There’s a piece waiting to be written about Inarritu’s contempt for the pretentious gatekeepers of art. People whose only real concern is where to go for cake and coffee when it’s over, as the line from Birdman goes. With Digger, Inarritu decides to expose them through their reviews by using the exact same device — a play within a movie — with clever subversion. In Birdman, the play is based on Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, headlined by an actor who has been the titular mainstream superhero. Carver’s story is about what love means. Inarritu takes that question and turns it inward. The play becomes a mirror of Riggan’s own desperate need for love & validation. And the stage narrative runs parallel to a fantasy narrative. In Digger, the play is original, “based on true events” and futuristic, headlined by a celebrated actor, but here the stage narrative runs parallel to a reality narrative. And this time, the mirror is turned outward. Fossil Fools tries to make sense of a reality that has already become absurd. The disaster has already happened. The play is merely recreating it for an audience that needs the catharsis of watching it before walking back out into the world it is depicting. If Birdman played with ego and alter ego, Digger plays with perception and reality. The former reflects the internal, the latter the external. Birdman asks: Can art help me understand myself? Digger asks: What the fuck is art supposed to do when reality is a shitshow? Birdman is about euphoria, Digger is dystopia. Digger takes many digs — at people who run the world, at storytellers who feel the need to tweak reality to sell tickets, at critics who crave for realism, at the audience who shows up for catharsis only to walk out into a trash can of a world. The punchline of this dark comedy or satire or farce or whatever reality is today isn’t funny because it’s deeply uncomfortable af! We are watching people watch a play about a disaster that has already happened. They laugh, they curse, they experience catharsis and then they walk back into the exact same reality they have just been watching on stage — WHILE those responsible for it are more than happy to sell tickets to the “Based on a” shitshow THEY caused. Pretty much like Netflix paying life rights to showcase serial killer documentaries — rewarding a life of crime with a lottery amount. And we are these people watching Digger and stepping out like all is well, discussing Inarritu and Cruise instead of what the mirror is showing us!! Digger is asking what art can possibly accomplish when reality itself has become more absurd, more grotesque, more theatrical and more dystopian than fiction. Yet if you read the reviews of meta-gold Digger, the conversation seems more concerned with opinions on the mechanics of art and Tom Cruise than with the uncomfortable mirror the film is holding up for us to look at. Or maybe that delicious irony is the point. Maybe the mirror has stopped working? Or how dumb have we become if we can barely see the mirror when it’s shown to us? For Digger is about perception and reality, about the ways in which reality gets manipulated, packaged and consumed. Yet much of the criticism remains focused on the packaging. As Cruise disappears into prosthetics, a lot of the criticism of Digger remains cosmetic. And utterly pretentious, every bit worthy of contempt. The fossil fools have exposed themselves. Maybe the mirror is broken. Maybe art is futile. Inarritu has been proven right. Maybe the cash-broke, opinion-rich audience, especially the gatekeepers of art, have no fucks left to give? P.S. Watch Digger on IMAX if you still believe in art to show you the mirror. More importantly, if you can still see — that the world’s biggest superstar has chosen to do a superbly crafted play for the biggest screens, with a ten-minute walking-talking dance of a monologue. Ballsy and spectacular. As paintings go, it’s a Lubezki.