Digger, explained (preview)

Every week, Lily or Emily write and publish a Friday newsletter about what's happening right now in pop culture. It's only for paid subscribers! Here's an excerpt from this week's piece, in which Emily writes about Alejandro González Iñárritu's Digger and what the reaction to it says about modern film criticism. If you want to read the rest, pick up a premium Episodes subscription using the button below!

In all my years first following critical discourse and then participating in it, I've never seen anything quite like what's happening with Digger. Yes, I've seen wide disparities between critical and audience responses many times before, but they almost always break in the direction you'd expect, with general audiences loving enormous blockbusters and critics preferring smaller, artier films.

But then there's Digger, which is, yes, enormous — it reportedly cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $180 million — but is also an intentionally abrasive, perhaps deliberately off-putting voyage into the incredibly annoying hubris of an oilman who destroys the world. (It's also about other things, but let's do spoilers in a second, shall we?) Critics (mostly) didn't enjoy the film; it landed at a 53 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a 46 score on Metacritic. The common thread in those reviews is that, well, the movie is abrasive! The fact that seemingly every line of dialogue is shouted comes up a lot, as does the film's position within the overall filmography of the always divisive director Alejandro González Iñárritu. (Put a pin in this; we'll be back.)

It would be a mistake to say that general audiences have embraced the film. It bombed at the box office, looking likely to be one of the biggest box office flops in history, and it received a truly mediocre C+ Cinemascore, meaning people who paid to see it weren't all that enthused. Though its audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes (75 percent) and Metacritic (7.0) are better than its critics scores, they mostly amount to a B-, more or less – pretty good, but no masterpiece, in other words. The film has scored similarly on IMDb, where it has a 7.5.

And yet if you have ventured onto any social media platform in the past week or so, the evidence of Digger hive is everywhere. This is perhaps most evident on Letterboxd, where the movie's 3.9 average places it well above a host of vaguely similar films from the last few months, films like Primetime, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and Backrooms, all of which received much kinder notices from critics. And Digger's score has been climbing. It grew from a 3.88 average to a 3.9 average just on the day I wrote this piece.

In a vacuum, this resembles other big-budgeted mega-flops that nevertheless won over a fervent cult. Digger's Letterboxd performance is eerily similar to that of Damian Chazelle's 2022 bomb Babylon, for instance, which currently sits at a 3.88 Letterboxd average, compared to a 57 percent Rotten Tomatoes average. What feels different about Digger hive is how vociferous the movie's fans can be — and how many of them seem to be in the entertainment industry. Like, I love veteran screenwriter Cole Haddon's 5 AM Storytalk, and I rarely see him as hyped about a movie as he is in this post about Digger. He's also pretty dismissive of critics who have raised what I think are substantive issues with the film, even if I don't always agree with those critics. What's more, a lot of the film's biggest supporters in the industry are, in essence, praising how much the movie hates them and the work they do, how it seems to suggest that literally all art backed by massive mega-corporations is tainted, empty, compromised.

That sounds great to me! And yet sometimes I doubt my commitment to Digger hive! I liked the movie but didn't quite feel like it pulled the whole package together for me. If I'm grading it on Letterboxd, I'm giving it the polite golf clap of a four out of five. This makes me the only person on the planet capable of properly adjudicating this debate. Just what's going on here? What does it mean? Will Digger hive come to your town?

To answer that, we need to talk about the always divisive Iñárritu.

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