Metalepsis in Digger and You Can See Everything

I watched Digger (2026) last week and You Can See Everything (2026) this week, and I have some thoughts about their use of metalepsis as a narrative technique. Both are still showing near me, so if you want to avoid spoilers, my verdict (which I don’t actually justify in this post) is a recommendation to watch Digger in theaters, and a weaker recommendation to watch Everything in theaters.

As an interstitial spoiler protection shield, here’s two comedic Man Carrying Thing shorts about the two movies. Both of them contributed to my wanting to watch them.

Paratext

My experience of these movies is inseparable from their paratextual¹ elements. Classically, paratext refers only to the immediate material surrounding the text.² In a movie, this’d include things like its title, or the posters and advertising you’d see as you enter the theater, and the opening and closing credits. I use paratext in a wider sense³ to include things like trailers, critical reviews, recommendations from friends, and media like Man Carrying Thing’s videos above.⁴

Now that anyone can air their takes online, in this ever-expanding democratization of criticism,⁵ I only go to the theaters for movies recommended by friends. This is as opposed to, say, being informed by advertising, professional critics, previews and trailers,⁶ or social media. Both Digger and You Can See Everything are movies that my friends have directly recommended watching without reading about them too much, and these recommendations came from people whose tastes matched mine, so I did.

Before coming into either movie, my understanding was:

• Digger is polarizing, and had a big audience–critic split. But again, friends whose tastes matched mine all liked rather than disliked it. I’d also watched Man Carrying Thing’s video above, so I knew that marketing was leaning into the split reception. I didn’t know anything about the movie itself, other than Tom Cruise is Digger,⁷ and “oil drilling bad” maybe.

• You Can See Everything is a widely acclaimed documentary by Nathan Fielder⁸ about Elizabeth Holmes. Both the premise and trailers alone caused discussion in my circles a full month before the movie hit theaters, centered on⁹ how Fielder would cover Holmes given the context of Fielder’s previous work, on whether the documentary replatforms Holmes in the public eye, how this movie would cause a lot of uncritical discourse and turn a large profit, and how Holmes’s wrongdoing is not a mere voyeuristic curiosity but a commonplace and everyday occurrence. I’ve noticed advertising for Everything throughout NYC as well, unlike Digger.

Already, we can see how my reception and interpretation of the text is shaped by paratext that is far removed¹⁰ from the text itself. I watched Digger with fluctuating expectations of its mood through its first thirty minutes, as I couldn’t quite tell where it landed on the comedy and satire scales. I began watching Everything with the guarded skepticism of taking nothing at face value, and for the first hour I constantly wondered about which footage had been cut.

This paratextual influence loomed larger than usual. Most media I consume comes with some sort of reason on why I’d enjoy it. When I buy a Steam game, it’s after I’ve looked at the screenshots and description on its store page. When I read fiction, it’s often because of a friend’s recommendation, which sets up its genre and appeal.¹¹ Often I’d read the Wikipedia page, or read some reviews. Despite this wealth of information, I don’t typically feel like my media experience is affected by my exposure to this paratext. I know I’m unusual in this respect.¹²

Perhaps then, it’s this lack of information about Digger and Everything that made my viewings feel noticeably different: if I’d known before that both had metafictional elements,¹³ it’s possible I’d have enjoyed them more. So, I make these comments on metalepsis without expecting I’d want to make these comments before, which means my read isn’t as deep as I’d like it to be.

Metalepsis

And now I have to define metalepsis.¹⁴ Oh dear.

The first thirty minutes of Digger tell the story of oil magnate Digger Rockwell, whose mining company has dislodged a large ice shelf. The company’s head of environmental safety, Dr. Ganesh, warns Digger and US President Compson that in three days, the ice shelf will crash into Europe, causing the death of thousands. As Digger and Compson discuss the matter while staring out a window, a tree falls in the background, and an overhead voice complains the tree fell too early. The camera zooms out, revealing that everything that’s happened is part of a technical rehearsal for the satirical play Fossil Fools, a dramatization of historical events, which premieres that night. Between scenes, Digger’s actor Curtis Markson learns that his daughter’s whereabouts are unknown, after she boarded a plane that’s gone missing.

The story-within-a-story is a device that should be familiar to any reader. In Digger, the story of Fossil Fools unfolds via the actions of Digger within the play. And above that story,¹⁵ another one unfolds via the actions of Curtis worrying about his daughter. These two stories lie on different narrative levels, and are separated by the boundary of the technical rehearsal. It’s only within the context of this rehearsal that Curtis becomes Digger.

What I call metalepsis is any kind of intrusion between narrative levels. After the scenes of Digger are revealed to take place within the play Fossil Fools, Curtis would sometimes break character as Digger to complain about the script. As the movie progresses, Curtis’s worries begin to bleed through¹⁶ his performance as Digger. In the film’s climax, Curtis engages in a heated argument with the play’s director Hannah, saying that the play’s blatant inaccuracies and irreverent tone are disrespectful toward those harmed by (the real) Digger’s actions. Kenny, producer and production-funder, mediates by saying that it’s precisely these hyperbolic aspects that make the play cathartic.

All these events are cracks in the narrative boundary. None of them are so overt as, say, Curtis himself appearing as a character within Fossil Fools, or Digger exiting the play to enter the real world. But these are certainly more intrusive than, say, if each scene rehearsal starts and ends without incident, and all discussion about the play takes place off-stage. So I’ll settle on classifying these as metalepsis, though others might disagree.

What about You Can See Everything, then? The documentary doesn’t have a story-within-a-story, so how can there be metalepsis? In Everything, the metalepsis occurs between the narrative levels¹⁷ of documenting the life of Holmes, and Fielder’s creation of the documentary.

At first, this intrusion is limited to allusion. Early in the movie, Fielder asks why Holmes and her partner Billy Evans invited the crew to document their everyday life. Then it becomes more direct, as Fielder would sometimes ask if it’s okay to record certain conversations. In one scene, Evans stops one of Fielder’s interviews, and they get into an argument about the documentary showing everything. So far, all intrusions are about either the documentary’s initial premise, or the filming of the documentary as it happens. This kind of metalepsis is so commonplace in documentaries that I doubt most viewers would consider these intrusions of a narrative-level boundary.

Around halfway through the film, Fielder shows the documentary-so-far to Amanda Seyfried, the actor who played Holmes in the miniseries The Dropout. We see Seyfried watching an earlier scene, where Holmes and Evans watch The Dropout, and Fielder asks Seyfried for her thoughts. Now this is an intrusion between narrative levels! Fielder then enlists Seyfried’s help to reenact two meetings that couldn’t be filmed: one where Evans asks for a cut of the documentary’s profit, and one where Fielder talks to Holmes in prison. In the climax, Seyfried asks Fielder if he’s formed an attachment to Holmes over the course of filming, and how this affects Everything’s attempt to uncover Holmes’s sincerity.

While it might be typical for a documentary to show how it began, show how its footage was put together, or even discuss its purpose, Everything goes a step further. It not only mentions its goals, but questions whether they’re achieved, which is uncommon enough of a move that I’m classifying it as an example of metalepsis.

Hermeneutics

We now have, I hope, enough background to discuss the hermeneutics¹⁸ of the metalepsis in Digger and You Can See Everything. That is, I want to ask the questions: How are we supposed to interpret the use of metalepsis in these movies? How does this metalepsis affect our readings of these texts?

These questions are partly motivated by Matthewmatosis’s¹⁹ criticism of meta content:

My conclusion here is that, for meta to be more than a “gimmick”, it needs to affect our reading of the text in an essential way. So we can look at each use of metalepsis and question if it advances the purpose of the text, or if it’s a cheap trick to seem clever. In doing so, I hope to learn about using metalepsis in future creative work.

While metalepsis can be used to produce a wide range of effects,²⁰ I’ll argue that both films use this technique in a similar, specific way. Both Digger and Everything use metalepsis to showcase how media has the power to affect the views of its creators and consumers:

• In the climax of Digger, Kenny gives a monologue about how the play gives the victims of the disaster someone to vilify and something to laugh about. We see how this speech convinces Curtis to continue playing the role of Digger, and how it convinces Hannah that the ultimate point of the production is how the play is received by its audience. Later scenes show Curtis portraying Digger in a more over-the-top way.²¹ We later see that the ending scene of the Fossil Fools premiere garners a long standing ovation from its audience.

• In the climax of Everything, Seyfried reflects on whether her depiction of Holmes in The Dropout has unfairly affected how other people treat Holmes. She defends the show’s artistic license, arguing that she portrayed a character based on, but not the same as, Holmes. She then asks if Fielder has become an unreliable narrator of Holmes’s story. The two discuss the question without reaching a conclusion. Then, the video fades to black, some on-screen text appears, and the credits play.

In both cases, metalepsis is used to show how media affects people, in a more-or-less explicit way. Kenny’s monologue makes Digger a story about the role of art in an increasingly dismal world. Seyfried’s question makes You Can See Everything a story about how a person’s depiction in media affects our views of them. In particular, these works use metalepsis to advance a different theme, which makes its usage feel less gimmicky.

Still, it’s not clear to me that every use of metalepsis is justified. Consider how Digger takes around thirty minutes before revealing that the scenes are from a play’s rehearsal. Sure, it was a neat revelation, and it was a little shocking when it happened. But it felt a bit too much like a bait-and-switch to me, given that the movie’s lead is Tom Cruise of action movie fame, that it looked like a movie with a $160 million budget, and that its marketing felt rather box-office than arthouse.²² It’s also not clear how such a dramatic reveal advances the story that Digger is trying to tell. Compare this to Everything, where Fielder’s mere presence immediately sets the expectation that something weird will happen.

Another effect of metalepsis is that, by its meta nature, the reader could apply the same questions toward the text itself. Digger itself is a piece of art produced in an increasingly dismal world, and Everything is overt about its self-application. This can function as an interception of potential criticism:

• Was making Digger a waste of effort given that it flopped? Well, as Digger itself argues, even “bad” art serves important societal functions.

• Was Everything a careful examination of Holmes, when its creators profit more by portraying her provocatively? Well, as Everything itself argues, depicting anyone on-screen truthfully is impossible anyway.

It makes me wonder: does this metalepsis make it less likely for readers to raise these questions in the first place? I don’t know. But now that everyone’s airing their takes online, in a democratization of criticism, I’d hope that everyone’s also becoming more critical about the media they consume.

1. ¹

   I first encountered this word when I took 21W.765 Interactive Narrative in my senior year at MIT, under Nick Montfort. That class is how I was first exposed to many of the ideas discussed in this post. I’ll continue alluding to 21W.765 through these footnotes.

2. ²

   In the great literary criticism tradition, I will call the media the text despite not being textual.

3. ³

   Gérard Genette, in “Introduction to the Paratext”, calls the immediate material the peritext, and everything else epitext.

4. ⁴

   Which, if you haven’t watched, you should. They’re funny.

5. ⁵

   I thought this was an original phrase but a web search shows several precedents, like “The Democratization of Criticism” and “The End of the Critic and the Rise of the New Gatekeepers”. Anyway, both cover roughly what I was gonna go for so whatever.

6. ⁶

   I watched Everything with friends, and we got to our seats maybe fifteen minutes late. I remarked that everyone already knows the movie proper starts way after the listed start time, so theaters are incentivized to make previews last longer, so people actually see them, in a kind of Red Queen’s Race. Victor replied saying this already happened. I’m not convinced this helps anyway, since people are on their phones during previews.

7. ⁷

   In much the same way Zendaya is Meechee, I suppose.

8. ⁸

   Fielder co-directed You Can See Everything with Lance Oppenheim, who barely speaks in the movie. When I refer to Fielder in this piece, I mostly refer to Fielder’s depiction of himself in Everything, rather than his role as co-director with Oppenheim.

9. ⁹

   These are important topics, and I think they should get airtime! But they’re not my focus in this post, and unfortunately, I don’t have any links to a good discussion about these issues. Let me know if you have any, especially about the banality of evil.

10. ¹⁰

    Removed in at least three senses: spatial, temporal, and authorial. I received this paratext far outside the theater, far before I watched the movie. And this paratext was made by people far from the original authors.

11. ¹¹

    I do this with my own media reviews: see Things I enjoyed reading in 2025 and Video game August, for example.

12. ¹²

    Relatedly, I’m not as averse to ending spoilers as many of my friends are. For example, I knew how Breaking Bad would end before watching, and I still enjoyed it.

13. ¹³

    As was often the case when I took 21W.765. We read several texts with foreknowledge that they were metafictional in some way, and I enjoyed many of them.

14. ¹⁴

    This word, I also first encountered while taking 21W.765, usually as part of the phrase ontological metalepsis, as distinguished from rhetorical metalepsis. I’m not sold on this being a meaningful difference, but the kind we discuss is rhetorical metalepsis.

15. ¹⁵

    I’m taking, as convention, that the story’s level lies “below” the narrator’s level. This follows Bell and Alber’s “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology”, which differentiates ascending, descending, and horizontal metaleptic jumps.

16. ¹⁶

    Here I’m borrowing terminology from RPG discussion, where people talk about player–character bleed. I couldn’t find an equivalent concept for acting after a cursory search; the closest seems to be de-roling. Does anyone know of any?

17. ¹⁷

    I’d argue that all texts, by virtue of being texts, include three implicit narratives. The highest level is the narrative of the text’s creation and distribution, the level which Everything breaks through to. The next level down is the narrative of the reader experiencing the text (which is broken, for example, when a character from the text addresses the reader directly). Finally, there’s the text’s narrative of its content expressed in its medium (which is broken, for example, when a movie character taps the screen it’s playing on), and I think this is the level immediately above the text’s levels.

18. ¹⁸

    Unlike the other jargon in this post, I did not encounter this word in 21W.765. I first encountered this word via Susan Sontag’s famous quote “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,” from the essay “Against Interpretation”. Evidently I’m not as against interpretation as Sontag is.

19. ¹⁹

    I’ve cited this video twice now, huh. First in my Mystery Hunt 2023 post, second in the first post on this blog.

20. ²⁰

    I’m again referring to Bell and Alber’s “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology”, which lists five thematic uses of metalepsis. Here, I combine their third (highlighting the power and potential danger of fiction) and fifth (a challenge to the creator—a loss of control over the creation) items as a single effect. While they specifically refer to ontological metalepsis, rather than my more general definition, I think they still broadly apply.

21. ²¹

    At least, that’s my interpretation of Cruise’s performance as Curtis’s performance as Digger. Who knows if that’s intended.

22. ²²

    I use box-office to describe mass market films, typically backed by a large studio. The opposite is an arthouse film aimed at a niche audience, typically independently published.