"Carpet Cowboys" - Documentary Review
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, Carpet Cowboys wouldn’t exist.
You may not be familiar with Dalton, Georgia. It’s a small town of 34,000 in the northwest corner of the state, closer to Chattanooga than to Atlanta. However, you’re very familiar with the city’s main output: carpets. Nearly 85% of carpets in the United States are made in Dalton. It’s a city ruled by the carpet and the self-described cowboys who are the leaders of the industry. Carpet Cowboys lets the audience into a world they’re somewhat familiar with, but only in the sense that carpet is inescapable. This mundane part of life mostly goes unnoticed, but if you told these cowboys that you didn’t pay attention to carpets, you might break their hearts.
As one can imagine, those who self-identify as carpet cowboys are a bit eccentric. There’s Roderick, the Scottish cowboy who’s a freelance carpet designer and dreams of opening a country bar in the Philippines. There’s Harry, who spent 20 years in the carpet industry, only to abandon it for his new material love: stones. Lee spends his days collecting animal feces from veterinarians around town to test how well different carpets stand up to stains. There are unnamed employees whose job is to walk in circles on carpet samples to test how well they withstand wear and tear. For all intents and purposes, the carpet industry is invisible outside of Dalton, GA. The people browsing IKEA and Target aren’t thinking about where the rugs or carpet swatches came from. They don’t think about who designs the carpets or the labor that goes into something that just gets walked on all day, every day.
courtesy of MEMORY
As is the case with all good documentaries, the heart of this film isn’t what you expect when you decide to watch it. Carpet Cowboys isn’t just about carpet manufacturing and distribution. The real purpose of the documentary is to deconstruct the American Dream. It’s heartbreaking to see Roderick’s belief that hard work and an entrepreneurial spirit will bring prosperity. It’s more than that, a far more tangled and thorny myth. For better or for worse, the American Dream continues to be the backbone of this country, but the country isn’t built for those who simply want to work hard to make their dreams come true. The deck is solidly stacked against the little guys, many of whom have spent so many years believing in the American Dream that giving up on it now is simply impossible. The juxtaposition of Roderick’s business persistence with a thirteen-year-old kid who made it big on Shark Tank is a stark reminder of how unpredictable life and capitalism can be.
Carpet Cowboys could have spent a little more time explaining the actual carpet-making process. How many other opportunities will there be for an in-depth study of the world of carpets and Dalton, GA? Carpet Cowboys is a deeply melancholic look at masculinity, loneliness, hope (and the lack of it), and living through the end of an era. Some of these people saw the boom of the industry, and now they’re seeing the end of something that gave them purpose, money, pain, and emptiness. Carpet Cowboys captures a dying ember in all its glory.
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