Tenet (2020)

Preamble

British director Christopher Nolan’s carrier has been a distinguished one. Like his illustrious compatriot, Ridley Scott, he has been famed for his ability to reliably craft ‘thinking persons’ studio feature films’. Whilst Scott has been credited with elevating the Sci-Fi genre, Nolan has been praised for his contribution to the realm of superhero franchise: it is not an exaggeration to say that Nolan has singlehandedly made this lucrative category ‘credible’ for industry critics. That being acknowledged, since the notion of ‘studio feature films’ being a euphemism for entertainment films, despite their considerable contributions to contemporary cinema, neither of them should be considered auteurs in a strict sense of the word. This is not necessarily the limit of the respective directors’ talent: it is the limit of career choices they have made. No matter how well written, directed, and performed Dark Knight may be, if one wishes to experience Christian Bale’s best performance, one is not going to find it in Nolan films (Bale as Dieter Dengler in Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, or his role as an addict in David O. Russell’s The Fighter should serve as examples). The same goes for Michael Fassbender: his best performance is always found in his collaboration with Steve McQueen, despite his legendary embodiment of David 8 in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. It is because the scale of studio feature films comes at an unavoidable cost. If you are involved with a franchise, the film will ultimately belong to the brand, and the copyright and distribution right holders, not to the director. Still, with Denis Villeneuve being a notable exception, currently none makes studio feature films more interesting than Nolan and Scott.

Nolan is, however, considerably more reliable than his elder compatriot. Whilst Scott has crafted many masterpieces, such as ‘Blade Runner’ as well as the ‘Alien’ prequels, his cinematography is spotty relative to Nolan’s. Indeed, Scott has directed quite a few genre-defining masterpieces. Yet, he has also directed just as many mediocre films. In addition, his operation has not been as tidy as it is expected to be: even in his finest hour, he has at times failed to realise his vision with his first attempt. This inability to consistently achieve his objective has, interestingly, resulted in his cult status. The prime example is Blade Runner (1982). Under the pressure from the studio, Scott added Deckard’s voice-over to make the narrative ‘accessible’ to the audience, despite Harrison Ford’s strong objection. Ten years later, Scott released The Director’s Cut (1992) where he removed Deckard’s voice-over and the ‘happy ending’ from the original version. He also reinserted the ‘unicorn scene’ to imply Deckard’s possible replicant origin. Then again, Scott released The Final Cut, allegedly the only version upon which Scott exercised the complete artistic and editorial control. We have seen similar development in The Counsellor (2013) and others with varying success. On the other hand, Nolan is more consistent due to his greater control over the production process; he nearly always writes the script for the films he directs (the only exception being the dismal Hollywood adaptation of the Norwegian masterpiece, Insomnia, the weakest film by the Brit), and his partner, Emma Thomas, has been deeply involved in every Nolan film as a producer. The tighter control over the production has been enabling him to achieve coherence in his work. It has also been allowing him to take on intellectual subjects that pose significant aesthetic challenges; he often incorporates exotic concepts such as the fallibility of memory and resulting ambiguity of personal identity, and in his latest film, Tenet (2020), he has explored the concept of inverted entropy and its catastrophic consequence.

The Protagonist

Whilst Tenet may not be Nolan’s finest, it is certainly the most accomplished work. The scientific concept that support the core narrative of the film is as complex as ever, yet the Brit has managed to make it ‘watchable’. When Barbara (Clémence Poésy) tells the Protagonist (John David Washington) that he is catching the bullet with his automatic handgun rather than shooting it to the target, and discusses Free Will with unnerving clarity and poise, the viewer knows that one must expect an ample intellectual stimulation. Yet, as Nolan admits, the cinematic representation and appropriation of the concept of inverted entropy are not meant to offer a scientifically accurate picture; they are meant to dazzle our senses and mind. Since there have been many articles written on the scientific subject that supports the story, I shall abstain from adding another here. Before moving on to the main subject of this article, however, I wish to point to one welcome aspect of the script and the direction which has been absent from the conversation, namely, the defiant rejection of gender expectations.

Tenet is not only the most mature film by Nolan, but it also brings a welcome departure from the action-thriller genre. Typically, these predominantly male protagonists are muscular and exercise magnetic power over the opposite sex. Like James Bond, some of them are smooth operators in smart attires, and others rough on the edges. Nonetheless, these men have no shortage of companions with a certain Hollywood appearance whose only reason d’être is to affirm the protagonists’ superiority as a dominant sex. With his measured portrayal of the Protagonist, John David Washington turns this stereotype on its head with remarkable ease and grace. He is physically strong and mentally sharp. His understated elegance indeed denotes his muscular quality, yet he never oversteps the line that holds the self-respect, and thus preventing the character from becoming a caricature of male fantasy. Most notably, Nolan makes a difference by upholding two directorial decisions: 1) whilst Katherine (intelligently portrayed by Elizabeth Debicki) is indeed dazzlingly charismatic, Nolan recognises no need for her to undress or to be in bed with the Protagonist; and 2) despite the profound care for Katherine demonstrated by the Protagonist, he acts without expecting anything in return and never attempts to make an uninvited advance. Many have interpreted these directorial decisions as major deficits : they have found no ‘chemistry” between the Protagonist and Kat, and have concluded that the ‘staleness’ of the alleged manage à trois has demonstrated Nolan’s inability to create plausible characters with genuine emotions. This misconstrue is based on the misplaced expectations; Tenet is an anti-Bond film, and we must appreciate the arrival of a proper gentleman with intelligence, integrity, respect for women, and modesty in the Protagonist. This film must be remembered and celebrated as the first instance when John David Washington completely outclassed a type of man marketed as the ‘ideal’ representation of masculinity.

Kat

Whilst the Protagonist’s portrayal is a welcome departure from dominant gender expectations, this is only half a story. Katherine Burns, or Kat, by Elizabeth Debicki also contributes just as much in this regard. Sadly, Katherine is the most misunderstood character in the story: critics have panned Nolan for his inability to create a plausible female character by condemning Kat as a ‘damsel in distress’ who is to be saved by the Protagonist. This characterisation of Katherine is the farthest from the truth. Kat is an independent woman with considerable strength and intelligence, and, thanks to her wealth, she enjoys economic independence and works as the authenticator of fine art. She has denounced her husband, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), once she discovered his trade as a prominent arms dealer, and has been trying in vain to wrestle their son back from his clutch. Unfortunately, Sator had an ace under his sleeve. Kat has misjudged a Goya’s forgery as an original and put her stamp of approval for an auction. The forgery was carried out by her close friend, Arthur Arepo, and Sator suspected that they had been in an intimate relationship. Sator paid 9 million dollars for the forgery, murdered Arepo, and has been blackmailing his estranged wife, effectively keeping her captive. When the Protagonist approaches her to gain access to Sator, whom he suspected of having had managed to invert ordinary ammunitions to a devastating effect, Nolan has not portrayed her as a helpless woman needing a saviour. The Protagonist and Kat have their own respective agendas, and they continue to negotiate the terms of agreement without losing the sights of their own specific goals. The Protagonist is tasked to stop Sator from destroying the life on earth from the beginning of time by preventing him from enacting inverted entropy, whilst Kat takes advantages of the situation and seeks to regain her freedom and take her son back from Sator. The fact that Kat is no damsel in distress must have been clear to everyone: in the end, it is Kat who exercises her volition to liberate herself and rescue her son from her monster husband by deviating from the pilot written and dictated by her male counterparts. Thanks to Debicki’s mesmerising portrayal of Kat, her story is a powerfully moving one. She is at once steely and sensitive, like a realistic woman trapped in an impossible situation. And she achieves her goal without, thanks to Nolan, undressing and seducing the Protagonist.

Hence, I deeply appreciate the relationship between the Protagonist and Kat. There is a tacit understanding between them that they are after separate objectives. Then yet, there is another, unspoken consensus between them: the Protagonist protects Kat from a distance, yet he expects nothing in return. She learns that the Protagonist’s intention is a disinterested one, and comes to trust him, for he understands what she really needs: autonomy from men who try to control her. And thus, I have found their bond profoundly moving.

That being acknowledged, neither the Protagonist nor Kat holds the key of the story. In order to extract the moral of the story, we must turn to another companion of the Protagonist, Neil.

Neil

Robert Pattinson expertly plays Neil, the side-kick of the Protagonist. He is a mysterious character who appears in different time-threads throughout the film. It is clear to the Protagonist from the first encounter that Neil knows something he does not. Aside from having earned an MA in Physics, Neil demonstrates uncanny familiarity with the Protagonist’s modus operandi as if he has known him for a very long time. He knows that the Protagonist never drinks on the job. He also knows that the Protagonist will continue to watch over Katherine and her son, Maximilien, long after the completion of the mission that has necessitated their connection. Just in case you have not watched the movie yet, I shall abstain from giving too many details here. At this point in time, it suffices for us to note that Neil is very likely Kat and Sator’s son himself. Only when one begins to focus on Neil’s temporal footprints on various time-threads that collide, one would begin to appreciate just how dizzyingly complex Tenet is.

With his almost untraceable movement in time (seemingly untraceable even to Nolan himself, as there are many inconsistencies throughout the busy action sequences toward the end. Still, we must consider one possibility: this phenomenon could be the result of Nolan’s canny calculation to intentionally perplex the audience), Neil distinguishes himself from the rest of the characters: he is simultaneously a messenger from the future as well as the field operator from the past and the present. That being acknowledged, there has been too much focus on Neal’s tracks on various time-threads, and little conversations about his message to the Protagonist. Therefore, in what follows, I wish to interrogate the meaning of Neil’s response to the Protagonist’s question: What do you believe in?

When Kat is fatally injured with an inverted bullet, the Protagonist attempts to save Kat’s life by going back in time. He deduces that, by going back in time, he and Neil could reverse the entropy of the bullet, thereby the injury Kat has suffered could become a treatable gun-shot wound. When the Protagonist, Neil, and Kat are moving back to Oslo for this life-saving mission, the Protagonist asks Neil: What do you believe in? To this, Neil replies: What happens happens. When asked by the Protagonist whether Neil believes in the notion of fate, Neil denies and explains his view: It is not an excuse to do nothing; it is a fundamental faith in the mechanics of the world.

It is critically important to note the circumstances in which Neil makes this statement. The reason why the Protagonist asks the above question to Neil is because there is no way to know whether their wager to save Kat’s life would bring a success. To the Protagonist, it is a desperate bet: he is committed to it not because he sees a clear path to achieve the goal; it is because he is committed to saving Kat’s life, and he cannot see an alternative. The plan the Protagonist committed has only a theoretical possibility of success, and there is no sound epistemological justification for their ‘rescue mission’. Having realised that their operation is driven by belief rather than knowing, the Protagonist asks his counterpart the above question. And Neil’s answer is a philosophically nuanced one despite its outward simplicity.

Before unpacking Neil’s statement, however, it is important to grasp the differences between the Protagonist and Neil. The utmost concern for the Protagonist is an ethical one: it is a categorial imperative for him to do everything in his power to save Kat. He has used Kat to achieve his goal, and she is mortally wounded as a result. His tenet tells him that he must do whatever he could to save her life. When he proposes to go back in time and attempt to reverse the entropy of the bullet that has wounded Kat, the commander of a unit from the organisation called Tenet correctly points out: the Protagonist has no idea what he is getting himself into. In addition, Neil points out that this operation could jeopardise their mission by giving Sator a chance to find what he needs to inverse the entropy of the world. Then why does he take such a risk with no guarantee of success? For the Protagonist, epistemological consideration is ultimately irrelevant. To risk one’s own life to do what he believes is right then takes a different, yet still rational, consideration. This is where Utilitarian Calculus becomes pointless. The Protagonist won’t weigh the value of all lives against that of one woman’s. He believes that every innocent life has an intrinsic value, and he needs to do everything in his power to save it (The way in which he judges which life is deemed innocent is shaped by his profession: he has no hesitation in taking the life of an arms dealer or a terrorist, or an obstacle for his mission). And he is ready to put his own life in line for his tenet.

Neil’s position is a more nuanced one. Like the Protagonist, Neil recognises that the chance of successfully saving Kat’s life is only a theoretical one. Again, like the Protagonist, Neil is committed to saving Kat’s life and to completing their mission. It is clear that none of these operations enjoys a particularly high probability of success, and there are myriads of ways in which they fail to achieve the goal in the process. Yet, unlike the Protagonist, it does not all come down to belief for Neil. His answer is at once a metaphysical one based on the epistemological uncertainty, and an ethical one rooted in his metaphysics.

As someone with an advanced degree in physics, Neil understands how the time works and how devastating the consequence of the weaponisation of the inversion of entropy would be. He recognises the moral obligation for him to do everything in his power to stop Sator’s scheme. Yet, like the Protagonist, Neil is aware that the outcome is not a foregone conclusion. Faced by this uncertainty, the Protagonist concludes that the uncertainty itself cannot be a part of his thoughts, for there is no point in considering unknowns. And thus, the Protagonist refuses to think about what-ifs and focuses on what he can do. He thus operates entirely by intensely willing the successful outcome. Neil offers a different perspective: he has learnt how to live with the uncertainty without altering his commitment to the mission. As a field operator of an intelligence agency, he must understand the uncertainty of the outcome of human actions. No matter how well one plans and prepares for the plot, the outcome is still unknown, and what one thinks at a time the right and/or correct decision might not turn out to be so. It is simply beyond our epistemic capacity to correctly take all possible variables into account to know anything with credible certainty. By openly accepting the uncertainty, and without shutting it out of his view, Neil embodies a quality that eludes the Protagonist: serenity in the face of possible catastrophes. Despite his youth, he has acquired rare wisdom: he accepts the fact that knowing one’s own limitation should not deter from doing what one thinks is right. By calmly resolving to acknowledge that ‘what happens happens’, Neil is at peace with these uncertainties. And he is at peace because he refuses to force himself upon the world.

Neil’s attitude is in direct opposition to Sator’s. Sator blackmails and tries in vain to control his estranged wife. Sator wants to destroy the world because he is dying of cancer. At one point, Sator declares to Kat in a fit of rage: If I cannot have you, no one else can. This cruel solipsistic desire to force his will upon the world and the people he knows defines Sator. Everything he does in this story should be summarised in the following paraphrase: If he cannot live on, he will take the world with him. By forcing certain outcomes to satisfy his egomaniac whims, Sator treats everything and everyone as mere means to exploit. Hence, we must conclude: the desire to force oneself upon the world is indeed evil.

Hence, this strangely charming character with an easy, innocent smile turns out to be the key to unlocking the story. Despite being an action-thriller film with a full-scale international studio feature production, Tenet reveals something profound and rare: a fundamental human paradox and how best one can live with it gracefully and graciously. As Neil tells us: one must do everything one thinks is right without identifying oneself with the outcome, for, at the end of the day, what happens happens. Hence, one must properly appreciate the mechanics of the world without taking oneself too seriously. After all, one cannot overcome the epistemic uncertainty: one cannot think of all the variables that determine the outcome of one’a actions, and what one thought at the time right and/or correct decision might not turn out to be so. And even if we can know everything, it does not mean that we can alter the mechanics of the world to force our preferred outcomes.

Most interestingly, with Neil, Nolan has juxtaposed yet another cliché: instead of an old, a youth has become the messenger of practical wisdom from which the old must learn. The absence of tragedy in Tenet is yet another welcome change one must embrace in the face of existential threats to humanity in the present time. As we are observing the fact that the established manners of thinking and doing is the problem itself at this point in time, we must find a way to open ourselves to a certain wisdom, that is, staying open to the unthinkable without dismissing the body of knowledge we have accumulated as irrelevant. If we are to avoid the mistakes from the past, we must learn from it. To learn from it, we must acquire the sufficient knowledge and understanding of it. Yet, if we are to overcome the structural problems stemming from the very nature of the Form of Life as we know it, we must be ready to think beyond it.

Therefore, it is appropriate to close this article with a quote from Tractatus logico-philosophicus.

6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

Let us go out there and do our work. And let us see to it and witness what happens. Because that is all we can do, and thus we must.