Everyone Hates ‘Digger.’ It’s the Perfect Climate Movie

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Title: Everyone Hates ‘Digger.’ It’s the Perfect Climate Movie

标题：每个人都讨厌《挖掘者》（Digger）。它是最完美的关于气候的电影

Save this story. Should you see a Looney Tunes–esque satire that stars Tom Cruise in prosthetics portraying a loud caricature of an American oilman, that’s currently on track to be one of the biggest box-office failures of all time? Absolutely yes—and it’s a movie that rewired my expectations of what a movie about climate change should be.

保存这篇文章。你是否应该去看一部类似《乐一通》（Looney Tunes）风格的讽刺电影？该片由汤姆·克鲁斯（Tom Cruise）戴着假体出演，饰演一个吵闹的美国石油大亨漫画式人物，且目前正有望成为史上票房最惨败的电影之一？绝对应该——这部电影重塑了我对气候变化题材电影应有样子的期待。

Digger, the critically panned, exorbitantly expensive new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, calls into question the purpose of art and even the basic purpose of telling the truth in the face of a capitalist machine churning the world toward climate disaster. The deeply uncomfortable film forces audiences to confront what kind of characters we’re the most comfortable making into climate villains. (Spoilers ahead—if you have any plans to see the movie, I really would encourage you to do so first before reading on.)

《挖掘者》是亚历杭德罗·冈萨雷斯·伊纳里图（Alejandro González Iñárritu）执导的一部新片，虽然影评惨淡且制作成本极其昂贵，但它质疑了艺术的目的，甚至质疑了在资本机器将世界推向气候灾难的背景下，讲述真相的基本意义。这部令人极度不安的电影迫使观众去面对：我们最乐于将哪种角色塑造成气候反派。（下文包含剧透——如果你打算看这部电影，我强烈建议你先看完电影再阅读。）

The film stars Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil billionaire who only wears cowboy boots and lives in a mansion covered in antlers and polar bear skin rugs. At the start of the film, one of Digger’s oil-drilling platforms accidentally causes a massive iceberg to break loose, resulting in a huge methane leak. With catastrophe impending, he has to alert the president (John Goodman, putting in a performance reminiscent of his best work with the Coen brothers) as the iceberg barrels toward Europe.

影片由汤姆·克鲁斯主演，他饰演石油亿万富翁迪格·洛克威尔（Digger Rockwell），一个只穿牛仔靴、住着挂满鹿角和北极熊皮地毯豪宅的人。电影开头，迪格的一个石油钻井平台意外导致一座巨大的冰山脱落，引发了大规模的甲烷泄漏。随着灾难临近，他必须向总统（约翰·古德曼饰，其表演让人想起他与科恩兄弟合作时的巅峰状态）发出警报，此时冰山正向欧洲冲去。

The trailers play up the movie as a too-broad-it’s-painful satire of American oilmen and how a Trumpian-inspired religious-right administration would respond to a real climate disaster. Iñárritu, however, lets us in on the secret early: The farce we’re watching is actually a play within the movie, being performed in a theater with a leaky ceiling that keeps losing power. Tom Cruise is not playing Digger Rockwell, but rather an actor playing Digger Rockwell.

预告片将这部电影渲染成一部令人痛苦的、过于宽泛的讽刺作品，讽刺美国石油商以及受特朗普启发的宗教右翼政府将如何应对真正的气候灾难。然而，伊纳里图很早就向我们揭示了秘密：我们所看到的闹剧实际上是电影中的一场戏，是在一个天花板漏水且不断断电的剧院里上演的。汤姆·克鲁斯饰演的不是迪格·洛克威尔，而是一名饰演迪格·洛克威尔的演员。

We eventually learn that the play, Fossil Fools, depicts events that actually happened some decades ago. From then on, you’re aware that every joke, every villainous portrayal of Digger and the president as Really Bad Guys, is for two audiences: moviegoers in 2026 and theatergoers living in a dystopian future.

我们最终得知，这部名为《化石傻瓜》（Fossil Fools）的戏剧描绘的是几十年前发生的真实事件。从那时起，你就会意识到每一个笑话、每一个将迪格和总统描绘成“真正坏蛋”的反派形象，都是为了两类观众：2026年的电影观众，以及生活在反乌托邦未来的剧院观众。

From the trailers, I’d initially thought that the movie was going to be similar to Adam McKay’s blockbuster Don’t Look Up, a climate satire that drew record numbers of viewers on Netflix when it aired in 2021. Don’t Look Up puts scientists racing to inform the public about an impending asteroid collision and pushing to avert catastrophe against corporate and political interests that have other plans. McKay, at the time, said the film’s purpose was to make “people less tolerant of inaction from their leaders.” If the media—journalists, filmmakers, and the like—could correctly inform the public about the risks of climate change, the film (and its accompanying calls to action) posited, we would begin to see progress on cutting emissions.

从预告片来看，我最初以为这部电影会类似于亚当·麦凯（Adam McKay）的大片《不要抬头》（Don’t Look Up），那是一部2021年在Netflix播出时吸引了创纪录观众的气候讽刺片。《不要抬头》讲述了科学家们争分夺秒地告知公众即将发生的小行星撞击事件，并努力在企业和政治利益的阻挠下避免灾难。麦凯当时表示，这部电影的目的是让“人们对领导者的不作为不再那么宽容”。该片（及其随后的行动呼吁）认为，如果媒体——记者、电影制作人等——能够正确地告知公众气候变化的风险，我们就会在减排方面看到进展。

Digger, similarly, deals with themes around climate misinformation. Digger admits he ignored alerts from his own company about the unfolding crisis on his drilling platforms. Goodman’s president and his cabinet decide to deploy a “firewall” that censors out all mentions of the climate crisis (including the phrase “Al Gore”) to control the narrative of what’s happening.

《挖掘者》同样涉及气候错误信息的主题。迪格承认他忽视了自己公司关于钻井平台危机的警报。古德曼饰演的总统及其内阁决定部署一道“防火墙”，审查所有关于气候危机的提及（包括“阿尔·戈尔”这个词），以控制对事件的叙述。

But where Don’t Look Up’s thesis is that action would happen if we just communicated the truth better, Digger takes a much more nihilistic view—that the truth has no value. Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger’s long-suffering environmental expert, angrily tells the oilman that he is going to tell the truth about his company and climate change to a crowd of European Union leaders, and keeps his promise. (Ganesh makes the first reference to the “Exxon Knew” investigation I can recall in a major movie.)

但与《不要抬头》认为“只要更好地沟通真相，行动就会发生”的论点不同，《挖掘者》采取了更为虚无主义的观点——即真相毫无价值。迪格长期受苦的环境专家加内什博士（里兹·阿迈德饰）愤怒地告诉这位石油大亨，他要向欧盟领导人揭露关于他公司和气候变化的真相，并且他确实做到了。（加内什提到了“埃克森知情”调查，这是我记忆中主流电影里的首次提及。）

Digger watches from a back room, then, in a ripping speech that forms the backbone of the movie, he tells the hostile European delegates that he, like other oilmen, knew that their product would cause runaway climate change. But that doesn’t matter, he crows. The world is hooked on oil, and the people in that very room have found a myriad of uses for it.

迪格在后台看着这一切，随后，在一段构成了电影核心的精彩演讲中，他告诉那些充满敌意的欧洲代表，他和其它的石油商一样，早就知道他们的产品会导致失控的气候变化。但他得意地宣称，这并不重要。世界已经对石油上瘾，而坐在房间里的这些人已经发现了石油的无数用途。

“You want energy to ask AI to solve the very same disasters that it’s fueling,” he says to the assembled delegates. “You want freedom to bask in the comfort of your unsustainable lives.” He ultimately leverages Ganesh’s truth-telling to avoid accountability—strolling out of parliament as members fight among themselves.

“你们想要能源去要求人工智能解决它所助长的灾难，”他对聚集的代表们说。“你们想要自由去沉浸在你们不可持续的生活舒适中。”他最终利用加内什的坦白来逃避责任——在议员们互相争吵时，他大摇大摆地走出了议会。

The bombastic portrayal of Digger Rockwell is, too, a rumination on what kind of truths we get as an audience and who the most palatable climate evildoers are. In between rehearsal takes of the increasingly outrageous Fossil Fools, we see Cruise grapple with how to play Digger, noting he watched hours of footage and found him not to be a finger-gunning shooting fool with a Texas drawl but a conniving, sharp businessman. But the play’s audience, watching Fossil Fools in a world Digger helped ruin, are not looking for truth—they’re looking for catharsis. Near the end of the film, an incredible late twist reveals the play has a wealthy benefactor with a vested interest in having it performed.

对迪格·洛克威尔的夸张刻画，也是对我们作为观众能获得什么样的真相，以及谁才是最容易被接受的气候恶棍的反思。在《化石傻瓜》越来越离谱的排练间隙，我们看到克鲁斯在琢磨如何扮演迪格，他提到自己观看了数小时的录像，发现迪格并不是一个操着德州口音、只会乱开枪的傻瓜，而是一个阴险、精明的商人。但观看《化石傻瓜》的观众，身处一个迪格曾参与摧毁的世界，他们寻找的不是真相，而是宣泄。在电影临近结尾时，一个令人难以置信的后期反转揭示了这部戏背后有一位既得利益的富豪赞助人。

One of my big critiques of Don’t Look Up was the notion that a Hollywood movie could be an agent for change; that the movie’s star, Leonardo di Caprio, who parties on superyachts and takes private jets, could tell people to listen to scientists and just vote our way out of this mess. Digger essentially spits in the face of Don’t Look Up’s existence, pointing out that enjoying satire about climate change that paints specific villains like Digger Rockwell comes at the risk of ignoring forms of corporate power more palatable to liberal viewers.

我对《不要抬头》的一大批评是它认为好莱坞电影可以成为变革的推动者；认为电影明星莱昂纳多·迪卡普里奥（Leonardo di Caprio）——一个在超级游艇上聚会并乘坐私人飞机的明星——可以告诉人们听从科学家的建议，并通过投票摆脱困境。《挖掘者》本质上是对《不要抬头》的存在嗤之以鼻，它指出，欣赏那些将迪格·洛克威尔这类特定反派描绘出来的气候讽刺片，其风险在于忽略了那些对自由派观众来说更易接受的企业权力形式。

This all may seem pretty nihilist, and I don’t think the movie is intended to be cheery. But I also don’t think it’s a message to not make art. Rather, Digger strives to be a reflection of our current reality, where truth often doesn’t matter, and art is often funded by the very powers it rails against. While Don

这一切看起来可能非常虚无主义，我不认为这部电影旨在让人感到愉快。但我也认为它并不是在传达“不要创作艺术”的信息。相反，《挖掘者》努力成为我们当前现实的写照，在这个现实中，真相往往无关紧要，而艺术往往是由它所抨击的势力所资助的。虽然《不要》