What Digger’s Satire Should Have Learned from Paul Verhoeven
From Showgirls to Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven understands that satire works best when the audience doesn't have an out.
This article contains spoilers for Digger.
Something strange happens during the final credits for Digger. Not a sequel tease or an easter egg. Rather, we just watch as an audience files out of a theater and into post-apocalyptic streets, while Melanie’s folk song “What Have They Done to My Song Ma” plays. That is, until a buzzer cuts off the song and a voice declares, “Level 4,” leaving the rest of the credits to unfold in silence.
The declaration “Level 4” also occurred a few minutes earlier in the film, telling the characters on screen, an audience who has been watching a stage play about the final days of oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), that they needed to put on their masks to deal with the poor air quality outside. But this second declaration isn’t for the characters: it’s for us, the audience in the real world, indicating how we needed to leave the theater. And if you found that bit of fourth-wall-breaking clever, then you’ve responded exactly how Digger director Alejandro G. Iñárritu intended. And you’ve also done something that Paul Verhoeven, another raconteur who worked within the Hollywood system, would never dream of letting you do: condescend to the movie.
No One’s Gonna Save the World
According to the trailers that played in front of pretty much every movie released in the past few months, Digger tells the story of Digger Rockwell, a crass, larger-than-life oil tycoon whose company’s drilling creates a crack in the polar shelf. The crack sends a massive chunk of ice heading toward Norway, and then toward Alaska, killing thousands and causing worldwide environmental and economic chaos. While Digger and his advisers, including American President Compton (John Goodman) and scientist Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) debate ways of dealing with the disaster, showing more concern for saving face and preserving profits than they do lives.
All of that does unfold on screen, in big and loud sequences that recall sub-Coen Brothers slapstick films like The Men Who Stare At Goats or Get Low. But after the first act, the story stops to reveal that we’re actually watching an expensive stage play called Fossil Fools, several years after the events it’s depicting. Cruise is not playing Digger Rockwell, but rather Curtis Markson, portraying Rockwell. Moreover, the entire show is funded by the real Rockwell’s nephew Kenny (Jesse Plemons), who invites performers and audiences alike to laugh at the ego and foolishness of his family.
The reveal of Kenny’s involvement also reveals the movie’s central theme. Digger isn’t a satire about dumb capitalists and American warmongers. Rather, it’s a satire about satires about dumb capitalists and American warmongers. Kenny invites people to laugh at his family because it charges money. He’s still rich and powerful, even after his uncle nearly destroyed the world. The system has not changed. When the Fossil Fools audience hears the “Level 4” declaration, telling them that Digger’s actions have left the air unbreathable, they put on masks made by the Rockwell Corporation.
By the time the movie directs its “Level 4” declaration at us, the real audience, Digger‘s point is clear: big Hollywood satires do nothing to actually change the world, because they’re made by the people who run the world.
It’s a valid point, and one that’s hard to refute. We’ve all seen how Amazon pays for episodes of The Boys that mock Vought International or how Apple TV pays the creators of Severance to show a dystopian office that looks like an Apple store. Those in power don’t realize that these works mock them; more likely, they don’t care. Either way, it changes nothing.
But is Digger‘s satire more effective? It’s hard to believe that Paul Verhoeven would think so, precisely because Paul Verhoeven would never be as easy on his audience as Iñárritu is.
You’re Doing Your Part
Starship Troopers released to mixed reviews in 1997, but everyone agreed upon one thing: it had the makings of an exciting sci-fi action film. The story of good-looking teens seeking adventure and glory by joining the Earth military’s battle against invading bugs, Starship Troopers hits all the war movie tropes and contains plenty of thrilling action sequences.
By the movie’s climax, aloof jock Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) has risen through the ranks to lead the elite Roughnecks, pretty girl Carmen (Denise Richards) has become a captain, and the human forces have captured the Brain Bug orchestrating the enemy attacks. When psychic intelligence officer Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) reads the Brain Bug’s thoughts and declares, “It’s afraid,” the people stand up and cheer, and the movie invites us viewers to cheer with them: the music swells, the camera pans over the celebrating soldiers, the attractive heroes we’ve been following throughout the movie all smile together.
At no point does Starship Troopers break to point out that, in fact, it’s kind of depressing to cheer about a living creature’s fear. Nor does it point out that Carl’s dressed like an SS officer. Instead, it simply heightens the reactionary nature of the Robert A. Heinlein novel it adapts and uses classic Hollywood war movie tropes, and leaves it to the viewer to decide if they want to cheer, or if they can recognize that endless conflict renders any form of life meaningless.
Starship Troopers is hardly the only time Verhoeven’s exposed the nasty side of Hollywood tropes. His first American movie, Robocop, presents itself like a sci-fi action movie, with the violence and bloodlust heightened to ridiculous degrees. Showgirls follows the same plot as Gold Diggers of 1933 and Gold Diggers of 1937, musicals about starlets making it big in showbiz, but emphasizes all the exploitation and cruelty it involves. Basic Instinct goes beyond the sleaziness of a film noir to make the police utterly incompetent and craven.
Each of these films have moments that should turn the stomach of a viewer with a mildly functioning moral compass. The shot of a pre-teen joining Earth’s military in Starship Troopers—turning to the camera and declaring with a smile, “I’m doing my part!”—or the weak resolution to Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley) and Cristal’s (Gina Gershon) tensions in Showgirls undercut any good feelings the music and dialogue demand.
But Verhoeven’s movies never do what Digger does. They never break from the facade to create a second audience, an audience to whom the real viewers can condescend. Instead, they just force the real audience to face the awful things they find enjoyable, and to wrestle alone with the messages the movie gives them.
Not So Deep
Even within the Fossil Fools section of the movie, Digger raises questions about how to control the narrative, suggesting that the way a story is told often has more power than what the story’s about. That’s true, and Iñárritu’s not wrong to point it out. However, by giving a foolish, false audience, Digger suggests that it’s “other people” who hear and believe that false story. Whether viewers loved or hated watching Cruise bluster on the screen and listening to Goodman bellow about his anal cancer, the frequent shots of fake audience members crying and cheering at the end of Fossil Fuels assures the viewer that they aren’t taken in. They’re smarter than the dumb-dumbs who are cheering for Fossil Fuels because they see what Digger‘s trying to do.
That raises two problems. First, it completely ignores the fact that Iñárritu is actually the person making the big Hollywood movie for Warner Bros. (now David Ellison and Skydance), in the same way that most of Digger actually is the broad Hollywood satire it claims to mock. Second, it doesn’t actually address any questions about the role of propaganda and the power of the culture industry, nor of the function of popular art in a consumer society. Digger plays like someone wanting praise for having read the wiki entries about Theodor Adorno and Guy Debord.
Verhoeven avoids those pitfalls because his movies own their depravity. They have no respect for the audience, nor respect for themselves. They take their tropes to the furthest, most stomach-churning degrees and leave it to the audience to do with them what they will. If they cheer, so be it. If they’re revulsed, even better. But Verhoeven movies will never ask for self-satisfied applause, something Digger and Iñárritu want so badly.
Digger is now playing in theaters.