we saw Digger at the cinema, simply because I needed to get out of the house and nothing else was showing.
word on the street is that this is a Tom Cruise-sized flop. the movie is “loud, surprising, audacious, and sure to be polarizing”, as per NPR. commercially, “fail” it did, having grossed a meagre $35.3 million worldwide by its second weekend, against a reported production budget of $125–180 million.
so I watched it expecting little more than an explanation as to why it didn’t land. expectation met (and then some), but in an entirely different direction.
129 minutes to remind me why we’re failing as a species. this isn’t a review, nor is it about the film, which we might call Cruise’s Eyes Wide Open. my review is 10/10. I don’t need to explain why; either you’ll watch it and agree with me, or you’ll score it—as some viewers do—lower than low, and wonder why you just wasted two hours of your life. don’t take my word on the latter, it was the highlight of my week (even if it was only Tuesday). I’ve yet to run his entire filmography through my head but intuitively, I reckon the character of eccentric billionaire Texan oil baron, Digger Rockwell, might well be the best role Tom Cruise has ever done. (a sentiment he might well echo, saying “It’s the most original film I’ve ever read. And such a moving movie. One of the most moving films I’ve seen. And that’s to be able to play this kind of character was a privilege.”)
but first, it’s important to acknowledge that dark humour is more often a miss than a hit. lucky are we so inclined to ever catch such a thing on the big screen at all; let’s just say the genre is to the screen what metal is to the speakers. Avenue 5 (coincidentally another eco-satire, albeit sci-fi inclined, as opposed to Digger’s focus on Big Oil) is a great example. gallows humour can help us cope with distress and connect through shared experience, but it’s not for everyone. being South African, I certainly grew up with it as a cultural coping mechanism. the work of artists like political cartoonist Zapiro (who was detained without trial by the apartheid regime’s security police in 1988) helped us process the insanity of our political realities for decades before memes started performing the same function on social media. humour, said Viktor Frankl in his memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, is one of the “soul’s weapons”.
in his 1927 essay ‘Der Humor’, Freud explores how humour can protect us from suffering. he considers the metapsychological function of humour to be a healthy defence mechanism (contrasting with the usually punitive nature of the super-ego):
Like wit and the comic, humour has in it a liberating element. But it has also something fine and elevating, which is lacking in the other two ways of deriving pleasure from intellectual activity. Obviously, what is fine about it is the triumph of narcissism, the ego’s victorious assertion of its own invulnerability. It refuses to be hurt by the arrows of reality or to be compelled to suffer. It insists that it is impervious to wounds dealt by the outside world, in fact, that these are merely occasions for affording it pleasure. This last trait is a fundamental characteristic of humour.
seen from this departure point, Digger speaks directly to Freud’s assertion that “it is not everyone who is capable of the humorous attitude: it is a rare and precious gift, and there are many people who have not even the capacity for deriving pleasure from humour when it is presented to them by others.”
do you ever lie awake at night wondering how the heck we got into the state of the world being the way that it is? some of the response to director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s satirical black comedy hints at why (the cinematography, by the way, is masterful).
the end of the world, some say, isn’t funny. fair enough if the film doesn’t work for you; I’m more interested in the objection that the subject shouldn’t be funny in the first place. perhaps laughter becomes harder when it asks us to acknowledge that a) it is, in fact, the end of a world, and b) cosmic jokes can only be appreciated by setting ourselves aside. this is captured, in all its intense brilliance, in Rockwell’s 10-minute monologue (filmed, as Iñárritu - whose previous work includes The Revenant and Birdman - explains in an interview with Collider, in a single master shot).
Digger, in addressing1 excerpted from a Reddit transcription; omissions marked […] the European Parliament, shifts the blame outward from himself, but nevertheless gets at the heart of the ecological reality that, depending on who you ask, is either the biggest crisis of our lifetime (hence Cruise’s Eyes Wide Open), or a hoax (an ostrich likes its Eyes Wide Shut when it dives head-first into the sand):
Now, Dr. Bergen-Ganesh has made a series of damning allegations regarding my company and its practices and I am here to look you in the eye and to tell you that every one of those allegations are absolutely, unequivocally, 100 percent true. Plenty of warnings, yet I deliberately chose to ignore them.
[…]
Why don’t we just stop drilling altogether?
The simple answer is: because you don’t want me to.
And every one of you, Jesus, no matter how conscientious you pretend to be, you want to drive around in cheapest fuel, you want to keep your lights on, your heat and air conditioning running. […]
Yeah, you want two day delivery of shit that you don’t need. You want to charge up, charge up them cell phone batteries so you can go up to your TikTok and your YouTube.
You want energy, energy so that you can ask AI to solve the very same disasters that is fueling.
So you want freedom, freedom to bask in the comfort of your unsustainable life.
Freedom.
You demand and I supply.
So let’s all just cut the bullshit because you love oil.
Hell, we all love oil.
[…]
What’s the real answer? Renewable energy. Solar. Hydrogen. Nuclear.
You couldn’t possibly comprehend the scope, the price tag, or the amount of time that it would take to make that kind of extreme transition.
Oil is what we have.
Oil is what God gave us.
Oil is the mother’s milk of earth.
Hell, there wouldn’t be a civilization to save if it weren’t for oil.
Digger, in being a satirical meta-narrative on a satirical meta-narrative, forces one to untangle what the “end” means. for me, the film is an optimistic celebration of the resilience of humanity to prevail against all odds; a view one can appreciate only once you watch the closing scene. without giving away the ending, I’ll say simply this: the word “end” originates from the Proto-Indo-European *antjo, or “end, boundary,” itself derived from the root *ant- meaning “front, forehead,” which includes such derivatives as “in front of, before.” of course, depending on, inexplicably, one’s political affiliation, the reason as to why the world as we know it is “ending” ranges widely. but an ending needn’t mean there’s nothing on the other side; it can simply be the start of something new.
as Ellen Goodman wrote in her farewell letter for her syndicated column in the Boston Globe:
There’s a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over – and to let go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on rather than out. […] It’s hard to recognize that life isn’t a holding action, but a process. It’s hard to learn that we don’t leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along – quite gracefully.
so yes, Digger ain’t for everyone. but it left me wondering how ready any of us are to say goodbye to what was and exit gracefully in favour of what is to come, as bleak as the reality of it all may be. there might come a day when we look back at the film as a prophetic reminder of what happens when we optimise our point of view for the sake of entertainment (“a whining, droning refrain of worn out discouragement, and total pessimism, wrapped in despair and darkness”, as one audience review reads2 a viewpoint with which I vehemently disagree ) as opposed to staring the abyss in the face long enough for it to gaze back at us.
sociologist Antonin J. Obrdlik, in studying3 “Gallows Humor” - A Sociological Phenomenon anti-Nazi jokes in Czechoslovakia during the German occupation, argued in 1942 that “gallows humor is an unmistakable index of good morale and of the spirit of resistance of the oppressed peoples. Its decline or disappearance reveals either indifference or a breakdown of the will to resist evil”. praise be to Digger for its 2026 resistance against the breakdown of said will. after all, if we can’t laugh at ourselves, we’ll most surely cry.
#100DaysToOffload/15
Footnotes
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excerpted from a Reddit transcription; omissions marked […] ↩
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a viewpoint with which I vehemently disagree ↩