This post features major spoilers from the film Digger. Read on at your peril. Or, better yet, go find a theater still showing it, then come on back.
The first 30 minutes of Digger are as bewildering as they are enjoyable. Tom Cruise, stuffed in a fatsuit and caked in enough makeup to make him look like an octogenarian, spits and mutters in a thick Texas accent. He’s an oilman, and he’s dealing with crises, great and small, on all fronts, from a cataclysmic environmental one caused by his drilling operation in Greenland to the comparatively insignificant death of his already-basically-dead cat at home.
Iñárritu echoes the frenetic energy and pace of Birdman. Cruise, meanwhile, masticates on the most meaty role he has played in a long time. Somehow, I’m underselling how trippy all of this is. The cheap-looking animatronic cat soils itself repeatedly. Cruise rat-a-tat-tats almost incomprehensibly. A bunch of heavy-hitting actors begin to show up (John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sandra Hüller). There’s a distinctly Wes Anderson pastiche to the production design and a knockoff Dr. Strangelove vibe to the plot, acting, and dialogue.
It’s weird and wonderful and possibly off-putting all at the same time. And then, the curtain is literally lifted. We learn that Tom Cruise is not Digger Rockwell but is instead renowned actor Curtis Markson playing Digger Rockwell in a satirical play—Fossil Fools—about real events that took place decades prior.
A lot of the weird things you’ve just witnessed make a lot more sense with this revelation, not the least of which is what this is actually all about. Digger becomes a film about how we relate to past events through art instead of one about the carelessness and incompetence of powerful people.
And what does Iñárritu have to say about sitting in the audience? Nothing less than that, at its best, its an unproductive activity on its own. At its worst, it might actually do some harm. As the play and the film unfold, we learn of the scale of the devastation wrought by Digger, and—just as horrifying—of our collective powerlessness to do anything about the calamity then or now, other than to point and laugh at Digger’s venality and stupidity.
As the play and film come to a close, the audience cheers uproariously, and then a “Level 4” alarm blares. Gas masks go on everyone, and out in to the flooded streets of London they go, bits of the old world and piles of wreckage all around.
It is bleak and searing. It paints forthcoming disasters as almost inevitable, and it lampoons the kind of useless from-your-couch activism that has been a fixture of the past decade. The pink pussy hats and black squares on Instagram and binge-watching of Succession—much of which I myself engaged in—didn’t achieve anything.
Markson’s portrayal of Digger tells as us much in the film’s best scene, when he castigates a vaguely European Union type of body for its outrage at the situation.
“You want dirt cheap tickets to Mallorca, so you can roast your pale asses in a hammock. You wanna to carve into a goood steak! Yeah, you want a two-day delivery of shit that you don’t need. You wanna charge up, charge up them cellphone batteries so you can gawk at your TikTok and your YouTube,” he says. “You want energy. Energy so that you can ask A.I. to solve the very same disasters that it’s fueling!”
“So you want freedom! Freedom to bask in the comfort of your unsustainable lives!”
Touché.
Aggressive and smug as this message might be, I don’t find it to be as damning as it might seem initially, and I do think Iñárritu finds a way to be hopeful at the same time as he is delivering withering criticism.
The fake play at the center of this film matters in its own way. It brings people together. It gives them (and us) a few hours of distraction, if not quite escape. It is important for us to be together. If COVID taught us nothing else, it taught us that. It’s just that merely being able to gather falls well short of saving us from disaster.
Part of being human is knowing that disaster is perpetually around the corner. Getting together and agreeing that one is coming and that we ought to do something about it is a far cry from actually doing something.