Tenet — A Thought & An Experiment
Back in 2000, an innocuous little opening shot from an indie film sent the global community of cinephiles & film nerds into a collective gasp. You can watch that scene below.
The film, Memento. The director, Christopher Nolan. Little did anyone know that this director, over a period of 20 years, through sheer force of will, talent, imagination & persistence would become the biggest brand as far as film directors go. The man, whose films are such events that people across the world would even risk their lives, in the middle of a reality-altering pandemic, to go & get a taste of on the biggest screen possible.
Christopher Nolan has become such a dominant figure in our collective minds not just because he makes brilliant films. But because he reminds filmmakers & audiences worldwide that the big screen experience is more than just watching films while munching popcorn & drinking soda! It’s a reality-altering, mind-bending, time-bending, shared dream that’s meant to be multi-dimensional & multi-sensorial. He has taught us cinephiles to experience, on an abstract level, the relationship between our well-defined physical reality, the subjective, expressionistic reality of narratives made more physically visceral by the impressionistic detail of cinematic manipulation.
Nolan’s latest time & mind-bender Tenet is a physical distillation of his pet themes & philosophical obsessions that made their presence felt in Memento & ever since, have been scattered across his entire filmography, with one set of ideas dominating in some films & others in other films. For the uninitiated, Time, Subjective vs. Objective reality & the fixated notion of physical reality based on sensorial perceptions have been some of those themes. He has also been increasingly obsessed with the idea of using filmmaking tools such as music, narrative structures, use of time & perception within the narrative fabric or outside of the film in the relationship with the audience & sound design to challenge his audience’s thought process.
Fragmented & fractured narrative structure is not a gimmick in Nolan’s films. There’s a purpose to that madness. Withholding & release of information in his films are again not done to deliberately confuse you; but it serves a grander ambition he has as a filmmaker. Nolan once said in an interview post-Interstellar (when lot of folks complained that the sound design sucked or was too loud), that he likes to use sound in an impressionistic way. He likes to layer sound effects in a careful manner to achieve narrative clarity or to provide cues to audience. He said, famously, that dialogues are not the only way to achieve clarity. He liked to use dialogues sometimes as a sound effect rather than a story-advancing technique.
In case you’re wondering where’s the review of Tenet, this isn’t a conventional review of the film. I am trying to analyse & place Tenet within Nolan’s oeuvre & its significance to him as a filmmaker.
Christopher Nolan often uses a few words in his interviews to describe his films & his filmmaking process, such as:
IMAX is used for maximum immersion.
Use sound in an impressionistic way. Layer effects to achieve narrative & thematic clarity.
Try & explore our grasp of physical reality from our subjective point of view.
Time has continued to be an obsession in all his films. In Memento, Lenny’s character says “How can I heal if I can’t feel time?”. Even in Interstellar, Dr. Amelia Brand tells Cooper “Time can squeeze, it can expand; but it can’t run backwards”. Inception again plays with the elastic nature of time & consequently its power to distort your notion of reality.
In Tenet, Nolan, as an auteur, directs your senses to make his most profound deconstruction on the notion of reality, time, sensorial perception & almost everything else. On the surface, it’s a classic spy story, a riff on James Bond — a spy with a sidekick tries to save the world, just in time, from total annihilation. But within this broad genre, he smuggles all his ideas run through a quantum mechanical prism. So, we have the concept of inversion, where objects, people, almost everything can flow backwards in time as long as its entropy has been reversed. This movement backwards in time happens in a highly localised setting within the fabric of the film, with a threat looming large of using an algorithm to make this happen on a planetary scale.
Nolan name drops Feynman-Wheeler’s notion of positron being an electron moving backwards in time. Entropy reversal also can & does change the charge carried by particles which would essentially mean particles just becoming a mirror image equivalent of their original. Hence, any matter whose entropy gets reversed, becomes antimatter. Nolan’s last 3 films (including Tenet) have all dealt with the concept of annihilation — Interstellar, Dunkirk & Tenet. But it’s here where even the concept of annihilation carries scientific weight & definition.
With entropy reversal, Nolan also tries to recalibrate the entire relationship between cause & effect. We humans value the comforting & sequential notion of cause & effect because it ensures a certain perceived order in life (regardless of the all-pervading chaos). This is again something that’s irrefutably stated by The Second Law of Thermodynamics — we are in the state of continuously increasing entropy. So, we are moving from a state of order to chaos. But Nolan, by reversing entropy challenges our comfort in existing philosophies of cause & effect, order & chaos binaries.
I’ve often said & believed that Christopher Nolan doesn’t write screenplays, as much as he constructs them. You can either view him as an architect designing an extremely complex labyrinth or an engineer designing an intricately linked machine. In both cases, the relationship between all blocks & levers are so intricate — if you remove one component, then the entire structure collapses. It’s for this reason that his films come together in the head more than the heart.
The visceral nature of Tenet becomes more clear when you begin to peel back the layers.
Tenet doesn’t have too many characters. From a population perspective, it’s a pretty sparsely populated film; but it still feels incomprehensibly dense. It feels complex to the point of exasperation. And it feels busy & overstuffed to the point of exhaustion. As part of its structural design, Nolan has the same set of characters exist both forwards & backwards in time doing & undoing things — sometimes, there are multiple versions of the same people within the same scene, thanks to its time-elastic nature. Again, this may prove to be frustrating to keep track of; but what Nolan achieves here is something far deeper from a quantum mechanical perspective — every character becomes both a cause & an effect of itself. So, Nolan doesn’t look at cause & effect as two separate states; but in & of itself — a self-contained potential for reality. Chew on this a little more, and you will see a subtle wink to the wave-particle duality & collapse of it defining reality within quantum mechanical universe.
When I watched Tenet, the first film that my mind wandered back to within Nolan’s filmography was Memento. It’s a film that Tenet shares some of its thematic tissue with. The lead character navigating through self-created loop to define his own reality. Tenet also takes place within a loop. The fact that the title is a palindrome, underscores this structural design. But while, Memento didn’t deal with quantum mechanics, a loop within a deterministic universe was easier to engineer. In Tenet, it’s nightmarish to conceive of. But make no mistake, Tenet’s universe is deterministic. And it’s here that Nolan’s genius & his original narrative technique from Memento serve him well. Nolan often puts us an audience in a subjective mental state as the protagonist of his films. This he achieves by using information beautifully.
We feel confused in Christopher Nolan’s films the first time we watch his films. It’s mandatory for us to watch them multiple times. The reason for that is — as a director & writer, Nolan doesn’t give us any more information than his character. We exist on the same plane to begin with. And we navigate his Escher-like labyrinthine scripts & worlds together with the protagonist with information received first hand. We are irritated by this, because films have forever conditioned us to see a story rather than participate in piecing one in real time.
In Tenet, this kind of “policy to suppress information” or not divulging the entire information to all the players or even “centralisation of information” if you will serves a key purpose. Since, this is a quantum mechanical world, the foreknowledge of the entire information might inform your actions. What if you act differently with the knowledge of all the information, and it opens a branching timeline of unintended consequences? Like the Everett interpretation of many-worlds theory? It’s not something the protagonists in Tenet want to run into. Hence, you see a highly centralised information structure, controlled information flow & a tightly controlled deterministic universe.
How different is life in this way? Do we go through life having all the answers before we begin living? It’s one of the most beautiful cinematic techniques with which Nolan has blurred the line between reality & film & has also forced us to accept the notion of a subjective reality a bit more.
Look at Nolan’s films & they always reveal themselves to you more & more upon each viewing. He is not someone who leaves his climaxes open-ended. His ends, like his universe are deterministic. The design of his universe is complex because of the inherent subjective design he deploys. These are self-contained loops. Each time you visit, you would figure out something new. And therefore, your chance of perhaps, either mastering the universe or even your own reality (for the mega trippers!) are enhanced once you have picked up all the clues scattered around. In a self-contained loop, the more you visit, you will see something new; not because there’s something new each time. But because you discover something new, because you’re forced to see the same thing with added information or from a different view.
It’s also the same reason why his films work as an exemplar of fractured narrative structures. For an auteur obsessed with mind, time, reality — it’s not surprising that his favourite device to upend your thinking is non-linearity. The weirdness of quantum world is not premised on linear or sequential progression of events. It’s multi-dimensional & multi-directional. Nolan forces us to understand fragment narratives and recalibrate our thinking processes. Tenet does something unique, subtle & beautiful here — watch the film again & you will see how Nolan adheres to T-symmetry notion enshrined in entropy & arrow of the time physics.
Tenet begins with the siege at Kiev Opera House. Few scenes later, Sir Michael Crosby tells The Protagonist that on the same day as Kiev Opera House siege, there was an explosion at Sator’s home town — Stalsk 12. The climax of the film is at Stalsk 12. So, a symmetry of events; but a different point of view. The Protagonist exists at both the places. Almost towards the early 1/3rd of the film, we see The Protagonist fighting an inverted attacker in Oslo vault. 1/3rd way before the climax, the Inverted Protagonist fights the forward Protagonist in Oslo vault. The same scene around the same time duration — from beginning & from climax — from different point of view. The Tallinn chase sequence comes somewhere in the middle. Layering of symmetrical structure designed by Nolan adheres not only to the entropy law; but also aligns with the palindromic nature of the title & the Feynman-Wheeler Absorber Theory too.
Finally, as Nolan loves to say, film is an immersive medium — Tenet is complex, yes. But not incomprehensible. It’s immersive. And if you truly immerse yourself into the world Nolan has built for you — soak in the sights & the sounds, every tiny detail, there’s enough breadcrumbs scattered throughout to help you navigate a complex world.
Ludwig Göransson’s hauntingly beautiful & mind-bogglingly layered score production of Tenet is a masterclass for a guy of such young age. The use of retrograde scoring — playing some key pieces of music & themes in aggressive tempo in forward sequences & slowing them down while playing them in reverse requires IMAX sound delivery systems for you to pick up. For all those that said the film was loud, perhaps, don’t understand why Nolan insists on IMAX, the use of impressionistic sound design. Now that Tenet is out on Torrents, please download an IMAX print & watch it with the best of headphones to pick up on Richard King’s (sound designer) & Ludwig’s (composer) extraordinary work on layering sound effects. Even the sound of flow of smoke, or the gravel when characters are running either forward or backward have a distinct flow to it. It’s this level of detail that Tenet is a carrier of. Nolan & his DP Hoyte Van Hoytema even worked with IMAX engineers to have cameras retooled to have film magazine running in reverse.
Why is this important? Filmmakers can obviously use CG to manipulate all of these visual tricks and most folks in audiences won’t be able to tell a difference. But Nolan’s insistence on doing things as much as possible in camera speaks to his philosophy of physical reality. Camera is the first ever piece of technology created that can actually record time or passage of time — imagine slow motion shots.
Entropy reversal, reversal of the arrow of time, quantum mechanics are often not discussed or talked about or chewed over in group conversations because there’s a belief that these theories don’t impact our everyday physical reality. But here’s a filmmaker who by manipulating every thing our eyes see, our ears hear in a physical, aural way, is trying to tell us something much deeper — that alteration of our reality is only a matter of time. And in 2020, between a raging global pandemic, that message is the deepest & perhaps the closest to the bone!
Thank you, Christopher Nolan for yet another mind-fuck!
