‘Coyote Vs. ACME’ Vs. ‘Digger’

Two of the biggest comedies of the year to come out in recent months are Coyote Vs. ACME and Digger. Both films revolve around corporate greed and its repercussions. Both films have a villainous CEO in them. Both films are ostensibly comedies. Both were made by Warner Bros. Yet, ironically, Warner Bros. initially shelved Coyote Vs. ACME (only distributing it once Ketchup Entertainment stepped in) despite its obvious merits, while it steamed full ahead with Digger, despite its obvious problems.

While Coyote succeeds in every possible way in getting its message across, Digger does not. Indeed, it fails in many ways, didactically, aesthetically, and financially. By comparing the two — including a few spoilers — it is easy to see what made the one a success, and the other not.

Digger revolves around the eponymous oil magnate Digger Rockwell, whose company’s actions drilling in the North Pole for oil result in massive ice floes the size of Boston and Philadelphia breaking loose and devastating the northern hemisphere’s population centers, resulting in the ultimate collapse of civilization as humans know it. The stakes are lower in Coyote Vs. ACME: Wile E. Coyote, fed up with defective products from ACME that always fail in his quest to capture and eat the Roadrunner, decides to take the ACME Corporation to court.

Digger is ostensibly a comedy, yet a peculiar one. In its most literal sense in the ancient into the early modern world, a comedy was any story that ended with a happy ending, or one that would have appeared to have been a happy ending to the audience. None of Aristophanes’ The Clouds and The Wasps and William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are particularly comedic, but they count as comedies, because they have a happy ending. In contemporary parlance, though, a comedy is anything that has gags and jokes in it.

Digger somehow fails to be a comedy by either definition. It has very little in the way of jokes, and what few there are, overstay their welcome — Digger’s greater concern for his dying cat than for his dead workers, the President’s anal cancer, and the Secretary of Defense’s obsession with blowing up any threat to the nation’s security all might be amusing at first but become obnoxious. It also has a bleak ending, with Digger’s actions resulting in a dystopian, empty society, with the sole silver lining coming in the form of Digger’s suicide.

Coyote, meanwhile, is a comedy on both accounts. It exists in the greater comedic tradition of Looney Tunes and the Marx Brothers, where there’s a joke every five seconds, and if one doesn’t land, there’s another one lined up behind it. Practically everything Coyote touches inexplicably explodes. All attempts to capture the Roadrunner — by Coyote, by Coyote’s lawyers, by the ACME Corporation — fail miserably.

The toons all have their typical comedic tics and antics (“We both know it would be very, I say, very unpleasant for everyone involved if anything bigger, I say, bigger were to become…public,”) that make them so lovable to audiences. And it has a happy ending: corporate greed is punished, the law firm Coyote hires starts rolling in clients and dough, and the Roadrunner and Coyote bond over their complex relationship and get back to running around Albuquerque.

Yet another way Coyote outdoes Digger comes in its morals. Both films have morals, despite the ostensible unpopularity of morals and lessons in today’s media. Alejandro González Iñárritu directed Digger and has much to say about his latest work, as many of the best and worst directors do. At one point in the film, Rockwell has a 10-minute monologue in which he insists that drilling for oil is a necessary evil, and that it is simply impossible to convert fully to sustainable energy without drastic consequences. Therefore, he argues, he ought to be absolved from any wrongdoing, even as his efforts to keep his oily juggernaut going have resulted in thousands of deaths from the fallout. Within the film’s satire the rant seems self-servingly disingenuous.

Astonishingly, talking about the monologue in an interview, Iñárritu said, “I’m not interested in pointing fingers or reducing the film to a political commentary or a right or left thing. I’m trying, through Digger’s speech, to say that we are all part of this madness. That there are no good people or bad people. The system has trapped all of us, and we have to find a way out together.” It feels like a statement made in bad faith or with a lack of self-consciousness that is entirely absent in his oeuvre so far.

If true, it would be a pleasant albeit naïve sentiment. Executives Lee Raymond, Michael Wirth, and Charles Koch are all just a few of the many (right-leaning) executives from various companies who have, over the years, sought to propagate the planet’s destruction by their pursuit of a profitable bottom line for their shareholders. Along the way, they have steamrolled and lobbied against legislation that would curtail runaway fossil fuel emissions that pollute, poison, and cause climate change, in order bring in their profits.

Coyote, meanwhile, has no such qualms in its portrayal of corporate greed. ACME lawyer Buddy Crane and ACME CEO Foghorn Leghorn (yes, Foghorn Leghorn is the film’s main villain) are unambiguously evil, defending as a necessary evil their experiments on Wile E. Coyote and a whole host of other toons. ACME as a whole is portrayed as morally bankrupt, shutting up their own scientists who try to blow the whistle on their corrupt actions and trying to assassinate do-gooders who would expose their actions to the world. Even when exposed, Foghorn Leghorn gives an impassioned speech before a U.S. Senate committee, a much better (and shorter) speech than Digger Rockwell’s, in which he has the senate and its audience eating out of the palm of his wings with his insistence that his company’s actions are necessary. There are no attempts to portray evil as nuanced or somehow secretly good. Corporate greed is evil in the universe of Coyote Vs. ACME, and is ultimately punished.

The last way Coyote outdoes Digger comes in its portrayal of its key subject matter. In the storyline of Coyote Vs. ACME, it is revealed that ACME has been doing most of its unethical testing for products on toons, with the rationale that toons are more resilient to harm and therefore it is acceptable to hurt them during experiments. Research scientist Dr. Peter Lorre (and the name is a homage) finds that this is untrue: Daffy Duck is driven insane and catatonic by ACME’s testing, and he’s just one of ACME’s many toon test subjects. Coyote successfully allegorizes, satirizes, and condemns the history of unethical experimentation on minority groups and animals rationalized because they don’t feel pain the way as “normal” humans.

Digger, meanwhile, lacks any such subtext and, despite dealing with one of the most pressing matters of our time, has little useful to say about it. Digger is portrayed as being vaguely chauvinistic, but the film does not deal with chauvinists who propagate climate change. The President’s cabinet is all white men, but the film does not address monolithic representation. Digger got his corporate contracts by cutting deals with European and American politicians, but the film has little to say about political corruption. Digger, the President, and one of his stooges express vaguely-phrased belief in the Judeo-Christian God, but the role conservative Christian politics plays in American policymaking and climate change denial is never considered by the film. All these things appear in the film but are never addressed in any sort of serious way. Despite the length of time it took him to make the movie, it feels as though Iñárritu asked a chatbot to summarize some of the main issues when it comes to climate change denial, and he made a film with those elements included in it.

Digger is a comedy without jokes, a corporate satire with barely a corporation, and a political film sans politics. Coyote Vs. ACME has a plethora of jokes, a moral portrayal of corporate greed and a realized presentation of politics. Despite his excellence in the title role, Tom Cruise is fighting a losing battle as Digger falls behind in every possible way. While Coyote seems destined to become a classic of the late 2020s, Digger may be doomed for the dustbin alongside Cruise’s other non-Mission Impossible films.