What do we do with all this awareness?

As for Digger, pointless criticism aside, we could talk for hours about how it is the most accurate, lucid analysis of the mother of all contradictions of our time. And yet understanding it fully also means realising how pointless it is to do so. In fact, it would risk feeding the very mechanism the film denounces.

The truth is that we have reached a point in history where we know everything. We know that grotesque, incompetent caricatures sit in the rooms of those who govern us; we are more than aware that we have passed the point of no return; we know the price of our comforts and watch the foundations of the world crumble before our eyes day after day.

And yet we are still paralysed by the impossibility of really making a difference.

All the fine speeches we pride ourselves on in our respective bubbles start from a shared assumption: “myself included”. We state with conviction that we are part of the same capitalism we criticise. We talk about it constantly. Because the more aware we are of the world we live in, the more we realise we are complicit in it, simply by living in it. And so we protest, we criticise, we march in the squares, we voice our dissent. But the bitter truth is that we do not do it to achieve a concrete goal, but to make sure nothing happens. To go home with a clear conscience and the vague impression of having done something.

This short circuit makes us the most aware generation, yet also the most powerless. Mark Fisher was right when he said we have accepted capitalism to such a degree that we are unable to imagine a world in which it does not exist, and we end up asking capitalism itself to carry out anti-capitalist activism on our behalf.

That is why all the controversy over the box-office flop, the withdrawal from cinemas and the critics split down the middle comes as no surprise. Perhaps they really do not want us to see this film. Because it is powerful, because it is hypnotic, because it makes you lift your back off the cinema seat and lean forward. But above all, because it is a film that confronts you with the fact that all the awareness in the world will not change reality. And surely someone will have thought that the only way, then, is to destroy the foundations of that very reality. Someone will have realised that to have what we have never had, we must do what we have never done.