Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I’ve been thinking about art and authoritarianism, satire, and action, and two works that stick with me in these tense weeks before the November 3rd elections.

In one, a glacier cracks off Greenland and an oil baron with a dying cat calls panic “a resource.” A president eats popcorn while millions of Europeans drown, and when an exasperated climate scientist exclaims “perception is not reality. Perception is just perception. Reality is reality,” the audience can’t help itself, we laugh.

That’s Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, which opened October 2nd. It was Warner Bros. last release before the company’s sale.

The other is set on election night, 2008. A rich man known only as the Big Guy watches Barack Obama win the presidency and decides his country has been stolen from him. He and his friends start to plan. That’s A.M. Homes’s The Unfolding, published in 2022 and read by many of us as an eerie forecast of January 6th.

Both are about rich men in private rooms deciding what the rest of us get to know. Both give me the chills. But Digger and The Unfolding aim at different targets. Homes satirizes the plotters. Iñárritu ends up satirizing the audience, which means you and me.

Homes writes intimate, nearly realist satire. Her scenes take place in hotel bars, over family dinners and describe the day to day logistics of a coup. Homes’s horror is how ordinary it all is. Iñárritu goes big and theatrical. Watch or rewatch my conversation with the brilliant A.M. Homes, and go see Digger for yourself. Defy the reviewers who set the movie on track to be Tom Cruise’s biggest loser in nearly two decades. And then consider what’s happening outside the theater.

Four days after Digger opened, Paramount Skydance closed its $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. One company, now called Skydance, controlled by the Ellison family, owns two Hollywood studios, along with HBO, CBS News and CNN. The executives who greenlit Digger are gone.

David Ellison’s father, Larry, a major backer of the deal, once told Oracle analysts that AI surveillance would keep citizens “on their best behavior.” It’s a phrase that befits Homes’s Big Man. David Ellison promises the newsrooms in his portfolio will be “completely editorially independent” thanks to a five-member “News Editorial Independence Board” that he will appoint and which will have no duty to make its findings public. Iñárritu’s Digger would approve.

Weeks after The Unfolding came out, a federal judge blocked Penguin Random House from buying Simon & Schuster. The seller in that deal was Paramount. It sold in 2023 to the private equity firm KKR, instead. Today, the Big Five in publishing answer to Bertelsmann, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, KKR, Holtzbrinck, and Hachette. And let’s not forget the tech moguls: Jeff Bezos at Prime Video; Apple with Apple TV.

This is neither coup nor comedy. It’s the work of markets and capital, and state-approved consolidation. It’s unregulated power acquiring unprecedented capacity to control culture making and perception, and it’s all too real.

Homes understands that. So too does Iñárritu. To tell you more would truly spoil the movie, but suffice to say that after making us laugh, Digger sends audiences out into the street with a closing scene to haunt our dreams. What should never have been normalized has been normalized and art’s remaining job is to distract our cares away.

The truth is, the most dangerous plotters don’t tend to be buffoons. They’re more likely to be charming seducers who plan dominance over dinners and conference calls. The Unfolding is about wealthy men making calls while everyone else watches election returns. The Skydance deal went through while protests were underway on two continents.

The horror is how undramatic deadly can be. Waters rise quietly, ice cracks widen slowly, dead birds drop softly from dry trees.

The critics will debate the satire we need most. Is it the one that calls us to action, or the one that catches us applauding? Or neither? I think we need all of it. But here’s the harder question. When the people we might satirize own the studios, the publishing houses, the newsrooms and the reviewers (as well as the boards that supposedly police them), who makes the next satire? Who pays for it? Who gets to see it?

It’s not too late to stop the normalizing, but it is well underway.