Tenet: Music
This post is a lot like the music breakdown I did for Joker, so feel free to read that post before checking this one out! Also read the explanation of Tenet before reading this otherwise a lot of this won’t make sense.
Movie music is frustrating to listen to and curate. I’ve listened to hundreds of tracks from countless movies and after a while it all starts to blend together. The hero’s theme. The love theme. The sad theme. Whatever. But once in a while I have the privilege to listen to something truly original and inventive. As a movie music fanatic I hunger for these moments, and though exceedingly rare, the wait is always worth. Tenet’s score by Ludwig Göransson is one of those rare moments.
You may know Ludwig from his other work in The Mandalorian or Black Panther. However, in most of his past work he has been constrained from truly embracing his craft. Tenet is Ludwig’s first and hopefully not last work where he was allowed to truly explore and experiment.
Movie music cannot be understood on its own. When you listen to Inception’s soundtrack. Sure Time may sound like an interesting piece of music, but the voices, the melodies really don’t speak to you since you don’t understand the context.
When I first listened to Tenet’s music this is precisely what happened. I just heard weird noises that repeated themselves. It all seemed disjointed, empty, and non existent. But listening again after having watched and understood the movie, the music is beautiful. It tells the tale of the protagonist so poignantly. Beyond the random noises, Tenet’s music tells its own story of a man thrust into a new reality while battling his own demons but ultimately emerging as a new man, the protagonist. Who is the protagonist? Someone who does not question or go insane at the existence of all reality but rather accepts whats happened has happened and moves forth, not afraid, but with resolve.
RAINY NIGHT IN TALLINN
This is the music that plays right at the beginning of the movie. This score serves to introduce all the themes that are carried throughout Tenet. Right at the beginning we are hit with a loud bang, bang, noise overlaying a techno-like noise that is trying to get out. As the seconds pass this techno-like noise continues its battle against the noise getting louder and louder and dominating more.
This techno melody that is trying to get out represents reality knocking. The 4-dimensional perception starting to bleed into the 3D. The protagonist coming to realize that something in his existence isn’t right. That bullet he saw went backward. The backpack with that little trinket on it. Something is not right, but the protagonist struggles to understand and accept the reality that is underneath. The reality that time exists in a continuum, doesn’t flow forward or backward, but just exists.
Around 4:30 the music resets as it builds by 5:30 again with the techno battling the constant beating of drums. The drums representing that steady march of time that we all must adhere to, the techno interrupting the drums going forward and backwards, in and out, representing the true nature of time, flowing instantaneously forward and backward in a constant existence. And by 6:00 we hear the rise of the horn-like sounds. The wailing cry of all of it compounding in the protagonists mind, all of it colliding in a difficult to understand garble of sound. 6:30 is one of the best melodies, moving in and out and again finding itself garbled. 7:18 is the final melody that realization. What the protagonist ultimately wants, the understanding of time in the way it flows. It is the protagonist theme, muted by the constant droning, but it is there. Framing the whole movie is this theme, telling the audience the ending at the beginning. The movie’s end is the movie’s beginning and the end is also the beginning, simultaneously.
THE PROTAGONIST
Another variation of the theme introduced earlier in RAINY NIGHT IN TALLINN. Softer, more tender than the other scores. This music plays at the end when the protagonist realizes that it was all temporal pincer movement. The protagonist realizes Neil is going to die and he is upset because of the end of a friendship, but Neil reveals to him it is just the beginning. Neil has known the protagonist for years. Years! The protagonist has a future in the past where he recruits Neil and gets up to all sorts of fun with him. Wow. Now go back and watch that whole sequence with Neil and try to find the pain in his face, seeing a friend who had died in the past and trying to not tell him anything. Wow, the true hero, Neil.
In beginning of the movie, the protagonist is not really the protagonist. He is just a man thrust into a new reality. Unsure, unaware, and most importantly, resistive. Throughout the movie “the protagonist” fights the reality. Even right before the team is about to storm the site to secure the algorithm, the protagonist asks a question about the pincer movement that reveals he still thinks in the 3rd dimension and hasn’t embraced the concept of what time truly is.
However at the end of the movie the music here breaks down the theme to its barest parts with a simple guitar and some background. All the distraction from earlier tracks gone. You can hear the emotion in the protagonist as he says bye to his friend, but there is a tinge of hope as well. It reminds me of an old western cowboy track, something straight out of Ennio Morricone (may he rest in peace). The cowboy on his own against the world. No one knows the justice the cowboy does, but the cowboy does it nevertheless. Not because anyone will love the cowboy, not because anyone will remember, but because it simply has to be done. Duty at its finest. Remember:
“It’s the bomb that didn’t go off. The danger no one knew was real. That’s the bomb with the real power to change the world”.
As the score moves on from the emotion you can hear the resolve, the acceptance of the protagonist as he embraces his fate, the reality that he is the pincer, he is the recruiter, he created it all. And he moves onto his future in the past. Gone is the CIA agent. The Man. Here comes the Protagonist.
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I could do this break down for each track, but it is not necessary. Heed the words written here and relisten to the soundtrack and then watch the movie. It is beautiful how the themes introduced in RAINY NIGHT IN TALLINN is developed, massaged, and eventually evolved into what we hear in THE PROTAGONIST. What you are listening to and witnessing is movie music done right. History. An Absolute Triumph. Music that is complex, takes time to understand, but absolutely original, inventive, and beautiful. Fightingly so. Bravo Ludwig Göransson. A legend in his own right.
