Tag: writing

Warning: this essay contains major spoilers for Digger, including the movie’s central structural reveal and ending. Also, this was written by ChatGPT.

I liked Digger a great deal, perhaps precisely because it is such an unruly movie. It is strange, aggressive, formally playful and unusually demanding of its audience. It asks you to reconsider not merely what happened in the story, but what kind of story you have been watching in the first place. That is part of its appeal. It is also, I suspect, the reason a lot of people are going to bounce right off it.

There is a more conventional version of Digger hiding inside the movie we actually got, and I have been thinking about how one might restructure it without destroying the ideas that make it interesting. The fundamental change would be simple: instead of withholding the fact that we are watching a theatrical production until well into the movie, establish from the beginning that the story takes place in the future and that a play about Digger Rockwell is being produced. Then make the beginning of the dress rehearsal the inciting incident.

That sounds like a small change. It would actually transform the movie.

As released, Digger initially presents itself as an exaggerated climate-disaster satire centered on Digger Rockwell, the grotesque oil billionaire played by Tom Cruise. The performances are enormous. Characters behave theatrically. Scenes sometimes feel artificial or oddly heightened. The movie initially encourages us to interpret all of this as the aesthetic language of an especially broad satire.

Then the floor drops out.

We discover that Cruise is not really playing Digger Rockwell. He is playing Curtis Markson, an actor playing Digger Rockwell in a theatrical production called Fossil Fools. The world of the movie lies decades beyond the events we thought we were watching. Digger Rockwell was a historical figure. The catastrophe already happened. The bizarre, heightened story we have been following is a dramatization created by people living in the damaged civilization that came afterward.

It is a tremendous conceptual trick, but it presents a real storytelling problem. The movie has not simply hidden information from us. It has hidden the category of narrative we are watching.

That distinction matters.

A traditional plot twist tells us that something inside the story is different from what we believed. A character was secretly working for the enemy. An event occurred in a different order. Someone we trusted was lying. Those revelations force us to reconsider the facts.

Digger asks us to reconsider the ontology of the movie itself.

We thought we were watching historical events unfold. In reality, we were watching actors interpret those events for an audience living much later. The movie suddenly asks us to mentally rebuild nearly everything that came before.

For viewers willing to do that work, the effect is exhilarating. For everyone else, it risks feeling like the filmmaker changed the rules halfway through the game.

My more accessible version would announce those rules almost immediately.

Imagine the movie opening not with Digger Rockwell, but with Curtis Markson arriving at a theater sometime in the future. We do not need a massive exposition dump. In fact, very little needs to be explained. We see a poster advertising Fossil Fools: The Digger Rockwell Story. We catch glimpses of unfamiliar technology. People carry breathing equipment that they treat as casually as we might carry umbrellas. News screens refer to environmental alerts whose significance we do not yet understand.

Curtis meets Hannah, the director. Kenny Rockwell, the wealthy producer and descendant of the real Digger, is somewhere in the orbit of the production. Everyone is preparing for a major dress rehearsal.

Then the rehearsal begins.

That becomes the inciting incident.

Now we enter the same Digger Rockwell material the existing movie gives us, except the audience immediately understands what it is watching. The exaggerated performances are not puzzling. They are theatrical convention. The characters are behaving like actors because they literally are actors.

That single structural decision would free the audience to concentrate on the much more interesting question: Why is the play portraying history this way?

It would also make Curtis the protagonist from the beginning.

That is one of the strangest structural consequences of the existing film. For much of Digger, we understandably assume Digger Rockwell is our protagonist because Tom Cruise is playing him and the movie seems to revolve around him. Only later do we discover that Curtis Markson is the actual dramatic center of the story. The protagonist effectively changes retroactively.

That is intellectually clever. Dramatically, it is awkward.

If we meet Curtis first, his conflict can become the spine of the entire movie. Perhaps he initially thinks Fossil Fools is a simple morality play. Digger Rockwell was a monster who helped destroy the planet, and Curtis has been hired to portray him accordingly.

But during the rehearsal process Curtis starts digging into the historical record.

He discovers complexity.

Maybe some scenes in the play never literally happened. Maybe quotes have been combined. Maybe events have been reordered. Perhaps Digger did not behave like a cackling villain every waking moment. Perhaps he sometimes sounded reasonable. Perhaps he genuinely believed his own arguments. Perhaps he loved his family. Perhaps he occasionally convinced himself that he was helping society.

Curtis begins pushing back.

If they are supposedly telling history, shouldn’t they tell audiences what actually happened?

That question gives Hannah the opportunity to state the movie’s central philosophical argument much earlier and much more clearly.

Because Digger is ultimately obsessed with the difference between facts and truth.

Curtis wants factual accuracy. Hannah wants moral truth.

Curtis wants psychological realism. Hannah wants mythology.

Curtis argues that turning Digger into a cartoon villain falsifies the past. Hannah can respond that portraying him as an ordinary, rational human being risks falsifying something more important: the enormous consequences of what people like Digger did.

That conflict could become the engine of the second act.

Each rehearsal takes Curtis deeper into the problem. He tries to make Digger more human. Hannah keeps pushing the performance toward grotesque theatricality. Curtis wants audiences to understand the man. Hannah wants audiences to understand the civilization that produced him.

Eventually the disagreement becomes uncomfortable because both of them are partly right.

That would make the movie’s theme far easier to grasp without making it simplistic. Historical art always performs some version of this negotiation. A documentary, biography, historical novel or play can reproduce enormous quantities of factual information and still fail to communicate what an event meant. Conversely, a piece of art can invent dialogue, compress characters and rearrange events while somehow producing something that feels emotionally or morally true.

That is exactly what Digger is wrestling with.

The change would also strengthen Kenny Rockwell enormously.

In the existing movie, much of Kenny’s significance arrives after we understand the larger frame. He is related to Digger, yet he has become an immensely powerful technological figure himself. He finances an artistic condemnation of the previous generation’s oligarchs while inhabiting a society in which he possesses enormous influence.

The irony is delicious.

Digger’s power came from oil.

Kenny’s comes from technology, information and security.

The civilization has supposedly learned its lesson about concentrated power while merely changing what the powerful people own.

A more conventional structure would allow the audience to watch that hypocrisy accumulate gradually. Kenny can congratulate himself for funding an uncompromising piece of historical art. He can talk about accountability. He can speak the polished language of someone who believes he represents progress.

Meanwhile, scene by scene, we notice that he resembles Digger more than anyone wants to acknowledge.

The son of one era’s oligarchy has simply become the oligarch of another.

That thematic parallel becomes much richer when the audience has time to see it coming.

The crucial thing, however, is that this restructuring does not require giving away the movie’s best final revelation.

You can tell us from the beginning that Fossil Fools is a play.

You can tell us we are in the future.

What you do not tell us is how badly the world outside the theater has deteriorated.

That becomes the twist.

Throughout the movie, the future can appear strange but functional. Most scenes take place indoors. The theater seems prosperous. Society continues. People work, argue, rehearse, eat, flirt and complain. There are environmental warnings in the background, but everyone treats them with the casual boredom people develop toward chronic danger.

The audience therefore assumes that humanity survived the catastrophe and more or less recovered.

Then comes opening night.

The performance ends.

The actors take their bows.

The audience applauds this savage satire about the foolish, greedy people who ignored environmental warnings and destroyed the world.

Then an alert sounds.

Level Four.

People calmly reach for their breathing masks.

The theater doors open.

And only then do we see what Manhattan looks like outside.

That, to me, could preserve nearly everything Digger is trying to accomplish while giving the audience a dramatically cleaner experience.

The revelation would no longer be, “Everything you thought you were watching was actually a play.”

The revelation would be, “The people watching this play are still living inside the disaster.”

That might even make the ending more powerful.

The great bleak joke of Digger is that history has become entertainment while its consequences remain completely present. People can laugh at the stupidity of previous generations, congratulate themselves for understanding how foolish those people were, and then put on respirators before walking into the poisoned world those same people created.

The audience inside the movie understands the lesson.

Understanding the lesson has not repaired the planet.

That is much darker than a simple climate-change warning. It suggests that moral understanding often arrives after it has ceased to be useful.

The characters can recognize Digger Rockwell as a monster because they have the privilege of hindsight. They know where his decisions led. The people living through Digger’s era did not experience themselves as characters in a morality play. They experienced themselves as people making ordinary decisions about jobs, prices, politics, investment, convenience and economic growth.

That is where the theatrical exaggeration becomes important.

Hannah’s production makes the past grotesque precisely because hindsight makes the past grotesque.

From the future, a civilization calmly walking toward catastrophe can look absurd.

From inside that civilization, Tuesday still feels like Tuesday.

That may be the most interesting idea in Digger.

And strangely enough, making the movie more conventional at the structural level might allow that idea to become clearer rather than weaker.

There would, however, be a cost.

The existing version produces an extraordinary moment of disorientation when the movie suddenly reveals what it has really been doing. The viewer undergoes something vaguely analogous to the transformation of lived experience into history. One moment we seem to be inside Digger Rockwell’s world. The next moment that entire world has become a representation, interpreted by people who came afterward.

History happens to everybody eventually.

The present becomes a story.

Human beings become characters.

Complicated people become symbols.

Arguments become quotations.

Decades of confusion collapse into a few scenes.

By withholding the theatrical frame, Digger makes the audience experience that process rather than merely think about it.

That is formally audacious.

It is also why the movie is likely to alienate people.

There is an enormous difference between asking an audience to solve a mystery and asking an audience to discover halfway through a movie what kind of movie they are watching. Some viewers will find that exhilarating. Others will understandably feel that the film has violated the storytelling contract.

That is why I suspect Digger may ultimately have a stronger life as a cult film than as a broadly beloved one.

The version we got follows the progression:

What the hell am I watching?

Then:

Wait.

Then:

Ohhhhhhh.

My hypothetical version would produce a different progression:

I understand what this movie is doing.

Then:

Something about this future seems wrong.

Then:

Oh God.

The first progression is stranger.

The second is probably more effective.

I am not entirely sure which movie I would rather have.

Part of me wants the cleaner version because I think more people would engage with the fascinating argument at the center of Digger: that art sometimes has to distort facts in order to communicate truth, and that societies often become capable of understanding their greatest mistakes only after those mistakes have become irreversible.

But another part of me admires the sheer nerve of the movie we actually got.

It does not gently invite the audience into its ideas.

It shoves us through a trapdoor and expects us to figure out where we landed.

That is frustrating.

It is also one reason I cannot stop thinking about it.