Sunday Pages: "Tenet"

A film by Christopher Nolan

Dear Reader,

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice indicted two Russian nationals—Kostiantyn “Kostya” Kalashnikov, 31, and Elena “Lena” Afanasyeva, 27—for conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment contends:

According to the court documents, RT, formerly known as Russia Today, is a state-controlled media outlet funded and directed by the Government of Russia. Over at least the past year, RT and its employees, including Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, deployed nearly $10 million to covertly finance and direct a Tennessee-based online content creation company (U.S. Company-1). In turn, U.S. Company-1 published English-language videos on multiple social media channels, including TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube. Since publicly launching in or about November 2023, U.S. Company-1 has posted nearly 2,000 videos that have garnered more than 16 million views on YouTube alone. Many of the videos posted by U.S. Company-1 contain commentary on events and issues in the U.S., such as immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy. While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, most are directed to the publicly stated goals of the Government of Russia and RT — to amplify domestic divisions in the United States.

“U.S. Company-1” is an outfit called Tenet Media, owned by a Canadian YouTuber and conservative (read “pro-Kremlin”) political commentator named Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan. Tenet Media doled out princely sums to its “talent”— MAGA YouTube personalities like Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, Tayler Hansen, Lauren Southern, and Tim Pool. The latter is the most famous, on account of never doffing his signature beanie, even if wearing a suit. (This probably has less to do with vanity about his Hunter S. Thompson hairline and more about the fact that without the cap, Pool is the spitting image of a middling Kremlin bureaucrat circa 1982.) I’d say you can go check out Tenet Media’s YouTube channel to learn more, except that YouTube nuked said channel for violating terms of service. What’s Russian for “oops?”

This is a lot of detail to process on a Sunday morning, so let me summarize: Russian nationals working directly for Moscow underwrote an entire ratfucking operation of American and Canadian rightwing media personalities. That shitheel Tim Pool was clearing a hundred grand per episode. If Pool & Co. knew they were taking Kremlin money, they are traitors; if they didn’t know they were taking Kremlin money, they are idiots—useful idiots, but idiots just the same.

What jumped out at me is that the company, which was set up before the midterms in 2022, is named Tenet. The logo plays on the word’s palindromic properties:

A covert Russian active measure called Tenet can only be an allusion to the 2020 Christopher Nolan film of the same name—a film whose villain is a rich, powerful, sadistic, and psychotic Russian oligarch who wants, and has the means, to end the world.

—Nuclear holocaust?
—No. Worse.

Tenet was released late in the summer of the pandemic. It cost an unfathomable amount of money to make, and despite turning a profit, was considered something of a bust relative to expectations. I generally find Nolan’s films (Memento, Inception, and, more recently, Oppenheimer) to be ponderous and pretentious, and from what I could gather four years ago, Tenet was the most ponderous and most pretentious of them all. Word of mouth was poor, at least in my little world. My son went to see it in the theater and left after half an hour, bored out of his skull. My standard joke was, “When I go to hell, as soon as they hand me a cup of hazelnut coffee, they will make me watch Tenet.”

I was turned on to the movie a few years ago by my friend Zarina Zabrisky, who was, at the time, just beginning her coverage of the war in Ukraine. “Oh, you have to watch it, Greg,” she told me. “It is about Putin.”

And so, on her recommendation, I did, and was surprised to find that I liked it very much. It is both ponderous and pretentious, as Nolan cannot resist being; the running time is half an hour too long, and in a film that tackles time travel using mini-lectures on quantum physics and grandfather paradoxes and temporal pincer movements, he makes the infuriating artistic decision to bury the dialogue so low in the mix that you can’t hear a goddam thing anyone says, necessitating the use of closed captions. But the story, the central conceit, the brilliant cast, and the incredible action sequences overcome these deficiencies. This is easily the best of Nolan’s films of this vintage, last year’s Oscar winner included.

In light of the Tenet Media bust, I decided to re-watch Tenet—yesterday’s was my fourth viewing—through the lens of Millennial Russian propagandists, to see what might be gleaned. I will try to avoid spoilers, but honestly, I could tell you exactly what happens and it won’t really matter.

This is the official logline for the film:

Armed with only the word “Tenet” and fighting for the survival of the entire world, CIA operative, The Protagonist, journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a global mission that unfolds beyond real time.

Here’s a less Nolan-y synopsis:

A secret agent is given a single word as his weapon and sent to prevent the onset of World War III. He must travel through time and bend the laws of nature in order to be successful in his mission.

Like the content put forth by the Kremlin-backed media company, the film is a mindfuck. All time travel stories are mindfucks, but Nolan seems to delight in it. I’m either not smart enough or too lazy of a viewer to say for certain what is actually happening—which events are playing out in linear, and which in inverted, time. As far as the plot goes, few people on earth are read into all the time travel stuff. They identity each other by a gesture, and the sort of password “tenet,” and by knowing the first and second parts of the phrase, “We live in a twilight world, and there are no friends at dusk.”

(See? Pretentious.)

The nameless Protagonist—played wonderfully by John David Washington, Denzel’s son, a former professional football player who bears a striking resemblance to Kawhi Leonard—is both the conductor of this space/time orchestral adventure and also, in the version we’re watching, ignorant of it, not unlike the main character in Memento. The impossibly handsome Robert Pattinson plays Neil, Washington’s (ahem) partner in time, his dashing presence indicating that this is indeed a Twilight world. Neil holds a Master’s in Physics, which gives Nolan an excuse to wax theoretical.

—But cause comes before effect.
—No, that’s just how we see time.

As best as I can tell, Tenet is the bootstrap paradox in the form of a Hollywood blockbuster. The bootstrap paradox is so called because of a short story by Robert Heinlein exploring this idea, namely: that the laws of causality are blown up when the events in the future cause things that have already happened. This is also known as a causal loop.

—Tenet wasn’t founded in the past. Tenet will be founded in the future.

Tenet—and here I am spoiling it a bit, perhaps—is, best as I can tell, the name for the futuristic superweapon being sent back in time to end the world—or, at least, to kill off enough of the humans who caused the oceans to rise and the rivers to run dry many decades hence to arrest climate change. Pieces and parts of the future’s arsenal emerge in the here and now via a series of “turnstiles,” which are basically portals or, if you will, time machines. These things are “detritus of a coming war,” explains a character who shows up exactly once to hip The Protagonist, and us, to what’s what. “A nuclear weapon can only affect our future. An inverted weapon can also affect our past.”

See what I mean? Mindfuck.

What strikes me most about Tenet is Nolan’s eerily prescient political sensibilities. The villain, Andrei Sator, played with terrifying menace by Kenneth Branagh, is a Russian oligarch, who operates as a “broker” between the present moment and the future people who want us all dead. The opening scene is a bunch of private Russian special forces occupying a concert at the Kyiv Opera House: violent agents of Moscow, disrupting the music, destroying art, killing innocent Ukrainians at the whim of their madman ruler—a scene shot two years before Putin’s invasion. The title of the film on the original movie poster is printed sideways, so the N looks like a Z—a letter that would have ominous Kremlin connotations two years later. Too, the assemblage of the nine Infinity Stones parts of the futuristic doomsday device is called the algorithm. But then, we always sensed that the algorithm would be the death of us all.

Other sequences take place at a freeport in Oslo, where libertarian billionaires store their artwork and other prized possessions to avoid paying tax on their gaudy acquisitions; on a yacht with a heliport off the Amalfi coast; and in the most exclusive dining club in London, where The Protagonist, in the film’s best scene, encounters a British aristocrat with intelligence connections played obligatorily by Michael Caine—who tells our American hero that, if he plans on passing himself off as a billionaire, “Brooks Brothers won’t cut it.” He then offers to recommend a tailor, which The Protagonist declines:

—You British don’t have a monopoly on snobbery.
—Not a monopoly. More of a controlling interest.

Another way to describe the film is: an American and a Brit, aided by a French scientist and an Indian arms dealer, join forces to thwart a plan by an evil Russian to destroy the world—and save a damsel in distress.

The critic Jessica Kiang distils Tenet to its essential components in her deliciously clever New York Times review:

Indeed, take away the time-bending gimmick, and “Tenet” is a series of timidly generic set pieces: heists, car chases, bomb disposals, more heists. But then, the lie of Nolan’s career has been that he makes the traditionally teenage-boy-aimed blockbuster smarter and more adult, when what he really does is ennoble the teenage boy fixations many of us adults still cherish, creating vast, sizzling conceptual landscapes in which all anyone really does is crack safes and blow stuff up.

But gosh, does he blow stuff up good.

All of that is true. I generally could care less about care chases and stuff like that, but Tenet does it so well. Part of what draws me to the movie is that the “stuff” our partners “get up to” is just really really cool.

But I disagree with her main contention: that the film lacks heart. True, I had to watch it a few times to get to that point, but I did find myself, as The Protagonist ties up loose ends, being genuinely moved. The damsel has been saved! And the world! The present has defeated the future!

Who knows? Maybe the causal loop is the best way forward (while simultaneously being the best way backward). One way to guarantee the survival of the species is to constrain time, such that everything always exists between Point A and Point B—like the snippet of an operatic score between the two musical repeat signs, 𝄆 ——— 𝄇.

But in the big picture—and Tenet is nothing if not a big picture!—what does it matter? Kiang is also right about what she calls “the brittleness of its purported braininess.” As a blockbuster, Tenet is rousing, if confusing, stuff. As a meditation on quantum physics, it’s merely an expensive, performative troll—not unlike the media company that appropriated its palindromic name.

There’s a scene in the middle of the film where The Protagonist goes through the turnstile, emerging in the past as an inverted version of himself. Preparing him for this space/time journey, the technician explains the physics of it: “The world is moving backwards. You are not.”

The same can be said of us, in the here and now. Trump, Putin, and their retrograde allies are moving backwards. We are not. And time is on our side, along with art, science, compassion, empathy, fairness, concern for the planet, and human decency. You know: the tenets of democratic society.

---

ICYMI

On The Five 8 this week, LB and I discuss all things Russia, both the here and now and the 2016/17 period.