This weekend, my husband and I watched Christopher Nolan’s latest film Tenet—twice. I wouldn’t say that we loved it so much the first time and had to see it again—although my husband, who researched palindromes and the Sator square for his first book, enjoyed it immensely. I don’t even think it was the complex, mind-bending plot that compelled us to rewatch it. For my own part, I just had a hard time hearing what was going on in the movie. For much of the film, the actors are speaking through oxygen masks or in settings with loud, droning background noises. Instead of punching up the dialogue, the sound mixing tended to wash it out. For a film where so much crucial information was conveyed through dialogue, instead of contextually, it often felt as though we were just missing out on something important. The second time through, we watched it with subtitles, and it vastly improved the experience of the film.
The film was dazzling, as all Nolan films are, but not necessarily the most compelling. (For what it’s worth, my favorite Nolan film is Interstellar. I originally saw it in a planetarium, which added a layer of aesthetic charm to the scenes in space. I am convinced that Anne Hathaway should always be seen in IMAX.) The characterization for the main characters was so often flat, which was an odd choice given how much of the film is actually a case study of an unhappy, abusive marriage. I couldn’t tell whether Nolan’s decision to name the main character “Protagonist”—and to set his assumed centrality alongside a global conspiracy that spans multiple centuries—to be clever, defamiliarizing, deflating, or just corny af. The only convincing actors were Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki—John David Washington’s delivery was monotone throughout, while Kenneth Branagh was doing his thing and ACTING with every fiber of his being. In the end, I thought that watching the film was not unlike solving a particularly difficult puzzle. When things clicked into place, it was incredibly satisfying. But, after that, what’s left?
Nolan is a competent film director, one who is simultaneously over- and under-hyped. It’s fair to question the conventional masculinity at the center of his films, but he is also a surprisingly sentimental, even melodramatic director. I think films like Interstellar want us to cry—and, to be honest, I did. But Nolan’s pomposity too often gets in the way of that sentimentality. It should be said that few film directors of Nolan’s popular standing ever take the kinds of risks that he does. (Can you ever imagine James Cameron—or, god forbid, whoever is in charge of the ceaseless churn of superhero films—ever directing a film that genuinely asked its audience to pay attention?) For all of their grandiosities, Nolan’s films are at least capable of aesthetic maturity, even if Nolan’s own sense of himself as an “auteur” means that he can never get out of the way enough for the films to achieve the level of vulnerability necessary to take advantage of all their ambiguities and complexities.
Ultimately, my skepticism toward Tenet comes down to its relation to ambiguity. The film is simultaneously too aware of its own status as an art object—and, therefore, incapable of escaping that spectatorial relationship. Tenet seems to want to be both open and closed—figuratively abstract and yet interpretively fixed. Like a math formula, it entices us with the interpretive pleasures of open-endedness, while snapping shut at the last minute. (A review of the film on Polygon reads: “Christopher Nolan’s Tenet feels like a loud, oppressive math exam.”) The form of Tenet, then, is teleological: the ending fulfills the beginning of the film in much the same way that the final piece of a puzzle fulfills the promise suggested by the first. Instead of “criticism,” the film rewards a kind of “forensic fandom,” best exemplified by popular genres of “explanatory” analysis often found on YouTube and Tumblr.
Yet, Tenet isn’t without its virtues, and the film resonates in particular as a film of the present moment in which we experience art—isolated and cut off from the intimate and social worlds that make the experience of art worthwhile. Something that stood out to me was how breathlessly the film jumps from one scenic location to the next. Apparently, principal photography took place in Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Norway, the UK, and the US—but, the film is also “set” in Vietnam and Russia. I sometimes forget just how globalized the film industry was before the pandemic. As a result, there is a kind of cognitive estrangement that happens while watching the film. You sense that it is about our world—our world of globalized, financialized capitalism—but it does not register as familiar.
In her recent monograph Calamity Form, Anahid Nersessian writes about the trouble of parsing Big Things:
What is to be done about a world whose complexity is so uncomprehendingly lived, whose harms are palpable and yet obscure, seeming to come upon us from everywhere and nowhere? … To feel but not to get, to undergo but not to understand: this is the etiology of trauma and of the traumatic historical event.
As much as it’s a film about convoluted plot machinations, Tenet is a film about trauma and the tragedy of a traumatic event that asks us to think differently about the world but without any map for how to do so. While the film is invested in the myth of the heroic individual (the “Protagonist” as a mythic hero), it seems to treat heroism as a tragic predicament. The film opens with Protagonist’s death—or, at least, his near-death after a failed CIA operation in the Ukraine. He is then recruited by a secret organization called Tenet and whisked around the world—all the while being lied to and deceived by the people around him. At multiple points in the film, he is told to think less “linearly,” but it is not entirely clear what other way of thinking he might adopt. There is a strong sense in which he must live the events of the film before he can know how to understand them. What is tragic, then, is the requirement that he live out the consequences of his trauma (both the trauma of his near-death experience and the trauma of a global conspiracy in which he is recruited), without ever being given the time or space to process his relation to those traumatic events.
Early in the film, when a scientist explains the mind-bending logic of “temporal inversion” to him, the Protagonist asks how that changes the law of causality. How can something happen before the event that caused it? Don’t try to understand it, the scientist explains to him. Feel it. In a similar vein, Robert Pattinson’s character instructs the Protagonist to “have faith” in the order of things. The film demands a change in attitude, a resignation to the uncomprehending experience of “feeling” and “faith.”
But to feel and not to understand, as Nersessian argues it, is to live within a world defined by trauma. What do we do with the fact that the film is so unequivocal about the value it places on “faith”? I take this as a kind of recognition of it’s own relationship, as art, to the world. Short of describing the world, the film allegorizes its own capitulation to the logic of globalized capitalism. Resignation, it seems to say, is the only possible response to a situation so mind-bendingly complex, so torturously puzzling. Perhaps, then, it is that powerlessness that makes the film an ideal site for investigating our own situation of generalized powerlessness. To have so little faith in the system—to recognize that the compulsion toward resignation is somehow unsatisfying—is, perhaps, a way of conceiving our own dissatisfaction with the world as it is: isolating, lonely, atomizing, authoritarian.
Reading
I just finished my friend Travis Chi Wing Lau’s short poetry collection Paring. (More on that here.) I’ve been reluctant to pick up my next book—Haruki Murakami’s Wild Sheep Chase—but I hope to start that in earnest this week.
Dog Update
We went for a hike this past week in the Wissahickon, a gorgeous 1800-acre parkland in the north of Philadelphia. Frequent hikes have been so necessary during quarantine—for us and for the dogs. Here they are in their hiking attire, ready to hit the trails.