When the lights came on, I was among just six souls in the audience. As I waited to validate my parking ticket I overheard a woman, one of the five people in line, emphatically arguing that “there had to be a malignant hit-job campaign on this movie! How could a film so good be so poorly received?”
Acclaimed documentaries like Naza and Musk have this year had to either resort to self-distribution or accept a short theatrical footprint due to intense political controversy and alleged death threats. But Digger is not a documentary, and I wouldn’t say it represents an obvious menace to the forces it portrays. At least not directly. Also, we’re not talking about an avant-garde indie with limited screenings at the Angelica. I saw Digger at Century City’s AMC, one of the most mainstream venues in West Los Angeles. Street Fighter was playing down the hall.
Over the past weeks, my social feed had been spinning with petitions and public appeals by prominent figures, from Guillermo del Toro to Neil Young and Ben Affleck, imploring audiences to support this movie. Their pleas not only praised its filmmaking, but also acted as a collective outcry against the extinction of films of this nature, both already produced and yet to be conceived. My own viewing experience was thoroughly enjoyable, spiked with fleeting moments of disconnect. So I chose to refrain from blaming the film’s tepid reception on some form of higher-up puppet-mastering. But what may have happened with Digger?
Have modern-day critics become overpowered by the undemanding, mind-numbing, high-octane franchise-based entertainment that has steadily taken over what remains of the moviegoing experience?
How patronizing of me. To clarify, critics can be insensitive executioners who need only twenty minutes to destroy the labor of love of a filmmaker’s last decade. But “sensitivity” is hardly an essential requirement for experiencing a film like this. If anything, Digger is an overt and rather explicit representation of how webs of power, self-confirmation, adoration and outright denialism among those in authority can lead us all into catastrophe.
Through its hypnotic reimagining of chaos and dioramic backdrops, Digger becomes a figurative and literal stage for a climate apocalypse. This unfolds less through metaphor than by offering a mirrored reflection of the events we’ve all witnessed firsthand: successive government administrations obscuring the actual health status of their commanders in chief; presidents firing surrounding dissident voices that would otherwise bring nuance and educated analysis; religious dignitaries anointing the president at the Oval Office on live television. We see it all. We hear it all. Every day.
Could audiences be coming down with a case of doomsday fatigue?
In recent years we’ve seen a plethora of dystopian pieces forecasting the apocalypse; yet most of these are soon rendered obsolete, as what they intend to warn or ridicule through fiction has usually been surpassed by a more frightening reality. Nothing in Digger is obsolete. If anything, one could accuse it of being over-contemporary.
Upon viewing I was inevitably reminded of recent Orwellian tales, such as Civil War by Alex Garland and HBO’s The Regime; as well as the echoing of fundamental period references like The Trial. Based on Kafka’s novel, the film by Orson Welles is an abstraction; an expressionistic metaphor for the weight and absurdity of modern bureaucracy. Digger’s departure, however, from films like Dr. Strangelove lies in that the latter leaned on Cold War satire as a way to process the unimaginable, or at least the unknown. But today, in “the era of information,” as tech CEOs love to call it, one doesn't need much imagination to envision what life inside the corridors of power looks like. These worlds, together with our own lives, have been opened for everyone to see.
Could the generalized lack of enthusiasm be due to Digger’s resistance to genre classification?
In contrast to other films featuring a life within a life, such as Synecdoche, New York (by Charlie Kaufman), Digger’s plot is less intellectual than sensorial. Interwoven, but not complex. Its structure is built on a dialectical scaffolding, expressed through a dualistic tone that shifts back and forth between opposing registers. The first time this eruption happens in the film, I thought of one of my favorites: Jafar Panahi’s Iranian masterpiece, The Mirror. As with the rest of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s body of work, the orchestration of elements is indebted to a governing principle. In Birdman, a previous film by the same director, that principle was the surgical precision of an interrupted narrative, achieved in a single shot. In Digger, the governing principle revolves almost exclusively around the multilayered crescendo of its two main characters: Digger Rockwell, the oil tycoon, and Curtis, the actor embodying him, both played brilliantly by Tom Cruise.
A dualistic camera approach, shifting between the restraint of studio-mode cinematography and documentary-style colloquialism, is always in service of Tom Cruise’s measured energy and layers of truth. He is selective when intimate and transformative when grandiose.
At first, performances by secondary actors may appear a bit off kilter, especially when appearing opposite Tom Cruise, and this might read as tone-confusion. But as the film evolves, grandiose set pieces and grotesque deliveries become interwoven with more vulnerable versions of the characters themselves, almost questioning the very pompous acting registers in which they are being asked to perform.
In a scene reminiscent of The Trial, where Mr. K. struggles to preserve his sanity while defending himself against an accusation he has yet to understand, Tom Cruise reaches the pinnacle of his mastery during Rockwell’s public address at the European Parliament. He confronts an angry yet innocuous crowd, dressed in timid beige uniforms that seem to suggest no real opposition can emerge from their collective indignation.
I couldn't help thinking of the Book of Revelation 3:15 (which in Spanish is known as El Apocalipsis):
I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. …So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing,” not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.
Unlike in Kafka, everyone here seems to be aware of the crime in question: Rockwell, the parliamentarians, and both the on-screen and off-screen audiences. We all know what we're accused of. And we all know we're guilty. Yet it was precisely when the film seemed most preoccupied with keeping audiences vigilant about the consequences of modern negligence that I felt the momentary need to withdraw.
How far can satire go in confronting an already absurd reality?
In making my own films, I've learned that two scenes with equal emotional charge, when placed contiguously, tend to cancel each other out. The same may be true when an already absurd reality is dramatized in a similar key.
Legendary writer-director Paul Schrader has said to create his fictional universes by way of metaphors: the cab in Taxi Driver serves as a metaphor for loneliness; Jesus's struggle with answering his spiritual calling in The Last Temptation of the Christ is represented by recurring migraines and crippling seizures. For this technique to work, Schrader explains, there must be a healthy distance between the protagonist’s problem and the metaphor chosen as a bridge to the audience. If the metaphor is too far-fetched, audiences will have a hard time making the connection. If, on the contrary, it falls too close to the literal conflict, the resulting collision might seem redundant.
And here may lie a clue.
When analyzing trends in storytelling, scholar Howard Suber speaks of the "habituation" phenomenon that has cycled repeatedly throughout cinema history. Much like what happens with consumable substances, film audiences become desensitized to a given set of norms, creating the need for increasingly greater doses of stimulation to achieve the same satisfaction. In movies, this is generally attained through exacerbation: editing is faster, films get bigger, louder, bloodier. Eventually, a different avenue is chosen, usually in the opposite direction. But the films that are brave enough to pursue radically new storytelling approaches tend to be the martyrs who immolate themselves at the box-office front lines, while paving the way to entirely new possibilities. Dare I say, Citizen Kane?
Citizen Kane is an unquestionable reference point in the history of cinema, a precursor of numerous technical innovations: from its use of depth of field by cinematographer Gregg Toland to its journalistic storytelling structure, which draws on talking-head testimonies to construct a multidimensional profile of Charles Foster Kane. Less often mentioned, however, is that Citizen Kane flopped at the box office upon its release in 1941. At the time, renowned Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges wrote a review in which he called it “a labyrinth without a center,” a description that I once heard Welles's longtime friend Peter Bogdanovich say had haunted Orson until the end.
As we know, Citizen Kane drew heavily from the life of media mogul William Randolph Hearst, who also had a political career. In the movie, Kane’s character runs for office and loses. His reaction? Claiming fraud. This was said to be inspired by Hearst’s real-life grievances, who himself had run for mayor and for governor of New York, and lost all races. At the time, the parallelism between fiction and reality was too close for Hearst’s taste, so close that he boycotted the film and leaned on his influence in Hollywood to add hostility towards the movie’s distribution efforts. I wonder if the close proximity between real life Randolph Hearst and fictional Charles F. Kane may have also been too close for escape-seeking audiences, hence contributing to its commercial demise.
Borges’ reservations towards Citizen Kane went even further:
I dare suspect, nevertheless, that Citizen Kane will endure in the way certain films by Griffith or Pudovkin 'endure': their historical value is denied by no one, yet no one can bring themselves to watch them again.
And I dare disagree wholeheartedly. When rewatching Citizen Kane a few years ago, this time with my daughter, she knew nothing about William Randolph Hearst or his political ambitions. But Charles Foster Kane’s election denialism was a familiar notion in the aftermath of the 2020 elections. I asked her, “What does this remind you of?” She grinned smugly. A film that had failed financially upon its release was inadvertently helping a teenager make better sense of the political implications, almost 90 years later.
At the risk of becoming lukewarm myself, I'm afraid the question with Digger is not whether critics have become insensitive, audiences suffer from doomsday fatigue, or the film resists the comforting boundaries of genre. Perhaps the distance between fiction and reality has now collapsed, leaving us habituated to outlandish political events that can no longer be dramatized through cinematic exaggeration. At least, for now. What I appreciate about Borges's review, if anything, is that it opens up the possibility that a film's relationship with its audience, particularly in the realm of art, is never entirely settled at the moment of its initial encounter.
This is what time does to cinema. And if anything, Digger is owed just that: the benefit of time. Who is to say that ninety years from now, some teenager won't come across Digger and, like my daughter, find more than historical value: a lens through which to better understand their own present. And hopefully, within its fictional universe, a possible path forward.
