Returning to the Theater: Thoughts on Life, Cinema, and Christopher Nolan's Tenet
I last stepped foot inside a movie theater on February 8th.
My girlfriend and I were seeing Parasite. It was my second time seeing the film (the first of which came back in September at the Telluride Film Festival) and her first.
On February 9th, Parasite made history at the 92nd Academy Awards, taking home trophies for Best International Feature Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and of course, Best Picture.
Watching the Oscars is one of my worst habits. Every year I tune in to the self-aggrandizing award show, only to be disappointed by its tone-deaf, ill-conceived selections. The 2020 edition was not without such moments - Joaquin Phoenix over Antonio Banderas? Adam Sandler not even getting nominated? - but its recognition of Parasite, not to mention other important films like American Factory and Hair Love, made it the rare Oscars ceremony to actually get it right.
After inexplicably naming Green Book the best film of 2018, the Academy rejected traditional Hollywood filmmaking altogether and acknowledged that the best film of 2019 did not, in fact, come from the United States. It came from South Korea, from director Bong Joon-Ho, whose genre-bending films have long blurred the lines between blockbuster and social impact cinema.
And I couldn't have been prouder to enjoy the film one last time in the theater, just a day before its well-deserved onslaught of awards. That weekend was a momentous one for film. In early February 2020, I felt enormously proud to be a fan of cinema. Little did I know, cinema, as far as I loved and understood it, was about to take a very long hiatus.
In mid-March, movie theaters worldwide began to close in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I continued to watch movies. In fact, I watched a lot of movies. I watched some incredible movies. And yet, I can't confidently say that I enjoyed these movies the way I would have in the dark of the movie theater. These movies felt smaller. Quieter. I, as a viewer, was distracted, no matter how hard I tried to resist the vibrations of my phone or the whistling of the wind outside my apartment's windows.
I believe in the theater experience, and yet, when I returned to the movie theater on September 2nd to see Christopher Nolan's much-anticipated Tenet, I was conflicted.
Was I doing the right thing? Was it safe? Was it worth it?
Film critics that I greatly admire have openly warned against venturing to your local cinema just to see Tenet or any of the other recent releases, and these warnings dominated my mind during Tenet's cold open. The truth is, however, that my girlfriend and I felt overwhelmingly safe in that theater. We were the only ones in our row, and the theater was largely empty anyway. There were perhaps 8 or 9 other people in the theater, all spaced out, all masked, all fixated upon the giant screen in front of them. Our shared deprivation was nearly palpable, and even as we remained distanced from one another, our communal return to the movie theater practically connected each and every one of us.
That's something I've always loved about the movie theater. It's why I've always felt comfortable going to see movies by myself. In even the most empty of theaters, spectators' shared immersion in the film before them turns them into a family of sorts. Each member of a theater's audience sees their attention oriented towards the same screen, and as a miraculous result of this common perspective, are oriented towards one another as well.
It may sound like a dramatic assessment of a bunch of people sitting in a room together, but there is a genuine magic that exists in movie theaters worldwide, a magic that I dearly missed over the last several months.
And that, ultimately, is why I returned to the theater so quickly. If food, shelter, and water are all necessities in my life, film belongs on a list just beneath them. Without the theater experience, I spent the last several months feeling incomplete. And for reasons related but certainly not limited to anything to do with movies, I fell into a funk this summer. 2020 was supposed to be a year of celebration, and yet I am destined to recall it as one of deep, deep sadness.
Returning to the theater therefore became as much about my mental health as anything else. And again, I am grateful to report that my experience was a safe and pleasant one. Returning to the theater is certainly not a good idea everywhere or for everyone, but it is also not worthy of the anger or outrage it seems to be stirring up in some circles.
And if you’re looking for a reason to return to the sacred ground of the cinema, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better one than Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. It’s loud, messy, ambitious, ridiculous, confusing, and surprising all at once. It’s everything you could ask for in returning to the theater. I wouldn’t dare pretend that I understood all that I witnessed Wednesday night, but I can emphatically say that I had so much fucking fun.
Nolan is a difficult director to talk about. He’s one of my absolute favorites, but his filmography has become so tightly intertwined with a sort of “film bro” mentality that I often hesitate to embrace him wholeheartedly. In truth, I find Nolan to be a mightily accomplished filmmaker. Memento is one of my favorite films of all time, and I owe much of my film fanaticism to his Dark Knight trilogy, even if I struggle with their decidedly conservative politics. A political reading of Nolan’s films can certainly leave a bad taste in one’s mouth, but his exploration of complex questions surrounding time, memory, death, and grief is consistently thought-provoking and worthwhile. If anything, Nolan should be commended for combining metaphysical inquiry with blockbuster filmmaking. Of course, his ambition often requires him to overexplain various concepts, and that seems to be where a lot of the dissonance surrounding his body of work comes from.
If overexplaining isn’t your thing, then Tenet might be your worst nightmare. The film’s core, um, tenets, require a lot of clarifying dialogue, but I didn’t mind. Less tends to be more when it comes to good dialogue, but Nolan has mastered the art of explaining a heady concept via witty banter between two characters, progressing character and premise all at once. And while similar conversations in Inception or Interstellar often felt grating due to the very absurdity of their respective subjects, Tenet plays things a little differently. One could argue the film is less accessible for this reason, taking less time to slow down and explain its time-warping to its viewers. But for the first time in a long time, Nolan seems more willing to surprise and misdirect his audience. Sure, you could try to “solve” Tenet, but it’s a much more enjoyable experience if you just submit to its insane maneuvers and enjoy the ensuing ride. The film featured at least three distinct moments that genuinely shocked me. It’s a feeling that has been notably absent from cinema in recent years, but also one that Nolan has figured out how to deliver more so than any other.
And if you’re like me and continue to approach Nolan’s politics with a heavy dose of skepticism, Tenet just might be a pleasant surprise. Ever since offering his take on Batman, Nolan has widened the scope of his films, placing his narratives on a global stage and adopting the rich and powerful as his central characters. He took a break from this trend to take a disinterested look at small-town America with 2014’s Interstellar and indulge in some uniquely British patriotism with 2017’s Dunkirk, but makes a strong return to it here with Tenet. I miss the intimacy of films like Memento or The Prestige, but Tenet somehow marks a return to this approach as well.
While the film does span the globe and ogle at opulent displays of wealth, it adopts a more distant perspective. Nolan has made his admiration for wealth and power clear in films like Inception, where its much more interesting plot about a man trying to reunite with his family takes a backseat to a muddled feud between two bigwig CEOs. In Inception, Cobb must play ball with the wealthy if he hopes to see his kids again. It’s the beginning of Nolan’s admission that we’re all down here, and they’re all up there, but it also detects in corporate powers a benevolence that likely does not exist.
With Tenet, Nolan has fully embraced the idea that we as an audience are so far removed from the powers that be. Nolan’s viewers sit at the bottom of a power structure that situates global powers at the very top. Here, Nolan’s narrative and thematic interests feel more appropriately intertwined. The events of Tenet play out on a level to which the average citizen would never be privy, with the titular organization tasked with conducting a covert operation to prevent global catastrophe. The film therefore carries anxieties surrounding global warming and wealth consolidation. There are a few moments, albeit subtle ones, that engage with John David Washington’s The Protagonist's lack of wealth, and even the color of his skin. These moments may not be substantial, but they do reinforce the socioeconomic disparities that ultimately assign varying degrees of urgency to the sorts of questions that Nolan so often asks.
Nolan can’t help but fantasize about money and power, but he also is transforming the very nature of the questions he has been asking for years. Nolan’s laser-like focus on time has always been immersive, but not necessarily productive. With Tenet, he has stopped trying to find answers. Instead, he is asking questions. He is acknowledging that answers may not matter very much when true power lies at the very top of a structure that keeps us at the very bottom. There is, of course, a certain narcissism in Nolan’s filmmaking that places him atop his own viewers in this structure, but even this can be read as an honest, if disconcerting, admission. In truth, we are at the mercy of organizations like Tenet, so we should be asking questions alongside Nolan, but the answers can only get us so far.
Tenet may demand multiple viewings and may encourage viewers to rearrange its puzzle pieces, but its disorienting effect just might be the point. If you venture to the theater to see Tenet and leave it feeling overwhelmed or confused, that’s not a defeat. It’s a success.
It’s not for everyone, but I’ve always loved the feeling of being deceived, perplexed, or stunned by a film. Nolan’s detractors often cite his tendency to trick as a knock on his cinematic project, but it’s arguably his greatest strength. Struggling to fully grasp or understand a film is not a failure. In fact, it’s an essential part of digesting such films. Nolan has long tried to challenge our obsession with chronology and causal effect, and so I’ll always appreciate his attempts to subvert or surprise, noting his shortcomings along the way.
Much has been said about Nolan’s metaphysical explorations, but he doesn’t get enough credit for his confrontations of narrative and storytelling. Sure, his manipulations of time are certainly in service of some complex lines of questioning, but they are also attempts to further direct our attention towards how narratives are constructed. This became especially apparent with Dunkirk’s triptych storytelling, and was also evident in Memento, which inverted time long before Tenet did so. Memento, as well as The Prestige, laid bare its duplicity from the opening credits. On one hand, this kind of trickery is in line with Nolan’s directorial dick-swinging, but it also has prepared viewers for a film like Tenet. Nolan has given us the tools necessary to engage with complex narratives and to evolve our own sense of what a story can be, and he wants us to think of his films as training devices in this way. Why else would the protagonist of Tenet literally be called “The Protagonist?” Sure, every story has real-world implications, but they are still works of fiction, and Nolan hopes that we recognize and consider their status as such.
Now, if this all sounds interesting to you but you’re still hesitant to head to your local theater, have no fear. Netflix has a nice alternative for you in Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Unpacking that film would require a completely different writeup (as if this one hasn’t already turned into an overlong mess) but I recommend the film nonetheless. Unlike Nolan’s works, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is barely even a narrative film. It’s mostly experimental, or perhaps the label “art film” is most appropriate, as it has shades of Lynch but also Linklater. It will undoubtedly confuse, irk, and overwhelm anyone who dares to watch it, and the fact that this thing is available for anyone to just happen upon and watch delights me to no end. It’s a film about aging and depression and family and romance, but it’s even more so a film about stories, or at least a certain kind of story. A fantasy. It’s about the impossibility of realizing a fantasy, but also the beauty in fantasizing. Kaufman is celebrating storytelling while also cautioning against it. Who knew he and Christopher Nolan were so much alike?
Movie theaters are back, which means movies, real freaking movies just as god intended them, are back as well. I encourage anyone who feels comfortable to go support your local theater. It will overwhelm you. It will shock you. It will blow your mind and maybe even your eardrums. What could be better than that?