In the wake of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s eighth film, Digger, being branded as a total flop in the box office sense (since that’s the only sense that ever seems to matter in Hollywood), appraising its true value—as art—is more important than ever. And not just because, as Ben Affleck recently noted on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, “Everybody wants to celebrate this bomb as if it’s the most exciting thing that happened. This is a pretty ambitious, interesting movie made by people who have talent. And everybody wants to count the money, what it lost, or whatever… [but] if you punish movies that take risks, guess what you’re gonna get? A bunch of shitty, homogenized movies because you cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing. And that means you’re gonna sometimes look bad.” However, Digger doesn’t make it easy to herald it as either purely “good” or “bad” from even a critical standpoint (though plenty of critics had no trouble declaring it to be the latter).
And this has nothing to do with what turns out to be its meta approach to telling the story of what already happened to humanity because of one greedy billionaire and more than a few greedy politicians. That approach not made evident to the viewer until well into the first act, after being introduced to Digger Rockwell (Cruise), whose “dick-swinging”/“swaggering” nature is initially somewhat downplayed by his bizarre attachment to a decrepit cat named Maggie. Indeed, the “evil” Digger being so affectionate toward a cat isn’t unlike Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) having such a fondness for Mr. Bigglesworth in the Austin Powers trilogy. The point being, in a sense, to show that even evil people can occasionally reveal glimmers of still being (somewhat) in touch with their humanity. Except, apparently, for the Orange Creature that calls himself the U.S. president—for he can’t even pretend to look humane by having a pet in the White House.
As for the U.S. president of the Digger universe, Compson (John Goodman), he seems to be getting far more of his karmic due, confessing to Digger that he has rectal cancer after learning of Rockwell United’s oil extractions in Greenland causing a huge ice shelf called “Judy” to break off and head straight for Europe, where it will make contact with Norway first before setting off a series of massive, life- and property-destroying tidal waves throughout the continent. But the reason Compson brings up his rectal cancer to Digger is ultimately to reemphasize that, as he declared in the meeting, this imminent cataclysm is “not his problem.” Nor did Digger seem to feel it was his even though he’s the direct cause of it.
For, despite being warned repeatedly by the staff he employs in Greenland that something very, very awful was going to happen if they kept drilling, Digger willfully ignores it and then brushes it off entirely when one of those employees, Sandy Clarkson (Danny Kirrane), actually manages to get him on a video call to further express the gravity of the situation. But all Digger can say is that the show must go on. Because, well, there are millions—if not billions—of dollars on the line. And yes, Digger of course pulls the capitalist’s favorite/go-to line that if he were to halt the project, thousands of jobs—ergo, workers’ livelihoods—would be threatened. And does Sandy really want that on his conscience? Since, clearly, nothing about environmental destruction is on any billionaire’s (or millionaire’s) conscience, let alone Digger’s.
To be sure, when “Judy” inevitably becomes a problem so unignorable that even the U.S. government has to get involved, the powwow among Digger, President Compson and the various members of his administration (the Department of Defense included) isn’t about solutions so much as mitigations. This extends to putting up an internet firewall on all keywords or information that might lead anyone to discover the truth about the gravity of the situation and, thus, cause widespread panic. And, make no mistake, this practice is undoubtedly used in real life. Anything to keep the hoi polloi calm and docile—that’s the motto of all governments.
As Compson talks privately with Digger while they look out the window of one of Digger’s secret rooms (for the meeting takes place at his mansion), the massive tree outside topples over out of nowhere. As it turns out, this is a prop failure within the dress rehearsal for a play called Fossil Fools, which reenacts the events that led to humanity’s current state in a post-environmental collapse world. The play, like the movie, is billed as a “satire,” but the thing is, neither one is that satirical at all. For, as the movie itself wishes to underscore, we’ve all been told that this environmental apocalypse is a fait accompli. What with most being inured to the idea that no one—least of all any heads of states—are going to do a goddamn thing to make the changes necessary to curb the many harrowing scientific projections that have been shared with the public over the years. Which brings one to Cruise-as-Digger’s “Oscar clip” speech as he tells the European Parliament he must confront, “No matter how conscientious you pretend to be, you wanna drive around [with] the cheapest fuel, you wanna keep your lights on, your heatin’ and air conditioner runnin’… You want a two-day delivery of shit you don’t need, you wanna charge up them cell phone batteries so you can gawk at your TikTok and your YouTube. You want energy, energy so that you can ask AI to solve the very same disasters that it’s fuelin’. You want freedom! Freedom to bask in the comfort of your unsustainable lives!”
And so it is that Digger, for as much as some might argue that it’s meant as a “wake-up call” (and as such, can’t afford to be “gentle”) is, at its core, a reflection of what Mark Fisher illuminated in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? In fact, in this regard, Digger is perhaps even more blatant than Wall-E, which was the film Fisher used as his example in describing how “anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism. Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the ‘evil corporation.’ Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it.”
There are times when the actor playing Digger, Curtis Markson, vaguely touches on this idea with his mutterings about “what’s the point of this?” That is, of doing the play, of re-creating the horror and catastrophe for those currently living in the aftermath to see what’s left. The point, of course, is to make people believe that it all “meant something”—if nothing more than this current crop of theater-makers being able to “create art” out of it. Which is a self-indulgent notion. And one that Kenny Rockwell (Jesse Plemons), the nephew of the real-life Digger (as the viewer will find out later in the film), manipulates to his advantage by offering up mounds of cash not to help fix some of the issues plaguing the world, but to finance this over-the-top “satire.” As for Digger itself being labeled as that, it feels less like a “satirical” “wake-up call” and more like a “yep, this is how it’s gonna be/already is” type of movie. So, in other words, you might as well prepare yourself and enjoy it all while you can by gobbling up even more oil-begat products and “experiences.”
In this sense, too, Fisher’s words reverberate. The ones that forewarned, “What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate.” Moreover, it “exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.”
Except that, perhaps what Iñárritu and Warner Bros. couldn’t fathom was how little impact the film would have in terms of drawing in a large enough overall audience to participate in that interpassivity. With even cinema losing its luster on that front “nowadays.” Which brings up something that Rachel Cusk, writing as the narrator of Life of M (incidentally, a faux biography about one of the last “box office draws,” Natalie Portman), said about movies: “Watching a film was a means of surrendering control over what could not in any case be controlled… There was so much in the world already, so many problems that needed to be solved, without complicating things by reenacting what had already happened or was happening somewhere right now or might never happen.”
Only, in this case, the whole environmental apocalypse thing most definitely will happen, and already is—as millions of people saw and endured over the course of Summer 2026. While Digger attempts to be “noble” by trying to shock people out of their obsession with comfort via a bleak and unapologetic portrait of the future, the film is, in the end, only priming the masses (or at least the masses who saw it) to accept what has been deemed inevitable. Or, as a graffito shown in the final scene shrugs, “Compliance Is Freedom.” And freedom, in Digger’s (and many others’) estimation, is “comfort.” At least for the time remaining when that’s still a possibility. But don’t worry: Digger assures there will still be “bread and circuses” even in the post-apocalypse.
[…] Digger Realism: Is There No Alternative? […]