Nava Medikonda Contributor

Digger Rockwell walks into a courtroom in his cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and red suit, ready to dominate a ferocious crowd of double-sided, soul-sucking government officials. He stands at the center of the chaos, observed by Lady Justice, ready to take them on like it’s his final rodeo over the catastrophes his known ignorance and oil rigs have caused. Though it shouldn’t be forgotten, the people know only the facts, not the story; the story is yet to be told, and Cruise articulates it meticulously, which upsets everyone around him.

Tom Cruise is Digger Rockwell and Digger Rockwell is an oil man; the kind of man made from the confines of a digging dynasty. His conservative philosophy is so deeply ingrained within himself, he’s become self-absorbed within his own empire: he hates to see it and its effects as anything but glamorous. But Digger Rockwell is not just black and white. Alejandro González Iñárritu, the writer and director behind the film, alongside some other contributors, develop Rockwell as having enough of a lucid clarity and rationale about himself that allows us to distinguish him from someone with merely absurd delusions about mother nature’s medicine (oil): as a gift from the gods to inevitably be found and used by the world. He really strikes a nerve, and to good effect, criticizing the hypocrisy and calling out everyone’s deep desire to dig Baby Dig, despite how many, on the surface, oppose it. How many of you have flown here today on private jets? Don’t you enjoy a nice steak? Electricity, heat? A note to surface-level climate environmentalists who may or may not drive a Tesla: do you feel called out!?

The big twist in Digger (stop reading here if you don’t want to be spoiled) is that Cruise plays not only Digger Rockwell but also Curtis Markson, but not like Michael B. Jordan in Sinners; here we see only Digger or Curtis at a time, not both at once. Iñárritu revitalizes the use of the theatrical production as a storytelling tool, as he did in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Innocence). I only realized what was actually going on when the film cut back and forth between Digger’s story and the stage production, as Cruise transforms from Digger into Curtis, and the play’s director, Hannah, in good faith as we like to think, claws into Curtis about his performance. The play retells events that actually happened in the world of the film so we can laugh about them. Why would anybody laugh about an iceberg headed for the mainland, leading to massive catastrophes?

If someone does laugh in real life, or the fictional world, within the film, I wonder if it’s because the world in the film has gone to such devastating extremes; instead of viewing its past events as terror, how can we not laugh at a self-consumed man who controlled the narrative of the entire world and actually messed it up? Surely, we might laugh at Schindler’s List if today’s atrocities were worse. The thought of that is simply absurd, both Digger’s impact on the world and laughing at Schindler’s List.

It is scary how the film portrays the fate of the world as resting in the hands of surface-level, open-minded people until the suggestions and strategies get too complicated, which is not very complicated to understand by general standards. But how can we criticize any of them for acting on instinct when dire situations are involved? Aren’t we getting back to the primal predator’s instincts? Isn’t acting in some fashion better than merely relying on nature’s course, which could punish us?

The satire here isn’t necessarily critiquing that a handful of men determine the outcomes of the entire planet, but that one person’s incompetence can cause devastating circumstances. But the film doesn’t shy away from depicting Curtis’ family problems alongside the spectacle of Diggers, and we all want his family life to succeed, right? I found Curtis’ personal conflict unnecessary to the film’s plot because it didn’t signify or lead to anything meaningful. It felt like a mere attempt to dramatize Curtis in any way possible, then deliver a sigh of relief to make the ending as happy as possible after what felt like longer than a two-hour runtime. If one were to defend its use, I suppose it’s a nice contrast between Curtis who isn’t in control of the narrative and Digger’s enormity of narrative control, and how both in the end, are as worthless in the eyes of Mother Nature. Might this be the film’s purpose, or just a close, unasked-for reading?

While satire depicts exaggerated events with enough touches of reality to be believable, the film’s hierarchical workplace politics nicely resemble this. At work, Clarkson, a Rockwell Oil employee overseeing the oil extraction operation’s environmental effects, gets involved in the plot. When Clarkson tries giving a warning, Digger reacts in a gaslighting fashion to turn the stakes of shutting down the entire oil operation onto Clarkson. The fate of thousands of people losing their jobs is put on Clarkson’s conscience, causing Clarkson to reevaluate his suggestions to run a few more tests to be sure, as if a 5 feet crack and a 22 feet crack isn’t a noticeable difference. I’d call this gaslighting that should enter the canon of all-time gaslighting moments. This is also the moment the entire film rides on, the what if it went another way moment: what if Clarkson stayed fierce in addressing the tycoon, because the tycoon is not pressured to act because he does not have to; his digging efforts don’t account for the consequences his operations might cause; he is not affected in the same like others are by his actions; he is protected from the everyday pitfalls while others aren’t. But I sincerely believe that if Digger knew all this would happen, he wouldn’t have kept his operations running. I do believe that Digger is not so far from the kind of man Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), whose title is slowly stripped to merely Ganesh as the stakes grow wider, describes him to be- that Digger would sell children if he knew he could get a dime out of the process- or I might just be charmed by Tom Cruise.

In one sense, Digger Rockwell doesn’t care about “people,” just as others don’t care about him. But do we care about tycoons? For the most part, no. But Digger Rockwell is looking after millions of people on some wavelength, keeping them alive and giving them comfort, so we can get our Amazon packages in two days, or use artificial intelligence to solve the very problems it causes. Digger Rockwell might be telling the story but remember: everyday people provide the vocabulary for it to be told. Takeaway… Stop using AI? Raise a farm in your backyard? Become pro-cyclist? Switch to solar panels? Regulate capitalism, or switch to socialism? Gosh, the choice is yours, because the joke is most definitely on us for tolerating it.