Digging Into Our Conscience

Satire is a tested style for oversizing a political statement in art, and when the artist is Alejandro González Iñárritu, the visual panache of the making matches the messaging, as in his first Oscar winner, BiRDMAN or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), in which a fading star with telekinetic powers, played to comic-tragic perfection by Michael Keaton, the first modern Batman, takes one last act to break out of his anxieties. When I saw the film in a London theatre more than ten years ago, it was my first introduction to Iñárritu—I came to Amores Perros later—and as the heightened rhythm of jazz drumming echoed the heartbeats of a desperate superhero in his autumnal isolation, it was easier to know why the Mexican auteur, along with his compatriots Alfonso Cuarón (of Roma) and Guillermo del Toro (of The Shape of Water), would form a sub-culture in Hollywood, maybe something similar to what the trio of Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes did in literature. I wrote here then: “In an industry that mythicises comic-book superheroism, and where the derangement of the delusional celebrity is an off-screen subplot, [the BiRDMAN] could be Iñárritu’s weapon of mass derision.” (‘Flying High with Birdman’, Open, March 1, 2015).

In Iñárritu’s much-lampooned new film, Digger, Hollywood’s ultimate superhero, who doesn’t need the Marvel franchise to stay in the stratosphere, gets a staggering makeover to play a drill-baby-drill oil tycoon to bring Doomsday closer. A prosthetically fattened Tom Cruise’s Digger Rockwell, in Iñárritu’s frames which make us wonder if Dalí is his art director, is the apostle of Apocalypse, and with his buddy in the White House, another caricature on steroids, capitalism’s plot against humanity (the seriousness of which is more pathological than philosophical) becomes a spoof staged by the high-mindedness of a filmmaker whose laughter is as dissenting as his characters’ behaviour is disgusting. As a glacier catastrophe in the Arctic, born from the driller’s billion-dollar dogma, threatens Europe, Digger gives a stellar performance in subversive virtue-signalling: your needs are fuelling my sins. The destroyer becomes the deliverer, and in Digger, as in the world Iñárritu is raging against, the weirdness of this evolution is natural. The lone voice of reason, a scientist of Indian origin, is lost in the soliloquies of Digger dragging himself towards damnation.

Two objects, one living and the other inanimate, clarify Diggerism as a human inevitability of the times. The cat, the only recipient of his affection, is a rejection of feline refinement as we know it; it is both feral and grotesque, and in Digger’s universe, the emotional quotient of the deranged plutocrat can be shown in no other way. The loneliness of Digger, as if he were plucked from a Latin American novel, is minimised by the intimacy of a crazy cat. The humans, even if all of them seem to be operated by an energy source even Digger cannot tap into, are beyond redemption, despite the warning by science. The other object, an ancestral shovel, is a reminder that the backstory of the masters of the universe has at its centre the individual quest for owning the future. Digger, inheritor of the shovel with which his grandfather struck black gold in Texas, may have come a long way, digging deeper into a tradition. His comic-book exaggeration is Iñárritu’s way of telling the vulgar truth.

Sadly, Digger remains an underappreciated film; most critics have called it a disjointed arthouse pretence. Iñárritu’s intention may be loftier, his over-the-top stylisation may have lessened the savagery of his satire in some set pieces, but the technically dazzling Digger is a bad film only if we deny the filmmaker the freedom to disentangle reality so that the madness and motivations buried deep within the follies of the diggers and their collaborators become more accessible. And Iñárritu is too smart a filmmaker to keep his magical frames loosely built on a creator’s conceit. He lets the memory of the living lead the rites of resolution. It is not climate alarmism that drives Iñárritu’s art. He is holding a broken mirror to the grotesquerie of power. The planetary grief is a familiar cause for a filmmaker for whom power without moral content violates the decencies of being human. Iñárritu’s masterly experiment in filmmaking convinces us that even the most cynical of violators can shovel his way into our conscience. Perfunctory dismissal is not what Digger deserves.