The Unbearable, Unstoppable Moguls of Digger and The Social Reckoning

Two movies, two unfolding catastrophes. And in both movies, holding the rich to account is an epic struggle.

While some stories provide imaginative escape, others are lessons or warnings, inviting us to dive into drama so we might return to our own lives with renewed purpose and impetus to act. Two of the most anticipated films of the fall, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, unfold urgent stories of our shared future, but ask what it means to tell them too late—too late to undo past wrongs, too late to change course, too late to do something with the lesson we might learn.

Digger begins with the eponymous Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), an aging oil baron with a heavy drawl, caring for his cat, who is clearly dying though Digger won’t admit it. In the middle of this ordeal, he discovers that his drill site in Antarctica—which he has criminally mismanaged—is setting in motion a series of environmental cataclysms. The American president (John Goodman) and his Cabinet descend on Digger’s sprawling mansion to make a plan—not to save a single soul but, rather, to skew global opinion in their favor.

As Digger and President Compson stand and gaze out of a picture window, a tree falls over on its side. It would appear to be another instance of environmental collapse, except that, moments later, a giant human hand reaches out and rights it. Be prepared, for the remaining 90 or so minutes of the movie, to feel left out, to find that you are, by design, the last to know what is really going on.

The Social Reckoning, on the other hand, delivers pretty much what a news-literate Sorkin fan might expect. The sequel picks up over a decade after Sorkin’s The Social Network, in which Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook and looked bad doing it, and critiques Facebook as a global power and an international threat. Sorkin, the screenwriter for both, takes over the directorial reins here from David Fincher, and Zuckerberg is now played by Jeremy Strong. Jesse Eisenberg chose not to reprise the role, telling Variety that he didn’t “want to be associated with that character.” In the film as in life, it’s Zuckerberg’s company and its technology that have taken on a worrying momentum of their own, appearing ever more capable of AI-powered mass destruction. Can a single whistleblower force the hand of a trillion-dollar company and set in motion radical change?

Both Digger and The Social Reckoning begin their stories of ego-fueled disaster at a point in the narrative when it is too late for any of the characters to stop it. They each approach the problem of too-late storytelling from their preferred modes. Sorkin turns in a trademark love letter to journalism, Iñárritu a satire of satire that moves between cerebral and bizarre. Just as Sorkin favors principled stances, stylishly delivered, Iñárritu makes a meal of moral ambiguity, but both films revolve around bad men and a lot of monologuing.  

Digger is the story of Digger Rockwell, but it is also a production of a play called Fossil Fools, centered on a character named “Digger Rockwell.” Most of the scenes in the film are in fact rehearsals for that play, and the others show us the drama behind the scenes. That is the film’s first twist, but it isn’t its last, and once revealed, it seems both obvious and impossible. Certainly, the viewer of a play would not witness the proceedings as we do, moving through the rooms of Digger’s mansion (antique, but still tacky), or experience a suspenseful pan from the person looking to what they are looking at. When the production is paused or halted, a network of elaborate, high-resolution screens are moved through space by faceless extras.

It is an unsettling trick,........

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