When the dust settles and we get past all the forward and backward movement in time, all the time inversions, all the reverse chronologies and temporal pincers, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is about the end of the world. And for this very reason it remains nothing more than one more Hollywood blockbuster about how the ‘hero’ saves the world from the hands of the evil ‘villain’. But seeing a film which moves into the past and future at the snap of a finger one might ask which world are we talking about? Which temporal reality does this world belong to? And the inescapable answer dawns upon us: the present one, the world to which we belong today. And if we are not exhausted by the confusion we might just ask “but why does it need saving?” Then again we remember the few lines which come by the end of this two and half hour roller-coaster of narrative convolution. It needs saving because it is worth it, because we believe in it. This is the Tenet: a science fiction which aggressively pushes the ideology of faith by putting on the mask of scientific seriousness.
Hollywood has dabbled with time travel movies since the early days of sound. But in their early days, time-travel films had often taken a comic tone capitalizing on anachronistic confusion and chaos induced by simultaneity and repetition. Like the 1944 film Time Flies (Walter Forde) which is a comedy where New York actors travel back in time to Shakespeare’s England. Woody Allen’s 1973 Comedy Sci-fi Sleeper also tackles the question of time travel with brilliant comic consequences. But perhaps a film which is closest to Tenet’s dominant themes of parallel time lines and meeting your past selves, is the 1985 Stephen Spielberg produced Robert Zemeckis movie Back to the Future which takes a comic look at the grandfather paradox.
These films capitalise on the confusion of repetition, simultaneity and temporal overlapping as well as temporal distinction which is inevitable when cinema, which unfolds through images in time, tries to play with the theme of time. This “doubling” effect is unavoidable in any film dealing with the problem of time. Tenet however tries to give it a self-serious “realist’ turn. It simultaneously introduces complicated concepts from theoretical physics –like Richard Feynman and John Archibald Wheelers theories from electrodynamics – and spectacular action sequences done in real time without using CGI – like crashing a real Boeing 747 into a building – which remains a hallmark of the cinematic experience of Nolan films. Add to this the forced sincerity of the script and the conscientious themes of climate change, free will, and we have all the elements required to produce the reality “effect” which makes it becomes easier for us to believe in the spectacle we see on screen whose only value is in its present consumption. “Don’t try to understand, just feel it”. No need of narrative coherence, no need of any original story with interesting characters. You can repeat any worn-out Bond film story line, add some exotic locations and predictable action sequences as long as you play your trump card – inversion of movement making things move backward and forward simultaneously. But unlike Nolan’s Memento where such simultaneous forward/backward movement is done through the arrangement of images, cinematically achieved through editing, in Tenet everything is literal, shown within the frame in action. This ‘literalization’ which produces the spectacular ‘reality effect’ hides a very simple ideological proposition. The present is all that matters though it is full of uncertainty and corruption and evil doing.
The Russian oligarch Andrei Sator— played by Kenneth Branagh who seems to have taken it upon himself to play Russian super villains (he played another Russian oligarch/super villain in the last Jack Ryan movie) — does not believe “in God, or future, or anything outside his own experience”. He is the quintessential nihilistic villain who wants to “invert the entropy of the world” and destroy it because he himself is dying of pancreatic cancer and cannot enjoy a future. He is being helped in his little ploy by a malevolent “future”. It is a “future” which wants to take the risk of destroying the past to save its own present because the past – which is our present – is the cause of all its problems. Our “protagonist” wants to save our “present” from the hands of this evil version of “future”. And yet our “protagonist” believes in another future – a future where “heroes” like him will form an organization called the “tenet” which will go back in time to save our present. Sator wants to end the future because he does not have a future but only the present which he can experience. Our protagonist on the other hand wants to save the present which is the basis of his belief in the future. “Each generation looks after its own survival” says our “protagonist”. The future is only a reference point for both these ethical positions which are exclusively grounded on the present. To experience the future makes you a monster while to believe in the future you have to “go back” and save the present. This is the ideology behind the “temporal cold war” – a cold war with the future as our enemy.
If we get past the sheer confusion of translating theoretical physics into cinematic images, the scientific jargon – turnstiles, algorithms, hypocentres, nuclear fission, radiation – and the narrative clichés of the abused wife (Elizabeth Debiki’s repeats her ‘fragile but elegant demeanor’ playing the abused wife of yet another arms dealer after role in the series The Night Manager), the parochial and selfish super villain, the sacrificial conscientious hero doing the dirty work – what we are left with is a hackneyed story of an arch criminal from Russia who has masterminded the end of the world which the American hero has to thwart.
Tenet is perhaps one of the most prominent examples in recent Hollywood cinema of what Fredric Jameson, the American cultural critic has called “the nostalgia for the present” which is an ideological claim that even if it’s full of problems and uncertainties and crisis, the present world order is our only choice. This is a far cry from a director who gave us Momento which studied the existential problem of time and the impossibility of action when we are left with the empty hollowness of our present moment without memory.
