62 THE NEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 14, 2020
the first blockbuster to be released for
public viewing since the reign of COVID-19,
it bears with it the hopes of an entire
industry. Will people rise from their
couches and, having weighed their crav-
ing for collective entertainment against
the risk to their health, flock once more
to the pictures?
Time will tell—although time, as
“Tenet” demonstrates, should not be
trusted. As of September 3rd, it is show-
ing in all but five states, New York and
California being two of the five. The
cavernous IMAX auditorium in Lon-
don in which I saw the movie was de-
cidedly unthronged; of more than seven
hundred seats, roughly a tenth were oc-
cupied. Studio accountants will soon
gather, muttering, around the box-office
returns, like ancient priests inspecting
the entrails of a sheep. What will count,
in such eager divination, is not “Tenet”
alone but the competing figures for
Disney’s “Mulan,” which, forgoing a
theatrical release, will be streamed into
the living rooms of American viewers,
at thirty dollars a pop.
What if “Mulan” cleans up, and
“Tenet” falls on its ass? Might other
filmmakers not cut their losses and switch
their loyalties to the small screen—that
homely and unmysterious shrine, where
nobody needs to sanitize? One could
argue that, given a year or two, and a
vaccine, we will return to our ticketed
seats and our sodas, but I can all too eas-
ily imagine a permanent failure of our
nerve. The idea of mustering in the dark,
among strangers, staring up at a bright
screen, and watching a story unfold has
been around for only a century and a
quarter, and our faith in it has been wan-
ing for decades; maybe Covid-19 will
complete the process. Some habits, once
broken, are never resumed.
Either way, whether “Tenet” winds
up as the savior of cinema or as the por-
tent of doom, it’s the right film for the
job. It both gleams with high-concept
modernity and gazes hungrily back at
earlier moviegoing joys. The old visual
thrill, long muted by mass tourism, of
seeing beautifully dressed characters
hop from one location to the next re-
ceives a peculiar boost, in these quar-
antine-ridden days, from Nolan’s ex-
travagant plot; O happy Protagonist,
swanning from London to Mumbai,
Tallinn, and the Amalfi Coast just when
the rest of us can’t! The lushest specta-
cle of all is that of Robert Pattinson,
who plays the Protagonist’s very Brit-
ish sidekick. He has a master’s in phys-
ics, a firm grasp of the Estonian lan-
guage, and a forelock for which the past
and the future might well, with good
reason, go to war. Ellen Page, with her
sportive smile, brought a leavening
amusement to Nolan’s “Inception” (2010),
and Pattinson, loucheness incarnate,
does the same for “Tenet.”
The problem that dogs this film is
not its complexity. Indeed, many fans
will delight in unpicking the clever clues
that stitch the tale together. No, what
strikes you is how determinedly bare
of feeling it seems, even when emo-
tional opportunities present themselves.
Thus, the Protagonist is drawn to Kat,
and you want them to want each other,
yet his efforts to rescue her from her
fiend of a husband, though noble, have
a procedural rather than a passionate
air. That dryness reaches into the small-
est nooks of the narrative; gold bars,
for instance, tumble from the belly of
the 747, clinking on the asphalt, but
when you think of the comparable mo-
ment at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s
“The Killing” (1956), in which stolen
banknotes are strewn beside a plane,
what you recall is the robber’s agonized
expression, as his ill-gotten gains swirl
away like moths in the night. No such
agony ever troubles “Tenet.”
Above all, there is Barbara’s in-
struction, as she ushers the Protago-
nist into the wonders of temporal in-
version. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel
it,” she says to him. The echo is clear:
“Do not try to understand. Just believe.”
That is what the hero of Cocteau’s “Or-
pheus” (1950) is told as he prepares to
pass through a mirror into the under-
world. Like Nolan, Cocteau sprinkles
his film with reverse-motion images,
but each one of them gives off a lyri-
cal shimmer, and when a dead woman,
lying on a bed, is ordered to rise, her
body springs to the perpendicular as if
reborn, and the hearts of viewers lurch
and lift in response. Although “Tenet” is
dazzling and deft, rarely does it pause, as
“Orpheus” does, to savor the strangeness
of its own creations. Does Christopher
Nolan flinch from what he might find
there, like someone afraid to analyze his
dreams? Maybe he hasn’t got the time.
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