Digger: "Amusing Ourselves to Death"

Everything about Digger gives you a dream-like feel. Fabricated set pieces, vivid colors, an absurd, sometimes unsettling manner to people’s movements, and an overall sense of weirdness makes this feel like a world separate from our own. Unfortunately, it is all too similar.

At its core, Digger is an environmentalist film. But rather than falling into the same pitfalls as a movie like Don’t Look Up, it avoids Hollywood righteousness and subtle as a brick wall themes. It’s quite obvious what is trying to be said here, but it's self aware. We love when things get meta over here, and director and co-writer Alejandro G. Iñárritu takes that idea and runs with it. Would you expect anything less from the director of Birdman?

The meta concept of a play within a movie was something I first saw in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. There’s a great line from Jason Schwartzman's character as he ponders the meaning of the whole stage production in this existential crisis that mirrors his own life, “I still don’t get the play.” 

In Digger, when you first realize that this is, in fact, a play, Curtis Markson (Tom Cruise, in Tropic Thunder levels of absurdity) questions everything about this in-world production of Fossil Fools and the true story of Digger Rockwell. (That name itself a great evocation of the Americana of Norman Rockwell and Rockefeller's oil empire.) Is it supposed to be a comedy? A tragedy? A drama? he asks himself. These questions arise as the dystopian reality of this world is slowly revealed. All the lives lost and nations economically devastated from a preventable climate disaster has formed a collective trauma. And he wrestles with the question of how a story like this should be told. 

It makes us reflect; how do you make effective satire? How do you engage sincerely on a serious issue without trivializing it? How do you avoid pretentiousness? When Digger Rockwell is making his scathing address to the European Parliament, rather than arriving hat in hand to repent for his sins, he admonishes the entire assembly about their hypocrisy. He chastises them for the same sort of ethos as an actor draping themselves in the cause of climate change during their Academy Award acceptance speech, yet leaves LAX in their private jet.

“You want freedom— freedom to bask in the comfort of your unsustainable lives”, he cries out in a fiery sermon. I also have to admire the George Bush shoe throw reference during this scene. Nice touch. 

For me, the film’s most defining image is a high-angled, frame within a frame shot peering through an ouroboros— the self eating serpent— and looking down at a table of fools. Yet it is those fools, Digger Rockwell, the President of the United States (a ghastly John Goodman plays the role great) and his cabinet, that dictate the collapse of society. We as the people of the United States are the serpent that is feasting upon itself. 

“When you’re running from a house fire, no one is mad about who left the toaster on.” 

Digger instructs his team to use AI to censor the spread of information about his drilling explosion as an act of damage control. “They know the facts. The story has yet to be told.” Those are foretelling words in this age of information. A Hideo Kojima-like cautionary tale of AI’s power to control the public narrative, throttling desired stories and blacklisting undesired voices. 

In the spirit of controlling the narrative, the grand irony of Digger is Kenny Rockwell (Jesse Plemons) buying the rights to the cult classic biopic of his vehemently hated uncle. His intentions of giving people a form of catharsis for all the lives lost in the global environmental tragedy seem sincere. But how much can you trust a man who spent a “gazillion dollars” to bring Fossil Fuels to Broadway? A man with a private security company who can track down Tom Cruise’s missing daughter? And we all know there is a sinister sheen to Jesse Plemons' eyes that betrays his cool exterior, a masterfully subtle villain. And so although Curtis hits an ethical crossroads mid performance about how this story should be told, he still takes up Kenny’s offer to find his daughter. These benefits of the elite are hard to pass up. 

The flooded streets, armed guards, and Big Brother-like telescreen drones patrolling the masked populace is a sobering end. “Level 4”, the air quality announcement spoke out as the theater goers exited Fossil Fuels. A reminder of the world we ourselves are entering when we step outside of the theater. Some graffiti on the wall read “Compliance is freedom”, in that backwards Orwellian language. There’s also a painted red “V” so I respect the nod to V for Vendetta as well. But while we’re at it with Orwell I think this is an apt time to quote a line from 1984: 

“[The high class] are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the low back into their old positions of servitude, and themselves become the High.” (p. 202)

Kenny borrows a line from the title of Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. That phrase, “amusing ourselves to death”, may prove to be the most damning of all prophecies. Information gluttony and social media activists, overconsumed in our content while the corporations that pretend to care are actually plunging the world into chaos. 

I also appreciate the Cassavetes Opening Night poster in the dressing room. Elite ball knowledge there.