Palindromic possibilities. Reflections on Tenet

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet has seemingly divided movie audiences around the world. The movie itself was marketed to persuade movie lovers to return to multiplexes across the globe. Many hoped the release would serve to reignite a flailing movie industry and provide box office receipts for Warner Brothers so the industry would get moving again after the many lockdowns caused by the global pandemic.

Ironically this was more of a hopeful wish than an objective one because the pandemic is an ever evolving and dangerous situation which pollinates different political ideas, thought and government reform which wildly differs both in success and application in different geographical locations.

The economic reality of audiences returning to the cinema is a difficult one to navigate and Nolan himself has come under fire from some online communities for being so adamant that audiences return to the cinema.

It is necessary to cite the pandemic and how it relates to Tenet because during this horrifying time it is easier to discuss one of the greatest themes running throughout Tenet which is: hope.

Hope in the face of nihilism whilst being grateful for ourselves, our loved ones and the wider community set against the negative space surrounding time is the most poignant theme hidden within Tenet; amongst the bombast, explosions, music 35 mm and IMAX photography.

There are many video essays on Tenet which ‘explain’ the movie or direct you toward Easter eggs. Whilst interesting these approaches at times can remove the emotionality within the story and do not illuminate any lasting resonance the movie might have.

Christopher Nolan tends to be thought of as a director within the pantheon of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen Spielberg. Whilst Nolan in his work after Following and Memento has pursued the populist appeal of Stephen Spielberg’s blockbusters and the visual ingenuity and poise of Kubrick; a director who should be referenced in regard to Christopher Nolan’s entire body of work is Michael Mann. These references are also only discussed with how Nolan used Mann’s Heat as a blueprint for The Dark Knight.

During the documentary The Fire Rises: The Creation and impact of The Dark Knight Trilogy which was an extra disc coupled with the limited edition of Nolan’s three Batman movies the director Michael Mann appears in the documentary. Whilst Heat is clearly a reference point for the thematic weight of The Dark Knight, the sequel also borrows visual motifs from Michael Mann’s The Insider as Russell Crowe’s tormented and virtuous Jeffrey Wigand passes a vehicle on fire. This scene from the Insider is directly given homage in The Dark Knight as police cars drive past a burning fire engine. In both scenes the symbolism of each motif is there to illustrate the ironic burning of society in The Dark Knight and the fractured, corporately corrupt world of The Insider.

These Mann references aren’t only reverential. At the end of The Dark Knight the collision between human self-sacrifice and an almost fascistic end to the story is truly wondrous. At the end of The Insider family, justice and unity are succinctly brought to bare on the story.

Both Mann and Nolan use the same visual metaphor to entirely different emotional ends for the audience. Nolan is not only in awe of Mann on a visual level he also attempts to combine Mann’s aesthetic leanings with the emotionality of Stephen Spielberg.

Whilst Mann walks toward the unification of plot, character and emotionality Nolan moves away from that triptych in much of his work and Tenet specifically where he demands that the emotional depth of the story relate only toward the intricacies of the plot. Nolan also seemingly tends to believe whether rightly or wrongly that his audience has already arrived at the cinema with his own emotional relativity to archetypal themes and people. In Miami Vice Mann portrayed two police officers working closely together to inform the audience on how in sync they were with each other by using the audience’s pre-determined understanding of undercover police work with little dialogue or emotional monologues from either of his two male leads. Tenet, also uses this approach but it is one that is only understood once the audience has reached the end of the palindrome.

Over the last few weeks I have seen Tenet a total of eight times. During this time I had many conversations about the movie with Hannah Lodge (writer for Geekrex and The Comics Beat). The focus of our discussions centred around how the movie related to Interstellar and whether or not the thematic beauty of tenant was hopeful or not. Hannah suggested that the movie was almost the antithesis of Interstellar because unlike Nolan’s entrancing look at inter dimensional time Tenet was about people in the present behaving selfishly and people in the future bringing about an apocalypse.

Lodge’s theory carries weight throughout Tenet and her ideas are best considered when placed in relation to Nolan’s previous work.

The physicist Kip Thorne served as a consultant on Tenet and in the book: The Science of Interstellar Thorne outlines his concept of ‘bulk beings’. Thorne cites the idea that within any concept of time beyond two dimensions (the two dimensional brane) moves toward a hyperspherical ‘bulk’ which incrementally morphs into a concept of time in which the ‘bulk beings’ exist within one of the dimensions of time and space outside of the traditional four dimensions, taking physical form to effect the past.

Therefore in Interstellar the relationship with the future is a hopeful one. The people or ‘bulk beings’ have decided to give humanity the chance at a better life and to escape an ever declining planet that will soon be uninhabitable.

Sator says this in explicit terms as Tenet reaches the tempestuous conclusion:

‘Because their oceans rose and their rivers ran dry. Don’t you see? Their world shrivelled because of us. They have no choice but to turn back, there is no life ahead of them. And we’re responsible. Knowing this, do you still want me to stop?’

Earlier on in the prologue at the Tallin opera house, where you have essentially three separate teams working in opposition to each other. One team begins planting bombs to cover their actions up and are willing to kill innocent people to do it. The people in the future have inverted technology like the turnstiles and created the algorithm to kill billions of people.

This is the antithesis of the loving, tactile ‘bulk beings’ of interstellar and it creates an incredibly oppressive tone throughout the movie in a similar way to The Dark Knight and Memento.

The horrifying idea that the planet is doomed and the people in the future are so desperate that they were willing to take a chance on their own lives and destroy the past is pessimistic and morbid.

They even choose to use the narcissism, misogyny and arrogance of a man like Sator to achieve these goals. But to what extent is wanting to survive a moral choice? Which also begs the question as to which side is right or wrong in the movie.

Lodge also suggests that Tenet is a signifier of the times we have lived in for the past few years. A zero sum game in which the only way to feel you have participated in the survival of your own culture is to hurt other people.

Unlike other popular modern time travel narratives (as much as Nolan refers to inversion, entropy and other variations on the idea. Tenet is a time travel movie) in the likes of Doctor Who, Star Trek and more recently Avengers: Infinity War. Time is inverted here to destroy us all. Whereas other time travel stories tend to use the medium of time travel to help others. Yet paradoxically those ideas are prevalent in Tenet but here hope is coupled with esoteric pain from the people in the future.

Whilst Tenet is oppressive and the quantum mechanics of the war it features are terrifying, there is also a core of hope, intimacy and kindness to the movie.

As John David Washington’s; protagonist learns from Priya that the scientist in the future who helped to create the algorithm took her own life after becoming aware of it’s true meaning, Inverting the technology so it could be hidden in the past:

‘Unlike Oppenheimer, she rebels, splitting the atom into nine sections and hiding them in the best place she can think of’

Priya also indicates that the scientist was acting out of personal fear, therefore she made a personal decision which has huge repercussions for the collective. However the fact she was willing to make a personal choice is where Tenet’s sense of hope arises from. Her actions seem to foreshadow the actions the Protagonist.

Amongst the oppressive framing of the story there is also an aspirational thematic resonance on screen. This sense of ambition is realised as we look at the actions of the Protagonist.

From the opening of the movie we learn that John David Washington’s character isn’t willing to take moral shortcuts. Whilst he is an agent of the state, capable of committing assassinations, he is also involved in espionage which by it’s very nature is corrupt. In the prologue he is the only person bothered about saving the lives of the people in the audience.

Following this scene he cries when he learns that no other members of his team survives.

During the meeting with Clemence Poesy’s Barbara where she outlines the theories behind inversion to him. The Protagonist asks her about free will. Barbara replies to him:

‘That bullet wouldn’t have moved if you hadn’t put your hand there. Either way we run the tape, you made it happen’

This short conversation would seem to suggest that although inversion moves back through existing time and space. The fact our own actions can still have enough value to change the future is revealing. (Poesy was pregnant during the shoot of the movie and symbolically this points toward Elizabeth Debicki’s; Kat and her son as one of the topics the movie covers is about who inherits the earth).

The Protagonist’s relationship with Kat whilst bare on the surface illustrates his moral integrity. He won’t allow her to die, when in the context of the movie that would be one of the easiest avenues to follow. Kat is a mother, which is more about symbolism here than it is about character. She represents the al ma mater of the narrative she represents the hope for new life unbound by the idea of fate that Barbara and The Protagonist discuss.

Once Neil and The Protagonist have decided to save Kat’s life he says to his friend Neil (played with boyish charm by Robert Pattinson):

‘This reversing the flow of time, doesn’t us being here now mean it never happens? That we stop them’

Again, we see the hope this character has for the present. Whilst the movie doesn’t give the audience the subconscious security of knowing the future can be changed, the characters clearly believe the fight isn’t over yet. Could being in the ‘here and now’ mean the death of the planet in the future can be changed? Nolan never provides the answer which is uncomfortable for the audience but he leaves the idea in the ether of the movie itself.

As the movie concludes Sator debates these ideas with our lead. The Protagonist suggests that killing others to ensure a better future isn’t morally percussive enough to deny Kat’s son life. Or the lives of everyone living in the present fabric of time. He assumes personal responsibility for the present by bringing people together led by Ives, Neil and Wheeler as part of the pincer group movement. Posterity is key here. The future generations of people are key for them, not the monolithic fatalism of Sator.

The Protagonist also places trust in Kat, she has a choice to make at the end of the movie. In sync with the layers of time of the story she chooses to make the right choice and deny Sator the joy of thinking he is taking her to the grave with him. Kat denies him that pleasure by killing him. She makes a personal choice at the time based on her own moral reasoning. The immediacy of the present and her understanding of how those minor faculties echo in time is unified in broader terms with how the protagonist understands the world.

Even Neil’s coda at the end of the movie in which:

‘The danger no one knew was real, that’s the bomb with the real power to change the

world’

Neil suggests that even those who have no knowledge of the events which have transpired such as the fact that the explosive didn’t go off; is the bomb with the power to transcend time and allow those in the present to decide their own future. Like much of Tenet this could be read the other way like the trains going backward and forward when the Protagonist is tortured at the start of the movie.

Kat walks away being one of those people as she joins hands with her son. Within a movie as calculated as Tenet is in terms of visuals it can be no coincidence that the final scene of the movie is a woman and her son walking forward into the future hand in hand. Jennifer Lame’s editing on this movie is gloriously sharp to key the audience into the meaning of the story.

Whilst Tenet is not a perfect movie, it is clear that Nolan’s sound design is purposefully used to keep the audience guessing. That same sound design can leave the audience on the periphery of the story. Tenet is about how you feel during the movie, using Ludwig Goransson’s gloriously propulsive score and the expanse only IMAX can give an audience is truly inspiring.

It is also true that Nolan does not receive the same latitude as other directors like Cronenberg, Lynch or Paul Thomas Anderson when critics and audiences consider his work in an abstract sense. Perhaps this perception is because Nolan went from Following and Memento into larger scale productions with such speed.

I would also argue that because Nolan works within archetypal frames in relation to gender sometimes this can create problems in how he portrays female characters on screen. Yet, it is also one of his virtues that his male characters seem to be inspired in a profound way by their female counterparts. The problem is that these norms may limit the scope of his stories in the future because it may lean toward the emotional symbolism of women rather than uniting that ethos with the intelligence, sophistication and skill of women both on screen and in society. Yet like Tenet this point requires further debate.

Whilst Kat is not just a passive observer within the movie, domestic violence is referenced in a movie that isn’t incisive enough to go deeper into the meaning of such despicable actions. This problem is made even worse by the fact Kat is not telling her own story here. Violence against women should never be used to illustrate the flaws of the movie’s antagonist.

Tenet also struggles to allow the male leads to truly emote toward each other. The scene between Robert Pattinson and John David Washington at the end of the movie could be more emotionally explicit. The emotion is there in the subtext of the movie and the performances worked on me as I shed a tear. Perhaps this could be more obviously portrayed for the benefit of other cinema goers. Whilst Nolan may yearn for Michael Mann’s style the director he admires is excellent at placing his male leads inside a wealth of emotionality.

With Tenet Nolan seems to want to suggest that although people move forwards and backwards in time like the Protagonist and Neil we deserve the right to discover the devastation of our actions for ourselves; or perhaps the idea together we can build a better world. Like the waves that crash over the catamarans earlier in the movie the Tenet suggests life is about the waters of possibility in front of us and not the morose sadness of the shores we leave behind.

Special thanks to Hannah Lodge- wonderful palindromic person and a good friend

References:

Tenet: The complete screenplay with selected storyboards. Christoper Nolan. Faber 2020

Tenet: Inside Christopher Nolan’s Quantum Cold War, James Mottram, Titan Books 2020