Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet”: Eternalistic Porn for the Masses
Christopher Nolan’s film “Tenet” was one of the most anticipated premieres this year, addressing the problem of time. However, the attraction presented to the spectator — shootings, explosions and catastrophes — only takes his (or her) breath away, and all the philosophical and scientific components are added to take this breath back for a couple of minutes.
According to the plot of the picture, the manic Russian oligarch Andrei Sator wants to help people from the future to destroy their own past, which for Sator’s contemporaries is the present. The Protagonist, who almost died during a terrorist attack staged by Sator’s mercenaries at the (fake) Kiev Opera, accidentally finds out about these plans. To prevent the oligarch, the Protagonist offers to help him rob a convoy of plutonium, which the SBU (State Security Service of Ukraine) transports from Kiyv to Tallinn.
The demonic Sator moves through time with the help of “turnstiles” and blackmails the Protagonist by killing his own wife Kate, with whom our hero has already fallen in love. The future, present and past are entangled in a tight knot, which the mighty Protagonist together with the beautiful Kate cut together, saving civilization from destruction. The plot sounds like a comics from the 1950s, doesn’t it?
The film is a spectacle for which the producers did not spare money (which is almost a quarter of a billion dollars!): here is the airliner crashes into the airport building in all possible shooting angles, and difficult races in the city center using a giant fire truck, and a grand explosion of a house and exciting attacks normal and time-inverted commando groups. Fans of exotics may like the shooting of terrorists with the Ukrainian Rapid Reaction Corps “Cord” of the National Police of Ukraine at the Kyiv Opera, which was filmed in Estonia. The music of composer Ludwig Göransson is especially commendable, which sounds so organic in the film that it sometimes seems like sounds from the inside of a fantastic organism. The plot of the picture is skillfully constructed in such a way that two and a half hours of screen time fly by like five minutes: the development of events is so fast that the viewer simply does not have time to follow it. Obviously, many viewers will need to watch Nolan’s film more than once.
The technical side of the picture is based on two concepts: the theory of the one-electron Feynman Universe and the philosophical concept of eternalism. In the spring of 1940, a Princeton student, Richard Feynman, called his professor John Wheeler, who told him, “Feynman, I know why all the electrons have the same mass and charge. Because they are all one and the same electron. ” Eight years later, Feynman developed a mathematical justification for quantum theory, in which an antiparticle is considered to be a particle moving back in time, and therefore the electron is a time-inverted positron.
The concept of eternalism states that all events of the past, present and future exist forever and do not disappear, but are located at a distance from each other in time, just as all objects are distant from each other in space. The opposite of eternalism is the concept of presentism, which states that there are only events of the present, events of the past disappear forever, and events of the future do not exist at all. Eternalism allows time travel to take place in the same way as space travel, and presentism denies the very idea of such travel.
Both concepts are purely speculative theories and have no experimental justification.
However, Nolan’s film “Tenet” does not delve into these concepts. The entire scientific and philosophical component of the picture can be placed in less than 1% of the screen time of the film. All the rest of the time there are explosions, shootings, shocking fights, races on expensive cars, a collision of an airplane with an airport building and other tricks from the arsenal of a banal action movie, which the film “Tenet” really is. However, the blockbuster is still not quite banal. This picture should be defined more precisely as a high-budget exploitation film.
Exploitation film belongs to the genre of cinema, which exploits a popular topic in order to make money quickly. The first exploitation films were quite cheap. Their goal was to attract the attention of the maximum audience and get the maximum profit with minimal investment. Now the situation has changed. Modern exploitation films receive hundreds of millions of dollars from producers. Tenet’s budget was $ 200 million, and the box office has so far reached only $ 341,6 million. The peculiarity of exploitation cinema is that it focuses on topics that are of most interest to people today. This is how films about cannibals, samurai, motorcyclists, drug addicts, armed girls, hippies, sex minorities, monsters, serial killers, women in a totalitarian prison appeared (hence, by the way, the aesthetics of the famous TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” based on the novel of Margaret Atwood) and so on.
Tenet is a hybrid of Warsploitation and Actionsploitation film. Warsploitation is a stereotypical military action movie, where the action takes place in distant exotic countries, and the hero has to rescue prisoners or steal documents from the enemy. A typical example is a series of movies about the adventures of John Rambo. Actionsploitation is an imitation of the blockbusters of the 1970s, where fiction is intertwined with martial arts, and the confrontation between the protagonist and the thief becomes just grotesque tension. This thunderous cocktail is always accompanied by a touch of romantic melodrama in the form of the hero’s love for a bright beauty to attract attention and open the wallets of the female part of the audience as well.
The difference between the film “Tenet” and the two above mentioned standard genre clichés is that it focuses on several major phobias of today:
- Fear of the future
- Fear of high-tech terror
- Fear of crazy Russian oligarchs.
The task of an exploitation movie is (unlike the usual one, which by aesthetic means draws the viewer’s attention to important issues of the present) by pressing the phobia buttons to evoke in the viewer a powerful mental reflex and the habit of repeating it regularly in the future. Thus, the audience does not join the special artistic vision of the artist — the author of the picture — but only gets hooked on the narcotic needle of an emotional stimulus. This is not a movie, but a physiological experiment with Pavlov’s dog, which has the opportunity to enjoy the contents of his bucket with popcorn. In essence, “Tenet” is a kind of porn film, where sexual acts have been replaced by shootings and explosions, because war still brings much higher profits than love.
Another important feature of the exploitation movies is that their characters are moving puppets without personalities and characters, because such details would require additional concentration, and the crazy pace of the action (and hence — the box office) would be threatened.
