The protagonist of DIGGER has three lines and nobody is talking about him.
🚨 Full spoilers below, including the ending. Mute now if you haven't seen it.
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First watch, something about the coverage bugged me. Second watch I figured out what it was, and once you see it the whole film reorganizes around a character you've been ignoring.
PART ONE: whose eyes are we looking through?
1/ The camera sits low and looks up. Not Chivo's usual low-wide ground stuff from The Revenant. This is up-angle in the mediums and close-ups, on dialogue. President Compson’s first close up is from below. Adults loom. The private jet scene is tilted up nearly the whole way. It's not an accent. It's the default height of the movie, and it's a child's.
2/ The most memorable time Lubezki shot like this was The Tree of Life. The boys running through the yard, the father photographed from just below his eyeline so he feels enormous even when he's gentle. That film is explicitly a child's memory. The height was the point. So when the same DP does it again, ask who the child is.
3/ There's exactly one child in DIGGER. Kyle, the boy in the play, Emma's son. The film trains you to ignore him. Then during the blowup between Curtis (Cruise), Hannah (Wilde) and Kenny (Plemons), it cuts to his face repeatedly. Reaction after reaction on a kid who hasn't mattered for 90 minutes. That's not coverage. That's the filmmakers telling you whose scene it's been all along.
4/ After the fight, Curtis (Cruise) and Kenny (Plemons) both walk past the boy and physically touch him on the way out. Two adults who just finished arguing, each laying a hand on the same kid. Watch it again. The film is drawing a line from them to him.
5/ "But a kid can't witness all of this." He's a child actor in the company. He's on set for the rehearsal, backstage for the fights, in the wings for the preview. And adult Kenny, the producer, spends the whole film lurking behind doors, listening to things he shouldn't. Kids specialize in that. Same behavior, decades apart. The eavesdropper was in the room the entire time. He's just four feet tall.
So: a camera at child height, a DP who has used that grammar before to mean childhood memory, one child in the cast who is physically present for everything, a burst of reaction shots on him at the climax, and two adults touching him as they exit. I think that's the case. We are watching DIGGER from where Kyle stands.
PART TWO: what that means.
If we're in the kid's seat, then everything the film hands him, it hands us. And the film hands him a lot.
6/ The cat. Maggie is the only thing Digger loves and the only dying thing anyone in that house attends to. In the dark-room scene after the situation room, with Digger yelling, Emma (Hüller) drunk and the mother checked out, the kid is the one holding her. Emma starts "don't put your mouth on that..." and never finishes. Adults who notice the dying thing and can't finish the sentence. The Rockwells summed up. The kid makes the best of it anyway.
7/ The rig. Digger gives the boy a handful of the cat's ashes. The boy asks, roughly, how a jar of ash can be Maggie. Digger: everything changes. That's also the film answering Curtis's complaint that the play is too cartoonish to be Digger. Fossil Fools is Digger's ashes. Unrecognizable, and still him.
8/ Mid-scene, Curtis gets a call in his ear that his real daughter is safe, while the boy sits inside the fiction waiting for the adult to come back from reality. A real child is saved offstage so a fictional child can be sent away onstage. The kid waits in the story while the grown-ups handle the world. That's our seat too.
9/ Digger tells the boy "better put your gas mask on." Inside the play. The poisoned air isn't the theatre's future. It was Digger's present, and it's the audience's present twenty minutes later when they file out in masks. The mask goes on the kid first. Then on us.
다른 얘기인데 난 시네필이면 영화 편식하면 안 된다고 생각해서 점프스케어나 로맨스같은 비선호 장르도 꼭 쿼터제처럼 챙겨보는데 저번에 누가 퀴어영화 안 보는 건 호러영화 안 보는 거랑 비슷한 취향 문제 아니냐고 그래서 좀 심란해짐 근데 영화광이면일단보고싫어해야하는거아닌가난그렇게생각해
“안녕하세요, 존 워터스입니다. 이 극장에선 흡연이 금지되어 있다는 걸 알려드립니다.”
존 워터스의 금연 권장 공익 광고로, 당시 여러 극장에서 실제로 상영되었다고 합니다🚬
존 워터스 쓰레기 3부작 상영일정📆
핑크 플라밍고🦩
▪️10/3(토) 13:00
▪️10/6(화) 20:00
암컷 소동👠
▪️10/7(수) 20:00
막가는 인생
▪️10/8(목) 20:00
\\ 메가박스 동대문 감사합니다!🤍🌈 //
2016년 8월 11일, 킹프리 개봉 이후로
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물밑에서 열심히 노력해주신 동메박 임직원 분들 및 동우 에이앤이 직원 분들, 현장에서 도와주시고 함께해주신 모든 지인분들 및 킹덕 분들께 감사 인사드립니다.🌈💞
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