Tenet
Which came first? The Chicken or the Egg?
The answer … both.
If any of you out there got this Watchman reference, bravo to you most of this post will probably be reiteration of what you already know to be true. To those of you who answered Chicken or the Egg, get ready for a reality check.
The reality we live in is a tiny tiny slice of the universe that we live in. We are quite literally ants, unable to see a dimension that controls everything we do. That dimension is time.
From the moment we are born we are spoon fed the idea of a past, present, and future. The idea that all these concepts are distinct entities that flow from one to the next. The past is created in the present, the future is not yet created since it has not yet happened. Once the future arrives, it is the present, then the past. And on and on this linear flow of times goes until we die. There is a beginning. There is a middle. And there is absolutely an end.
This idea is absolutely wrong. Special relativity introduced by Einstein completely shatters this traditional idea. True the way that we experience time can be described by the paragraph above, but this is simply because we are 3 dimensional beings. The reality of it is that there is no future, there is no past, and there certainly is no present in the way we understand it. Time exists in a continuum, it is not created or destroyed, it does not happen, it just exists.
Sit back and think about this for a second. The implications are vast. It implies you sitting here reading this blog post are at this same moment somewhere in spacetime being born and also dying. You are having your first kiss and feeling the last embrace of a loved one. Your death. Your birth. Everything is happening, it hasn’t happened, it will not happen, it is all happening.
So then why can’t we see it? Why don’t I feel like I am dying? Why don’t I feel like I’m being born? Why am I stuck in this sliver of reality where spacetime in front of me is fed to me in a constant linear stream? This is because as I stated earlier we are ants. Ants live in a two dimensional existence. All ants know is forward and backwards. An ant would tell us that is all there is: there is just a forward and backwards. We would probably blow the ant’s mind by telling it that no, there is also an up and down. The ant lives in a 2 dimensional projection of a 3 dimensional universe. Same thing for us, we live in a 3 dimensional projection of a 4 dimensional universe. We are all ants in 3 dimensions.
So what does a 4 dimensional being look like? Probably no different than us. But the difference is that what is the “future” and “past’ to us is just hills and valleys to this 4 dimensional beings. Meaning just as we can walk up a hill, these beings can also walk up a hill to their birth, walk down a valley to their death. It’s all the same to them. Time is happening. It is always happening. It isn’t created. It exists in an instantaneous continuum.
Tenet is a movie created in a 4-dimensional perspective, not 3-dimensional. That is why most of the movie is difficult to understand because just as you show ants what height looks like if you show us the true nature of time, we just shake our heads and scoff at something that we can’t see and thereby can’t actually exist.
Christopher Nolan has done it again with a movie that completely goes beyond expectation giving audiences art that forces us to go outside our comfort zone and view our world in a new perspective. Nolan loves playing with time, dipping his toes in Inception, expanding into special relativity with Interstellar, and now completely immersing himself with Tenet.
The point of it is, there are two protagonists, maybe even more at different parts of the movie. We view the movie through a slice in a 3 dimensional perspective, following one iteration, one line of the protagonist as he moves through spacetime. However, at the end of the movie it is revealed that it is the protagonist that set up the whole operation, that recruited Neil, Priya, and everyone else setting this all in motion. How? If he was the one that did this, then why doesn’t he remember what he did in the past?
Now if I go into the past, just like Avenger’s Endgame, that past becomes my future. Two copies of me can exist at one time, one moving from the past to the future and another moving from the future to the past, the copy moving from the past to the future doesn’t know what will happen in the future even though that future lies in the past. Sit down and think about this for a bit if it doesn’t make sense to you, as it forces you to think outside the limited 3D perspective.
This is exactly what is happening here. After the end of the movie, the protagonist, now with all the knowledge, has a future in the past. He goes into the past and recruits Neil, Priya, and sets all the events into motion that leads to the movie that we see. The protagonist eventually meets his end in the past, but not before sending Neil, Priya, the CIA agent guy, all of it into motion to pull himself back into the fray. The whole movie, everything is just one large temporal pincer movement. Absolutely Brilliant!
Now I can guess what you are thinking, which came first? Did the protagonist go back in time first and teach Neil or did Neil teach the protagonist first? But that can’t be possible since Neil only learned about the truth from the protagonist… The paradoxes go on and on in this movie, but these paradoxes simply do not exist. They exist in our 3-dimensional understanding of the world. Neil didn’t teach anyone first, the protagonist did not first go back in time and then not, it all happens at the same time. It all happens simultaneously, nothing is created, there just is a continuum.
Spooky, then another question that pops up is if you know what will happen in the past then can’t you change that? No. What has happened has happened. Reality exists, it isn’t created. So is there any free will? Again missing the point, we still act to create reaction by our own volition, just because it is all already happening by infinite copies of ourselves at different points in spacetime doesn’t mean we didn’t choose for any of it to happen. But regardless of what we choose, it is happening. Deciding whether to eat out or in? Regardless of what you decide, it is happening. You are eating that Chinese Takeout you eventually decide to eat or you are eating those heated up dumplings.
Tenet is a rare movie created by people who understand this truth to a deep level and gives us a glimpse of the universe in the way it actually exists. This is something I strive to do, but far too often does society just pull us into the old way of thinking. Everything is so organized behind the concepts of there being a past, a future, and present, it is hard to pull away. However, while watching Tenet there are glimpses when we are invited away from this way of thinking, and for once truly see the beauty inherent in our cosmos. Nolan has done it yet again, creating a movie that I will be thinking about for years to come. He is truly one of the great filmmakers of our generation.
