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Political satire is under threat; reality keeps stealing its punchlines. When the absurdities of political life require little embellishment before spilling into complete lunacy, how far can comedy go before it stops being funny? Alejandro Iñárritu’s Digger sits at the heart of this dilemma. Its polarising reception raises a question extending beyond the screen: when catastrophe becomes a punchline, are we laughing at the situation, or at ourselves?
Blending dark comedy and political satire, Digger follows a wealthy oil tycoon, played by Tom Cruise, whose reckless drilling triggers an environmental disaster of apocalyptic proportions. Roughly thirty minutes in, however, the catastrophe is revealed to be nothing but a theatrical production titled “Fossil Fools”, recreating events from decades earlier. This play-within-a-film structure complicates the boundaries between performance and reality, allowing Iñárritu to explore the failures of political power and society’s remembrance of them.
The film’s most provocative moment arrives in a courtroom, where Digger defends his drilling by arguing that society cannot condemn him for supplying the comforts it demands: cheap petrol, air conditioning, international holidays and even the energy required to ask artificial intelligence to solve the crises it helped create.
His defence is as cynical as it is uncomfortable. Digger’s culpability is undeniable, but he also exposes a collective contradiction: we condemn environmental destruction while remaining reluctant to relinquish the conveniences that sustain it. The satire implicates more than corporate greed. It confronts consumers who demand climate action…provided that the luxury of same-day delivery remains untouched.
This is where Digger leaves a bitter aftertaste. By making complicity a joke, the film offers viewers little comfortable distance between themselves and its villain. For those receptive to its cynicism, this may be precisely what makes the satire effective. For others, the relentless bleakness risks feeling like a lecture that implicates the audience before they have a chance to laugh.
In an era when political reality increasingly rivals its own parody, Digger confronts a particularly contemporary problem: the world no longer needs much exaggeration to look ridiculous. Once-absurd publications like The Onion and the sketches of SNL appear more like reflections of reality, albeit with a more theatrical dose of overzealous fearmongering. When the world itself begins to resemble a punchline, satire needs to find new ways of relating to audiences before absurdity gives way to indifference.
Hannah, the director of “Fossil Fools”, insists that audiences “must be able to laugh” at the madness they witness, that humour makes confrontation possible. The film’s closing image of an audience laughing through tears captures exactly this. The film’s self-aware, meta approach ultimately exposes the limits of satire: if satire reveals our complicity, does laughing at the joke help us confront it, or simply make it easier to live with?
Perhaps the danger, then, is that laughter has become a substitute for action against the absurdities of the world.