But this is just a play’s approximation of his final hours. Furthermore, it is in a play paid for and championed by Digger’s nephew, who happily will paint his uncle as history’s great villain, even as he reasserts his family’s generational wealth and power.
We don’t learn too much about how Plemons acquired that wealth, but we do see that he still maintains a reach as great as his forbears. It’s how the younger Rockwell uses his futuristic “security technology” to find the lost plane carrying the daughter of Cruise’s thespian. His ability to apparently save this single life, or a handful assuming he rescued whoever else was on that plane, is enough to earn Plemons eternal thanks and admiration from Cruise’s character, who then goes up on that stage and happily plays the fool on the pillory for his benefactor’s amusement. I’m still not even sure the real Digger died by suicide. Either way, when Plemons’ character joins his actors in the curtain call for the play’s first preview, it suggests Fossil Fools will be a raging success for the creatives. That’s good news, too, for the Rockwell family, which likely still needs strong PR rehabilitation. They already have the power and, as we soon learn, the money printing it.
In the movie’s closing moments, a voice on the theater’s intercom announces that the air is “Level Four” outside the playhouse. We don’t know the exact severity of that warning, but it’s apparently a standard problem in the future where every theater member, from the elderly to parents helping their children, absently puts on a gas mask. And each gas mask is manufactured by the Rockwell family.
In the play within the movie, Digger is seen accepting before any non-scientist that the ice shelf obliterating Norway is an inevitability. The only question remains how do you profit off this and keep yourself holding all the cards? Digger, we are led to believe by the play, never quite figured that out as the hegemonic world order post-1945 came to an end. But it would seem his nephew figured it out with time to spare.
If climate change makes the air unbreathable, the man selling gas masks is going to make a fortune. He can even afford a vanity project that will help repair his family’s public image while throwing one deceased ancestor under the bus.
Fossil Fools is loud, obnoxious, and grating, but it also lets audiences jeer at the past while resting assured they’re more enlightened now. This is the story of presentism from the days of contented Victorian superiority in the works of Bram Stoker or Rudyard Kipling to, say, 2019 Best Picture winner Green Book. Meanwhile a certain cycle persists where wealth and power are consolidated in a few hands—often descended from generations going back to the Victorians and earlier.
