In Medias Res: October 2026

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

Digger Is...(massive spoilers ahead)

[I was contacted by someone who suggested I share my Facebook and Letterboxd review more widely, so here it is. You've been warned.]

Digger is...

1) absolutely NOT a failure. I can only assume that the smart folks I know and follow who have written off this film as a misbegotten catastrophe got through only the first 30 minutes or so--during which, admittedly, the tone and the pace and the staging of the movie’s story never truly synced up, and several comic set-ups really didn’t deliver--and, as soon as the miniature tree fell over and the stagehand’s head popped up in front of what what was revealed to us in the viewing audience as a stage screen, meaning we were watching a movie about a play, simply wrote the move off then and there. I can come up with no other explanation for why a film with a genuinely brilliant science-fiction premise, but with an undeniably less than brilliant execution--it was too long, and some of the tableaus that were clearly supposed to be riffing on us watching play actors watch something the audience couldn’t see offstage were more distracting than clever--should have received such a terrible critical lambasting. This is not a great movie, but it is a movie loaded with greatness, just one that failed to make it all work.

2) a movie that probably won’t provide Cruise with the Oscar he deserves, though not for lack of trying. Among other things, as I alluded to above, the film’s rhythm and sound design prevented what could have been some truly hilarious comic moments from landing. Cruise’s character Curtis Markson at one point complains that the play is failing at satire and is playing its horrific story of an environmental apocalypse as farce, but--unless this is yet ANOTHER layer of satire in this complicated, ambitious, flawed film?--the movie only very rarely grants its central character any moments of true farcical darkness. A different approach to the whole production might have made Cruise’s performance of Curtis’s performance of Digger Rockwell’s terrifyingly honest and hilariously fanatical speech about how the oil industry’s destruction of the world was all done in the name of freedom, and ought to be forgiven for everything accordingly, the absolute centerpiece of the film. But while Cruise may still win the Oscar statue, I really don’t think anyone will end up considering this movie one that showcases his acting talent, the way Magnolia or Jerry McGuire or Born on the Fourth of July did; the scenes just weren’t assembled in such a way to serve the big moments his character had.

3) a movie that I will be happily arguing about with anyone who wants to for years to come. I have to reach back to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Proyas’s Dark City (all of which, let me be clear, are better movies overall than Inarritu’s Digger), or similar films to come up with cinematic tale that has SO MUCH going on in its narrative, in its performances, in its whole mise-en-scene. The mysteries abound. Is the water dripping through the sets part of the play-within-the-movie structure, or is it just water dripping through the theater where the play-withing-the-movie is being performed, and what are we to think about that either way? Is Jesse Plemons’s Kenny Rockwell a hero (he found Curtis’s lost daughter!) or a villain (he took a defiant independent play, “Fossil Fools,” that gave a middle finger to all that had destroyed the planet, and made it into a massive production which the audience responds to hysterically as a sop to make them content with the shattered authoritarianism they now all live under!)? I don’t know! And a movie that so confidently--if imperfectly--presents unknowable stuff like this to us, the viewing audience, deserves massive praise.

4) not a movie that I can give five stars to, but a movie that will definitely be on my Top Ten of the year list. Worth nearly $40 to buy three tickets for Melissa and I and our youngest to all see it together on the big screen and then talk about all night afterwards? Absolutely.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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Digger Is...(massive spoilers ahead)

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