If I liked Digger, am I even myself anymore?

Happy Monday, Episodes pals! This week, we've got takes on Digger, Silksong at a year out, and our usual collection of other bibs and bobs. Remember: If you subscribe, you'll get this newsletter in your inbox every Monday!

Digger, Or (the Unbearable Feeling of Really Liking an Alejandro G. Iñárritu Movie)

NOW I HAVE NEVER PARTICULARLY BEEN A FAN OF THE MOVIES OF–

WAIT. HOLD ON. whacks newsletter on the side a few times

Okay. That's better. Now. I have never particularly been a fan of the movies of Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Birdman is one of my least favorite Best Picture winners of the 21st century, Babel is embarrassing pap, and Biutiful is miserabilist for its own sake. The man trades in all-caps emotion in a way I find deeply grating. I like Amores Perros, his debut, well enough, and I didn't hate The Revenant while not really liking it either, but that's about it. He's a man who saw that "I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards" scene from Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, then just kept on trucking.

So I was going to skip Digger. I don't care enough about Tom Cruise to have been heavily anticipating this one, and the tone of the marketing suggested the same shout-y affect that has always bugged me about Iñárritu's "comedy." Then the reviews started to pour in, and they were wildly all over the place – right down to one couple I know splitting down the "one of the worst movies of the year"/"one of the best movies of the year" line. What's more, people who don't really like Iñárritu seemed way more into this one, even if they ultimately gave it a poor review.

Then, finally, the movie accidentally became the last movie released by Warner Bros. as an independent entity before it gets scooped up by Paramount, and the studio's heads were fired as part of incoming boss David Ellison's changes to the system. Given the movie's enormous, bloated budget, it seems entirely plausible that Digger will be remembered by history as another Heaven's Gate, which is to say, a film that killed a studio, even if that sequence of events won't really be accurate at all. Could I avoid getting in on the ground floor of that?

I could not! I passed over The History of Concrete and Primetime – two movies I'm pretty sure I'm going to at least like – to take a chance on Digger, and it brings me no joy to report that... I kinda loved it? Now, my usual problems with Iñárritu are all present. The CONSTANT SHOUTING is very much the thing that makes this movie hard to take, and I suspect if it had even 15 percent more tonal variation, it would be cruising to double-digit Oscar nominations, even as a huge flop. (An experienced Oscar campaigner could absolutely spin support for this movie as tacit pushback against the Ellisons acquiring Warner Bros.)

And yet the "genius" of Digger – if it can be called that – is that any criticism you can make of the film is one it has already anticipated. Like the shouting does have thematic purpose, and even if I ultimately find that purpose a little flimsy, it's not nearly as self-impressed as Iñárritu's films usually are. Indeed, you could see large portions of this movie as being, like, Iñárritu telling on himself a little bit.

Spoilers for basically all of Digger, but...

Over the course of its over-two-hour runtime, Digger gradually reveals itself to be a play-within-a-film. Initially, this is grating because the play seems to have the world's largest budget and seems to have no good reason to exist as a play, rather than a film-within-the-film. But then that gets wrapped into the text, too, because this is a big-budget theatrical restaging of a cult classic play about the events that nearly caused humanity's extinction somewhere in the near-term past of the film's world. And the play has been given such a lavish budget by the extremely rich nephew of the real Digger – the character Cruise's character is playing – because he doesn't mind if you laugh at his family. In fact, maybe it makes him seem just a little bit cooler. And anyway, isn't it worth everybody coming together to cheer at a man's death? Doesn't that help a little bit??

Well, the characters still live in a climate-ravaged hellscape. Like, yes, they all got to cheer for the death of an odious man, but it doesn't change their material realities. And yet for two hours... they got to not think about those material realities. Iñárritu and his team are wrestling with the idea of whether art/satire/etc. have any purpose in a world hurtling toward apocalypse, and the conclusion they reach – some purpose, but not much of one – at least feels more honest than he usually lets himself be.

Anyway, I could go on (and maybe I will at some point), but this, weirdly, reminded me of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven and its TV series adaptation, but with MORE SHOUTING. I think it's worth seeing, even if you hate it, and I look forward to the inevitable cult that forms around it and leads to a Criterion release. –Emily St. James

Revisiting Silksong, one year later

A year and a half ago, Hollow Knight: Silksong was a grim vaporware meme, the epitome of a game that, many fans feared, would never actually be released. A year ago, Silksong — the hand-drawn product of a three-person core development team — was the biggest game on the planet, a release so big it instantly crashed every digital storefront when it went on sale. In the immediate aftermath of Silksong finally dropping, it was hard to see the actual product beneath the discourse: its extreme difficulty, in particular, was the subject of breathless discussion from fans and media outlets (Episodes very much included) alike.

Silksong hates you because it wants to teach you to dance

A game already notorious for its difficulty finds art and beauty amid destruction, Lily Osler writes.

EpisodesLily Osler

Now, though, it's been thirteen months since Silksong came out. At the start of this week, I booted it up for the first time in a while and started a new save file. Now that the discourse cycles about Silksong had (mostly) run their course, I wondered whether I could appreciate it as just, like, a game. I'm glad I did! Silksong really is fantastic on its own terms. And with a greater sense of remove from the two discussions — its protracted development and its difficulty level — that dominated the months following its release, I can see the ways that both of those factors made the game better than it had any right to be.

By now, it's a canonical part of the Silksong story that the game's many blown deadlines were the result of Team Cherry being in development heaven: they freakin' loved working on this game, and they didn't want to let it go. On this playthrough, I've noticed the attention to detail that comes from loving a project so much in every nook and cranny of Silksong. For instance, the game tends to run at a (sorry) silky-smooth framerate, but some character animations are intentionally choppy. When Hornet, the game's protagonist, segues from a sprint to a rolling jump, her animation goes juddery, as if she's been drawn on fours. The slowdown gives her a sense of simultaneous momentum and buoyancy; it's like she's run fast enough to have briefly outpaced gravity itself. It's a tiny, tiny detail, but one that builds Hornet's character and gives you, the player, a sense of acrobatic joy.

Team Cherry's devotion to getting every little detail of the game right also shines in the atmospherics. While Hollow Knight, Silksong's predecessor, often had the vibe of exploring a haunted house, Silksong's tone takes more from post-apocalyptic works like Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, portraying a society that's clinging to the old rhythms of life and faith even as moss grows over their towns. The background details in the game's scenery do an amazing job of building this detail — you'll notice a pile of abandoned silk-gathering tools on the moors or the shape of a building protruding from beneath the spongy ground — as does Christopher Larkin's elegiac score. The game it reminds me most of is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, another melancholic trek through the lush remains of an old civilization.

And like Breath of the Wild, the game's series-high difficulty forces you to slow down and take in that carefully-designed scenery. Every time you trek back to a boss fight from a save point, you're likely to notice something newly wonderful and sad about the remains of the kingdom of Pharloom. Difficulty is a lever that lets a designer control the pace and depth of a game; the more tries it takes to figure out an enemy's patterns, the more time you get to bathe in the game's atmospherics. Hard, slow games that take forever to come out can make a fandom go mildly insane, but, at least in Silksong's case, they're very much worth the wait. —Lily Osler

This week in foreheads

Buy Emily's It's a Wonderful Life book!

Every Time a Bell Rings, the book about It's a Wonderful Life that I cowrote with Defector's Lauren Theisen, is out now! Less a making-of or a historical document, it's more an attempt to consider the film from a variety of angles, major character by major character. There are essays about World War II PTSD, whether Bedford Falls had any gays in it, and Donna Reed's impossible standard for womanhood. And it's an incredibly beautiful holiday gift, with a gold foil cover and festive seasonal endplates. Buy it today! —ESJ

Last week in Episodes...

• In last week's Monday Digest, Emily argued that it's basically impossible to have an interesting TV canon built by consensus, while Lily talked about Emily St. John Mandel's Exit Party and the odd experience of being homesick for dystopia.
• Emily wrote about how Twin Peaks' third season captures the feeling of living in the aftermath of the end of the world:

What makes "Part 8" so incredible isn't just that it breaks so heavily from the show we've been watching so far — including long sequences mostly in black and white. It's also in how carefully the episode takes the question of evil's true nature and both deepens its placement within the show you're watching and detaches it from the show at the same time. By offering a long flashback to the 1940s and '50s, the show posits a sort of "answer" for why Twin Peaks is Like That, but it also drops viewers into a world where all of this has been happening for a long time, where there are extra-dimensional structures and beings who exist mostly to watch over these endless cycles of good and evil.

• Lily and Emily finished their Infinite Jest read-through by considering whether the book's reputation as lit-bro bait makes sense in this day and age.
• And Lily finished out the week by going long on Exit Party, nostalgia, and what to do when you can never return to the world you grew up in.

And yet I miss those years so keenly that I find myself tearing up sometimes when I think about them. They sucked, but at least they sucked in ways that I could understand. The rhythms of turn-of-the-millennium life — landlines and desktop computers, a political universe not yet devoured and digested by the internet — will probably be in my blood forever because of when I was born... It is frighteningly easy to think of an objectively fucked-up time and place as your home.

Want to read all of that great stuff? Or this week's upcoming essays on The Americans finale and The History of Concrete? The only people who have access to all of it are our paid subscribers! Why not upgrade your subscription today? If you do, you can take part in Friday's upcoming mailbag!

Some pop culture things we're into

• I watched the first two episodes of the second season of the Scrubs revival. They were pretty good! I continue to find this show comforting in a way I can't entirely pin down, and it's nice to have John C. McGinley around more often. I am sure I will keep watching, but I'm not sure I'll have much more to say. –ESJ
• I checked out the 2024 film version of Salem's Lot because the book stuck with me a lot more than I thought it would. And I know, I know, I should have watched the Tobe Hooper version, but that one is three hours long! Well, it turns out that this story, which is all about accumulation of dread finally boiling over, really needs the three hours to fully tell its story. The 2024 version – directed by Gary Dauberman – originally came in with a three-hour cut, but it was sliced to ribbons and released at 105 minutes, which is just not enough time to let the dread build. Like we've got full-on vampire outbreak by the hour mark in this one! It really reminded me of the difference between the (okay) theatrical cut and (sublime) director's cut of Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep, also a Warner Bros. production. Maybe the studio should release Dauberman's three-hour cut. I doubt it would be much worse? What a way to make it up to the fans, David Ellison! –ESJ
• I rewatched Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (the 2004 film starring Jim Carrey) for the podcast, and cramming three separate books into one film just ends up feeling a little too breathless, even if it has a deeply underrated Meryl Streep performance in the middle of things there. Also: The kid casting was terrific. Too bad it was a mild disappointment because I think they would have figured it out in a follow-up film. –ESJ
• I started reading Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler this week, and, while I haven't finished it yet, I am absolutely loving it. My experience with Calvino is slightly weird simply on account of having taken Italian in undergrad and thus having muddled through most of Invisible Cities in a language I truly did not understand, but I've always appreciated that his postmodern noodlings are grounded in an uncommon specificity of place and character. That the same thing manages to be true here, in a novel that, famously, is just a bunch of unrelated first chapters smushed together, is really amazing! —LO
• Have you seen this thread of music videos from the last hundred-odd years? Statistically, probably not, considering how few likes it's gotten thus far. But you should! It's insane! How did Cab Calloway do that?? —LO

Let's visit New York's abandoned honeymoon hotel, frozen in time, shall we?

Discuss

What's a time somebody who normally makes stuff you dislike made something you kinda love? Talk about it in comments or the Discord!

Some good links

• How Has Ella Langley’s ‘Choosin’ Texas’ Spent 24 Weeks Atop the Hot 100 — And Why Are People So Shocked By It? [Billboard]
• The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off Lurches Unsteadily Into Cake Week [Defector]
• Leaving the UK with a heavy heart [Growing Up Transgender]
• A search for movie history in Upstate New York [Defector] [but also Every Time a Bell Rings]
• What it feels like at Cornell right now [The Cut]
• A bookseller confronts a mysterious company hunting his rarest books [Mother Jones]

A Good Song

The free edition of Episodes is published every Monday and every other Wednesday. Premium subscribers get those newsletters, plus extra ones every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Our editor-in-chief is Emily St. James, and our managing editor is Lily Osler. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).