I Dug Digger

The film Digger, by Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, is graveyard humor that uses the alienation effect of foregrounding rather than hiding its theatricality. In this it is reminiscent of To Be Or Not To Be (1942) by Ernst Lubitsch. At the time it first appeared, Lubitsch’s film—now considered by many his masterpiece—was largely panned and considered in poor taste—particularly its reference to a concentration camp. Jack Benny, who stars in it, remained deeply proud of it despite the harsh criticisms it received—including from his father, a Jewish immigrant who walked out from the premiere when he saw his son wearing in the film a Nazi uniform. Like Lubitsch’s film Iñárritu’s film masterfully has divided audiences, which isn’t great for the bottom line but I think will make it endure as a film to see again in the future. The director takes on the developing climate disaster in which we live while the oil companies manipulate governments, democratic and otherwise, and we remain fascinated with the spectacle of the disaster in which we live. The spectacle is usually without the discomforting level of alienation that Iñárritu makes part of his storytelling. It begs the question what we, the audience, will do. This has been a question that theater and film have sometimes dared solicited from their audiences, from Greek tragedy in its relation to the Athenian demos to African cinema, whose works, as arguably its most renowned early practitioner Ousmane Sembene argued, should be valued according to how vigorous a debate they provoke among the members of their audiences. There is a clear reference to Brecht in the modern evolution of this approach. The film’s mocking celebration of the glorious messenger we imagine will come riding in and its disgust with our complacency are a provocation for taking multiple actions to resist, to—in Walter Benjamin’s inversion of the image of the train of history—to try anything in order to throw the emergency brake: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.”