Digger: Tom Cruise and Hollywood are done saving the world; time to embrace the end

Tom Cruise has been single-handedly saving the world for decades, and now, with Digger, he has single-handedly destroyed everything. Of course, this is not Tom Cruise the person or the actor, but the characters he has played that have dominated Hollywood, and by extension, the rest of the world. Digger can easily be labelled as Tom’s best performance, but it also makes you wonder how the American ‘soft power’ that Tom peddled for decades is now a thing of the past and they seem to have accept the fact in the film.

Tom Cruise’s Digger is a cartoonish, but equally conniving villain

Alejandro Inarritu’s Digger has Cruise playing Curtis, an actor whose daughter is the center of his life. And in the play within the film, he is playing Digger, the oil magnate who one might imagine runs the Illuminati and controls everything that goes on in the world from his garish mansion. Presidents of major countries are at his beck and call as Digger makes decisions that destroy the world, without any supervision whatsoever. Such characters have traditionally been cartoonish villains in films, and here too, Cruise plays Digger like a caricature. He knows how to gaslight the audience into feeling that they are equally responsible for the climate crisis that was triggered by him. He puts on an exaggerated performance just so he can trap them in a web of self-reflection and get away with his crimes, one more time.

Tom Cruise in Digger.

Digger is the obvious villain of the story here for he brought the entire world to a halt. But the film goes a step further when it introduces Jesse Plemons’ Kenny, who is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Kenny reveals he is Digger’s nephew in the third act and this is when we also find out that the play is based on a real-life chapter from recent history where millions of people lost their lives and livelihoods, all because of Digger (and the many governments who chose to look away while he was running the show). Kenny, like his uncle, gives an impassioned speech where he paints Digger as the biggest villain there ever was, and claims that he is producing this hyper-realistic play so the people can process their grief, with a dash of laughter. Just like Digger made the people self-reflect, Kenny does too, and that’s where he, like his uncle, wins again.

Kenny is fooling the world, just like Digger

It is only at the end of the film that we actually see the reality of how the climate apocalypse triggered by Digger has changed the reality of the world. The cities are literally falling apart as people walk around the ruins of a civilisation wearing giant masks that cover their faces, for all the necessities of life have ceased to exist. And Kenny, the nephew of the disgraced oil tycoon, residing in his ivory tower, is using his immense wealth to put on expensive plays.

Kenny thinks of himself as a supporter of the arts in a world where human life can’t survive anymore; he has fooled the people into believing that he is the good guy, the man who hates Digger just as much as anyone. Of course, Kenny is self-aware and knows that he can’t be seen singing praises of his uncle anymore, even though he was the guy who set him up for life (rather, set the family up for generations). So he does the next best thing: turn into a hypocrite and dictate how the public must feel.

Jesse Plemons in Digger.

Putting up plays is not his sole job (duh!), as he also runs some secret Mossad-like organisation where he can trace any individual in any part of the world but Curtis, who is playing Digger, can’t see through the farce of this man because, just like the rest of us, he too is busy putting food on the table and worrying about his family’s survival. Kenny, meanwhile, is gathering more wealth through the many businesses he continues to run as the world slowly comes to an end.

Industrialists have been running the world ever since the Rothschilds formalised banking systems. Digger, surely, does not tell us anything new in that department, but it surely does tell us that we, the masses, are too gullible for our own good. What else could explain our fascination with the uber-wealthy people who have the resources to actually help millions around the world, but choose not to? And no, this isn’t about them doing charity work to keep their conscience clean, but about taking steps to stop harming the world.

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Digger could be seen as the age-old story where a wealthy industrialist has destroyed the world but unlike those stories which often ended with someone saving the day, there are no heroes anymore. The Tom Cruise-like saviour who could have ended the tyranny of someone like Digger no longer exists, because the situation is so far in the dumps that the Kennys of the world are now pretending to be our new saviours.