‘Carry-On’ and the Birth of the TSA Thriller

As far as I know, I’m the only English professor in American history to moonlight for the TSA and then write an airport thriller about it. This unique background made my experience of watching Carry-On, Netflix’s current blockbuster about the daily lives of TSA agents, bittersweet.

Back in 2012, I spent a few months as a Transportation Security Officer (TSO)-in-training at Albany International Airport in upstate New York.  I’d clock in at 5am, work the morning shift at the checkpoint, and clock out at 9am.  Then I’d hustle to my office at the University at Albany, swap my blue uniform for standard professorial garb, drink more coffee, and get ready to teach another fiction writing workshop.  Morning after morning, I’d go from scrutinizing x-ray images of passengers’ often crammed backpacks to analyzing the characters and plots of my students’ often jumbled stories.

The novel I wound up writing, In Security, is about a TSO who, while grieving the loss of his wife, gets caught up in a terrorist plot that involves passing an unsearched bag through an airport checkpoint.  It was my third book but my first attempt at a thriller, and I worked on it for years before it published in 2020.  Despite strong endorsements from a handful of Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, it was almost impossible to find an editor willing to publish the book.  Again and again, I heard that no one would care to read about the grinding life of an airport worker.

Last I checked, Netflix’s Carry-On had close to 150 million viewers and was one of their five most watched films of all time.

A university press eventually published my airport thriller.  I don’t want to talk about how many—I mean, how few—copies I’ve sold.  Let’s just say the royalty checks have not been pouring in.

Still, I feel vindicated.  People do care about TSA officers.  Well, at least if they’re Hollywood stars trying to stop a jet full of passengers from being blown to bits.

Working for the TSA was just the beginning of my fascination with the ever-expanding security industry.  That expansion began after 9/11 and has shown little sign of slowing.  Most of us now take it for granted that college students can major in Homeland Security.  In fact, at the university where I teach, we have a free-standing College of Cybersecurity, Emergency Management, and Homeland Security.  That’s weird.  Or it should be.

The next book I published after In Security, with the photographer Danny Goodwin, was a study of security labor in the US (MIT Press, 2024). That book led to a museum exhibition of photographs, videos, redacted documents, and other materials on the same subject at UAlbany’s University Art Museum. I also formed an international research group in Amsterdam focused on security labor.  We are studying not only the ways that workers, consumers, and the public at large have become complicit in the ongoing expansion of the security industry, but also the impact that the security industry has on the lives of its employees and on society in general. Our ultimate goal is to envision more effective and caring approaches to the work of keeping people safe.

Over the years, as I’ve talked about my months at the checkpoint, I’ve consistently sensed that people are surprised, maybe even disappointed, by what I have to say.  They expect to hear tales of corrupt, inept, mean-spirited TSOs screwing in family restrooms, smuggling drugs, stealing laptops, tormenting the elderly, and harassing Muslims, all while failing one critical Homeland Security test after another.  But I don’t have those kinds of stories.

Instead, I tend to share a saying I learned on the job: “If you’ve been to one airport, you’ve been to one airport.” I explain that I can’t speak for what happens at other airports, or what might happen in the future, but I can talk about what I experienced and what I saw at Albany International.  Then I go on to mention the former used car salesman who had great patter while telling people what to put in their bins, or the retired construction worker who had taken the job to help his grandkids through college, or the young former volleyball coach who dreamed of someday joining the FBI.

In other words, I saw a diverse group of men and women of all ages who sought TSA employment because it offered a combination that seems scarce these days: entry-level positions with real health benefits, job security and the possibility of career development. For all its supposed faults, the TSA is an opportunity for thousands of people who want to help keep their finances and the nation secure. Some were more skeptical about the mission than others, and some were more crass in their conduct than others, but everyone I saw performed their stated job as best they could.

Long after I stopped working at the checkpoint, I continued to closely follow coverage of the TSA in the news.  Yes, far too many officers abuse their power. They pat down toddlers. Cancer survivors must remove their prosthetic breasts. The list goes on and on, impossible to overlook.  In short, the TSA seems frequently to offer evidence that the large-scale infrastructure of security is inescapably exploitative and dehumanizing.

Other jobs I’ve held over the years include kennel cleaner, dishwasher, gardener, gravedigger, and lab assistant. Working as a TSO-in-training was as challenging as any other work I’ve done, including teaching graduate students and writing novels. At the checkpoint, management urged us to maintain superhuman focus, hour after hour, shift after shift.  And it could get exhausting. We repeated our scripts, studied documents and images, searched bags.  From the moment we clocked in to the moment we clocked out, the TSA expected us to perform each task—from swabbing the palms of people carrying pets to confiscating yet another water bottle–as if our lives and the lives of everyone around us were continuously at stake.  Which they kind of were.

This brings me to the “sweet” part of watching Carry-On: It’s good to see the simple, day-in, day-out grinding heroism of TSOs get some major attention on the contemporary media landscape.  Sure, inaccuracies in Carry-On’s depiction of TSA work and airplane construction are easy to find. TSOs rotate from position to position throughout the checkpoint, so no one would be working the x-ray machine for a whole shift, and you definitely won’t see anyone sitting by an x-ray machine drinking coffee.  Rousing call-and-response chants between TSOs and passengers aren’t really a thing. The daily briefings are more in the style of Welcome Back, Kotter than Hill Street Blues.

Even if you could move easily between an airplane’s passenger cabin and its cargo hold (you can’t), you’d be unlikely to find a large, air-tight, see-through refrigerator unit down there. But none of this takes away from the pleasure of knowing with certainty what I’ve suspected for a while now: people actually want to learn more about the everyday labor of the men and women who are devoting a large portion of their lives to trying to keep us safe.

During my recent holiday travels, whenever I passed through an airport checkpoint, I asked a few TSOs if they had seen Carry-On.  Everyone said yes, they had seen Carry-On, and inevitably started listing some of the film’s errors.  Then, before they turned away to get on with their work, I let them know about a much more accurate novel that was available in paperback.