Warning: this article contains major spoilers for Digger.
In director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film Digger, the eponymous Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) puts on his Stetson first thing in the morning. It’s an embodiment of his credo: “Rise early, work hard, strike oil.” He is rarely without it as he rides roughshod through the extinction-level environmental catastrophe his drilling company has caused.
As other critics have noted, Rockwell’s hat is borrowed from Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens), a character in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove. In that film’s famous closing sequence, Kong wears his Stetson as he rides a nuclear bomb like a bucking bronco. And there are similarities beyond the hat. Digger also borrows Dr. Strangelove’s war-room satire and its identification of a militaristic male elite as the root cause of the world’s doom. What Iñárritu’s film does with these borrowings, however, is very different.
After Digger’s opening act it is revealed that we are actually watching the technical rehearsal of a play: Fossil Fools. It is here that the connections with Kubrick’s film are strongest. Dr. Strangelove and Fossil Fools are made up mostly of men talking, debating and shouting at each other. Shot in extended takes, claustrophobic chamber scenes capture the insularity of the ruling elite. In doing so, they expose the absurd catch-22 logic driving humanity’s seemingly relentless march toward nuclear holocaust and environmental collapse.
Both films are centred on what film scholar James Naremore calls “wargasm”: the end of the world resulting from a male lust for power, founded on a toxic misogyny.
Dr. Strangelove opens with a B-52 bomber refueling mid-flight – an aerial manoeuvre staged explicitly to resemble sexual intercourse. It ends with Dr. Strangelove imagining a post-apocalyptic society of Aryan alpha males living in mineshafts beneath a radioactive wasteland.
Digger measures the crack that develops in the Arctic ice by the size of his penis and states that his life’s aim has been to “penetrate our sacred planet 24/7 in every hole available”. The killer iceberg threatening Europe is named Judy, with one military adviser offering to use nukes to “blow that frozen cunt up”.
Both films use nightmarish black comedy to expose an existential threat hiding in plain sight – and to pillory those who cause it and fail to deal with it. But Digger is more than just the Fossil Fools play, and here the films diverge.
Performance within performance
Cruise is Digger but he is also Curtis Markson, an actor concerned that his performance as Digger is too broad and too removed from the truth to be credible. He is also distracted: his daughter’s plane has gone missing in a Caribbean hurricane.
Cruise’s performance as Markson, a seemingly decent, hardworking and loving father inevitably complicates the audience’s response to Digger. Cruise playing Markson playing Digger is intended to secure our admiration (and perhaps an Academy Award). But his casting actually short-circuits the film’s satirical bite and instead celebrates the celebrity playing him.
Peter Sellers’ three roles in Dr. Strangelove might be said to introduce a similar layer of self-reflexivity to that film – but none of the characters Sellers plays is a version of Sellers himself.
Tellingly, Kubrick cut an 11-minute pie fight from the film’s original ending. He did so because he thought the actors were too clearly enjoying themselves and that this made the audience aware of the film as a film.
Instead, Kubrick sought to retain a fine balance of military and social realism that, even when treated satirically, created a coherent story world. This allowed the audience to be emotionally affected and, as a result, inspired to act. Digger, by contrast, uses self-reflexivity to pull the rug from under every source of hope.
Digger visits the European parliament and confronts its ageing politicians, arguing that they are unable to pass laws that can prevent climate catastrophe because they are complicit, as are we all. Climate science is represented by Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), who works for Digger. He arrives too late with his warnings and compromises his veganism to eat a fabled piece of sashimi.
Digger’s half-sister (Sandra Hüller) runs a renewables company, yet she barely gets a line. We learn that Fossil Fools, ostensibly an example of art as resistance, is paid for by Digger’s nephew (Jesse Plemons), who is heir to the family fortune and now a sinister tech entrepreneur. Funded by the very problem it satirises, the play within the film is disavowed – an empty pastiche of Dr. Strangelove.
At the film’s close, Fossil Fools is revealed to be a history play: an account of a catastrophe that has already happened. As the well-heeled theatregoers don their gas masks and leave, we see a world that is flooded, poisoned, authoritarian and fraught with division. It is a bleak ending, with the future already foreclosed and all opportunities for change ruled out.
In 1964, Kubrick’s audience had recently lived through the Cuban missile crisis, and the film gave shape to fears of nuclear war as public opinion turned against the arms race. The film was a commercial and critical success.
Digger arrives amid a comparable appetite for action on the climate crisis. Fossil Fools, channelling Dr. Strangelove, does manage to gesture towards where that action might begin, through the challenge of those in power, but Digger insists every route is closed.
Guy Westwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.