Cinematic Digging into the Underworld

The recent debates on digital technologies have largely been focused on the concept of the cloud that lures us into an immaterial future governed by disembodied data. As such, the cloud appears as a symbol of Cartesian victory: an infinite mind finally free from perishable matter. Looking up to the sky to embrace these fleeting clouds, however, keeps from us an awareness of what lies beneath our feet: the soil, the mud, the dirt, the roots.

If we shift our attention and learn to appreciate the materiality of that which is underground, we will become aware that the digital devices we use to read this essay, for example, are made of precious metals excavated from the Earth, largely in non-Western countries. As scholars such as Jussi Parikka¹ or Erkki Huhtamo² indicate, digital culture does not lie in the immateriality of the cloud, but rather in the bodies of organic and non-organic entities that are utilised in its production: the bodies of those working in the mines and the factories, but also
the body of the Earth and the resources forcefully extracted from her.

In this essay, we attempt to dissolve the myth of an immaterial digital reality by looking closely at two recent films that emphasize the act of digging: Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2021, US: A24) and The Dig (Simon Stone, 2021, UK: Netflix). By combining the textual analysis of selected scenes with a film-philosophical framework, drawing on Jussi Parikka’s work on media archaeology and its sub-field, which he describes as the geology of media. Our adventures in the underground will be additionally accompanied by other experienced guides, scholars trained in expeditions to other-worldly, uncertain terrains.

This study is an invitation to travel deep down the rabbit hole, to a core in which we discover a lack of distinction between subject and object, between mind and matter, between film and the spectator. We are departing into what Guattari labelled as chaosmosis, implying the creation of a new ethico-aesthetic paradigm, where our engagement with a film becomes an act of absolute submersion that annihilates the distinction between subject and object³.

Desire for Materiality: The Mud and Digital Touch

There are several films in recent years that have creatively utilised the motif of digging, plundering the Earth, and submerging into the mud: Ammonite (Francis Lee, 2021, UK: Lionsgate), Minari and The Dig are just some examples. This cinematic fascination with plundering the underground can be seen as the desire for material touch, for materiality itself. The image of opening the Earth, connoting a sacrifice of our straight posture to submerge in the mud, the dirt, and the soil becomes additionally pronounced with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Barred from physical contact with each other, of the right to touch each other, we have been forcefully installed into an even more virtual realm. The most material aspect of our lives, a journey to work, shopping, and social entertainment such as attending the cinema or visiting a friend, has shifted into the online world.

The experience of reality has become overwhelmingly virtual, but does that mean it has become less real? Does shifting into a virtual, algorithmic kingdom of machinic calculations mean that matter, the body, become irrevocably lost? These digging films prove otherwise as they present us with the untameable tactility of primordial matter, the materiality of the depth of the earth. Before we move into our analysis of The Dig and Minari (films we selected for, aside from their common theme of digging and largely virtual release, their parallel aesthetics in a depiction of the environment) we must be warned by the danger of entering the world beneath our feet. The journey into the underground reminds us of the adventure of Alice in Wonderland, which Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari treat as a conceptual persona in their philosophical work.⁴

They see the figure of Alice as someone who ‘has moved into an alternate universe where things are measured differently’ and returned with the ability to destabilise sedentary, anthropocentric modes of thought.⁵ Through the melodramatic, poetic form embodied by Minari and The Dig, filled with tactile images of landscape and the site of digging, we become Alice as we submerge into the virtual, but real, cinematic world governed by alternative timescapes. Are we ready for the transformational journey into the underground in which our common sense will be eternally lost?

Ecosophical Aesthetics

Minari and The Dig provide rich material to comparative analysis, or rather for diffractive reading of these works through each other, due to their common aesthetics that following Guattari we will define as ecosophical. In Three Ecologies Guattari proposes ecosophy as ’an ethical-political articulation…between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity)’.⁶ Exploring the possibilities of digital devices and media,
and the films’ usage of sweeping, poetic, transcendental cinematography that recalls the work of Terence Malick, Minari and The Dig embody the interplay between the mental, social and environmental ecologies and the importance of each of these singular realms in our conceptualization.

Both films are period dramas based on true events: Minari depicts the director’s memories of his childhood in Arkansas, while The Dig presents us with a cinematic rendition of the Sutton Hoo excavation. They incite us into a bodily, non-personal submersion into the past that allows us for the creation of the future. With The Dig being a Netflix original film and Minari largely presented to audiences virtually due to the pandemic, these cinematic worlds appear
to be harbingers of a new approach to the digital, virtual realm that embraces matter and allows it to lead the mind through these fast-changing post-human times.

This new ecosophical regime prophesized by Minari and The Dig is governed by the law of intuition – bodily attunement to the milieu. The male protagonists in both films initially shun the advice given to them by those whose bodies are more prone to access intuitive knowledge. They ignore the importance of corporeal communication with the land while they reveal and hack at it, unearthing what lies beneath. Consequently, however, it is the body that possesses the most effective compass – intuition.

Haptic Visuality

The necessity to allow our cognitive minds to follow our bodily compass is additionally highlighted by the heart disorders suffered by little David Yi (Alan Kim), in Minari and Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) in The Dig. The human heart and the earthly soil become aesthetically conjoined in the films, guiding us towards a reliance on materiality. As such they beget Laura Marks’ haptic visuality as a mode of embodied spectatorship:

‘The term haptic visuality emphasizes the viewer’s inclination to perceive haptically, but a work itself may offer haptic images. Haptic images do not invite identification with a figure so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image… Thus it is less appropriate to speak of the object of a haptic look than to speak of a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image’.⁷

What is more, the films avoid the fetishization of any technology utilised for digging operations. They emphasise not advanced machinery and its inhumanness but rather human physicality, the body that becomes submerged in the mud, sacrificing the straight posture emblematic of illusory human superiority. These bodies, covered in dirt and soil and digging the earth on their knees with bare hands cease to be conceptual hu(Man), proud owners of
infinite mind and reason. These tactile images echo what William Brown and David Fleming, drawing on Donna Haraway, say: ‘we are never gods set apart from each other and from nature, but we are “com-post”—a com-post-human world not of man-gods but of humans constituted symbiogenetically through their relationships with other species.’⁸

The Dig: Excavating Materiality

The Dig is set in 1939 Suffolk, where Edith Pretty decides to undertake the excavation of the burial mounds located on her land. To tackle her mission she hires Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes), a self-educated excavator and archaeologist, who accepts the post after demanding a higher salary. Despite his initial appearance as a man governed by profit, Brown emerges as someone gifted with real passion and remarkable knowledge about his profession. Consequently, Brown and his small team of local people discovered the grave of an Anglo-
Saxon king. The mission undertaken by the archaeologist uncovered a 1,400-year-old burial site of a large wooden ship and a burial chamber containing rich treasures, now owned and displayed by the British Museum.

Media Archeology

Why return to this event in film? In our search for answers, we will rely on Jussi Parikka and his description of media archaeology as critical methodology.

‘Media archaeology can be understood as a heterogeneous set of theories and methods that investigate media history through its alternative roots, forgotten paths, neglected ideas and machine… Media archaeology is decisively non-linear, and rigorously theoretical in its media historical interest of knowledge.’⁹

Returning to the past can not only help us to understand our present, but it stimulates the creation of the future, which is not anchored in the linear, spatializing temporality of neoliberal infinite progress. It allows us to discern the forgotten and neglected lines Parikka discusses, which in the case of The Dig are embodied by the character of Basil Brown whose contributions to archaeology were not formally recognised until 2009

The advent of World War II in the United Kingdom, and the uncertainty and fear that accompanied, is reminiscent of our current situation and the pandemic that continues to transform our reality. Being faced with events we cannot control, the characters of Brown and Pretty demonstrate that returning to the individual and collective past through humble digging of the Earth can help us to uncover the treasure that will create our future. A future where the body and matter are not shunned but rather celebrated.

The Dig and Hyperobjects

The dense emotions catalysed by this global crisis are embodied in The Dig through cinematography focused on handheld, Steadicam or drone shots that seem to be following or circling around characters, emphasising both the tension of this pre-war period and the lack of control over the course of history and the forces of the environment. We can here refer to Timothy Morton and his notion of hyperobjects denoting invisible but tactile entities – such as global warming and nuclear radiation – so widely distributed in time and space that they cannot be perceived directly.¹⁰

Cinematography and Neuroscience

Drawing on neuroscientific research into film spectatorship, the hypnotising, transcendental camera techniques amplify our feeling of empathy and identification with the figures on the screen or rather merging the figures on the screen that are performing the movement.¹¹ Our canonical and mirror neurons mimic the physical actions that we observe onscreen and thus – literally – we are being put in motion.

Further entangling subject and object, The Dig is filled with long, panoramic shots of the landscape featuring small human figures. The human becomes submerged with the land and as we, viewers, haptically consume the image we merge with it. There is no distinction between viewers, characters or non-humans: the digital image touches us through its affective surface, activating our haptic visuality. This tactile vision enabled by digital technology recalls Parikka’s notion of medianatures, coined in reference to Donna Haraway’s term natureculture which she discussed in her work on companion species and cyborgs.¹² The concept of medianatures argues that not only is media made of minerals and other earthly resources, but they also have bodies that are capable of affecting our own corporeality.

The Matter is Vibrant

The haptic images of digging incite our reflections on the materiality of the ground and its constituent parts. As Jane Bennett affirmed, the matter is vibrant and enchanted, conceived of uncountable singularities and assemblages that they produce while encountering each other.¹³

This vibrant materiality of which we are a part, and which constitutes our bodies, is most strikingly rendered when the archaeologist Brown becomes buried in the soil after the excavation site collapses on top of him. The accident is preceded by a debate between Pretty and Brown about a non-hegemonic timescape that emerges during archaeological excavations as they overlook the side. When Brown starts digging, the screen becomes black and after a long moment of silence, we begin to hear muffled voices of the terrified Pretty and local people running to help. They are portrayed in close-ups, on their knees, covered in mud with the camera swinging around them in slow motion while they try to excavate Brown himself. Light becomes a force, sculpting time and space, merging them together: time loses its meaning in the face of death and material disintegration. After being uncovered and resuscitated by Pretty, Brown spits out pieces of mud a remnant of both his visit to the underworld, the land of death, but also the kingdom of life that the ground begets: the soil from which life springs. While covered by it he became possessed by it, it entered him. The soil and mud are portrayed as active agents with their own subjectivity and desires, Bennett’s vibrant matter again.

Minari: Migratable Plant Life

Minari follows Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun), his wife Monica (Yeri Han), and their two children, Anne (Noel Cho) and David, who immigrated from South Korea to America during the Reagan Era. Making a living as a chicken sexer, Jacob envisioned a different future for himself and his family: his goal is to establish a farm that grows Asian vegetables for the local immigrant population.

Minari, similar to The Dig, relies on wide shots that undermine the importance of human figures and allows the milieu to play an active role in the composition. The Steadicam technique, however, is less utilised here as Minari explores the potential of shallow depth of field enabled by digital cameras. The environment becomes softened and the figure in focus becomes more pronounced, which amplifies the affective power of acting performances. There is also an emotive, awe-inducing musical score that in combination with the techniques
mentioned above, allows for a chaosmic cinematic experience. The act of digging, although less pictured in Minari, has crucial importance in the film: to establish his farm Jacob must dig a well that would transport water to the plants, as well to his own house. Digging is thus a matter of life and death.

Being the director’s fictionalised memoir, the film evokes the vision of a child as soft and haptic, with sunrays frequently creating shiny flares within the lens. As such, it is an example of the haptic visuality elaborated by Marks. This is the return of the past, an archaeological excavation of the filmmaker’s memory, which through its translation onto the filmic language, engages in the creation of the future. The future is woven through the past every time we enter the affective assemblage with Minari during the screening of the film.

Logic vs Intuition

In parallel ways to Basil Brown, Jacob also attempts to approach the act of opening the earth by using his mind and the logic based on common sense that it offers. Jacob refuses to follow the advice of a local water diviner who relies on his intuition, and thus his body, to find water: instead of following the man led by a stick, with his eyes closed, Jacob chooses the logic of the mind.

Digging the well in a place of his own choosing emphasizes the naivety of Jacob’s unhinged confidence in the ability of reason, which is also associated with the idea of capitalist progress. In a scene during which he instructs David to never pay for anything he can get for free, they are both depicted in wide shots that undermine their importance in the frame, and it is the milieu that overtakes the composition. Despite the idyllic non-diegetic music, the birds-eye wide
angle shot which portrays Jacob and David celebrating their successful dig mocks their self-imposed superiority by highlighting their existence as interconnected with their environment: inseparably part of it.

The logic-driven attitude that initially characterises Jacob’s actions is contrasted with David’s heart condition which does not allow him to run and freely experience his childhood. The moment when the boy listens to the beating of his own heart through a stethoscope is pregnant with affective forces that harbinger the transformation which Jacob will have to undergo to achieve his goal. He must ethically engage with the land, or rather find a mode of communication that allows for the mutual exchange of the affective forces, imperceptible but
tactile.

This is the method used by local water diviners who, through hundreds of years of settling in North American soil, are attuned to the potential and needs of the land. Planting Korean vegetables on foreign soil require the creation of a productive encounter between these two singularities, which cannot be materialised without deep knowledge of them both.

Anne’s mother who arrives from South Korea to live with them embodies such productive, bodily dialogue between the Amercian land and the Asian plant minari. The eponymous minari is an Asian edible plant that grows near ponds and rivers. Being uprooted from its home, it recalls immigrants, such as the Yi family, who try to adjust their bodies and (embodied) minds to their new milieu. The parallel between the plant and the immigrant as forced out of their native milieus emerges not only as a virtual, disembodied metaphor but as actual and material: the Guattarian three ecologies interacting with each other. Taking this further, the film Minari can be viewed as an immigrant being in a new land just like its namesake. Its largely digital release goes against the typical marketing strategy of Oscar-nominated films, and its presence online is conspicuous and out of place in this regard.

As the Grandmother ventures into the forest, a small creek attracts her attention providing the humidity and indirect light that the plant needs. Similarly, the Yi family manages to spread their roots in a foreign land as they listen to their bodies and the environment, filled with enchanted matter. The final scene depicts the family sleeping together on the floor of their living room in a small caravan, calmly observed by the grandmother. Despite the loss of their vegetables in the fire, or because of it, they now understand the essential part of their compost – love, acceptance, and togetherness.

Such uprooting is, however, not an easy task, requiring them to dig a hole in their body and excavate what lies in the deepest chambers of their consciousness. Similarly, in the context of spectatorship, Minari offers us a cinematic lobotomy through its affective aesthetics foregrounding the vastness of the landscape. It plunders the underground of our corporeality, uprooting us from the Western conception of duality between mind and body.

Conclusion

Both The Dig and Minari embody the recent trend of films that excavate our relationship to the Earth by depicting that excavation as a material and historical archaeological act. They both assist us in our shift to the virtual realm, though in different ways. The Dig presents us with bodies becoming possessed by soil and earth, completely rejecting the subject/object divide that exists in traditional depictions of archaeology. Minari, on the other hand, depicts the rose-tinted spectacle of childhood memory where bodily intuition comes more naturally. Lee’s film suggests that if we listen to our bodies, like David, and like the local water diviners, our relationship to the earth can consequently be unified. Guattari’s three ecologies are thus symbiotically interacting. The films, therefore, emphasize the materiality of our milieu, in a way that includes the virtual environment of the Internet. As Parikka reminds us, the cost of digital technology on the Earth, through the extraction of precious metals and resources, so too do these films go some way to reconnecting us with that which is most important: an appreciation and understanding of the soil that gives us life.

Footnotes

1. Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archeology?, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012); Parikka, A Geology of Media, (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

2. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (eds.). Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

3. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, (Sydney: Power Publications, 2006).

4. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy, (London; New York: Verso, 2009).

5. Ian Buchanan in Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory. (Stanford: Stanford University Press.2003), p. 107.

6. Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), p. 28.

7. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp.2-3.

8. William Brown and David H. Fleming. Squid Cinema from Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulhumedia. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 149, also see: Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 11.

9. Parikka, What is Media Archaeology, beta definition ver. 0.9, (16.12.2012), np. Available: https://jussiparikka.net/2012/12/16/what-is-media-archaeology-beta-definition-ver-0-9/. Accessed: 9.05.2021.

10. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

11. Vittorio Galesse and Michele Guerra, The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience, (Oxford: Oxford University Pres., 2020).

12. Parikka, A Geology of Media; also see: Haraway D, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,(New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181.

13. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

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Filmography

Lee, Isaac Chung, dir. 2021. Minari. USA: A24.

Lee, Francis, dir. 2021. Ammonite. UK: Lionsgate.

Stone, Simon, dir. 2021. The Dig. UK: Netflix.