Tenet

Originally published on 10/03/23 on Letterboxd

COWBOY SHIT

Finally seeing this the way I’ve wanted to see it for 3 years has probably rewired my brain in irreversible and disastrous ways. As much as I admire Interstellar’s sweeping cosmic melodrama, there’s really nothing in that film that appeals to me so singularly as two very attractive men in exquisite tailoring wrestling with backwards versions of themselves using backwards physics™️ to fight backwards. The operatics of movement here are so acute and so deeply grounded in its relative logics that they’re predictable down to the last movement, and yet the film never loses a sliver of the chaotic vigour that characterises its action. Eisensteinian rhythms aside, there’s a musicality to every movement that affords even the most brutish of gestures an enormity that stretches beyond the temporal limits of the scene- when a breath is exhaled or a magazine is loaded, an affirmation is spoken without words, communicating inscrutable yet unshakeable intent. Not since Cronenberg’s Crash has a film embodied the centrality of Bergsonian time-image so rigorously.

What I find so profoundly moving about this (in spite of its rejection of any vaguely human notions of warmth or longing until its final moments) is the fact that it is one of few, if any, science fiction works from the past decade to have any sort of clear-eyed engagement with the roots of speculative fiction: the imminent ecological decay that is practically immanent to every action we perform. The total eradication of the past in service of salvation for the future is not particularly novel in the realm of sci-fi, and yet the film’s grounding of this dialectic in climate apocalypse renders it a particularly unsettling iteration of this concept because it not only questions the precluding of an alternative future under the banner of hauntology so but also questions the underlying principle of the conservative logics of rationalism that runs throughout Nolan’s filmography.

Will probably have more to say about this when I get to see Oppenheimer, but I’m pretty confident that, now and forever, this is Nolan’s crowning work as an artist: a synthesis of genre governed by so many contradicting philosophies it collapses in on itself, leaving nothing but a furious audiovisual assault on the senses.