Digger Ending Explained: It’s Bleaker Than You Realize

This article contains Digger spoilers.

How will our descendants view us? It’s a question that seems to haunt Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director and co-writer of Digger. He is old enough to vividly remember when folks around his age—albeit perhaps more so in the U.S. than outside of it—began looking at their parents as “the Greatest Generation.” They were the ones who lived through the Great Depression and faced the horror of World War II. Yet, almost miraculously, they left the world better than they found it. They even gave us films like Dr. Strangelove, which parodied their era’s most apocalyptic tendencies.

One glance at the world today shows no promise of us leaving it better than we found it. Hyper commercialist greed, algorithm-fed loneliness epidemics, forever wars, and, of course, climate change fed by our ceaseless addiction to oil, threatens a less rosy tomorrow. But it’s easy to blur that noise out and focus on the here and now. When gas is $6 a gallon, who wants to take the long view of how history will judge us?

Hence why Iñárritu uses Digger as a fast-forward button. The movie flashes by all the minutiae and daily indignities to speed-run to the vantage point of our children, grandchildren, and the posterity beyond. It asks us to consider how loud, distracted, pernicious, and boorishly selfish we will seem. Kind of like Tom Cruise in a fat suit with an animatronic cat in one hand and a finger-gun shape on the other.

The big twist of Digger is that we are watching a play-within-a-movie. Everything bellicose and deliberately hammy about Cruise’s performance is meant to feel like a caricature by design. In fact, the real character Cruise is playing, a highly respected actor of the stage honing his craft decades from now, resents how garishly big it all looks. The real Digger Rockwell, he insists to his director (Sophie Wilde), was uncouth and eccentric, but also apparently more tactful and measured than this supervillain personification of American capitalism.

But as we learn over the course of the movie that’s the point—although there are yet further layers still on this indictment of society, then and now…

A Play’s the Thing

It’s the big twist at the end of Act One. After more than half an hour living in a Stanley Kubrick-inspired comedic world where Digger keeps the President of the United States (John Goodman) waiting downstairs like a naughty school child sent home early, it turns out all the over-the-top sneers and boasts is intended to be a bad joke, even to the people making it. (One might wonder if Digger’s lack of laughs as a movie is also intentional?)

The beautiful natural world of Digger’s Yosemite-chic home is revealed to be a set, and Digger a strained creation by a struggling actor. But this amounts to more than just a twist. It is also a slowly unfurling secondary narrative wherein we learn that the name of this play is Fossil Fools, and it was a cult hit on the London stage some 20 years prior.

This means that the real Digger, who allegedly died by suicide while living abandoned and in squalor on a dilapidated oil rig, has been deceased for so many decades he’s looked back on in history as a buffoon, not unlike how we might now consider the saber-raddling that got the U.S. and NATO into the Iraq War, or, a little further back, how we process the milquetoast diplomacy that called appeasing Hitler “peace in our time.”

This is a history play being executed as farce. It therefore suggests everything we see onscreen is deliberately obscene. Consider the way European leaders first boo and then provide what sounds like background vocals of harmonizing approval to Digger’s megalomaniac speech about why the world needs him. Similarly, much to the chagrin of Cruise’s actor playing Digger, the apparently deadly decision to bomb the second ice shelf about to crash down on Alaska incredulously features Digger, POTUS, and a preening, cowardly vice president (Michael Stuhlbarg) on the same military aircraft.

This makes no more sense in the “real” world of Digger’s future than our own. It’s frustratingly arch satire that is hitting you over the head with a hammer, even as it makes observant points, such as when Digger insists on renaming the deadly ice shelf , currently called “Kimberly,” to something more Russian. It’s all to better avoid American responsibility. But as is finally spoonfed to us by Jesse Plemons’ character, the heavy-handedness of the didactic dialogue is the point.

Literally waiting in the wings for most of the movie as a mysterious “producer,” Plemons’ character reveals at the climax that he is the real Digger Rockwell’s nephew, who we see as a little boy throughout the film via the play-within-a-movie. And he too struggled with Fossil Fools when he saw it growing up in London decades ago.

According to Plemons, audiences needed to laugh at their parents’ excesses and recoil from them. They needed to see the generation that bequeathed them this world—us—as monstrous morons, as well as just plain monsters. So in the end, Digger is supposed to be about how your grandchildren will view you. However, there is something else a little more nefarious at play too…

There Is No Such Thing as Breaking Money’s Doom Spiral

The above summary is the main level Digger is operating at, but if we stopped there it would gloss over what I think is especially pertinent to Iñárritu’s darker, more subversive vision: Jesse Plemons plays the nephew of the real Digger and he’s financed this public spectacle turning his uncle into a figure of ridicule, complete with a moment where the audience can applaud with blood in their mouths when ol’ Digger ends it all by swan diving off Deep Water Doom.

There is some awareness paid by the play’s creatives that until his last breath, Digger like so many successful narcissists lived in a reality distortion field that could convince people who should know better to follow him into the gates of perdition. Hence the play’s allegorical suggestion that after the oil rig runs out of food, which should mean everyone left alive on the platform must either evacuate or starve to death, Digger instead uses his sheer willpower to bully God into creating more food and abundance.

Alas, for the noble oil man, that godlike power to save his family isn’t enough. It is said that the world ends in a narcissist’s mind when they die. So it is when Digger would seem to take his reality-distorting powers with him as he chooses to go over the railing into the waters he helped warm, pollute, and unleash as a massive flood across the world.

But this is just a play’s approximation of his final hours. Furthermore, it is in a play paid for and championed by Digger’s nephew, who happily will paint his uncle as history’s great villain, even as he reasserts his family’s generational wealth and power.

We don’t learn too much about how Plemons acquired that wealth, but we do see that he still maintains a reach as great as his forbears. It’s how the younger Rockwell uses his futuristic “security technology” to find the lost plane carrying the daughter of Cruise’s thespian. His ability to apparently save this single life, or a handful assuming he rescued whoever else was on that plane, is enough to earn Plemons eternal thanks and admiration from Cruise’s character, who then goes up on that stage and happily plays the fool on the pillory for his benefactor’s amusement. I’m still not even sure the real Digger died by suicide. Either way, when Plemons’ character joins his actors in the curtain call for the play’s first preview, it suggests Fossil Fools will be a raging success for the creatives. That’s good news, too, for the Rockwell family, which likely still needs strong PR rehabilitation. They already have the power and, as we soon learn, the money printing it.

In the movie’s closing moments, a voice on the theater’s intercom announces that the air is “Level Four” outside the playhouse. We don’t know the exact severity of that warning, but it’s apparently a standard problem in the future where every theater member, from the elderly to parents helping their children, absently puts on a gas mask. And each gas mask is manufactured by the Rockwell family.

In the play within the movie, Digger is seen accepting before any non-scientist that the ice shelf obliterating Norway is an inevitability. The only question remains how do you profit off this and keep yourself holding all the cards? Digger, we are led to believe by the play, never quite figured that out as the hegemonic world order post-1945 came to an end. But it would seem his nephew figured it out with time to spare.

If climate change makes the air unbreathable, the man selling gas masks is going to make a fortune. He can even afford a vanity project that will help repair his family’s public image while throwing one deceased ancestor under the bus.

Fossil Fools is loud, obnoxious, and grating, but it also lets audiences jeer at the past while resting assured they’re more enlightened now. This is the story of presentism from the days of contented Victorian superiority in the works of Bram Stoker or Rudyard Kipling to, say, 2019 Best Picture winner Green Book. Meanwhile a certain cycle persists where wealth and power are consolidated in a few hands—often descended from generations going back to the Victorians and earlier.

Plemons is a better man than his uncle, or at least the image of the dead man he’s bankrolling. The nephew also really did a good deed in helping find and save Cruise’s daughter. But one act of benevolent charity, especially in assistance of someone he personally knows, does not excuse the system he profits from, thrives on, and will now use to give the masses a brief distraction.

When Fossil Fools ends, the real world encroaches back on the audience. In the sobering final shot of Digger, they must go out into a reality where the worst-off cling to life rafts floating down what used to be New York streets, and where dystopian authority figures keep the dregs of “society” in line.

Iñárritu is making a rather bleak comment on the limits of art. Even works as righteous and angry as Fossil Fools, or Digger, can only exist due to the benevolent patronage of a system designed to keep control and money in the same hands that got us into this climate change doom spiral. And it imagines a future where our legacy will be scorned, but our systems will remain in place as things inevitably get worse. Then the final image closes with the stark warning to you: Level Four is in effect. Thanks for stopping by and offering some applause. Now, good luck out there.

Digger is in theaters now.