Thoughts on “Tenet”
Tenet operates as an amalgamation of Hollywood action movie trappings. It runs like a precise machine, all the action scenes slickly choreographed, the dialogue like nothing a real person would ever say, the music adrenaline-fuelled and dripping with acceleration. If you do nothing but pay attention to what a scientist tells the protagonist in an early scene — “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” — you’ll have a good time.
But there is something hollow at the film’s core. Tenet weaves together all these Hollywood action tropes (the Russian bad guy who wants to destroy the world, car chases, heists, run and gun action sequences, hand-to-hand combat) around something unique and interesting — a take on time travel not seen in Hollywood before, as far as I’m aware. It does all this with slick ease and precision. But at the end of the day — this is all it does. It is nothing but spectacle, miraculously performed spectacle, but only that. Who can say they ever really cared about the fates of the characters, or even the world, in Tenet?
Tenet is a film blindingly about, and more importantly of, capital, in all its spectacle, enticement, nausea, desire, speed, and inhumanity.
Empty Signifiers and The Spectacle
Tenet takes the violence, the shooting, the car chases, the one-liners of Hollywood action films, and elevates them to the grace and precision of something like a ballet. One thinks, of course, of the fight in the Oslo freeport and the inverted car chase, each move neat and needed because you are going to watch it in reverse later — but this precision is present even in the opening scene at the opera, in the way the protagonist’s team smoothly joins the waves of armed police at exactly the right moment. Everything, it feels, is running on time.
The effect of this is a very satisfying watch. It seems, during these action sequences, that nothing is wasted. There is an economy of motion.
What is the meaning of all this? Nothing but enjoyment. It’s like watching a fire, or a highly performant athlete, or the Formula One. It’s getting lost in the speed and the intricacy of the thing. I think of certain right accelerationist tendencies that valorise the manic intensity of capital and flows of commodities, and privilege the inhuman outside. (And one has to remember this kind of speed is only possible — in the really existing world — because of the kind of capital at Hollywood’s disposal.) Sheer spectacle.
Talk about spectacle: the world and characters of Tenet feel unreal, modelled not on any part of ‘reality’ (whatever is meant by that), but on decades of bland but slick Hollywood action movies — think the 2000s Die Hards, Mission Impossible, James Bond sequels, John Wick. These films themselves modelled on earlier action films, westerns, a tradition of impossible hyper-violent masculine images leading back to the advent of cinema.
This image of people and the world rooted in no such thing as reality is perhaps even more apparent in the dialogue. The characters are almost self-aware that the entire thing is a movie, a performance. Lines like, “I’m the protagonist of this whole operation” and “Don’t think about it too hard”, and even Neil’s monologues about time travel and paradoxes, are all impossible to imagine a real person ever saying. The dialogue feels like “text at sample velocity,” pithy one liners and call and response rapid fire exchanges without thought.
Even the one vaguely human relationship, that of Kat and her son, feels empty, shoehorned in. This is besides the fact that Kat’s own character seems unnecessary, as if Christopher Nolan remembered halfway through writing the film that there should be a woman in it. Her character arc occurs solely at the behest of the protagonist, and, in the end, is almost unnecessary to the resolution of the plot.
A lot of the film’s criticism was levelled at its sound mixing, with the dialogue inaudible; and many were confused by the plot. But isn’t it interesting that this is a film one could enjoy without either of these things? That one could submit to dialogue as sheer noise, plot as unnecessary framework for violence and speed?
Everything in Tenet, visual, audible, and plot-wise, is an empty signifier. The people look and sound like people, until you pay attention to what they are saying, and realise everything about them is hollow. The Russian villain is no longer Russian because of tensions between the US and the Soviets, but because the Russians have been the villains in Hollywood for decades, and because Sator needed a nationality so why not make him Russian? The Gary Stu protagonist’s demeanour and skills an amalgamation of every male action hero from the past few decades (and isn’t it telling that he is nameless?). All the trappings of the ultra-rich — opera houses, hydrofoils, yachts, freeports — signs of a world nobody really existing in society, and certainly nobody watching the film, has ever inhabited.
All these things refer back only to Hollywood itself, to the empty body of the central source of the spectacle, in Guy Debord’s sense. The same can be said, admittedly, of almost all Hollywood films, but Tenet’s mastery of this empty form comes from the fact that it performs this role without any pretence to being something other, or with such little pretence that it is easy to forget. It becomes easy to lose yourself in the spectacle because of this.
Two Kinds of Money
Debord says that the spectacle exists as the means and end of the really existing mode of production in society. One suspects then that Tenet, as spectacle par excellence, might have some relation to capital.
There is one scene in particular that come to mind.
PROTAGONIST He knows? And he’s never done anything about it?
KAT Why would he?
PROTAGONIST He paid nine million dollars –
KAT Which would barely cover the holiday he just forced us on.
PROTAGONIST Where’d you go — Mars?
KAT Vietnam. On our yacht. His yacht.
Kat looks the Protagonist up and down…
KAT (CONT’D) You’ve got the suit. The shoes, the watch. But I think you’re a little out of your depth.
First — it feels disingenuous that the protagonist’s character would not understand how nine million dollars could amount to nothing, having presumably spent decades in the world of international espionage. But ignoring that and assuming he’s playing the role of the audience insert more transparently here — this conversation and the concept of a kind of wealth in which nine million doesn’t even figure brings to mind something in Anti-Oedipus, where Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari talk about two kinds of money, wages/salary vs. finance.
Finance is the kind of money that does things, that structures production and has power. Finance is what produces a movie like Tenet, produces the whole spectacle of which Hollywood is merely a part. In contrast, the money which the average person is granted as wages or salary has value only as purchasing power, only in relation to an imposed range of consumer products. The former has the power to determine the very means of production and life of a society; the latter is powerless in the face of it. There is a threshold where money flips from wages to finance. This threshold is quantitative itself, but marks a qualitative shift.
What the protagonist fails to understand is the line at which this threshold is crossed. For him it seems that nine million is a sum capable of great things — journeys to Mars for example. It is a sum that to him is mind-bogglingly huge. And no doubt it is a large amount of money. But the entire global film apparatus makes more than one hundred billion a year.
The difference is that nine million is a sum to which the average person seems life changing, but in the context of the wider system, is capable of changing nothing at all. Speaking from within the perspective of capitalism, it is finance solely which is capable of acting. It is finance as capital that determines what working conditions people must live under, what new products they must purchase in order to live within the spectacle, what bizarre cross-pollutions of life and work they must undergo. Your wages help you survive or purchase experiences (nine million and a trip to Vietnam) in this pseudo-natural order, but will do nothing to change it.
I mentioned, briefly, before, certain right accelerationist tendencies that valorise the speed and violence of capital, that see in it a cyber-positive future. To be clear, capital is not capable of qualitatively changing capitalism, just the conditions of what gets produced within it. It determines the means of production, determines structures, determines power distributions, but it cannot go beyond itself. It is a mistake to think that the further ongoing erosion of life by capital, the further reduction of things and time and people to abstract units of money, could ever somehow flip to a liberatory act, rather than the endless creation of more images of things, gadgets, and experiences that we must purchase with wages. A film like Tenet makes this abundantly clear — in its hollowness one finds only capital for its own sake, speed for its own sake, humans reduced to vessels for an intoxicating but dehumanising experience.
Money, whether as wages or capital, is not able to change the world. Is anything?
Time and capital
Of course, it is impossible to talk about Tenet without turning to the central gimmick, a mode of time travel which, as far as I’m aware, is unique in media, or at least Hollywood.
Time is presented in Tenet as a navigable space, something which can be traversed forward or backward, as one might sail up or down a river. The events or landmarks in this stream always remain the same, regardless of how many times an actor winds or rewinds the clock. Everything is already decided — and so despite the script’s attempts to convince us to “stop thinking in linear terms”, as if to imagine time as somehow more dynamic than the extant model of progressive time, what arises is an image of time in which events are infinitely static, all possibility of change already foreclosed by the nature of temporal navigation.
This is the time of all Hollywood story-telling, in which events always have significance, fit just right no matter whether read forward or backward, everything culminating just as it should for the neat ending, the wrap up, the conclusion of the story. It’s in the nature of events in a Hollywood story to slot together, everything happening for a reason to drive the events forward, to set the characters up for the next plot beat, to set the good guys up to win.
So nothing is new in Tenet, but it appears more obvious because things cannot be contingent anymore when time is understood in this way. In a normal Hollywood story, one can imagine that everything was a series of coincidences, that the outcome was a question of luck or skill on the part of the characters (rather than pre-decided by the writer’s room or the demands that the status quo prevail in every big superhero film). In Tenet, everything always had to happen exactly this way, all the events decided from the beginning of time, from the very start when we see Neil save the protagonist at the opera. In this way, the unfolding of actual events doesn’t matter very much, when everything is already set. Neil tries to reassure the audience that free will is still important: “What’s happened, happened. Which is an expression of fate in the mechanics of the world. It’s not an excuse to do nothing.” But in the end — the mechanics of the world, the structure of time itself, have already decided what outcomes are not only possible, but inevitable.
How does this model of time weigh up to the time we experience under capitalism? The idea that events don’t make a difference, that the outcome, the future, is already decided, is all pervasive. Capital is able to subsume anything that might disrupt the orderly dissolution and abstraction of all things into commodities — one thinks of the presence of May 1968 in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and in recent memory we see the global financial crisis, coronavirus, and the looming shadow of climate crisis, all having done nothing to stop the onrushing tide of capital and GDP growth. The structure of time and the structure of capital seem coterminous. This structure manages all these events and decides the outcome as soon as they occur, which is the prevailing of the status quo, and the impossibility of divergence from the progressive, abstract, commodity time of capital. Either the climate crisis or the pandemic will get us — it’s all been determined from the beginning.
In the case of Tenet, of course, the predetermined outcome is that the good guys win — that the good guys will always win, no matter how many paths the villains and heroes trace backwards and forwards in time. Just like in ‘real life’, everything done leads to exactly this: the status quo. Of course it does — it’s Hollywood, and the only people who ever want to change the world are the bad guys.
Conclusions
So. Despite all this I love Tenet. Because of all this I love Tenet.
I think of Mark Fisher’s 2012 essay Terminator vs. Avatar. Quoting Jean-Francois Lyotard, he talks about the idea that capital can be enjoyable, is disgusting because of that enjoyment but enjoyable nevertheless. “The hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion of hanging on in the mines[.]” The enjoyment in Tenet is quite different to the proletarian enjoyment Fisher and Lyotard are talking about, yet I think the two must be related.
Tenet is slick, clean, refined, and completely empty. It’s not a world you could live in. It is devoid of humanity. But perhaps I like it for exactly that reason. Because it lets you live in the fantasy that maybe all this suffering might be enjoyed — if only you could just submit yourself to the machine a little better, if you could just divest yourself of all that hates and suffers under capitalism, if you could just let go of your own humanity, if you could let go of your sense of morality — if you could just let go of all that unnecessary baggage, you might actually be able to enjoy capitalism, with all its speed, heat, violence, and noise. At least until you step outside the cinema.
