Digger: Why are they staying away in droves?

 

Digger; Movie; Digger Rockwell; Tom Cruise; Psychoanalysis; Psychology;

Brilliant.  That was the first comment of the reluctant wife as the credits scrolled on this film that was in its second week of release.  We were sitting in the multiplex near our home, in the smallest of its many theaters, with about 5 other people, and I think this was a typical showing.  I couldn't agree with her more.  Brilliant.  This is an immense, interesting film – topical, relevant, but also, deeply uncomfortable to watch.

The discomfort may be on multiple levels.  It is, on some level, a farce (if anything like farce is possible in our current cartoonish political world).  Nothing like what happens on the screen could happen in real life – and the sets underscore this.  It is a surreal world tantalizing like ours, but also, somehow, distinctly different.  We don’t know how different at the beginning of the film, and the reasons for the differences becomes apparent only as we move forward in the film.

And the disorientation of a film that confuses the viewer about what they are seeing and requires them to work it out may be the second source of discomfort in the film.  We are confused and betwixt and between.  The reviewers promised a twist 20 minutes into the film, and they didn’t want to give it away – and neither do I.  For me, the “twist” was only the opening of a confusing can of worms that contained a can of worms within it.  Only by the end of the film, when an explanation of how it is constructed emerges, is there a sense of how the multiple themes running through the film are connected.  But by then, we are deeply engaged and equally deeple repulsed, and the forward momentum just won't stop even when we join the players in just wanting to bring the whole thing to a close.

But I think it is the damning of us all – the sense that we want to blame others for the mess we are in but we have only our selves to blame – that is at the root of the resounding snubbing that this incredibly well-crafted movie is receiving at the box office.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if Tom Cruise, the king of the box-office, were to receive his first acting Oscar for a film that flopped?  I think it might happen here – in part because of how off-putting this film is.

Cruise fully inhabits a hateful character.  His character is powerful beyond measure, but he repeatedly uses the power to destroy.  He destroys those who work for him, he destroys his family, he destroys the planet.  He even destroys the one creature in the world that he seems to care most deeply about, his cat – mostly by caring to keep it alive long after it should, by all rights, have been allowed to rest in peace.

We are invited to hate Digger's character by the film and by the character himself.  He is so hateful and unfeeling that we are deeply and thoroughly repulsed by him.  We are so thoroughly repulsed by him that when our identification with him occurs, it is disorienting on a deeply disturbing level.  How can we go from hating someone else so thoroughly to hating ourselves in the very next instant?

We had gone to a late afternoon show – so maybe there would be a few more people at the evening performance, and maybe this will gain a following over time, but I don’t think so.  We contemplated going home for dinner.  I asked that we go out to somewhere quiet that would serve comfort food.  It was getting dark and a light rain was falling – the remnants of a hurricane that had reached us here in the Midwest.  We received difficult news earlier in the day, so that was part of our conversation, but we kept circling back to the dislocation we were feeling in the wake of seeing this film.

When couples go into treatment, the Gottman’s have discovered, they do this with the intent of the treatment impacting (changing) their partner.  That is the Gottman’s explanation for why couples treatment fails so much more than individual treatment.  In individual treatment we go because there is something that we need to change in ourselves (though a friend of mine once pointed out that the modal number of treatment sessions is seven – and he posited that seven is the number of sessions a person needs to go to in order to figure out that the therapist is not going to change the world, but is, instead, going to ask the person to change).

This movie points out that our efforts to pin the current state of our disarray on others is misguided.  We are the problem.  Digger is, in all his despicable actions, actually serving us – something we are loathe to see. 

There is a fantasy embedded in the film itself that hating Digger will actually bring out the millions, and perhaps that would have been the case if we were allowed to retain that hate - as the fantasy does.  But the performance at the box office to this point punches a hole into the hot air at the center of that fantasy holding true about a call to arms based on our being responsible for our plight.  We want to be able to blame someone; we don’t want to be told that it is we, ourselves, who are to blame…

There is an old truism in advertising.  If the thing you want people to stop doing by showing the negative consequences is too graphic - too disgusting - people will turn away and the effect will be lost.  The quintessential example of this is anti-smoking ads that showed smokers' lungs that were filled with black tar in comparison to a healthy lung.  We turned away from that ad; it was too gross.

Part of the reason that psychological treatment takes so long is that we have worked hard to not know that we are part of the problem.  We don't want to know this for many, many reasons.  We need to work through those reasons carefully and slowly.  This film deconstructs them all in an instant, and does that when we are headed in a different direction.  The surprise of not getting what we came for combined with getting exactly what we didn't want interferes with the pleasure of a deeply disturbing and incredibly well crafted film - and also with internalizing the important message that it embodies.

 

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