For, isn’t the world beyond parody?

Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell in a still from the satirical black comedy ‘Digger’

There's a play within Alejandro Inarritu's Digger that's a movie in itself. Categorically, this is not a spoiler - but the very point of the film, originally titled Blah Blah Blah, about how the world is just a lotta talk, and basically the stories we tell ourselves.

Hence, the story within a story in Digger, for an audience watching a movie, with an audience watching a play. What matters is who contrives/controls that narrative then; no matter when, or where.

Left to itself, that play, Fossil Fools, would be a fine film on its own, and it is - with Tom Cruise as the aged energy baron, Digger Rockwell, bum-chums with the US President/American establishment, faced with the global crisis of an ice shelf, shifting from his oil fields in Greenland into Norway, and what the seductive psychopaths do thereafter.

But it would be, at best, over-the-top agit-prop (agitation-propaganda), or Armageddon anger, dressed up as social satire, exaggerating fact with fiction/farce - the sorts of Succession showrunner Jesse Armstrong's minimalist black comedy, Mountainhead (2025), about a bunch of tech-bros ruling the world from a room.

In my opinion, which is so humble, that you can discard it - anger alone makes for poor art. I remember a Satyajit Ray interview, where he was asked, whey he never participated in political agitations/dharnas, etc - he found it "unaesthetic". He was an artist.

Inarritu, and his supremely inspired co-writers on Digger (Alexander Dinelaris Jr, Nicolas Giacobone, Sabina Berman), besides its Oscar-worthy production design (Dennis Gassner), a telling background score (Cosmo Sheldrake), while subverting the lead actor Cruise himself - play with form to such an extent that content is no more the intent.

The experience/entertainment essentially is. And you've also gotta dig deeper with Digger. There's a much-touted, 10-minute monologue by Cruise, before the European parliament in the movie, that some could see as its point.

It's really the counter-point, suggesting it's possible to be both anti-capitalist, and anti-consumer, or even gather the supposed left and the right into the same mainstream - only a film can really do that, for what is it, if not a story?

That there's a story within this story, being watched by a future generation, the said play, with its own patron/purpose, makes Digger, equally, a critique of art as temporary catharsis, preserving a permanent status-quo. Hence, it's a critique of critique itself!

We are doomed, one way or another, according to Digger. How else do you comment on a world that, anyway, feels like a parody - without parodying it, as is?

An environmental scientist, Dr Nirav Ganesh, seems the only voice of reason in the pic. But his understanding of climate change is so theoretical - you can't see how he could fit into the material world.

Riz Ahmed plays this Malayali-Indian bloke. He looked like actor Fahadh Faasil to me. I'm told Faasil was offered this part, and he couldn't make it. Huge loss! ‘Prostheticised' Cruise, from an angle or two, looked to me like a bloated Larry David, bloviating as usual.

This recital is a master-class. That Digger has been compared to Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1964) feels less of a coincidence then. Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is also that occasion Cruise went as far from his comfort tent-pole, risking it with a role.

It's his universally attractive face/demeanour that, unfortunately, conceal what a powerhouse performer he actually is - as great as any in world cinema. It took my generation to catch Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July (1989) as kids to figure this, first time on.

I'm glad I watched Digger after everyone had passed their hasty judgments, lowering my expectations, as a result. Not once did my eyes in the empty hall reach for the phone - neither should yours - and there are still more layers to discover from a second viewing, that I definitely will.

Digger is a misanthropic masterpiece. How do you decide on the latter? In retrospect, always. In the present, masterpiece is a prediction. I make the same for Paul Thomas Andersen's One Battle After
Another (2025), by the same studio, Warner. They've been sold off since.

For its impact over time, or the precision in its prescience, the masterpieces in my living memory are the sorts of The Truman Show (1998), The Matrix (1999), American Psycho (2000), Her (2013)… I've no clue what their box-office returns were.

Digger is being deemed a disaster, because such few people showed up for such a blockbuster-budget pic. As if audiences watch movies through the box-office, and not their ticking brain, or beating heart.
Hence, this defence.

Hollywood actually redeemed itself investing around $150 million, earned from superhits that are often shit, to leave behind popular art for future generations to remember, rather than caring only for shareholder value - what Digger takes a dig at, actually! It is their corporate social responsibility.

For, how many mindlessly mammoth human-intelligence slops like yet another Avengers do you wanna watch, anyway! Or, well, wasn't that kinda the point of Inarritu's Birdman (2014)?

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.