Yoshifan456

We don’t see a lot of John Goodman in the Digger trailer, so I’m extrapolating from very narrow information, but he doesn’t appear to be doing a Trump impression. And Trump impressions have been an albatross around the neck of American media for a decade now. I expected that impression to be there so I’m just stewing in my own (pleasant) surprise about its absence. And I think part of the reason Goodman isn’t doing a Trump impression is that Trump-era American politics have progressed to such a point that you can actually just emulate its insanity generically now. You don’t need to reference Trump to do “a Trump impression” because the impression you’re doing is of US politics writ large. The symbolism of a president in American film isn’t just a depiction of the person but of the moment broadly. And the current moment, broadly, is unfettered fascistic mania. Amalgamating JD Vance/DeSantis/Cruz/Trump/Musk/McConnell/Biden/etc into a single insane decrepit president guy is a much more efficient and effective (and funny) impression of contemporary political leaders than a Trump impression ever could be.

And it’s such a stark contrast to Cruise’s last film, TFR, which does an American politics AU where Kamala Harris becomes president. And what’s never stated in that film, but must logically be true, is that part of the global insanity happening in the MI universe is because a black woman is president. Like, Jan 6th happened to protest Joe Biden. Can you imagine a version of Jan 6th with Harris winning lol. Both TFR and Digger (again, going off of a trailer, so take this with a grain of salt) have radically different visions of American politics and the problems produced as a result of those politics. I always liked McQuarrie’s position that the Entity is a stand-in for surveillance technology broadly. I roll my eyes whenever people say that Ethan is battling ChatGPT in that film. It’s such a hyper-literalist reading of Final Reckoning that misses its obvious political arguments. Both it and Dead Reckoning are grappling with private + state surveillance technologies and their active role in eroding a societally agreed upon truth. Like truth as a public good has been fractured to what feels like an irrevocable point. And MI is not a deep or complex political franchise. So the Entity is very clearly not a chatbot or even just a generic AI stand-in.

Anyway all of that is colliding in my brain and making me think like, do you think Ethan knew about January 6th prior to it happening. I mean like it was openly planned so it’s not that difficult to anticipate. But still. Actually god could you fucking imagine if TFR was about January 6th and Ethan stopping a domestic plot to destroy American democracy. I feel like that would actually be much more thematically appropriate as a bookend to MI given that the first film is about a mole in the US intelligentsia. Like MI has always been about America/Western allies fighting internal battles to maintain their own sanctity, so in a way, an MI film about Jan 6 would be a very obvious adaptive move if you want to transpose the political context of post-Cold War cynicism onto 2023 during a global pandemic and mass disinformation hysteria. And to be clear that version of TFR would have been extremely bad. Mr McQuarrie I respect you but I do not think you would be capable of saying something intelligent about that political moment. Most of Hollywood can’t do that either so it’s nothing personal. 

I hate when people joke about his age and appearance, like for example in the comments under the digger trailer people were like haha he finally looks his age- NO TF HE DOESNT. First of all, Digger is like 80, and second of all, people dont know how 60 year olds look like, like he looks perfectly normal for his age, there are actors who dont have a single WRINKLE at like 70 but sure lets target him who is just athletic and has a lot of muscle and probably good genes. Like i know people who are even older than him and other than the white hair you wouldnt guess their age, its just dependent on so many things and like he takes a lot of care of himself and eats good so of course thats gonna reflect on his appearance

And it just gets me thinking about real Tom Cruise, a lot of us probably don’t think about it, I know I didn’t until recently. But I don’t know how close he is to his children, but he seems to be alone a lot- everyone else probably has their own lives, families. Of course he’s extremely successful but once he goes home he’s just…alone, surrounded by expensive and luxurious things but little to no one to share it with. How does he feel when the crowds dissipate, the credits roll and everyone goes home? It just sounds….lonely, I know Top Gun tried to glamorize it with cinematics but I can’t help but wonder if Tom didn’t incorporate that into TGM to give us a glance into his real life. It just seems…lonely, and I really feel for him- everything he’s gone through? And he’s just….alone.

Digger starts the trailer, and I think its safe to say the movie also because of the theory I'm going to give you now, with telling the audience that: "Everything changes. One day you are a cat, or a king, next day you are just ashes in a box." This sounds like he knows the futility of controlling life and fighting change. Yet that is what he tries to do in the rest of the trailer and the movie: control the narrative and prevent change (which is trying to save the world but also his reputation and money I bet, since we know from the shot in his closet that he is vain and obsessed with money). He says that he knows the problem and accepts change happens, but he doesn't show it nor act out of that principle.

What if the cat having been dead for a long time is tied into that? What if the realization that the cat is dead (including an hilarious montage of past scenes with the cat where instead of a real fucked up cat it's a clearly dead and stuffed fucked up cat) is also the realization that Digger can't stop the change/the end of the world and in fact that he was always too late to start, because he only said to accept and acknowledge the fact things change, but never realistically acted on it until far too late. Which will I think be his arc in this movie. I don't think he will save the world, maybe save his reputation but for the world I suspect it will have been too late already. The facts are fucked but the story can be twisted around still, right until it can't, which the reveal of the dead cat (also literally done by someone going against his own story he painted about the cat being alive) will signify.