TENET and the Troubles of Tricking Yourself (Patreon)

A few years ago, I finally did a huge deep dive into the cinema of Christopher Nolan. The piece was mostly focused on his themes, particularly exploring the reasons why so many young men are drawn to his work. Yes, some of it is the way that Nolan’s work evokes a cool, humorless, adult-minded seriousness that befits adolescent aspiration (granted few other filmmakers are making these kinds of movies and I very much like them, too). But the bigger revelation for me was realizing the way that Nolan always portrays a kind of character who is gripped with the paralysis of emotion, much the way so many young men are. Specifically, when they are trapped within the framing of the idea that gave the title of my deep dive itself: “Christopher Nolan and the Cruelty of Time." Because Nolan’s so good at that particular, panicked feeling of acting under pressure, evoking the emotional way seconds tick by and we can’t do anything. The way time makes us lose people. The way it punishes us, whether it’s decades in a dream, an hour in a plane, or minutes to years on a time-bending star. There are the things we always lose to the cruelty of time.

Three years later, it would seem almost too on point that he would release TENET, a film where time is literally time attacking us.

…Sort of.

Okay, it’s more that some objects / people have become “inverted” in time, which means they can move backwards and create all sorts of havoc because of that. But we are also meant to take Clemency Posey’s advice early on and, “don’t try to understand it.” For the truth is that in popular storytelling, we never really need to understand the deep physics of the freaking thing. We just need the basic instructional essence to get by. Like, “if the thing is inverted, you can do a backwards!” And given Nolan’s oeuvre, what with the dream heists and magic xerox machines, we should be used to this kind of shorthand. But whereas all the logical loop de loops of exposition in his prior films landed with us more soundly, TENET feels a bit lost in the reeds. The only question is why? Why does it all feel so much thinner here? Why does TENET simultaneously feel both more dense, yet more slight than usual?

The answer is relatively simple. For all mountains of exposition in his prior movies, the truth is there were still driving emotional forces behind the central characters. In Inception, Cobb was haunted by his dead wife and it drives him into the impossible heist. In Memento, Leonard was haunted by his dead wife and it drives him to solve her murder. In The Prestige, Robert Angier was haunted by his dead wife and it driv-okay okay, you get it. The truth is that joke is both totally fair for me to make and yet, I fully admit Nolan does that singular plot-line pretty darn well. The motivations of his fridge-stuffing are simple, yes, but he also integrates the grief right into the story. This gives (some of) the audience an emotional grasp and central thrust, thus allowing him to go about playing with the narrative tricks in more assured fashion and not get tripped up on the logic. More importantly, Nolan’s is often quite good at finding variation in those expressions and making them fit into the central theme. Like the way that Cobb’s conscience is laced with guilt, which invades his subconscious and the heist itself. Or the way that Leonard’s repeated “forgetting” of his catharsis keeps him trapped in the cycle of loss. Even Angier’s all-consuming rage feeds another self-destructive cycle, which is made horrifyingly literal.

But in TENET, such foundations are largely foregone.

The film is purposefully made without such emotional anchors. In fact, John David Washington’s character has no personal backstory at all. He is simply called the “Protagonist,” which is a seemingly just straight-forward version of Neal Stephenson’s all-timer gag of calling his lead, “Hiro Protagonist” in Snowcrash. Only, you know, this is very serious. And yeah, yeah, on paper, I can see what Nolan’s going for. We are supposed to know nothing about this person other than he is a loyal soldier who will do anything for the mission. The movie’s title even gets at the sanctity of this viewpoint, in that a tenet is a “a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true especially one held in common by members of an organization, movement, or profession.” Like the character, we are simply supposed to believe in the cause of all this and go right along with it.

The real problem is that, emotionally-speaking, it’s just lacking. As the old writing adage goes, “it’s not that the character does the thing, it’s the WHY the character does the thing.” And the why of TENET is more of the same “end of the world” nonsense that feeds most blockbuster movies (don’t worry, we’ll come back to Debicki’s arc in a few, we’re just first dealing with our protagonist).

Please understand, it’s not that Washington is lackluster in his performance. In fact, I liked him in this probably more than I liked him in anything else I’ve seen so far. He often underplays it, slowing down a lot of big moments, and even nails a few deadpan looks. I even like that they tried to imbue his character with these little touches of class commentary with his mild disdain for the upper crust lifestyle. Some of which even feels like it dips a toe into bigger commentary or America or even the subject of race (some moments of which, like the hot sauce line could be rather pointed, but in Nolan’s hands feel… a bit awkward). But in the end, intentional or not, Washington is working with a character / motivation that is thinner than thin. And as such, we begin floating through dangerous scenario after scenario without much to grab onto other than the puzzle of the dense plotting around him…

You know, the very same plotting that the movie seems completely disinterested in actually conveying to us? That it’s telling us not to understand? Especially in a way that would make more sense up front? Particularly when delivered through Nolan’s increasingly weird affinity for mushmouth dialogue and sound? It’s all part and parcel of how everything in TENET just keeps getting pushed behind walls, putting the audience on their heels. So ultimately, it’s not that the film is any more oblique than Nolan other narratives. It’s just that we have so little else to hang on to, and thus we feel the slick thinness of it so, SO much more.

Granted, there is genuine entertainment to be had in the games it plays. Hell, I’m actually pretty sure that we can just start calling these tropes Nolan’s cinematic fetishes at this point. The dapper suits! The intense practical effects work! The squads of soldiers running around in intensely geometric settings with horizontal framing! It’s all there. But so are some fun little details. I like that he lets Debicki be tall and isn’t throwing male actors on apple boxes. I like the mileage he gets from Pattinson’s wry smile. I like that Washington beats up a dude with a cheese grater. But most importantly of all, I like the overall pastiche of the action approach with the backwards fights and whatnot. I’d even argue that the big turning point set-piece with the red / blue rooms is probably the most visually striking thing that Nolan’s ever done. But even more enthralling is the way that set-piece just serves as a set-up to Washington’s first “backwards time attempt” in the highway chase. As he puts on his mask and prepares to go outside, you genuinely feel that danger and the rush of exhilaration.

It’s funny, when I first saw the trailer I joked “Did.... Did Christopher Nolan just make a super high budget spy movie version of BRAID!?!??!” and the truth is he kind of did. But whether intentional or not, Nolan’s picking choice parts from good material. There’s the use of the two chambers a la Primer, there’s back and forth understanding of time and messaging a la Arrival. There’s even a moment where it tells us “if your particles come into contact, annihilation” and I’m like HELL YEAH BABY, THEY’RE USING TIME COP RULES. I like so much of the texture of what they’re showing. The breathing gear? The inherent danger of counter-intuitive, backwards movement? It’s all fun. Though I will say, the fire / ice thing is so unnecessary and insane (especially as it comes up once but then never again), but part of me also loves that Nolan went for something so silly. But in the end, it all gets swallowed up as part of the grand slickness. Heck, you can practically FEEL the vast swarms of money they spend on this artifice, perhaps best symbolized in the moment where they were throwing gold bars off the side of a plane as a distraction.

But slickness only gets you so far, even in action terms. There are few sequences in this (especially during the end battle) that needed to do a much better job finding mini objectives to call out and create tension before the surprises. But like so much of the movie, we spent our time on our heels instead of leaning in with anticipation. But perhaps that’s part of the trouble with time-travel centric action— it’s clever, but undramatic. Mostly because the one big move you have in your arsenal is, “oh hey, this is that thing I saw someone doing before, I guess it was future me so I’m gonna do it now!” You just don’t get much else from it (and while we’re here, the execution of the turn with Robert Pattinson knowing more than he lets on does nothing when you reveal it only part way the middle part of the narrative, either he should know everything in the middle or you play it all harder at the end. My vote is, of course, the middle, which gives you a chance to deepen the relationship between him and the Protagonist in the actual movie).

Perhaps it all would land harder if the themes actually had a better anchor, but the thoughtfulness often seems limited to little gestures. There’s the opening being a literal overture and the soldiers storming in and destroying art (not the first time it will happen). With many of these sequences, I can thematically project into all the world building that Nolan is doing. I can dive into the cryptic notions and symbology that litter the frames, as characters speak in code, saying “we live in a twilight world,” echoing the notion of the things we do to stave off the apocalypse. But all of this cerebral guesswork. And none of it really is meant to add up to anything strictly coherent to the emotional journey. So much of what piqued my curiosity feels like it’s just pointing at the possibilities of things that exist off screen. While what is actually on screen is the more important discussion.

Speaking of which, it may seem odd that I’ve gone this far without bringing up what is clearly the emotional backbone of the story, but I did so to make a point about a flaw in the film’s construction. Because about a third of the way in, our protagonist soon gets drawn into a plot involving Elizabeth Debicki and her tyrannical, abusive, controlling husband who is bent on ending the world. He’s also Kenneth Branagh and he is playing a Russian billionaire and I hope we get over this kind of casting thing soon. (People always try to justify it and say, but there’s no big Russian stars! Which is of course a chicken / egg scenario. Because there will never be a big Russian star unless you stop casting old British men in those roles). Anyway, their story is fraught with a ton of palpable tension. He’s going to blow up the world cause he’s a Time Terrorist or something, who’s dying anyway and if he can’t have his wife then no one will (honestly, it’s pretty convoluted). But on the emotional level? Branagh plays the malice of it all pretty hard. And Debicki plays her reaction with the mix of verve, fear, nuance, and control. And in the end, her character is the one granted a full arc, hitting into the film’s only real offer of thematic significance (that would be freedom from her “present,” finding hope for the future, etc). Which helps you realize a simple and clear problem with the construction of the overall narrative.

It’s her story.

Meaning, yes, she should be the lead. Or at least part of a genuine two hander with Washington or something. Because there’s genuinely no reason we can’t be with her as the central through-line of the story (especially given that she already makes up the emotional backbone). But instead, Washington has to be the “protagonist” and we spend far too much time getting caught up in the games of the world as she gets Damsel-ed a bit too much for my liking. There’s an alternative approach, of course. Given how delightful it is watching Washington and Pattinson debonairly coast about in their little heists, it’s easy to see the way this could have been better framed as something with the loose DNA of a Buddy movie (at least as much as Nolan could do one). Besides, by the end of the film it is technically saying that these two are already that duo, just in the future (which is probably too cute by half). So instead of either being Debicki’s story or the buddy adventure, Nolan tries to split the difference and do both story approaches, and doesn’t end up with enough of a backbone to fully support the film. And thus, Washington is rendered a passenger in his narrative… which is also, of course, totally on purpose.

Make no mistake, the film’s ending reveals that Washington is the architect of so much of this story (he just hadn’t done it yet) is fun stuff on a surface level. Particularly when you get to deliver lines like “turns out we’ve both been working for me.” And I like imagining the way this will all play out from here. Especially when you get that look at that knowing smile from Pattinson, with the hint that his death is only the beginning at their friendship is going to be so important in the future (they’re totally doing a Doctor / River Song relationship and god I wish this movie had the balls to be more queer). In a way, the thing I’m left with is the feeling I get when I’ve just seen an intriguing pilot and figure the best stuff has yet to come. But in a big budget movie? The truth is all the stuff that makes for a fun ending also makes for an unsatisfying journey in getting there.

So in a way, Nolan’s narrative basically falls victim to its own trick.

Even in looking back while revisiting the film, the things that are most interesting are just all the devilish details of the puzzle. There’s the opening heist where you don’t realize they stole the main Macguffin. The way the trains move in opposite directions. The split of the two colored eyes. All of these details and set-ups click into place like a well-oiled machine. But whether looking forward or looking back, the one place in the movie I’m never really comfortable in TENET is just emoting within the present. And no matter what film you are, you have to live in the dramatic moment. So even though I genuinely like the pizzaz of the trick (as I usually do with Nolan), he didn’t ground it in something meaningful enough to me for it to really matter (as much as he tried with Debicki). So at best, the thing I like most about TENET are all the building blocks for something that might exist in the future.

A future that almost seems silly to talk about now. I know I’ve gone this long without mentioning this film’s misguided theatrical intentions during the covid outbreak and lynchpin role it was supposed to play in the future of the film industry, but other people have written about that subject with much more insight. I simply acknowledge that this history hangs over the film. And it will continue to hang over it as Nolan and Warner Brothers go into battle over the changes to the industry, still. So who knows what could be. I can simply focus on what it was trying to be.

And for all the talk of sequels, it’s funny that Nolan reportedly imagined this as his new James Bond-esque franchise. The comparison is especially hilarious to me because the appeal of the James Bond films is the lark of it all. The utter indulgence in martinis, tuxedos, sexual bravado, and (hopefully less problematic) pulpy fun. But outside of the taste in fashion-ware, none of those indulgences are really in Nolan’s repertoire, are they? So what’s the pulpy fantasy here? What would a guy like Nolan even fantasize about? Given that the man is trapped in puzzles and always feeling the oppressive cruelty of… Ah, the second I even say it, the impetus becomes clear. The big fantasy of TENET, that is the one thing Nolan could imagine as the biggest escapist fantasy ever…

…is having power over time.

For better or worse, I can think of nothing more him.

<3HULK