Retro Review / Personal Essay by Noah Thompson
Content Warning: Suicide
“What’s happened, happened. Which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world. It’s not an excuse to do nothing.”
“Fate?”
“Call it what you want.”
“What do you call it?”
“Reality. Now let me go.”
There is an opera house. An audience. Musicians. A composer. The music is about to begin.
Bang – the composer is shot, and falls to the ground. Armed and masked men fill the stage. It is immediate pandemonium. A cascade of hundreds of panicked heads. The musicians and the opera’s audience fear for their lives. The men yell and break instruments. It is unclear how this started, and so it is unclear about what will happen next. A van is outside of the opera house. A man inside the van listens to the commotion over the radio. A command rings out: “Wake up the Americans.”
In the back of the van sits several men, also dressed in armor, masks, and with weapons of their own. A man in the center opens his eyes. He cocks a pistol, a casing careening from its center. Our Protagonist. The Protagonist. A call to action with no discernable answer to the question “Why?”. A man has been thrown into a dangerous situation, and we run out of the van with him. Tenet begins.
It is September 1st, 2020. I am in a movie theater for the first time in roughly seven months. A friend of mine has joined me, and it is his first time too. Everyone in this theater, it is their first time. COVID did not just shut down cinemas, it shut down the world. But here we are, back to this place of solace. An audience and a screen.
My friend and I are now seated in the theater. After a small batch of trailers, Tenet opens with that siege on the opera house. I feel my mask against my face. I can hear my breathing, how it rings through my ears with almost the same intensity of the film’s thumping musical score and pulsating sound design. This continues for the entire film. I watch John David Washington shoot and run. In front of and below the screen I can see a crowd of heads in seats, some with their masks still on looking onward, others with their masks off, eating popcorn and drinking soda.
I have been transported, I am in an uncertain place with an uncertain time. I am lost, but I am like The Protagonist.
We go on this journey into the unknown together.
When I saw Tenet for a second time, in December from the comfort of my home, it brought me back to the darkest period of my life. From 2014 to 2015, my sophomore year of high school, I was suffering from body image issues, general depression, and heavily struggling in a geometry class. I had privately resigned myself to the fact that if I were to actually fail this class, which seemed like a true possibility, I was going to take my own life.
It did not take very long after the fact of this time passing that this was an extremely foolish thing, wanting to do something so drastic about something so mundane. But, that is something that happened, that was a period in my life, and it is something I have had to live with since.
The opening sequence of Tenet concludes with The Protagonist extracting a mysterious man in a suit from the opera house, then being miraculously saved by an (of course unexplained) backwards-firing bullet shot from the gun of a man with a red string and metal circle on his backpack, and then being tortured by mercenaries in a railyard before seemingly taking a cyanide pill to kill himself. It is only after the title drop following this action that he is revealed to be alive. He has an entire life and a new mission ahead of him.
It took me a long time to realize this, but I see a part of myself in The Protagonist’s attempted suicide. I am so drawn to The Protagonist because he is someone who was so willing to die even in a place of such uncertainty and confusion. He doesn’t, he is saved by determination and luck in equal measure, and then a whole new adventure awaits him.
He lives, and when I managed to pass that class, so did I. We both were allowed to keep living.
Life and death are connected states of being instead of two separate existences.
Does that make complete sense? I know I’ve gone back and forth from quotes from the film, to describing its opening, and then providing personal context with the pandemic and myself. It’s a lot. If it doesn’t all make sense, that’s alright.
Tenet as a film is not totally inconceivable, but in most other films, there would be some desire for a movie to better tell us the “Why?” of everything, especially with something as bombastic and seemingly heavy with stakes as the opera house siege taking place. Again, all of that occurs even before the film’s title appears on-screen. Instead of offering any notable breathers, the film presses on. Tenet is a film all about fluctuating and changing with time and space. The Protagonist moves forward, while his quest focuses on people and objects moving backwards.
After we find out that he is alive, and that his mission is only now starting, The Protagonist meets with a scientist to see how that aforementioned backwards-firing bullet worked. It is through this that The Protagonist, and therefore the audience themselves, learn that this occurs through “inversion.” The bullet he’s shooting has been fired from a gun into a target with holes already in it, moving backwards from its target to the gun. It isn’t that he fires these bullets so much as he catches them.
The scientist explains the sensation in technical terms with the concept of entropy, but it is the blunt yet philosophical wording of what is happening that has undeniably stuck in the minds of just about anyone who has seen Tenet, whether they loved or loathed the movie: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”
“Time isn’t the problem. Getting out alive is the problem.”
Robert Pattinson plays a character named Neil, who initially shows up in the film seemingly out of the blue. Neil sits next to The Protagonist as someone simply meant for The Protagonist to meet for information and partnership during his mission. However, something about Neil is off, from the duo’s first few exchanged lines of dialogue to Neil’s body language.
Neil talks to The Protagonist like a friend would. We learn what is happening, just with further time to move forwards and backwards with these two men. What is happening between them is two events at once. For one of them, this is a first-time encounter. For the other person, this is just another means of interaction. We only learn the further implications of that later.
Their chemistry works from scene to scene because it is a give and take. They are meeting for the first time, while also taking comfort in that unspoken familiarity that is often impossible from a first meeting. This is the feeling of walking around with someone who you are meant to care about, and they engage in some wild action movie affairs, from hopping up a building with wires to crashing a plane into an airport to fight an inverted masked soldier. You know, as friends do.
The meeting of The Protagonist and Neil is the meeting of soulmates. I believe that when I watch every and any moment they share together on-screen. It is the feeling of someone who you may have been destined to be with, where you know that with time even if you do not think or understand it initially. There is a pit in your stomach and a flutter in your heart that first feels so it then can understand.
We had no idea how long this lockdown would last, and therefore how long the pandemic would. Here we were and where we really still are: A few days became a few weeks, which became a few months, and it’s now been over two years since this all started. Place yourself there, early on, well before a vaccine and without any conceivable notion that “normalcy” would be attained. What did you think, and how did you feel? Did you know the “Why?” behind it all?
Remember how slow those early days are. The first couple of weeks that may have felt like months. Think about how it went further on. How it just kept going. How it seemed like it would never stop, even if you wanted to reassure yourself that someday it would. Beyond the rise of social anxiety and the threats to physical health, time was the greatest victim of bastardization during this pandemic. Even if “normalcy” could be this thing we could return to within further time needing to pass, time itself was different.
Time is our currency from day to day that has turned blurry and slippery to the point of no longer being able to properly count it. We have placed discernable numbers on time, seconds, minutes and hours out of necessity. How can we manage to measure time now that it feels so different? How does it matter when a conversation can last a day and a moment can last a year?
Desire and hope drive us to think it can fully make sense again, but I acknowledge that it may not. That is where we are now. This is the “new normal.” But, for the confusion of time and space, and the ways in which we spend them, there is something that helps us better grasp it all. Where the desire for understanding can hold us back, the ability to feel pushes us forward. Our connection to feelings and the space to express helps pass, control, and think about time.
“You’re only halfway there. I’ll see you in the beginning, friend.”
The connection between Pattinson’s Neil and Washington’s Protagonist works for me. Really, it works shockingly well. It is overall, even above the aforementioned phenomenal film score or the measured and engrossing cinematography, the throughline for Tenet that makes it so special to me as a film. It’s the expressions between these two characters, a surprising pull of the “bodies and spaces” format of character-building that often is not Nolan’s flair, but harkens to the great late career films of one of Nolan’s major influences, Michael Mann.
I have often thought of Tenet as my equivalent to how others view the film Miami Vice. Both are films in which there are rules you could follow and tangible logic that you could focus on if you so desire, but the films themselves eventually demonstrate that these rules are secondary at all times. It’s the feelings that come first and the understanding that comes second.
In their final interaction, The Protagonist realizes where he has seen Neil before. On Neil’s backpack hangs a metal circle on a red string. This is the masked man who saved the life of The Protagonist during the opera siege, and he is the man that, during the film’s climax, gives his life to save The Protagonist one final time.
The Protagonist is the man behind the entire operation at the center of Tenet, therefore “The Protagonist” in every sense, and Neil has lived his whole life with The Protagonist as his best friend. With Neil having experienced this life with The Protagonist, he now marches to his death. The Protagonist experienced Neil’s death, and now will continue on to see Neil’s life.
This is reality. It’s fate, it’s love, it’s friendship, it’s life and death and every experience one can ever experience and know. These are two people who have managed to connect themselves over time and space. We see the finale and the opening at the exact same time. The beginning connects to the end. Life and death are not polar opposites. It is a circle on a string.
Movies have always been a love language for me, even in movies where “love” is not immediately apparent. I can love being angry and being sad under the right circumstances. I watch most movies on my own, and have gladly been able to do so when it comes down to that. But, there will always be that “movie magic” for theaters as a place to go to with others.
I want to “feel” with others.
Movies are undeniably changing in our current society. This change was perhaps already in motion, but COVID only sped up the transition from theaters with active audiences to television screens in solitude being the initial way to experience new films. Films are, or were, meant to be seen on a big screen with a large crowd. That is how they were invented to exist as. They are now experienced on a couch or in bed. I will never call that a bad thing. It is simply a change.
I do not want to discuss the strategy of Warner Bros. and Christopher Nolan pushing the release of Tenet possibly far too early than it should have been during the pandemic. Even if I did find this effort from Nolan and his studio overall noble to at least try, and it did certainly get me back in a theater when just about nothing else would have, that nervousness to the point of a hyper-awareness of my own breathing and senses during my theater viewing was undeniable.
Instead of going any further there, I am simply fascinated by the notable changes of how we experience, analyze, and talk and write about films in a post-COVID world. Tenet finished filming well before the pandemic, and had even conceptually been an idea in Nolan’s head for roughly twenty years. I then think Tenet speaks to the overall power of the artform, and time itself, with how a movie that technically predates the pandemic can affect me in the way that it did.
It is a mix of distinct personal attraction to this movie, while also believing that I am not alone. That is a lovely feeling. Believing I am not alone. It is not even just that someone sees me, but someone could even be in the past, putting up a frame, a screen, for me to look at and reflect on. I can connect with The Protagonist, his fights, his transformation, and Nolan does not even know who I am. He did not know that he would be releasing this movie and that I would be seeing it during a pandemic. But here we were, in some way, together.
I did not know the person I would become during the pandemic until it happened. No one asked for this to happen to them, but time is a circle. It is not the first worldwide pandemic, and it likely will not be the last. If time can move forwards, then who are we to say it cannot go backwards? We can think about who and what we used to be, even if memories are more dreams in our heads instead of snapshots from reality. Time and space move backwards like a gun catching a bullet.
“But it’s the bomb that didn’t go off, the danger no one knew was real, that’s the bomb with the real power to change the world.”
Things are better now, undeniably. For myself, for others. For the time being, mask mandates have been lifted, and a large chunk of the people in my country are vaccinated. This is that “new normal,” or at least truly a step towards it. Again, whatever “normal” ever even meant.
Things are better, but they are different. Time has changed. It’s strange, but I like to think that I understand it all better. I feel it all better.
A little over a year and a half on from having seen the film for the first time, and with four overall viewings of it under my belt now, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is the film that has connected me to and helped me through the fluctuations and uncertainties of the pandemic the most.
When I watch and even think about this movie, I think it touches on something truly visceral. There’s the beating in my heart that comes from that pulsating opening, the forward and backwards car chases, the forward and backwards fighting, the “temporal pincer movement” finale, and of course, following that, the heartfelt farewell between The Protagonist and Neil.
The kind of thing that’s more than just “a good movie” and enters the realm of “an experience.” It is a film that made hundreds of millions of dollars and has its assortment of fans, and I am both grateful for the people who love it too, as well as the people who just gave it a chance even if they ended up disliking their experience. Tenet has the type of blockbuster filmmaking that I wish was more common, a filmmaker being allowed the space to simultaneously experiment with something “new” while also boiling themselves down to the bare essentials of their appeal.
My greatest wish in regards to how other people engage with Tenet in the future is not to fall head over heels in love with it. I again acknowledge that my appeal towards this film is extremely personal and specific. Instead, I wish that it can be a springboard for other people to find themselves broadening their horizons with feeling-oriented cinema, big or small.
From directors considered “auteurs” or indie directors editing films out of their garage, I crave movies bold enough to propel themselves with such confident aesthetics and ambiance. Allow me to feel. Allow me to connect. Allow me to see something inside and under the surface of myself and movies that reminds me of the power that art possesses, how anyone can feel.
To the future, whatever may come, and however “time” may pass and change even more: posterity.
“Just saved the world. Can’t leave anything to chance.”
“But can we change things if we do it differently?”