DIGGER

Lord Acton

The world has become a caricature, and power continues to play the part of the saviour. It is from this contradiction that Digger, the film by Alejandro González Iñárritu, takes shape: an apocalyptic satire that stages the environmental crisis, the irresponsibility of extractive capitalism and the degeneration of politics through a deliberately excessive, theatrical and redundant language. This is a representation in which the grotesque does not distort a reality that remains recognisable; rather, it seems to conform to a reality that has already exceeded the limits of plausibility.

Digger Rockwell is the caricatural embodiment of a form of power that confuses the availability of resources with the right to exploit them without limits. His wealth, hunting trophies, oversized residence, artificially altered body and even his cat Maggie, a monstrous, unnaturally engineered creature, compose a universe in which everything seems subject to the same obsession: possessing, accumulating, prolonging, controlling. Nature is not a limit to be acknowledged, but an obstacle to be overcome; life itself becomes something to be managed according to convenience.

When Greenland begins to give way under the weight of the environmental consequences of drilling, Rockwell does not question the system that has made him powerful. Instead, he attempts to deny reality, replacing those who communicate it with someone willing to confirm his expectations. The veterinarian who announces Maggie’s imminent death is dismissed and replaced by a more accommodating doctor. The same logic governs his relationship with the climate crisis: if a truth is unacceptable, it is not refuted; the witness is eliminated.

Denial thus becomes a political device. Power does not merely conceal facts; it claims the authority to determine which facts may be recognised as such. In this respect, Rockwell’s behaviour recalls that of those who, within the contemporary information economy, regard reality as subordinate to convenience, the preservation of consensus and the protection of vested interests. Truth does not disappear: it is rendered irrelevant whenever it interferes with the functioning of the system.

Countering this erasure is Ganesh, Rockwell’s company’s environmental officer, who attempts to translate catastrophe into a sequence of causes, consequences and responsibilities. CO₂ has helped fuel the process; methane, released by the instability of the seabed, threatens to turn an ongoing crisis into an uncontrollable chain reaction. Yet scientific knowledge, however precise, lacks the power needed to prevail over economic and political expediency. The figures are eloquent, the forecasts terrifying, the potential damage incalculable: and yet awareness does not automatically translate into action.

The disproportion between the gravity of the disaster and the quality of the responses produces one of the film’s main comic effects. Faced with the threat of a catastrophic wave, the solution proposed by the authorities is to bomb the ice sheet, disregarding the warnings of those who predict even more devastating consequences. Environmental catastrophe thus becomes the setting for another catastrophe: that of political thought, incapable of conceiving a response that does not reproduce the same logic of domination, aggression and destruction that helped create the problem.

President Compson, who draws a parallel between his own illness and that of the planet before identifying China as the enemy to be fought, embodies this transformation of responsibility into conflict. Rather than opening up a space for reflection on shared vulnerability, the cancer metaphor becomes a tool of exclusion. The language of war replaces that of understanding; the nuclear briefcase emerges as the ultimate embodiment of a form of power that, even when faced with the possibility of extinction, continues to imagine salvation through the threat of violence.

But the most interesting passage concerns collective responsibility. When Rockwell defends himself before international representatives, he denounces the hypocrisy of those who condemn oil while continuing to depend on the comforts it provides. Everyone wants the energy, mobility, consumption and privileges made possible by the very system they claim to oppose. His accusation contains an uncomfortable truth, but also a strategy of self-defence: turning collective participation in an economic model into proof that no one can be held specifically accountable for it.

Here the satire acquires a more complex political dimension. Responsibility is not distributed evenly: there are substantial differences between those who consume within an established system and those who control resources, shape decisions and profit from the consequences. Reducing everything to a shared dependence on oil means acknowledging a genuine contradiction while simultaneously risking the erasure of the power asymmetries that make it possible. Rockwell can denounce the hypocrisy of others precisely because he has no intention of relinquishing the privileges that enable him to exercise his own power.

The issue, then, is not to establish who is innocent, but to understand how a system manages to survive even when its destructive effects are known. Humanity does not necessarily ignore the disaster: it measures it, calculates its costs, discusses its causes and produces images of it. And it continues to desire what fuels it.

Making this contradiction visible is a form that knows no measure. The settings are caricatural, the dialogue redundant, the characters exaggerated, the performances constantly push towards excess. Jokes accumulate, gestures become ostentatious expressions of character, and situations seem to cross every threshold of credibility. The comedy arises less from the subtlety of observation than from reiteration, insistence and disproportion.

It is a choice that can prove exhausting. Redundancy risks suffocating the insights it seeks to sharpen; excess, repeated without respite, can lose its capacity to surprise. When everything is grotesque, even the grotesque risks becoming a convention. Yet it would be reductive to regard this theatricality merely as an expressive limitation. The film seems to seek a correspondence between its own form and the object it represents: a world that has transformed catastrophe into a succession of images, declarations, calculations and spectacular gestures cannot be portrayed without confronting its own nature as spectacle.

It is no coincidence that the dimensions of the film set and the theatre become increasingly important. Representation progressively overlaps with reality, while the characters seem to perform roles that precede their own actions. Power does not merely govern: it stages its own governance. It does not merely produce consequences: it constructs narratives that allow their perception to be managed. Even the saviour of humanity is a role to be performed, a figure to be displayed before an audience that must be offered a reassuring story, even when every element of that story demonstrates its inconsistency.

From this perspective, theatricality is not merely a stylistic device, but a way of interrogating the relationship between reality and representation. If politics becomes spectacle, denunciation risks becoming spectacle in its turn; if catastrophe is consumed through images, even its artistic representation can become another product to be consumed. The spectator recognises the absurdity, laughs at greed, condemns irresponsibility, but recognition does not necessarily lead to transformation. One can understand the disaster perfectly and continue to participate in the conditions that make it possible.

This is the most interesting ambivalence of Digger: satire exposes power, but must contend with the risk of reproducing its methods; it denounces the spectacularisation of the world, yet constructs its own denunciation through an exaggerated spectacle. The film does not resolve this contradiction, and perhaps it could not do so without abandoning its own underlying structure.

Maggie’s story, too, acquires an emblematic significance in this context. The artificial creature whom Rockwell tries to save by replacing the doctor who tells him the truth embodies the magnate’s desire to prolong what he cannot control. In the most grotesque way, he discovers that the relationship between the one who feeds and the one who is fed is not necessarily one of absolute domination. Death enters his private life with the same inexorability with which catastrophe enters public life. Power can postpone the recognition of limits, but it cannot abolish them.

The delusion of power evoked by Digger finds a counterpart in Ari Aster’s Eddington, where individual paranoia, propaganda and the proliferation of personal truths progressively dissolve all common ground. If in Eddington delusion spreads through the internet, polarisation and the compulsion to turn every conflict into a self-representation, here it assumes the grotesque form of a tycoon who claims to save the world without giving up what is destroying it. The forms of the staging change, but the same pathology remains: a form of power incapable of recognising its own limits, turning reality into a stage and responsibility into a part to be played. In both films, the grotesque is not the opposite of tragedy: it is the form tragedy takes when no one seems capable of interrupting its performance.

The satire’s contemporary relevance is particularly evident in the construction of Digger Rockwell, a composite figure in whom traits associated with Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem to converge, alongside those of other figures in global economic and political power. From the former, he recalls the muscular display of authority, aggressive language, the personalisation of politics and the tendency to turn every contradiction into a confrontation; from the latter, the intertwining of technological ambition, the cult of innovation and the conviction that the world can be redesigned according to an individual will. Yet Iñárritu seems less interested in caricaturing a single person than in condensing an entire anthropology of power. Above all, vulgarity—understood not merely as crude language or ostentatious gestures, but as a display of impunity—becomes a political hallmark. The powerful no longer feel the need to conceal their arrogance, restrain their contempt or cloak personal interests in some form of institutional decorum. Bullying is flaunted, insult becomes argument, provocation replaces debate. Power does not merely exercise its strength: it flaunts the privilege of doing so without being held accountable for the consequences. Rockwell thus becomes a grotesque synthesis of a present in which the concentration of wealth, the narcissism of leaders and the spectacularisation of authority increasingly overlap, until vulgarity becomes not an accident of power, but one of its forms of legitimation.

The ending, which introduces a twist capable of placing everything that precedes it in an unexpected perspective, adds another layer of meaning to the reflection on theatricality and representation. It is a conclusion best left unanticipated: its effectiveness also depends on allowing the spectator to discover its significance independently. One can nevertheless observe that it does more than bring the story to a close; it brings to the foreground a question that runs throughout the film: what is the relationship between the representation of a catastrophe and the ability to escape the catastrophe itself?

Ultimately, the question extends beyond Rockwell and his caricature. If knowledge is not enough, if denunciation can be absorbed into spectacle, and if even awareness of disaster coexists with the desire to preserve one’s habits intact, what function remains for art? Can it still interrupt repetition, or is it destined to become another means through which the system contemplates its own ruin?

Digger offers no comforting answer. And its excess, with all the contradictions it entails, at least conveys the image of a world in which the absurd no longer needs to disguise itself as normality: normality itself has assumed the features of caricature.