The near-apocalyptic critical and commercial failure of the big-screen satire Digger should be taken as the most encouraging of cultural indicators.
Here is a movie that is so deeply woke in its ideas and attitudes that it deserves to be called pre-woke. Director and cowriter Alejandro G. Inarritu’s outraged portrayal of a venal, lawless, environment-destroying oil tycoon (Tom Cruise’s character, Digger Rockwell) suggests someone who has only recently become acquainted with the news of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and his eagerness to display his own card-carrying climate warrior credentials — the United States’s exit from the Paris climate accords is actually referenced at one point — suggests someone who has just watched the 2006 Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth. In other words, this is the perfect movie for Greta Thunberg, in her “How dare you!” mode, around 2019 or so.
In fact, at times, Digger hearkens back to an even earlier variety of baldly anti-American satire, as when Inarritu has the U.S. president character played by John Goodman — modeled, in his red necktie and general bellicosity, on Donald Trump, though in his purportedly low-class religious convictions and utterly unacceptable sympathy for oilmen, George W. Bush seems to be the closer model — refer to the “Russkies.” What is this, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966)?
Tom Cruise in “Digger.” (Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection)
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Tom Cruise in “Digger.” (Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection)
That the public has emphatically rejected — that a large portion has, in fact, skipped altogether — this movie’s dumb, dated virtue-signaling and odious attempts at humor is a real cause for hope. One of the ironic benefits of our social media age is that since trends in thought and attitude fluctuate so quickly, the wokeness that might have seemed au courant when Digger was being hatched sometime in the late 2010s has become as dated as an “in this house we believe” yard sign. Let this fiasco be a lesson to the Skydance Corporation, which, the week after the movie’s release, subsumed the studio that made it, Warner Bros.: Movies that present people who work in the energy industry as evil rubes, the president as a belligerent idiot, military leaders as ungovernable hotheads, and Cruise in old-age makeup are not the way forward.
And about Cruise in old-age makeup: Since so many of this film’s references are years or decades old, permit me to make one more. While watching Cruise slink around a bit too lithely and speak a bit too smoothly for someone his character’s age, was anyone else reminded of the old TV commercials for Six Flags amusement parks that starred an obviously young, clearly limber performer made up as an old man who proceeds to show off all manner of dance moves? Cruise, despite being given some signs of aging in his face and a mild paunch, does not walk, talk, or act like any known senior citizen. That’s fine for his Days of Thunder sequel but a disaster here. He is too nimble as he holds court in his mansion (featuring, in one of many clichéd touches meant to scream “wretched excess,” huge mirrors accented with antlers). He is too quick on his feet, which are nearly always wearing cowboy boots, even when he is still in his pajamas. Just in case you miss the point.
Which is not to say that Digger’s actions are any more credible than his appearance and affect: In the event that sets off the story, Digger is seen expressing total indifference to a disaster of some sort in an oil field in Greenland — an accident that has torn asunder an ice shelf, now wandering ominously toward land, where it is certain to whip up tsunamis and cause further death and destruction. Yet Digger suggests using technology to quash the news through some vague scheme that involves scary words like “AI.” Exaggerated behavior is necessary for satire, but when it is exaggerated to such a degree to become unbelievable — as is the case in the response of Digger and other U.S. officials to this situation — it crosses the line from satire to spite. Simply put, Inarritu must really believe that American capitalists are as crass and callous as Digger, and that American military men are as quick-tempered as the ones here (nuclear weapons are on the table), and that American society in general is one gigantic display of corpulence, literal and otherwise. It is no accident that the president played by Goodman is dying from colon cancer or something like it, a condition described most inelegantly throughout.
SKIP ‘THE WHISPER MAN,’ IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY
As it turns out, Inarritu — whose previous overrated movies include Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015) — has a handy solution for this movie’s increasingly rancid ridiculousness. Spoiler alert: It is revealed at one point that the scenes we have been watching of Digger and the U.S. officials contending with the ice shelf situation are excerpts from a play — a stage show! — based on actual people and events. In other words, Cruise is not cast as Digger but as “Digger,” a character drawn from the real Digger, who, I guess, we never really see. As if it were not annoying enough, this is one of those “meta” movies that means to foreground its own artifice.
Yet there is nothing feigned about the moviemakers’ pernicious notions about our country. When Digger swaggeringly asserts that he doesn’t “speak Celsius,” or when a general gloatingly proclaims, “Bomb first, questions later,” the writers who penned such over-the-top lines are expressing contempt for the institutions the characters represent. This is a notably unpleasant and incompetent movie.
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
