Fossil Flop
By now you have probably heard that acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu’s eighth feature film, Digger, is a massive flop. Its heavyweight star, Tom Cruise was expected to effortlessly put asses in seats. Instead Iñárritu has had his worst film opening in nearly twenty years. Fingers are pointed at the film’s promotional trailers, which relied so heavily on the promised spectacle of Cruise-being-whacky that the movie, itself, may have felt hollow. Others were probably turned off by the negative critical reviews, which are wildly uncharitable and frequently dead-wrong.
The first half of this review is for those deterred by the former. The second half will come for the critics.
I will say now—lest you have already decided from my title here that you’re gonna be good and go see this film, which is what you should do, and if so, I’ll wait—this review contains spoilers.
The first of which is this tiny one: those trailers were a fake-out.
For those who haven’t seen it, I am going to describe to you an alternative trailer I have imagined. I am taking a lesson from another movie coming out this month that is clearly taking great pains not to spoil anything for you in its promotions, while still leaving you utterly intrigued: Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything. Those strange, blue marble eyes. The butter-thick tension. You know what I mean. I trust Nathan completely, that he’s got something for us, no matter how muchmy gut tells me there’s nothing actually interesting about Elizabeth Holmes.
With several Academy Awards under his belt, we should have also trusted Iñárritu. So here’s my teaser trailer: you see terrifying man-boy, Jesse Plemons, in a dark room, giving one of the film’s most powerful speeches, interspersed with that weird droning bwaaaa that’s in every film now, between cuts of wild climatic disasters—floods sweeping away trucks, wild-fires, melting glaciers—and as you hear Plemons say “comedy, tragedy, farce, it doesn’t matter,” the shot suddenly cuts to “now what?” and it’s centered on Cruise, with all his facial prosthetics and his big, unexplained shovel. Digger!
See? Wasn’t that more intriguing? WTF? Now go see it.
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If you've already seen the film, you know that the trailer you actually saw was less for the movie itself than for a play within the play. What you saw—a cartoonish oil tycoon named Digger played by Cruise, as a cartoon—was essentially the promotional material for a play, titled Fossil Fools, that was being put on within the film itself. Cruise really plays an actor, Curtis Markson, who is playing a farcical, cartoonish version of Digger Rockwell, the man who, in this version of the real world, actually destroyed the entire planet. And this play is bad—there’s an impossibly ancient cat, asshole jokes, grotesque sexism, belching, barfing, and a frozen corpse. Now, I’m not saying that Digger the film gets to sidestep its harshest critics simply by claiming that the thing they definitely hated, and was bad, was in fact supposed to be bad, and that it’s actually good, because the movie was doing it on purpose. (Though it is supposed to be bad). But you were also supposed to be caught, just for a moment, kind of enjoying it. And I suspect, for most people who actually saw the movie—and didn’t write reviews of it, or weren’t put off by the reviews of it that they read—they did get caught in exactly that way.
For a fairly heady film, after all, the Rotten Tomatoes ratings present a fascinating contradiction. The Popcorn Meter, which measures the responses of regular theater-goers, is significantly higher than the Tomato Meter, the critics’ aggregated score. This is unusual. A movie about art about theater about politics should be critic cake and audience kryptonite. What’s going on? On the surface, it seems that general audiences are actually okay with being teased a bit. But on the other hand, if you hold out a squeak toy for the critic while saying “you like this, huh?” and then viciously pull it away? Maybe critics just bite your hand over that sort of thing?
Let’s look deeper.
What the first 40 minutes of Digger make you believe you are watching is something else, something from the very specific genre of movie that has emerged in the Trump-era. You think you are watching a film for the Good Liberals Who Hate the Cheeto Man. In this kind of film, epitomized for many by Don’t Look Up—which I did not see, because it looked bad! [Editor’s note: it was]—our stupid, bloviating, narcissistic world leaders are mocked for ruining everything. As they get their comeuppance, we are able to wash our hands of their whole deal. Movies like Triangle of Sadness or even HBO’s Succession are this very specific kind of hate watch: Spend hours with some of the world’s worst and richest people on screen, drink in their incompetence and depravity, and relish in your own relative decency, your compassion for the world and its people, your worldliness, your own good values and good sense.
I was certainly fooled. Here’s a horribly wealthy ego-maniacal man who only cares for his desiccated husk of a cat, I thought, and I guess he’s gonna destroy the world? (He does.) After Digger is alerted to an explosion at his company’s oil rig in a national park in Greenland, which cleaves off a massive hunk of ice and embarks on a high-speed collision course for the coast of Norway, he meets with the US president and his cabinet and assembled scientists, at which point the head of the military suggests “blasting the cunt.” The president (John Goodman) interjects “Sir! There are ladies present!” only for the men to look around, see absolutely none, and roar into laughter.
The plan they all decide on is to release a “firewall” to “control the narrative” about the impending catastrophe…and also to blow up the glacier. But then, the curtain falls, or rather, a tree on set falls, revealing the frame within the frame. We have been watching a play satirizing the events that transpired some twenty-five or thirty years before, whose outcome, we are in no uncertainty about, were apocalyptic.
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For many critics, this is when it seems like the rage begins. Across the critical landscape, Iñárritu is being blasted for creating “a little patch of moral high ground reserved for those who Get It,” as The Ringer puts it. Coleman Spilde at Salon says Digger is overwhelmed by its contempt for humanity, portraying “the average person as a seal, ready to bark and clap at anything that so much as alludes to reality.” And Eileen Jones at Jacobin argues that the film “shifts blame to the struggling masses just trying to get by in a world run by vicious self-serving plutocrats.” The consensus amongst the haters, of which there are many more, is that Iñárritu spun this all up to say something like art in the time of climate change is a distraction from your complicity in the crisis.
Do critics dislike this accusation so much because they disagree so strongly with it? Or perhaps, because they feel like, deep down, he has a point, that they’re in this image and they don’t like it? Might they even feel so implicated, and be so angry about it, that they’re overlooking the fact that this isn’t what he’s saying at all?
Much of the critical seething hinges on a now-infamous ten-minute monologue, delivered by Digger at the European Parliament, in which Cruise stomps about the audience of ministers and representatives, grabs his balls, and bellows about their complicity in pumping the atmosphere with CO2, the way they demand cheap gas and “two-day shipping for stuff you don’t need.” Performing any amount of mental gymnastics necessary to avoid taking the full blame, Digger is just being a stereotypical billionaire, a parody of the type. But I think many who detested the film saw themselves called out and unfairly accused. You can practically hear the indignation in their responses: “Just 57 companies are responsible for 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions!” they’d say; “It’s not my fault!”
Of course, the revenue for these companies comes from somewhere—you, at the pump, you, on the plane. No one enjoys hearing that 25 to 30 percent of potential emissions reductions are actually within your power, at home, everyday—riding the bus, eating beans. Most people would much rather blame Taylor Swift and her stupid plane than earnestly examine their lifestyle choices. And it would be completely fair of Iñárritu to have spent some amount of Digger’s run-time disabusing the movie-going public of the idea that they have nothing to do with climate change—if he had.
But all he did was have the villain be a villain. It’s as if many of the critics recognized that the meat of the film was a play being put on for people in a post-apocalyptic New York, but zoned out halfway through and forgot that crucial fact. Maybe by the European Parliament scene everyone was still feeling a bit tender from the initial bait and switch? (Which, I’d argue, was more strongly directed towards you, The Good Liberal). But the monologue in the parliament, during which Digger accuses the politicians of funneling investments toward polluting industries and signing off on environmentally disastrous development, is addressing the rubber-stampers of the past, as seen by the audience of the future, who are—we might suspect—struggling with their own internal, gnawing sense of complicity with what has happened. The nameless angry ministers surreally babble “blah, blah, blah” as Digger castigates them, eventually slinging so much blame that they all end up attacking each other. And with this bombastic deflection, he walks away unscathed.
After the ice shelves collide into both Europe and North America, sea levels rise dramatically and rapidly released methane speeds up global warming, and Digger is “exiled” to a converted offshore oil rig, where he and his family are given a full staff and regular food drops (at least until they abruptly stop).
No tribunal, no revolution, no rolling heads. The family quietly squeaks by while millions die.
I suspect the incensed critics probably read an interview Iñárritu did, regarding the Parliament scene: “I’m not interested in pointing fingers or reducing the film to a political commentary or a right or left thing,” Iñárritu told Indiewire. “I’m trying, through Digger’s speech, to say that we are all part of this madness…The system has trapped all of us, and we have to find a way out together.” I suspect that much depends on what you think he means by “the system.”
After all, the system includes not only our material economic dependence on fossil fuels, but also our relationship to particular narratives and modes of storytelling. The climate change narrative, after all, is pretty stuck, something we also have to find our way out of. But in his attempt to unstuck it by pointing to the way the media creates both scapegoats and escapism, I think he stumbled on a general critical reluctance to reset our own narratives. This is not a movie about complicity, but about the pacifying effect of the stories we tell.
It’s now common knowledge, after all, that back in the aughts, British Petroleum hired a marketing firm to promote the notion of a “carbon footprint,” to shift the blame of climate change onto individuals. For a few decades, a lot of us thought in those terms, of footprints. We now tend to think of the footprint as it was, a psyop. But even as we cast off that narrative framing as corporate drivel, we are still in the raw numbers trap, still doing carbon accounting. Regardless of the frame, the question is still Who is doing this? rather than How else can we fight?
Towards the film’s conclusion, Curtis Markson interrupts the dress rehearsal to air his distaste with the portrayal he is giving of Digger Rockwell, who he is playing, basically, as the rootin-est tootin-est cowboy of the oil industry, and not as the cold psychopathic murderer of history. His director reminds him that the play is supposed to be funny, and that the people “need to laugh.” When Curtis argues that this trivializes the suffering of the past, the producer, Digger’s own nephew Kenny (Jesse Plemons), steps in to break up the fight. He says it doesn’t matter, that they are both right, that the people outside only need to come together, process their grief, and heal.
It is abundantly obvious why Kenny says this, why he wants the story told the way it is. He has inherited his mother’s greenwashing clean energy business and turned it into a global surveillance corporation, and he is also “controlling the narrative,” giving the audience a long-dead enemy to cast blame on (while he, himself, presumably carries out new horrors in the world outside). He tells the production team that he first saw this play put on by only a few actors, doubling as several characters, in a run-down theater in London. He bought the rights to it and had it adapted for post-apocalypse Broadway.
What he doesn’t say is that all that matters is that it’s his vision on the stage. The original Fossil Fools was put on by the working class, for the working class, a sort of Punch and Judy show amidst the rubble. And we don’t get to see that play, though we can’t avoid imagining how much deeper and harder it must have cut, how it may have called on people to rise up, to protest, to riot. Instead, we only get to see the billionaire’s play, the Rockwell’s play, the play for Good Liberals that doesn’t ask you to do anything.
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If Digger’s critics are fixated on who is supposedly on trial, Digger itself is about who gets to tell the story and what those stories do. And look: ome of the monologues are too long, and I hated the cat, but the slow reveal was exceptionally orchestrated with some of the greatest set designs I’ve seen on screen. But if you were wondering who the audience is for Kenny’s version of his family’s story, we only need to look at the theater after the lights come up. The playhouse speakers announce that outside conditions are a “Level 4,” upon which all of the well-dressed theater-goers don their high-tech breathing masks and file out to the street where other, desperately unfortunate souls are breathing the toxic air unmediated (while looting abandoned cars and throwing trash at scared soldiers). This is what the world of blame being thrown around has wrought.
I think Iñárritu is uninterested in blame. I think he knows as well as we do who is ultimately at fault. It’s not an interesting question when you know the answer. What is interesting is how the art of our time, made for the minor elite, the comparatively petty bourgeois, tells them they don’t need to revolt or fight or organize or even think about the classes just under them; it tells them that they’ve had nothing to do with it, they are merely passive audience members. Those stories make it about the raw numbers, about who is doing all the carbon dumping. But Digger makes us consider power, and who else—other than the oil execs of the world—collectively, has power to force change. In the aftermath of the genocide of millions and the near-complete collapse of society, who gets to pay top dollar to attend the Broadway play and wear prosthetic lungs? What do they cheer for? Do they feel better after having seen Fossil Fools?
Do we? When the lights came up inside the tiny theater at Grand Lake—the film was pushed to theater 4, the smallest one, for its poor performance—we heard “Level 4” announced again, to remind us we are still, as always, inside a narrative. I guess a lot of us are the ones still standing, after the pandemic, after mass deportations, widespread layoffs, seven-dollar gas. Maybe we aren’t as culpable, and maybe we don’t have as much power, but we sure can be placated into thinking we shouldn’t try at all.
