The Anti-Populism of “Digger”

Despite his fame and success as an unapologetic auteur, or perhaps because of it, Alejandro G. Iñárritu is one of the most divisive and controversial directors in Hollywood today. I wasn’t exactly surprised, then, to find out that his new film, Digger, starring Tom Cruise, was being greeted with some of the most thoroughly negative reviews I’d read all year. In his take for RogerEbert.com, for example, Robert Daniels wrote that Iñárritu's latest is “a sneering premise awaiting a drop of humanism.” Variety called it a “ponderous absurdist lecture.”

While the film has its defenders, its detractors aren’t simply critical; they hate this movie.

But let me admit something to you here: I've always thought you learn more about someone from what they hate than what they love. So, the more I read these responses, which seemed to me to reflect a loathing born of deeper springs, the more interested I became in discovering what it was about the film that put people in their feelings.

Now that I’ve seen Digger—and cards on the table, I think it’s a flawed near-masterpiece and the best thing Iñárritu has ever made—I have a theory about why it got under so many folks’ skin. There’s an inherent romance to a morality tale: the wicked brought low, the righteous rewarded. Iñárritu gives us not an ounce of that romance. Instead, he rubs our faces in the truth: when it comes to politics, at least, the morality tale is a cop-out.

For that reason, I think anyone who is on the liberal-democratic side of the current divide between ascendant populist authoritarianism and liberalism in defensive retreat should see Digger as on their side, even (or especially?) if they don’t actually like it.

Spoilers from here on out, obviously.

For its first half hour or so, Digger is the impossibly broad and ham-handed climate satire that its trailers threatened. Buried under a fat suit and using an exaggerated Texas drawl, Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil baron whose drilling in Greenland sets off an ecological catastrophe that ends the world as we know it.

It’s loud and lazy, like a tedious Bill Maher riff made with a $125 million budget. But then, unexpectedly, a prop malfunctions, the director starts shouting notes, and we realize we’ve been watching a play—and a bad play, at that, one that very much feels like something that Adam McKay would make, just saying.

This isn’t Digger, this is Fossil Fools, a cult classic now being remade on a massive budget, about a series of climate catastrophes that, we learn, happened 30 years ago—and turned modern life, at least in western Europe, into a dystopian hellscape that makes Children of Men seem idyllic. We learn, too, that the ‘real’ Digger, the one that was actually involved in the disaster 30 years before, was—according to Cruise’s frustrated character, an actor by the name of Curtis Markson—nothing like the finger-gunning good ol’ boy that we’ve seen thus far. The real Digger Markson complains, was malevolent and ruthless, but he was also quiet, composed. He wasn’t a cartoon character, and he certainly wasn’t single-handedly responsible for so much destruction.

That turn is why I believe that Iñárritu’s film is not merely a meta-commentary on bad art. Its other theme, its primary theme, is populism.

In What Is Populism?, Professor Jan-Werner Müller defines the political impetus of our time as "a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified—but, I shall argue, ultimately fictional—people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior.” Fossil Fools is a product of exactly such an imagination, and the worldview of Fossil Fools is what Iñárritu, in Digger, is exposing as fundamentally false. And not just false, but also politically impotent.

In an interview with Indiewire, Iñárritu claimed that the 10-minute harangue that Digger delivers before the European Parliament, in which he castigates everyone for their hypocrisy, delivering the oilman’s version of the “you need me on that wall” speech from A Few Good Men, is the “spine” of the film, and is meant to illustrate “that we are all part of this madness … there are no good people or bad people.”

I’d put it a bit differently. Some of us are better, and some of us are worse, but none of us are all one or the other. But whether you accept Iñárritu’s omnidirectional blame or my own more qualified kind, anyone who rejects the populist idea that our biggest problems can be placed at the feet of a few “morally inferior” people should appreciate what Iñárritu is doing.

Because while it’s true that I’m less guilty of the climate catastrophe than is the head of Exxon, it’s also true, as Digger bellows, that many of us wish we could simply punish some bad guys for what is, in truth, an “unsustainable” way of life that we all share and that only a small number of us are willing to give up. When the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate & Sustainable Growth polled Americans in 2025 on climate solutions, for example, it found that only 38 percent were willing to pay a single dollar more per month for the sake of sustainability.

And as the contrast between President Trump’s first and second terms have shown so far, there’s an enormous amount of corruption and brutality and misgovernment that US voters are willing to forgive—or even vote to reinstall—if they think it’ll also bring them lower prices and higher wages. Yes, there’s a movement to stop MAGA. But don’t kid yourself about how much smaller that movement would look if prices at the pump were the same as in 2019.

Put simply, collective problems require collective solutions. Systemic failures require systemic responses. Yet in an age of mass politics, telling the truth and waging effective political action is, as Hannah Arendt wrote in “Truth and Politics,” a tricky business. Too much truth, and everyone is paralyzed by guilt. Too much politics, and you end up hunting witches instead of putting out the fires consuming your world. 

Given its evident skill at alienating its audience, I think it’s fair to say Digger is not interested in the balance. It’s all-in on truth, and indifferent (if not outright hostile) to politics. But just because a filmmaker can’t show you how to channel the mobilizing furies of populism into something positive doesn’t mean no one can or that the pursuit itself is hopeless. 

It can be done. And we know that because we’ve seen it happen.

When FDR mobilized voters against “economic royalists,” for example, he was trying to harness the populist rage he saw roiling the country and divert it away from its natural home—populist authoritarianism—towards “a New Deal” instead. Roosevelt didn’t ignore public opinion, but he didn’t treat himself as its mere instrument, either.

This is a tension that any liberal in the era of mass politics is going to have to navigate, and it’s why I believe that Digger is more interested in attacking the logic of populism than embodying or defending the logic of liberalism. So when Fossil Fools resolves with a broken and delusional Digger committing suicide, floating to his death at the bottom of the sea as the crowd erupts in applause, at least two things are going on.

Iñárritu’s camera focuses on the faces of the crowd, and many of them are genuinely moved. Their catharsis is real. But at the same time, we know that what we’re watching isn’t fundamentally different from the exile of a scapegoat. Digger has been purged from the human race. And yet the world remains broken.

Eventually, the film reveals that the strange young producer funding the play is a scion of Digger, and he is the one who explains the production’s real purpose, at least as far as he’s concerned. It’s not to tell the truth about what happened during the catastrophe depicted in Fossil Fools, but to give people a chance to grieve about it. That may be well and good for a play, especially for what appears to be a rather bad play—but, translated into politics, it’s the logic of populism.

But what, then, is the logic of liberalism? 

It's certainly not articulated in Digger, a movie very much about the futility of human endeavor, despairing about modern society's ability to make the collective sacrifices necessary to avoid climatological disaster. But providing an alternative model to populism isn’t the film’s concern. This is a film interested in uncomfortable questions, and it asks them while refusing the burden of only asking the ones for which it has clear solutions. 

To some viewers, that is neither emotionally nor intellectually satisfying. But false answers, no matter how confidently and ‘scientifically’ given, are ultimately even more disappointing. In our world, the answer to the questions Digger raises are a lot less dramatic than watching an oilman drown. Adam Gurri, the publisher of this very publication, has said that liberals stand for a world “where people can go where they wish to go, be who they wish to be.” Notice what isn’t promised there as much as what is: you’ll be allowed to find your own way, but no one is going to map it out for you. Liberalism is an imperfect way of reducing concrete evils. But what it lacks in catharsis is more than compensated for by its being true.

At the end of Digger, the crowd for Fossil Fools, having enjoyed their moment of release, straps on their air-filtering masks and heads into the world that the climate catastrophe—and not simply Digger Rockwell—has left them. And what could be truer of populism than this? It may allow you to see the people you want hurt to suffer. It’ll let you watch Digger die. But it doesn’t actually solve our complicated, collective, and structural problems. Only liberalism can do that.

Featured Image is Alejandro G. Iñárritu, by Ralph_PH