Based Upon a Book That Hasn’t Been Written Yet: Tenet

The best and worst thing I can think to say about Tenet, a film based upon a book that hasn’t been written yet, is that it is very, very Christopher Nolan. It’s arguably peak Nolan at a time when that seems least needed. “Big movies are back”, I recall one trailer announcing proudly, even though I think thematically Nolan wold have been better off to rerelease Following, which is the Nolan film we need right now, even if Tenet is the one we deserve.

Tenet curves out of the projector like the bullets in Wanted: smoothly and improbably. The film shows us that the secret Big Idea that connects the films of the Nolan project is convolution, that same quality for which he is derided by critics and against which defenders brace his oeuvre by explaining just what happens in Inception and why it totally, totally makes sense.

But for Nolan, it doesn’t have to make sense. While the Tenet feels most like a spiritual sequel to Inception, the film more closely embodies the principle behind what is probably Nolan’s best film, The Prestige: ideas (confusion) triumph over material (cohesion). In that film, one magician makes the illusion real, and the other makes the real illusory. To Nolan, one is more powerful than the other. Visual and narrative trickery abound in Tenet, amounting to the admission that narrative confusion is not a side effect but an endgame. That’s Christopher Nolan’s magic trick.

Approaching Nolan’s films as puzzle boxes to be solved, Hellraiser-style, that one might gain entrance to some secret psychosexual world, is to fall for the trick, or at least to mistake Nolan for David Lynch. Nolan’s films are squeaky clean convolution designed to comment upon the very idea of creating or solving a complex story. Nolan creates narrative Rorschach tests, not maps. If your reaction is to dismiss his films, then you may be the type to answer that you see in the inkblots “a Rorschach test”.

The single best piece of commentary on Nolan’s work is the South Park episode “Insheeption”, a brilliant parody of Nolan’s work and its reliance on setup overload and narrative loose ends. Tenet follows in the footsteps of “Insheeption”, but with stuff that moves backwards sometimes. If you love Christopher Nolan, you’ll probably love Tenet. If you hate Christopher Nolan, Tenet is proof that he doesn’t care.

I caught Tenet at an outdoor screening. It was a compromise with myself: I still refuse to see an indoor movie, but a screening on the lawn of The Lyric might be justifiable. Or maybe that’s just a weak excuse for my desire to sit in a darkened area with nothing but a screen in front of me for two and a half hours. The moviegoing experience has long been essential to my sense of self. Without it I feel lost. Tenet gave that back to me.