Digger: Music of an Organic Catastrophe

I’m very happy to be back this week with a score that I can frankly say I loved.

Today we’re going to talk about a film I wasn’t expecting that much from and that I ended up liking quite a lot. Digger, proudly directed by Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring the beloved Tom Cruise, comes to ask us many questions through satire.

When it comes to the music, we have Cosmo Sheldrake. Someone I hope to see at future awards ceremonies. An Englishman with a rather peculiar trajectory from birth, son of biologist and parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake and singer Jill Purce. Science and Art from the very beginning. Sheldrake is an anthropologist and, together with his biologist brother, is passionate about recording sounds from nature and adapting them into musical pieces. One of his most notable collaborations was with Cirque du Soleil in 2020.

Today, he brings us the music of Digger with his signature authenticity and, perhaps without even noticing it, with a chimeric and, at the same time, organic mark.

The score begins with natural bird sounds in Avian Elegy and gradually blends with synthesizers that give the impression of twisted voices. This combination brings light and weaves itself into what is presented on screen. A twisted perspective through the eyes of an oil magnate.

The music moves into Solarium, a piece where the clarinet is introduced as the main voice. Which I think is an incredible choice. Nothing as playful and irreverent as the rounded sound of a clarinet. This tone, so different to the ear from what the string section or other choices might offer, exposes the character of the film: the satire and the incongruity within it. A climate catastrophe that is accompanied by an instrument and a combination with this character creates a dissonance with logic and exposes the absurdity of human behaviour in the face of something devastating.

Throughout the score, I think a dialogue is woven between the clarinet, brass, synthesizers and… an attempt at voices, synthesized voices… sounds that can be made or that recall those sonic gestures that, in one way or another, we have all made with our mouths at some point.

What can this tell us? I think it is a stroke of genius that makes us think about the interrelationship between nature, body and machinery: it makes it difficult to distinguish the boundary between what is body, what is instrument and what is nature. Putting it in terms of the plot, perhaps this proposal invites us to reread climate change as a crisis of separation between humans and nature. Digger manages to do what he does precisely because he conceives of these resources as something external to him, something he can possess, extract and commodify.

In this way, this distinctive texture also invites us to think about how our natural resources are at the mercy of a handful of magnates whose intentions are based on nothing more than ego. An ego composed of the creation and commodification of the relationship between nature and humans. That is why the allusion to sonic gestures at this boundary of separation strikes me as a good move.

This Sacred Promise is another piece where, once again, we can see that, through the music, we are invited to think that we ourselves are the ones who create and sustain the climate crisis.

Without a doubt, the “blah blah blah” piece is a determining point in human action within climate change. A monotonous relationship, directed by the perspective of a few, that ends up becoming empty: here, the human voice is the noise in the face of the crisis.

Now, towards the end of the score, we have pieces such as Drowning, Judy, Ifs, Possibles and Clouds, and Avian Elegy (reprise). In Drowning, we can see the composer’s characteristic traces, as his albums and works are based, for the most part, on recordings of sounds from whales, birds and fungi. Drowning leaves us with the feeling that our actions are immersed in and inevitably bound up with nature. The final pieces, on the other hand, guide us and contrast that invitation with the relationship we build as a society today, whose interests guide us and the history we are building.

Lastly, and if you’re curious, I invite you to look at the names of the pieces or cues… almost as if the composer were telling a parallel narrative. I’ll leave that as homework.

For me, Digger and its music and its sound maintain an important organic texture that weaves us, as an audience, into nature and into the decision-making around it. It is a critique and satire of the directions we take and the forces we allow to guide us. The choice of the music and the composer reinforces this proposition. As I always tell you on this channel, music and its choices are not random, much less an adornment when it comes to a cinematic product. In this case, it can be seen clearly. Iñárritu’s choice and commitment to an anthropologist who would capture and use that same organic dialogue to highlight the incoherence of human selfishness is precisely what gives it that critical character.

While the protagonist acts from an assumed separation from nature, the music insists on weaving us into it. The music in Digger, beyond being texture, is immersion, critique and vision.

We have already discussed the aspect of immersion and critique, but why vision?

Because within the decision to use this musical structure lies the stance of finding the relationship between humans and nature irreverent and satirical, and that, more than a narrative, is a social and political vision.