I Couldn't Stop Thinking About Social Media While Watching 'Digger'

Spoilers ahead for Digger.

I couldn’t stop thinking about social media while watching Digger, director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s latest film. Digger wasn’t well received by critics, but the film—its themes and its play-within-a-story execution—deserve closer inspection. Regardless of how one feels about it, it’s hard to deny it’s a conversation starter, and the way it switches back and forth between its story settings is reminiscent of our social media reality.

Tom Cruise plays the titular character Digger Rockwell, a rich oil tycoon, and Curtis Markson, lead actor of Fossil Fools, a satirical play that follows Digger and a group of powerful men as they navigate an oil-fueled catastrophe they helped cause. Digger oscillates between showing us the farcical play, extremely dark and egregious at once, and moments from Curtis’ life while on set. The back and forth felt a lot like scrolling Instagram and TikTok: news of horrifying real-world events instantly replaced by videos of someone dancing, #adpartners, or a hot take about a celebrity. It’s jarring, bizarre, and very effective.

Social media platforms give us everything all at once. It’s overwhelming and overstimulating and can be very doom-and-gloom. Between watching real people die and suffer in videos by way of state-sanctioned violence and a celebrity trying to convince me they don’t use Botox, but a moisturizer that does the work to erase their forehead lines, our online scrolling habits simultaneously plug us into reality and completely remove us from it. It distracts us while also giving us something to hyperfixate on, just as the Fossil Fools audience is given something else to focus on besides the horrid circumstances they live in.

Nostalgia works in the same way, especially online. Videos and posts about the 2000s or “simpler times” keep our minds off the present, offering something we can understand and attach to emotionally. A social media villain of the week offers up someone to project our anger onto; it’s usually on a smaller scale and gives us someone to collectively hate. It’s not unlike how Digger is made into the film’s sole villain despite being only one cog in the machine. His entire speech, which sees him admitting his role in the ice shelf disaster, ultimately leads to the people fighting each other as he shifts the blame onto them. It’s not dissimilar to comments section arguments, which can often veer away from the point of the post, turning the fight inwards.

Iñárritu and co-writers Alexander Dinelaris Jr., Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman understand the disconnect between what’s real and what isn’t, and the desire to stay in the know while wanting a break from the tidal wave of despair. Social media is essentially the amalgamation of the world in one place—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and Digger underscores the juxtaposition of bearing witness to the reality of a situation and satirizing it.

Instagram and TikTok posts can be good at breaking down topics that seem gargantuan, while others mock public figures, lessening the sting of their horrific actions. It’s a roiling wave of contradictions, a dose of truth and humor, horror and cute pet videos. It’s darkness and light in a constant state of flux that is vying for our attention, which is burnt out from working on hyperdrive. The film is always in conversation with these absurdities, and the mental exhaustion born from the chaos of too much (and Digger can be too much).

What Digger ultimately contends with is who gets to control the narrative—on Instagram, TikTok, or otherwise. After all, social media has gotten so big that it’s become another arm for maintaining the image of public figures and their propaganda. By the end of Iñárritu’s film, the audience laughs at Digger and what happens to him. He’s a public-facing villain who ultimately, despite his influence, got his comeuppance.

But as the crowd walks out of the theater and puts on their breathing masks to survive the poor air quality, with the damage caused by the ice shelf apparent in the water surrounding the city, Kenny Rockwell (Jesse Plemons), Digger’s nephew and the financier of Fossil Fools, is still rich and powerful enough to steer public perception. So while social media can be an outlet for just about anything, and scrolling keeps us both entertained and informed, Digger reminds us that there is always someone rich and powerful profiting from our distraction, even if they seem to be in on the satire.