Amusing Ourselves to Death: “Digger” Mocks the Futility of Billionaire-Funded Political Art

Despite all that you’ve heard, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Digger is not a wretched stinker of a movie. Despite the groan-worthy zany trailer heralding the impending doom of exploding oil rigs, wayward glaciers, and catastrophic tsunamis, like an even more libtard cringe version of Adam McKay’s much-loathed farcical finger-wag Don’t Look Up (which, for the record, I should admit I enjoyed. Maybe I’M cringe!), Digger is not about climate change (not fully, anyway). Despite John Goodman playing a hollow-eyed, ailing, dementia-ridden president surrounded by a familiar circle of flaccid yes-men, bomb-loving warmongers, and a male version of Paula White-Cain, Digger isn’t a preaching-to-the-choir send-up of the Trump administration. Hell, Digger, despite its name, is not even really about Digger Rockwell himself, a Cosby sweater-wearing, paunchy, frequently bloviating oil man who wields his inheritance—wealth, family yarns, and granddaddy’s shovel—as a weapon against both reason and nature. Instead, Digger is a paradoxically overblown and sobering reflection on the futility of billionaire-funded political art, especially when it’s already too late. The apocalypse is here, and not even Digger—or Digger—can dig us out of the shit! The film is cynical! It’s bleak! It’s absurd! What more could you want in a movie?!

Ok, I realize a whole lot of critics wanted more in a movie—or apparently didn’t understand it at all. After seeing Digger, I’ve been completely baffled by not only critics’ ire for the film, but also their misunderstanding of its intentions entirely. Are they being willfully obtuse, or do we have a serious crisis of media literacy in criticism on our hands? However, there is a big problem: There’s no way for me to write about Digger the way I want to without spoiling the whole thing for you, dearest readers, entirely. I don’t usually resort to spoiler alerts because, well, read it or don’t. Whatever. But this time, I’m making an exception because Digger’s twists and turns are so integral to its enjoyment that I don’t want to ruin it for the dwindling audience who actually want to see it. So, if that’s you, stop reading! But if you’re going to let me watch it for you, continue on!

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I realize this warning is probably unwarranted. Despite the rise of Digger Nation on X and endorsements by allies like Mandy Patinkin and Neil Young, who called Digger “the best film I have ever seen,” Digger is a big ole flop at the box office. In fact, the stench of failure is exactly what drove me into those strangely intimate AMC recliners. A lover of divisive cinema, wild rides, and big swing crappers, all I had to hear were X users comparing the movie to Eddington, Megalopolis, and, one of my all-time favs, Freddy Got Fingered, and I was there. After seeing the film, not all of these comparisons work; one in particular stands out as misplaced. Though chaotic, Digger is not exactly a Megalopolis mess. While I loved taking a delirious trip into the deteriorating mind of Francis Ford Coppola, I wouldn’t say Megalopolis was a good film. Digger, in contrast, is a great one. And it also doesn’t include anything quite as slobberingly batshit as considering moving walkways utopian architecture.

There is, however, a pitiful, matted, incontinent white cat, who opens the film with her bleary, nearly dead eyes that look so close to the beyond it’s like she can already see heaven. This poor critter is Maggie, Digger Rockwell’s aged kitty, whom he feeds tuna with his jagged coke nail. A tour-de-force performance by Tom Cruise, Digger isn’t faring all that much better than Maggie, soaking in cat piss in his ornate bed and wandering around his puzzle-like estate, an architectural caricature combo of generational wealth’s ill-gotten gains and a dusty mausoleum dedicated to outdoorsy American masculinity, filled to the brim with Medieval tapestries, art historical wonders, and animal trophies. Interrupting his demands for others to care for his waning kitty is a call from a very nervous and even colder scientist, Sandy (Danny Kirrane), in Greenland, who warns of a rapidly widening crack in the glacier that holds Digger’s oil rig, an impending unnatural disaster that Digger caused, though he seemingly couldn’t care less. Sometime between this call and the arrival of three other anxiety-riddled scientists, whose nerdy quirk is ripped straight from a Wes Anderson movie, the whole thing blew, killing poor Sandy and sending a glacier named Judy (“Well now, I’m not gonna talk about Judy!” Is Iñárritu a Twin Peaks fan?) barreling toward Northern Europe.

Much of this environmental chaos plays out in a manner that should be familiar to anyone who has suffered through an Aaron Sorkin production: lots of characters hollering over each other about a cataclysm happening off-screen. The yelling only grows louder after the arrival of President Compson, played in exaggerated glory by John Goodman, who seems to be inhabited by the ghost of Rip Torn (hence the Freddy Got Fingered comparison), and his Dr. Strangelove-like Cabinet, including a trigger-happy jughead Fitzgerald (Robert John Burke) and a wimpy VP (Michael Stuhlbarg). These government officials join Digger in some good old-fashioned crisis management. Should they bomb the glacier? Suppress any words related to glaciers on social media and hope for the best? It’s only when President Compson takes Digger aside for a chat in a soggy, ghoulishly dead bird-decorated room to divulge details about his “ass cancer” that yet another accident triggers a revelation: the crisis we’ve been watching is all a theatrical production, a corny play terribly titled Fossil Fools. Digger isn’t really Digger but a disgruntled actor, Curtis Markson.

In retrospect, there were signs. Maggie, a ragged puddy automaton who looks as lively as the puppet version of Salem on Sabrina the Teenage Witch, was a glaring early tell. Not to mention all that ham-fisted acting, all those off-screen deaths and disasters, and all those shit and butthole jokes, from Maggie’s foul odor to Compson’s tumor the size of a raccoon, which seem remarkably juvenile for a filmmaker who has won numerous Academy Awards. That being said, I laughed. A lot. I mean, with lines like, “You get a different perspective when death starts whispering into your anal cavity,” how could you not? Apparently, I’m the exact sucker that falls for this kind of schlock! In particular, I was tickled by the references to real-life American political ridiculousness sequestered within Fossil Fools—the scam preacher-led laying of hands on the president, an elderly politico glitching out at the microphone à la Mitch McConnell, a nice nod to Secretary of War and former(?) drunk morning show host Pete Hegseth’s American flag jacket lining, and even a chucked shoe as tribute to Muntadhar al-Zaidi. Of course the issue with Trumpian satire has always been that it’s impossible to satirize a reality that has already become farce. It’s difficult to exaggerate a bloodthirsty nutjob cabinet member when the IRL Secretary of War is riffing about a public livestreamed execution, for instance.

A significant portion of the critical bile spewed Digger’s way is a reaction to the purposefully tiresome and cheesy nature of Fossil Fools rather than Digger. Some of this is understandable. The play is grating. But how much worse is it than other sanctimonious shitlib art? I’d rather watch Digger wax poetic about in-flight tuna (risky!) to Riz Ahmed’s perpetually petrified Dr. Nirav Ganesh than stare at a giant floating Trump baby or the sculpture of Trump and Epstein tiptoeing through the tulips together. However, if you’re annoyed by Fossil Fools, you’re shit out of luck since Iñárritu is clearly smitten with that hack world, continually switching back and forth between the increasingly ridiculous play and “reality.” An even bigger reason for critics’ inability to get over Fossil Fools is Tom Cruise himself… or really, Curtis’s barnstorming performance as Digger. First off, Tom Cruise is always a distraction as one of the only true Hollywood stars left (he’s crazy, he’s in a cult, he was one half of the sexiest couples in history, though Nicole did the heavy lifting there). Then, add in Digger’s astonishing 10-minute-long grandstanding monologue in front of a furious European parliament in the wake of Judy’s flooded wreckage, a scene that would win Cruise an Oscar if everyone weren’t so goddamn grumpy. Arriving in a ten-gallon hat and obnoxious belt buckle, an on-the-nose representation of the idiotic American cowboy tromping all over Europe, Digger deflects the blame for his own environmental catastrophe. He channels Kevin O’Leary’s muttered justification for needing more data centers (China!) on Tucker Carlson. He needles at the politicos invested in his destructo company. He dismisses the renewable energy supported by his sis (an underused Sandra Hüller). He throws polar bears under the bus. But, above all, he points fingers at the general public’s wanton consumption, a death cult of freedom that demands two-day Amazon deliveries from contractors who have to pee in water bottles and consults ChatGPT about how to fix the environmental problems that AI caused. “You want freedom to bask in the comfort of your own unsustainable life!” he drawls. It’s a clownish corporate tour de force, but Digger isn’t entirely wrong. He’s not fully right either. Ultimately, it is the oligarchs’ fault. And you’d think critics might have noticed the audience wasn’t supposed to take the whole rant seriously, given the Parliament’s repeated chants of “Blah! Blah! Blah!” partway through the speech.

What this dizzying scene also makes clear, even with the scattered mannequin seat fillers, is Fossil Fools’ eye-wateringly high budget. The person footing this astronomical bill is Kenny Rockwell, Digger Rockwell’s ginger shagged nephew, who also appears as a bit child character in the play under the name Kyle. Played by Jesse Plemons with his characteristically placid menace, Kenny’s role is small but possibly the most significant in the film. Not just a nepo nephew, Kenny is a Peter Thiel-like owner of a global security firm who produced the play after seeing the cheers, jeers, and catharsis experienced by the crowd during its first performance in a tiny London theater. We see a similar response to Digger’s last stand in this elaborate production with close-ups of multiple audience members shedding dramatic tears, like Elizabeth Holmes squeezing out a salty one in the trailer for You Can See Everything, before returning to the grim, toxic, drowned, dystopian world outside.

Which says a whole lot about the efficacy of well-funded political art, doesn’t it? The audience can laugh and cry, but in the end, nothing has changed at all about the worsening cataclysm just out the theater doors. At one point, after Curtis fights with the play’s director Hannah (Sophie Wilde) about the mischaracterization of Digger as a laughable dunce in contrast to the slicker, psychopathic reality, Kenny butts in with a tell: “It doesn’t matter. Satire, comedy, farce, drama—it doesn’t matter. You’re both right. We’re all right. Now what.” “Now what?” should be the question for most institutionally sanctioned political art. And I should note, I say institutionally sanctioned because I DO believe some political art matters, particularly when it breaks through walls of censorship, like about the Gaza genocide. But that’s so rarely the kind of art that finds its way into well-funded museums or big-budget productions. Kenny’s “We’re all right. Now what?” reminded me of the soft chuckles and scoffing responses to Arthur Jafa’s collaged video The White Album in his exhibition I Am Tony at the New Museum. Sure, I also laughed at the dorky white guy dancing down a sports stadium stairs to Bon Jovi, rolled my eyes at the vertically-filmed white girl whining about being accused of racism, and shuddered when I saw parking lot footage of Dylann Roof walking into Mother Emanuel AME Church, as did so many other people in the crowded screening room. These are all reactions that work to distance white museum-goers from the action on screen. Surely, we are not like THOSE people. Great. Many of us believe we are on the same page about white supremacy. Now what. Now what?!

Interestingly, for the few critics able to get over the overt terribleness of Fossil Fools, Digger has become something of a Rorschach test, with individuals seeing what they want to see in its commentary. Jayson Greene’s exalting editorial in The New York Times embraces Kenny’s thrill at the audience’s catharsis: “an accurate portrayal of the necessity of bad art…” while The Guardian’s Sian Cain inches closer, admitting art won’t save us, but in the end also reverts to believing Kenny: “Art will never be the thing that saves us from existential threat, Digger argues – but it can give us catharsis.” Maybe it’s because I spend a lot of time ruminating over the nefarious makeup of the MoMA board (Leon Black, Larry Fink, Ronald Lauder…), but I don’t think we should ignore that the catharsis bestowed upon the people in Digger is from a billionaire tech fascist whose surveillance network is so wide that he just needs a simple phone number to track a person’s whereabouts.

The catharsis Kenny is offering, like the catharsis offered by our billionaires who are actively striving to make society worse while funding OUR art, is manipulation—placating the public with a farce that makes them feel like they’re superior to the goofballs that wrecked the globe and that they are doing something while they’re just passively sitting in their seats (“Compliance is freedom,” as a spooky piece of graffiti reads in the final scene of the film). It works too. Note that the audience members, likely well-off given the probable high ticket prices, are not the same people tossing rocks at a paramilitary force over crumpled Cybertrucks and Tesla robots (It’s also the stark difference between whatever this is at the #NoKings protests and the French rioting). Sorry, Karl M., but billionaire-funded political spoofs may be the real opium of the masses. While the coziness between the Epstein class’s extreme exploitative wealth and the visual art world is a tad more obvious, Digger’s dig at financial backers and the fecklessness of the political art they fund could not come at a more relevant time. Digger is possibly the final Warner Bros. movie before the Ellison’s Skydance takeover. Imagine the genocides, war crimes, and other criminal behavior that they’ll be laundering through art!

Even more than this meta film studio commentary, Digger’s biggest gag may be its own audience’s return to the world outside of the theater. For me, I reemerged into the East Village suddenly overrun by over-fillered TikTok blondes with their phones out and tech bros in Google hoodies and US Open hats, pricing the rest of us out of our apartments while they pay $4000 a month to wait in long lines for over-hyped, expensive chicken parm sandwich spots. Online is no better: Videos of craggy old Tony Hawk and burnout Bam Margera skating around the New York Stock Exchange for some finance AI company (rad!). Young guys in “America First” hats yawn behind Donald Trump, illustrating the Groyper future that I, too, see coming in 2032, if not before, unless the Democrats get it the fuck together (unlikely). Oh, look, there’s also sold-out hypebeast streetwear drops of Palantir drip, including Palantir bucket hats and shirts that read “Cowardice Kills,” from a company that makes tech that kills people. Charli xcx says it best in her also placidly menacing song, “SS26, “We’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell. Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion, or film.”