing off the calamity as they disembarked – and the stricken Carnival cruise went from a potential Titanic epilogue unfolding in real time to the ultimate shaggy dog story. 'When you hear 'Poop Cruise', you think '… OK'', says Bafta-nominated director James Ross. 'But actually there's a lot more layers and twists and turns to the story.' His latest film, Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, follows recent documentaries in Netflix's Trainwreck series on the fall of Toronto mayor Rob Ford and the Astroworld festival tragedy. Poop Cruise doesn't just dive head-first into the graphic details; it deftly walks the line between the serious and the side-splitting while reconstructing the epic yarn in 360 degrees.
Right away, we're introduced to a cross-section of Triumph cruise survivors: the bachelorette party looking to blow off steam, the nervous fiance traveling with his future father-in-law for the first time, the divorced dad who just wanted to have a nice vacation with his 13-year-old daughter. Their passive experience aboard the cruise – the bachelorette party ominously skipped the safety briefing upon boarding the ship and headed straight for the bar – is juxtaposed with perspectives from the cruise director, bartender and other non-Americans on the crew pulling 70-hour work weeks to keep the good times rolling. (Think Upstairs, Downstairs on the high seas, with bed-hopping above and below deck.) 'It's hedonism,' says Ross. 'There's this huge extreme of people on one end who are there just to really enjoy themselves and the crew who are there to facilitate that. But it was also important to show that this terrible scenario didn't just happen to the passengers; the crew were in it as well.'
Poop Cruise cleverly puts viewers back onboard the Triumph, setting its expert witnesses inside kitschy dining halls, bars and other backdrops that suggest locations on the actual ship. At one point during the interview with the nervous bachelor, Devin Marble, the lights flicker out – a fortuitous and poetic echo of real life, as it happens. 'We were shooting in an arcade shop in a mall in Houston, and there was a power cut midway through,' says Ross.
Poop Cruise also features one of the better applications of scene re-enactments in a documentary, especially when it comes to reconstructing anecdotes. (One memorable scene takes shape as one member of the bachelorette party recalls her disco-like endeavor to use a blacked-out cabin bathroom with a flashing beacon between her teeth.) Ross says he wanted the re-enactments to 'not feel too real' but also signal to viewers that 'you're in this kind of hyper real place, because the real footage is the star of the show'.
Ross had his pick from hundreds of hours of passenger-generated footage, each adding to this mosaic of civilizational collapse in miniature. Passengers go from cannonballing into the pool and hoofing around the disco to creating tent cities on deck and contemplating how long they can hold off on going No 2 before they have to break down and defecate in a crew-issued hazmat bag. Finding the footage of those critical story beats, says Ross, was just a matter of tracking down insiders such as Marble (whose vlogs became a critical window into the crisis) and sorting through the trove of video and photo evidence that was submitted for the disaster investigation. Ultimately, the fire was blamed on a fuel leak – a preventable failure that Carnival knowingly sailed right past.
Poop Cruise could have easily gone sideways again trying to shoehorn such a wide-ranging story into a tight 45 minutes. But it benefits from natural time constraints (five days) and legitimately earned twists that raise the stakes from scene to scene. A major inflection point sneaks up when the Triumph, which has drifted out of range for a Mexican rescue, crosses paths with a sister Carnival cruise liner – the Legend (which diverted its course to help). Triumph passengers go from thinking they're saved to realizing there's no way all 3,143 of them can be transferred over to the other ship safely. (The Triumph crew does manage to grab critical supplies from the Legend, and one passenger who required medical attention makes it across.)
Worse, the passengers aboard the Legend shrug off the Triumph's plight, gawking at the destitute ship as if it were a breaching humpback before resuming the good time that Triumph passengers had themselves signed up for. But when Triumph passengers realize they can 'steal' the Legend's working wifi, they throng to the deck with phones in hand and reach out to their loved ones. Shockingly, it was through those mayday calls that the world learned that Triumph was in crisis. Up to that point, Carnival corporate's PR strategy was to relate as few details about the fire as possible – a scheme that kept the media uninterested at first. ('You give them what you believe they need,' says company spin doctor Buck Banks, 'and no more than that.') But once those Triumph distress calls started cropping up on Twitter and elsewhere online, Carnival was forced to reckon with a 'complete media bloodbath', says Banks.
CNN was one notable outlet that struggled to justify covering the Triumph fire story over Barack Obama's State of the Union, Pope Benedict's abdication, saber rattling in Pyongyang and other pressing news. But once the fuller picture of the situation aboard the ship came into focus, the network – which had just been placed under the management of former NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker – went all-in on the story, and competitors swiftly followed their lead. Once the ship was under tow and within striking distance of shore, there was a mad scramble to intercept it in the air and go live with the first images of the deterioration. For many aboard the ship, that media onslaught was their first indication that this three-hour tour from hell was in fact drawing to a close.
Of course there will be some who might not have the stomach for Poop Cruise. Besides holding the potential for inducing claustrophobia, it traffics – by necessity – in the scatological. (One of the cooks aboard the ship likened the desperate scene he found inside a god-forsaken lavatory to a 'poop lasagna'.) But the thing most likely to turn off viewers is that Carnival didn't really face any serious repercussions from the poop cruise. (In general, cruise passengers give up their right to sue when they purchase a ticket.) After a $115m clean-up effort, the Triumph was relaunched under a new name: the Sunrise. Buyer beware.
The average person would never think to book a cruise again after surviving such an ordeal. But Poop Cruise is more than a deep rewind on 12-year-old clickbait. It's a rollicking allegory for the precariousness of our modern world and the resiliency of the human spirit. 'People were saying this was the best cruise they'd ever been on, I think because the crew worked so hard,' says Ross, who seized on the opportunity to make a different sort of documentary. 'This was an opportunity not to tell a kind of dark sad story about a crime or whatever, but to do something where in the end nobody died. Yes, it was a terrible experience, and people learned from it. But it was also one of those 'holy fuck' stories.'
Trainwreck: Poop Cruise is available now on Netflix