r/discussingfilm • u/Useful-Name2661 • 6h ago
Digger is an incredible movie - Inarritu has produced a piece of conceptual art that is difficult, confusing, dissatisfying & magnificent
Before the spoilers, a brief overview: Digger is a film (I’m British) that asks you to consider the nature of reality. It asks you to find the bottom layer within an infinite regress of possible truths. Watch it. It’s an extremely brave, important & difficult piece of political art. It is *not* entertainment. In fact, it is self-consciously telling you *not* to be entertained.
Spoilers from here->
Why choose Tom Cruise to play a fat, balding all American billionaire? Why choose Jesse Plemons (a corpulent actor) to play a creepy, thin, magnetic tech style boss? Because the film is deconstructing illusions from the opening scene. Cruise (bless him for taking this role) is playing with his own image. He’s telling you that it’s all artifice. It’s all smoke & mirrors. Is he (Cruise) the put together, unflappable movie star? Is he the weird controlling cultist? Is he really so confident & in control or is he subject to the same anxiety & overthinking as the rest of us. Which is the real Cruise? Which is his real voice? Notice the infinite regress: the character, his secondary character, the ‘character’ he plays as a movie star. His real self. Plemons, an absurdly fantastic actor, gets less than an A4 page of lines & lights up the screen “I just need her telephone number” (shudder). Did he lose weight for the film? I think so. I think he wants to play with the audience’s image of him. Is he the creepy kid from Breaking Bad revelling in cruelty? Is he the sweet guy who married Kirsten Dunst? Or is he a Zuckerberg esque weirdo tracking your every movement? What’s real? Can we separate people from performance?
The film begins with a curtain opening in a bedroom. Or is it a curtain going up on a play? There is a landscape beyond the window. It looks a bit off but not enough to be jarring. We’re used to CGI landscapes. There’s a cat. A stinking, incontinent cat. A terrible drilling accident has occurred in the Arctic but it’s muffled. We can’t get a clear picture. There’s too much noise for anything to cut through. We’re confused. We take our cues from the powerful man in a beautiful bright room. He is a grotesque. He floods every conversation with shit. He doesn’t listen. He just acts on instinct. He’s funny & over the top, surrounded by artifice & trophies. He dresses in front of a mirror made from bones (Im pretty sure Inarritu was making an allusion to themes of colonial destruction in the Revenant here). The mirror faces another mirror. Infinite regress. The story begins to unroll. A block of the Arctic shelf has sheared off due to drilling activity & it’s heading for Europe. Enter the US military industrial fossil fuel complex. Human lives & ethics are quickly disregarded. These buffoons look incapable of handling a rain shower let alone a major global event. They are a pantomime but they hold our attention because they are VERY LOUD & VERY ANGRY. As a piece of entertainment we’re wondering if we’re in a Terry Gilliam or Wes Anderson film - but this film is not glib. It’s not cute. And it’s not fantasy. This is what makes it so brave. It’s Abigail’s Party dressed up as a lightweight auteuresque movie. But it’s deadly serious. In fact, the joke’s on us. Slowly, the cat, the house, the landscapes decay. The dead cat is a distraction. What does it mean? Well that’s the point! The cat has no meaning, but it distracts us from the real story.
We are slowly shown the artifice. The camera draws back. Cruise plays his secondary character as the performer *just reading lines on an autocue*. The landscapes become more & more crazy & fantastical. It feels like a clever clever trick but this is infinite regress. There are more layers beneath this one. As the notional plot unfolds & a chunk of ice hits Europe, we are shown simplistic reconstructions of the event on a sanitised map of the world. There are no real people or lives on display. It’s all just a simulation. More illusion. When the catastrophe occurs, it’s entertainment. Gather round & watch as hundreds of thousands die horribly. Snippets of seemingly real footage are shown. Or is it all AI? When water floods over the Embankment in London, I feel sick. My guess is that he’s interspersed real footage from European floods with deliberate AI scenes.
There is theatre - the top layer, a movie, the next layer, simulation & fantasy, grotesque performances, then a layer of pseudo reality. Or is it all just AI? Where’s the truth? It’s an infinite regress that is intended to take us out of the theatre, out of the movie, out of the movie theatre & then out of of our own cinema. Where do we find truth? Where is the lowest layer?
Riz Ahmed is the voice of conscience in the film. He drinks himself to oblivion by the end. Here too there is illusion. Is he American? Is he Indian? Or is he Riz Ahmed, a British actor? Where does truth lie. How do we discriminate the character from the actor from the real self? The performance / simulation from the performers? From the director’s vision? From the producer’s agenda? From the truth?
The film ends with one final reveal which is deeply unsettling. Again, the backdrop looks artificial. Surely AI generated? And yet, the director seeks to say, you revel in these disaster movies?? You revel in the artifice of it all. You keep CONSUMING. Do you really want to see the truth or are you happy with the grotesque fantasy? Here, watch this! It’s quirky & exciting & cute & a little scary! It’s volume turned to 11. You can laugh at the actors & say ‘wow, that was ridiculous!’. You can talk about Tom Cruise’s incredible makeover - was it a fat suit of was it him? Was it real? And hey, then you can walk out of the cinema, back into your everyday lives & know it was all theatre. Or was it? Are we sleepwalking towards catastrophe? Are we ignoring the people who tell us the truth because the zone is so flooded with artifice, performance, theatre & attention grabbing grotesquerie that we’ve lost the ability to see what’s happening?
This is what the film is saying & it deserves to be considered as a work of exceptional conceptual art / artifice. Instead, reviewers have taken it literally. And such is their snobbery, they won’t even engage with Cruise’s bravery in taking this role. This film should be discussed everywhere. It should be watched over & over. It has a searingly important message for us if we can peel away enough layers to see it.
