While Digger is a critique of the complicity and willful negligence of those in power (both in business and those holding political office), it isn’t just that. The meta-narrative framing begins to reveal something else, something even more incisive: a glimpse at a world, several decades from now, being actively ravaged by the full effects of climate change. Unlike in Don’t Look Up, which makes the narrative choice to not explore the world after the consequences of the crisis have seriously materialized, Digger shows us the actual reality of climate change: while it won’t cause the extinction of humanity, it is going to be really, really bad and involve the needless deaths of truly absurd numbers of human beings. And this future world, the one suffering from effects of climate change we are only now beginning to get small samples of, is not magically removed from the political forces of our world, that is, the political forces that created this crisis. Capital will respond by further cracking down on dissent and resistance, it will further invest in surveillance, militarization, and subjugation, all to ensure it has the monopoly on whatever systems survive the crises. And most relevantly, capital will continue to propagandize and placate. Digger is an emotively powerful work. It brings one’s attention to the world we presently occupy, and the world it will transform into, a reality that we avert our eyes from because, well, on an individual day-to-day level we can’t do much about it, and the truth is so nakedly horrific. But as much as a work like this one is affective, it’s not going to change anything. This film is not going to cause the organization of the kind of mass radical movement necessary to upset capital and force necessary political action on climate change. Nothing is going to happen! And this film is well aware of that. In-universe, the play Fossil Fools is revealed to be literally bankrolled by the Rockwells, the very same family that instigated the mass death being portrayed. Kenny purchased the rights and created a high-budget, fancy media production for middle-income people to watch, laugh and cheer at, before donning their expensive protective masks and returning to the fucked up world outside. The ending very clearly invites us to imagine ourselves not as disembodied spectators, but as the audience: we are consuming a media product that was created for the purpose of selling entertainment for profit, and then we leave the theater to our normal lives. The film is critiquing works like Fossil Fools. As much as it seems to superficially attack capital, the play is actually utilizing one of capitalism’s most effective tricks, the commodification of anticapitalist sentiment into just another revenue stream. (Consider for a moment how many films feature a generic evil corporation as the bad guy - it’s so common it’s practically a trope - and then consider how many of those films are themselves made by evil corporations!) Digger points to works that seem to acknowledge the real threat of climate change, and yet, turn that anger and grief into placation. You enjoy a media product, and then go back and live your life. As I said earlier, Digger is keenly aware that it itself is a media production in this vein. It raises serious issues about climate change and the political system that created it, but it can’t do anything about it. It’s just a film! Real political action requires violence, not sitting in a theater consuming a media product. The film is relentlessly self-critical about this aspect (which from an artistic perspective I found immensely compelling). Now, turning to Don’t Look Up, I hope you can see why I feel the way that I do: while the film lampoons the negligent incompetence of our political leaders, even in the face of a very obvious and horrific threat, ultimately it’s just a media project with no call to action, no moral, a work which scarcely even acknowledges the existence of the Third World (despite it taking, by far, the worst hits from climate change), and ends with a gag about the rich jerks getting offed by the fauna on some alien planet. It takes a real problem - climate change, and the total inaction surrounding it - and turns it into an entertainment product you can enjoy. That’s what Digger is critiquing. (originally posted at https://www.tumblr.com/aismallard/830695321140166656)