A Backward Movie for an Upside-Down World
Revisiting Tenet in the wake of Oppenheimer shows us how Christopher Nolan has long been fixated on humanity’s capacity for self-destruction.
Like many Americans, I first saw Christopher Nolan’s Tenet under rather strange circumstances. After the film’s many pandemic-related release delays, it finally came out in the U.S. at a time when cinemas remained shuttered in New York. So two friends and I rented out a movie theater in suburban New Jersey and drove for an hour across state lines. We pulled into an enormous empty parking lot early one weekday afternoon; we were literally the only car there. We entered the desolate multiplex, walked past surreal rows of prefilled popcorn containers and gleaming soda machines, and made our way to the cavernous auditorium, where we sat in opposite corners of the room as Nolan’s bizarre action extravaganza unfurled.
The movie left us impressed — and perplexed. “That was great, but I wasn’t always exactly sure what was … uh, happening,” was how one of my pals, the filmmaker Branan Edgens, put it at the time. (My colleague Nate Jones did yeoman’s work when he wrote a great explainer piece on the actual plot of Tenet that many readers have referred to over the years.) Tenet both enthralled and baffled me. I was enormously moved by scenes even as I only vaguely grasped what was happening in them. At one point, I wondered if, after months of being shut indoors glued to the television, I had simply forgotten how to watch a movie in a theater. Maybe my mind was just refusing to process these images.
I have revisited Tenet many times since. I’ve torrented cam rips. I’ve watched it streaming. I’ve watched it on Blu-ray and in 4K. I’ve seen it again in theaters since a number of New York City rep houses and museums have wisely shown it on film over the past several years. And yes, I have tickets to see it in its brief, long-overdue Imax rerelease. I have come to realize, however, that nothing will ever match that first showing because what was onscreen reflected in some way the unhinged nature of our lives at that moment. Despite the nutty circumstances of its release, I can’t help but think Nolan’s thriller wound up perfectly timed — a backward movie for an upside-down world.
As an action flick, Tenet is a true original, a sci-fi thriller built around a conceit so elaborate that it occasionally achieves Zen koan levels of paradoxical placidity: Two men fight, one moves backward in time, also they’re the same man. Think about it enough and, as with a koan, the intellect fades and we start to experience things on an intuitive level, which I suspect is what Nolan wants.
The entire movie is built on withholding information. “The policy is to suppress,” the charming thief Neil (Robert Pattinson) tells our hero (played by John David Washington and known simply as the Protagonist) after a particularly confounding moment. (“Whose?” “Ours, my friend!”) At the same time, Nolan sweeps us along through sheer breakneck kineticism, always keeping us a few steps behind. The story is founded on the idea that a future technology allows humans and objects to move in an inverted direction through time, and we get little information about how that might even be possible before we’re plunged headlong into a world where it’s being used regularly. Major events that happened earlier in the film are referred to as coinciding with future events because different characters are moving in different directions in time. When Neil asks the Protagonist, “Does your head hurt yet?,” we suspect this is also Nolan cheekily addressing his audience. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it,” Clémence Poésy’s scientist character, Barbara, says early on, delivering the kind of corny line we often get in dumb entertainments warning us not to ask too many questions of the plot. But in the case of Tenet, it helps to take the advice to heart because precisely at the point when most films will start to explain themselves and gain clarity, Nolan’s picture goes in the other direction — literally. Halfway through Tenet, the Protagonist inverts himself and proceeds to go back in time through the earlier half of the movie, and our disorientation reaches new levels.
Which brings me to the aforementioned fight inside Oslo’s Freeport, in which our hero’s forward self tussles with his inverted self. As an action scene, it’s beautifully done — both times. The first time we see it, we’re taken with the herky-jerky, physics-defying movements of the Protagonist’s masked adversary; the second time, what strikes us is the premeditated, dancelike smoothness of the fight, as if these two men were anticipating what will happen. Ludwig Göransson’s score, so brash, percussive, and downright atonal in the first fight scene, now seems more muted and melodic — almost as if the soundtracks of these two scenes are meant to fit together. Suddenly, all context slips away and the scene achieves a strange allegorical power, as if this struggle has occurred repeatedly over the course of human history.
Maybe it has. After all, we’re watching someone grapple desperately with their past self, each determined to keep the other from progressing through time. Something similarly stirring occurs when Elizabeth Debicki’s Kat recalls a memory of having once seen a mysterious woman dive off her husband’s boat. “I’ve never felt such envy … of her freedom,” she says. “I dream of just diving off that boat.” By the end, she will understand that the mysterious woman was in fact her future self, who returned to kill her husband (while bearing the marks of her husband’s attempt to kill her), thereby liberating herself and saving the world. Forget trying to tease out whether such a thing could ever happen, even in a world in which reversing your entropy were possible. Emotionally, it feels right: We can be our own worst enemies, but we are also the only ones who can save ourselves.
Nolan, like his hero Stanley Kubrick, has sometimes been accused of being a cold, fussy technician. I’ve never found this to be the case. (It wasn’t true of Kubrick, either.) If anything, Nolan seems to get totally wrapped up in the emotional texture of his movies. For him, a MacGuffin is never just a MacGuffin. In Inception (2010), planting an idea in your mark by manipulating their most basic, fundamental feelings turns out to be what the whole film turns on. Interstellar (2014) may be the bleakest Hollywood sci-fi adventure ever made, consumed with the devastation of the Earth and the profound tragedy of not being able to see one’s children grow up; its ostensibly triumphant finale is bathed in melancholy and death.
Anybody who revisits Tenet in the wake of Oppenheimer will see that Nolan’s fears about humanity’s capacity for self-destruction are on full display here as well. (J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project are even name-checked in the movie.) “I had become fascinated by the idea that you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube,” the director told me last year when I asked him about the similarities between the two films. “So Tenet is a metaphorical science-fiction approach to the scientists who discovered nuclear power, nuclear fission, and then fusion. It’s sort of a paradoxical, cathartic wish that there was some way to put the toothpaste back in the tube.”
But what toothpaste is being put in which tube? Is it the all-consuming explosion that fails to happen at the end of this film — “the bomb that didn’t go off” — or the hinted climate apocalypse that the unseen people of the future are trying to prevent, the reason they’re waging this war on the present? “Their oceans rose, and their rivers ran dry,” the villain, Russian arms dealer Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), tells the Protagonist. “Their world shriveled because of us. They have no choice but to turn back, there’s no life ahead of them. And we’re responsible.” In any other movie, this would be a bit of obligatory shading to give the bad guy some dimensionality, but Nolan commits in ways other directors don’t. Sator’s words haunt us. Tenet is on some level about the Baby Hitler conundrum, but in this case, we are Baby Hitler — humanity’s present and its past, which have collectively doomed humanity’s future. Two men fight. One moves backward in time. They are the same man.
Is it any wonder Nolan’s growing obsession with an incoming apocalypse coincides with his becoming a parent? This may be one reason that the anxiety at the heart of Tenet never really dissipates, even at the film’s supposedly victorious climax. Does the fact that our heroes stop Sator and the forces of the future from destroying the past in turn mean that they’ve guaranteed humanity’s destruction? The characters in Tenet speak memorably of a temporal pincer movement — a military tactic in which one half of a team moves forward in time, and the knowledge they gained is used by the other half of the team, who move backward. The implication is that we can act more boldly, more fully, more wisely if we know what the future holds.
But we often do know what the future holds, don’t we? Let’s not forget that Tenet wasn’t just released into a world ravaged by a global pandemic; it was released into a world that had been warned for years that a global pandemic was coming. “What’s happened’s happened,” says Neil as he leaves the Protagonist behind at the end of their final scene together. “Which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world. It’s not an excuse to do nothing.”
It’s worth noting that Neil is at this point leaving to invert himself again so he can be shot in the head at a critical juncture of the film’s climactic battle. He’s going off to die in the past, as he knows he must. This entire final scene, a magic-hour farewell framed by the soft light of a setting sun, speaks of a friendship that hasn’t happened yet. Neil and the Protagonist have barely gotten to know each other, but it seems they will be close partners one day. This is no happy ending, but there is an insistent glimmer in Neil’s eyes as he reminds the still-skeptical Protagonist that, after all they’ve been through, the future remains unwritten.
Again, the plot mechanics fall away and we are left to contemplate the gleaming immediacy of the moment. A life lived in the knowledge of death. This, after all, is the paradox of the human condition: We know what’s to come, yet we have the freedom to act. Will we then act differently when we realize that the future is a real place — that it’s where our children and later generations live? “This whole operation is a temporal pincer,” Neil tells the Protagonist as he walks away. “Whose?” “Yours.” There’s a reason the Protagonist has no name. He’s Everyman. He’s us. Life is a temporal pincer movement. Most of us simply haven’t realized it yet.
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