Iñárritu built a machine of nested simulations and the critics marked the innermost layer. A defence of the most intelligent film about the end of the world I have seen, and an autopsy on the profession that could not read it.
The Flop
Digger opened on 2 October. Eight million dollars worldwide in the first weekend, against a production budget of a hundred and twenty-five million with marketing piled on top. The worst opening of Tom Cruise’s career in twenty years. Warner Bros. is staring at losses somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred million. Many critics panned it, the Tomatometer stalled at about half, and the New York Post advised its readers that they would urgently want to leave after the first five minutes. The Guardian ran both sides of the case, printing a verdict of the most disappointing film of the year and then, a few days later, Sian Cain’s argument that it is a misunderstood masterpiece.
Cain is right and most of her colleagues are wrong, and the wrongness is so systematic, so exquisitely self-incriminating, that the reviews will outlast most of the films released this year.
Four Films It Stands With
Heaven’s Gate, first. Cimino’s film was a sustained indictment of American political economy, of the violence that property does to people while calling itself order, and of the greed that organises the whole arrangement. It was buried on release, it took United Artists down with it, and for a generation it could not be seen in anything resembling the form its director intended. It is now on the syllabus. Digger indicts the same political economy at its terminal stage, which is extraction pursued until it consumes the conditions of its own continuation, and the industry has buried it the same way and for the same reason. Nobody minds a film about greed. What nobody will pay to watch is a film in which the greed turns out to be ours.
Dr. Strangelove, second. The generals who demand the right to put a warhead into the glacier, in the obscene idiom the film hands them, are Buck Turgidson’s heirs, and the flight out towards the ice is Major Kong’s ride to the target. The difference is that this bomb is being carried to repair a catastrophe the men in the aircraft caused. That is a sharper joke than Kubrick’s, and it has been dismissed as derivative by critics who appear to have decided that only Kubrick is licensed to make it.
Citizen Kane, third, and not for the mansion and the crates. Kane is a man reassembled after his death out of other people’s testimony, and the assembly never produces him; “Rosebud” is a joke at the expense of anybody who believes a life has a key. Digger Rockwell gets precisely that treatment. The man himself, we learn late, was composed, frightening and seductive. What posterity has made of him is a clown in a ten-gallon hat, because a clown is easier to hate and very much easier to stage.
There Will Be Blood, fourth, and this is the film Digger takes on directly. Paul Thomas Anderson gave us the oilman as a species of monster. Daniel Plainview’s appetite is a pathology and his damnation is entirely his own, delivered alone at the bottom of his own house in a private bowling alley. It is a magnificent film and it lets us off, because a monster is by definition a thing we are not. Iñárritu takes the identical figure and goes further by removing the pathology. Rockwell is not sick. He is employed. He does what the demand requires, he says so out loud, the demand is ours, and that is exactly why nobody will buy a ticket. Plainview drinks your milkshake. Rockwell points out that you ordered it.
The Cat, the Finger, the Painted Garden
It opens in the register of Xanadu. Rockwell feeds his cat. The food is so rich, so costly and so evidently delicious that the housekeeper, with his back turned, lifts a taste of it on her finger. The entire political economy of that household is in the gesture and it takes four seconds. Then the windows. The gardens beyond the glass are compositions of great beauty, and then, by degrees, they declare themselves. They are backdrops. They are installations. The very rich commission the view when the real one will not do.
Baudrillard’s line, that the map now precedes the territory, is not quoted here. It is built, in set dressing, in the first ten minutes, before a single rivet has failed in Greenland. The man has bought his horizon. Everything that follows is the consequence, and the critics who complained that the film tips its hand were watching a film that had already told them, politely, in the furniture.
The Ice Comes to Europe
Then the methane, the explosion, and a slab of the ice sheet the size of a small country calved off and under way, with fifty feet of water behind it. Timothy Morton’s word for such a thing is a hyperobject, an entity so massively distributed in time and space that nobody can perceive it whole, which sticks to everything it touches and phases in and out of human attention. Global warming is his example. An ice sheet bearing down on Europe is that object granted, for once, an outline and a bearing.
Here is the serious criticism, and no reviewer made it. The gift is a cheat. Rob Nixon’s slow violence is precisely the kind of harm that has no event, no frame and no news cycle, the attritional killing that works over decades and photographs badly. Iñárritu hands the climate what the climate does not possess, a date, a culprit and a deadline. He makes it an action film. That is a formal concession of the first magnitude and the film should be argued with about it.
But notice what the concession buys. The realist apparatus of the probable and the domestic was built to exclude exactly the planetary improbability we now inhabit, which is why the climate novel keeps failing. Iñárritu abandons realism at the level of form instead of content. He gives you the action film and then takes it away, and the taking away is the argument.
The Speech
Standing before a European assembly to answer for the disaster, Rockwell admits it, and then turns the chamber inside out. The demand, he tells them, was theirs.
“You want freedom to live your unsustainable lives. You love oil. Let’s cut the bullshit.”
The chamber has no language in which to answer him. Lyotard called this a differend, a wrong that cannot be stated in the idiom of the court obliged to judge it. The only idiom available here is consumer sovereignty, and inside that idiom Rockwell is telling the truth. The drowned have no standing in a court of preferences.
Name the referents, since the film does not flinch from them. The two-day delivery of things nobody needs is Amazon’s, and the warehouse, the van fleet and the data centre are the physical body of the convenience the speech is describing. The figure of the billionaire who causes the catastrophe and then offers himself as the one man equipped to repair it required no invention in 2026 either. We have the real article: Elon Musk, selling the electric car and the rocket off the planet in the same breath, atonement and exit bundled at checkout. And John Goodman’s President Compson, a grotesque who whines about his own bowels while the ice comes on, is not a caricature of a type. He is a caricature of an office as it has lately been occupied, and the audience supplies the name Trump without being asked. Cain put the point better than I can. We like our presidents stupid and laughable rather than stupid and terrifying, and this one holds the codes.
Then the deeper move, which is Žižek’s, after Sloterdijk. They know very well what they are doing, and still they are doing it. Ideology stopped needing our ignorance long ago. It runs on our cynicism and it prefers it. Rockwell’s speech is that formula delivered from a podium by the man who banks the proceeds, and it works because everyone in the chamber, and everyone in the cinema, already knows. Knowledge was never the thing we were short of.
He Steps Off the Plane
He is in an aircraft flying out to put a nuclear weapon into the ice, the President aboard. He leaves the fuselage. He steps down. He is on a stage.
Cruise is not playing Digger Rockwell. He is playing Curtis Markson, a jobbing actor cast as Digger in a didactic satire called Fossil Fools, staged decades after the rig actually blew. Hannah adapted and directed it. Rockwell’s nephew Kenny paid for it, out of what looks like a small instalment on an unpayable family debt. The red-haired boy glimpsed earlier in the mansion is the man now writing the cheques.
This is Brecht, and it is Brecht performed rather than cited. The Verfremdungseffekt, the estrangement effect, better translated as making-strange than as alienation, since alienation is the condition Brecht was treating rather than the cure, was never a gimmick for its own sake. It was a device for interrupting identification at the moment identification becomes complicity, so that an audience stops weeping and starts thinking. Iñárritu lets us sit inside a disaster movie for forty minutes, lets us enjoy the spectacle of our own extinction with popcorn in our hands, and then pulls the floor away and shows us the boards. We were not watching the catastrophe. We were watching a show about it, and we had already decided the show was bad.
Markson plays Digger as a clown and is given a euphoric standing ovation. An alarm sounds. The audience put on their masks and file out of the theatre into a world under fifty feet of water, crossed by boat and elevated walkway, where the air is graded and rationed. The catastrophe was never the play’s subject. It was the theatre’s address.
What the Critics Did, and Why It Is the Best Part
Stuart Hall’s old distinction does the work here. A text encodes a preferred reading, audiences decode it as dominant, negotiated or oppositional, and the gap between the two is where ideology operates. Film criticism almost never supplies a clean experiment. Digger has supplied one.
David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter called it a climate crisis satire so smug and bombastic that it makes Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up seem almost innocuous. Alonso Duralde in the Film Verdict reached for the same yardstick and found an even more heavy-handed and dire Don’t Look Up. Owen Gleiberman in Variety put it shortest. “Here’s the real problem: Digger isn’t funny.”
Every one of those verdicts is correct, and every one of them is a review of Fossil Fools, which is end-of-the-world agitprop written for a shabby London fringe theatre and then inflated by the guilty money of the dynasty that ended the world. It is meant to be smug. It is meant to be bombastic. It is meant not to be funny. Marking it down for those properties is like marking Hamlet down for the acting in The Murder of Gonzago.
Coleman Spilde’s notice in Salon engages with the reveal, explains it to the reader, and then goes on calling Cruise’s character Digger Rockwell from first line to last. Markson leaves no trace in it. The complaint is that the film indicts its audience when it ought to be pointing at itself. The indictment belongs to Hannah and to Kenny. Watching an audience sit under it, and feeling the cushion give, is the experience the film is built to deliver.
Eileen Jones in Jacobin runs the whole manoeuvre under the title “No, Digger Is Not a Misunderstood Masterpiece”. The film is gruelingly unfunny and uninvolving, we should go and watch Dr. Strangelove instead, and there is a sneer in passing at the guardians of art and high culture defending it against lowbrow proles. Consider where that argument has stranded her. She is upholding the box office as a verdict on a work of art.
The Objection Worth Having
Now the objection that deserves respect, because several critics made it and they were not being lazy. If every weakness in the first half can be reassigned to the play, the defence cannot be refuted, and a work that cannot be criticised has bought its immunity too cheaply.
The answer is that the film never asks us to admire Fossil Fools. It asks us to watch an audience receive it and then to notice whose seat we are in. And the structure is not immune, because the badness is organised rather than merely present. Hannah and Markson stand on stage and have the critics’ argument for them. Is this satire? Is it farce? Is it revenge on a dead man? Or is it only a bad telling of a true story? Kenny closes the argument without settling it.
“It really doesn’t matter. Satire, comedy, farce, drama, it doesn’t matter. You’re both right. We’re all right. Now what?”
A film that stages the dispute about its own register, gives each party its best line and leaves the verdict open has not dodged criticism. It has annexed it. What survives of the objection is a practical residue and it is real. Spend forty minutes earning a misreading and you will be misread, and the bill falls on the box office rather than on the argument. Iñárritu took that bet with his eyes open. He has said that the film is not perfect, that he likes taking risks, and that he would rather be savaged than received tepidly, because starting the conversation is what he takes a film to be for.
Recuperation, Which Is the Film and Also Its Fate
Debord gave us the sentence that the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image, and he gave us recuperation, the process by which the spectacle digests its own critics and sells them back to us as merchandise. Fossil Fools is recuperation staged and lit. It is a critique of the family that destroyed the world, mounted with that family’s money, as penance, at scale, with stars. The nephew does not fund it to be forgiven by the dead. He funds it because a play is cheaper than a reckoning.
Then there is the film itself. A hundred and twenty-five million dollars of Warner Bros. and Legendary money, spent on an attack on extraction, marketed by the apparatus it attacks, released into multiplexes running on the same grid. Iñárritu did not escape the condition he was filming and the film knows it. Which is why the figures are not an embarrassment to my case. They are the last act.
It has become easier to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth than the breakdown of late capitalism. That is Jameson, and Mark Fisher gave the condition its name, capitalist realism. Digger is what it looks like when a studio spends a hundred and twenty-five million dollars testing Jameson’s sentence and finds that it holds. Adorno said that amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. The last image of Fossil Fools is an audience putting on gas masks, having been entertained about the thing that is killing them, and going back out into it. That is the culture industry filmed from inside the auditorium.
Four Frames and No Outside
Baudrillard said that Disneyland exists in order to conceal the fact that the whole country is Disneyland. The theatre in Digger exists in order to conceal the fact that the drowned city is the real. Count the frames. There is the painted garden at the window, bought by a man who can afford to choose his horizon. There is the staged catastrophe, which we take for the catastrophe. There is the theatre, which the characters take for the place where the matter is being addressed. And there is the flooded world outside the doors, where the air is graded. Each is mistaken for the world by those inside it. Only the last has nobody standing outside it, and we are not standing outside it either.
The licensed fool may say what nobody else may say, and the licence is also his neutralisation. Carnival inverts the order for a day and the order is stronger on the Monday. Markson plays Digger as a clown, the fool speaks, the house rises, the catharsis is administered, the alarm goes, the masks go on.
Aristotle thought catharsis purged the emotions. Brecht thought it anaesthetised the will. Digger stages the Aristotelian version inside the Brechtian frame and invites you to watch the anaesthetic go in, through your own arm. Then it asks the only question it has any interest in, and it puts that question in the mouth of the man who paid for the play. Now what?
Two Performances
One more thing, and it is not a small one. Cruise has never been better, and I include Magnolia. He is playing an actor playing a psychopath badly, on purpose, holding three layers in view at once and never signalling which one he is in. That is close to the hardest thing an actor can be asked to do, and the hostile notices keep praising his commitment as though commitment were the achievement. And Goodman’s Compson is a study in the stupidity that is not funny, the kind that has the launch codes and a grievance. In my view both men should have Academy Awards for these performances. Both will be punished instead for the gross, because a flop is the only review the Academy reads twice.
It will be re-evaluated. Heaven’s Gate was, and the re-evaluation took twenty years and arrived too late to help anybody who made it. I would not care to guess the schedule for this one.
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Paul Ernest
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