“When all else fails, you hit ‘em with the truth! You know, the hard truth! Just bang, bang, bang!” swaggers Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), villain-protagonist of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s eponymous black comedy, firing finger pistols like a Wild West gunslinger. Moments earlier, the oil baron had faced a European Parliament enraged by the ecological devastation and mass death wrought by his lies. His truth, told as he gripped his belt buckle and sashayed through the chamber, insults and shoes flying: the feckless Euros need him! And moreover, fucking want him! His oil is the Mother’s Milk of Earth, the basis for their prosperity, the electricity in their homes, the steaks on their grills. Forget solar, wind, or any other alternative; that’s too expensive, irrelevant, impossible. The planet’s got no choice. Maroon suit and all, Digger’s all they got.
“The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” argued the reactionary philosopher Thomas Carlyle. The film agrees — at first, anyway. Its world hinges on Digger; he’s seen as indispensable, whether for its salvation or damnation. “Digger here got us into this mess, and Digger’s gonna dig us out!” crows the dying U.S. President Compson (John Goodman). Digger had dug them a deep hole, too distracted by his also-dying cat to heed experts’ warnings about drilling in Greenland. The callousness spawns “Judy,” a city-sized ice shelf that breaks off and drifts toward Europe, bringing ruin. Sirens wail as we witness the Thames overflow and Holland swallowed whole. Bodies drown in the sea, and the scene looks apocalyptic. Most other men would be banished for their incompetence, if not executed. Not Digger, sprawled in the President’s War Room, still calling the shots.
Cruise, often proclaimed the last true movie star, proves the ideal vessel for the tycoon. Clad in a fat-suit and buried beneath prosthetics, he struts with his granddaddy’s shovel as the camera fawns, snarling that his victims may “know the facts, [but that] the story has yet to be told.” Digger’s boasting about the potential to dictate narrative, an ability of supposed great men, but Cruise exercises that power on us. In succeeding as Digger, magnetic even if monstrous, he seduces his audience into sympathy, daring us to excuse him, to find him funny, even awesome. Charm cripples our capacity for effective criticism, our will to demand change. Even when a figure’s faults are evident, we enable them, prizing their style over substance, their personality warping our experiences, becoming accomplices in their actions. “Words are perception, and perception is reality,” Digger states to the annoyance of Doctor Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), his scornful scientist advisors. “No,” Ganesh fumes, “reality is reality!”
There’s another meaning. Roughly thirty minutes in, a tree topples as Digger and Compson stare at the verdant yard outside the oligarch’s mansion, and we hear “CUT!” A stagehand rushes to set it right, and we discover we’re at a rehearsal: the story we’re watching is actually a play, Fossil Fools, a satire staged several decades after Digger screwed the globe. Cruise isn’t Digger, at least not directly. He’s Curtis Markson, its passionate yet skeptical lead actor, concerned for his missing daughter and harboring severe doubts about his character’s clownish portrayal. He views the show as ahistorical. Digger Rockwell, he tells his director, was a cold, terrifying man, not some campy buffoon.
Curtis’ gripes raise the film’s main question: who is this portrayal for? The answer stands in the audience, silently observing the argument. It’s the play’s mysterious producer, Kenny Rockwell (Jesse Plemons), Digger’s nephew, whose child self we’ve seen on stage, fiddling with toys amidst chaos. Everyone made silent, he explains how when he first saw Fossil Fools in a crowded indie theater, he was so inspired that he cheered, regardless of his family name. He knew he wanted to stage it, to make it a spectacle, so he purchased the rights, and with them, his uncle’s “story yet to be told.” That way, the ravaged world could process its losses, and through laughter collectively grieve the cost of his family’s sins. Fossil Fools becomes great-man history in reverse: instead of crediting one man with everything, it saddles him with the blame. Digger goes down as a demon, and few notice the fortune that outlives him, or the system which made him. Even if we take him as sincere, a dubious proposition, Kenny now wields the Rockwell shovel and all the brutality it entails.
Kenny’s story coaxes the reluctant Curtis into agreement, and the play goes off without a hitch. Finally, we watch its climax: A ragged Digger exiled to an Arctic oil rig, hallucinating religious visions and scattering his beloved cat’s ashes into the wind. He stands on its railings and dives into the dark below, the audience applauding their villain’s demise. Amidst cheers and tears, an announcement booms over the intercom in their theater: “Level Four” conditions are in effect, strap your masks and make for shelter. The crowd then shuffles out into flooded streets patrolled by soldiers and androids. It’s back to dystopia. Nothing has changed.
Then, in a chilling Brechtian display, the credits roll, and that same warning sounds over our own speakers.
Lord Acton wrote that “great men are almost always bad men.” Digger reminds us they’re terrible, and we’re craven for centering them. No, We Are The World, as another great and bad man sang.
