Digger: Absurdity is a Performance

Digger starts off as what’s clearly an absurdist and mildly uncomfortable rendition of the tale of an oil magnate reckoning with the impending ecological doom that his machinations caused. It’s absurd and you keep waiting for the movie to ‘pick up the pace’, and more importantly, ‘get real’. It refuses to.

Instead, as it progresses, it becomes clearly that Iñárritu is not (just) holding a magnifying glass to the oil magnates and the politicians, but holding up a mirror to us, the audience sitting in the theater, while we watch a movie about our impending doom and cheer for the miserable deaths of the people that have wrought this crisis.

Amongst all similar movies that focus on the broken conditions of a world either facing a specific kind of impending doom (think: Don’t Look Up) or set in post-apocalyptic worlds (think: Blade Runner), Digger insists on being set in our world.

I’ve heard opinions saying Iñárritu is criticising satirical movies or hopeful movies or the role of art in effecting change. Perhaps he is, but that felt like the less interesting bit to me.

The interesting bit was the lack of interest in specifics. There were just enough specifics sprinkled in at the start and through Digger’s speeches, but it didn’t matter. Digger’s speech really attempted to show the audience the mirror. That didn’t matter either. On a meta level, so many themes they advertised to us, the movie-goers, about the shovel and his “bang bang” quip - all irrelevant. The ultimate denouement was just on Digger’s well earned misery and insanity, and the audience waited so they could cheer for his death - his comeuppance. But there was no interest in understanding the conditions that led to the existence of Digger and his ability to do the things he did. Because who’s going to focus on that? Who can worry about the next Digger? And with that, Digger becomes our sin-eater. An easy (albeit extremely well-deserved) scapegoat, because the alternative is to understand everything that got us here, and examine our role in that. It’s so difficult to fathom, it’s practically impossible to.

Who’s going to think about all that? Movie’s over. We gotta leave and get back home, there’s work tomorrow. We gotta figure out how long it’ll take to navigate the city’s polluted traffic in the heavy rain to get home, and what we’re going to eat for dinner. The world spins on, after all.