Time travel part 2 - Nolan's 'Tenet' (2020)
This is the second part of my blog posts on time travel: the first will appear sometime later. (See what I did there?).
So, Christopher Nolan's 2020 'Tenet' is a film, not a book, but as I'm lining up a read of This is How You Lose the Time War it's kind of vaguely relevant. Vaguely. Plus, I wanted a rant about the over-hyped mess that is 'Tenet'. It's a cool film in many ways but a disaster in others, and that's all down to two things that any story in any medium has to get right: in-universe consistency, and decent plotting. 'Tenet' fails on both scores, and watching people try to make sense of something which was put together without any true adherence to logic is frustrating (like the often violent debates about the nature of the Trinity in Christianity). Spoilers aplenty coming up: you have been warned.
The basic idea of 'Tenet' is very cool: that the flow of time can be reversed for objects or people, such that they move backwards against the forwards flow, essentially experiencing sequences of events in reverse. I love how this constrains the way time travel works - it's a breath of fresh air (you'll see later how clever this particular comment is) compared with the staid old 'time-teleportation' idea of something like Dr Who's Tardis. But the problem starts because Nolan cannot leave the idea at that: he has to bring the physics of reverse entropy into it, and as soon as he does this he causes major issues for himself and the way the film works.
It is explained that inverted people (maybe we should call them 'extratemporal aliens') cannot breathe uninverted air because of the way energy flows. This 'fact' means that anyone who is inverted has to wear a facemask with a similarly inverted oxygen supply, which is a great visual clue that someone has been inverted (alongside people moving backwards, which inverts do not always do; see below on Neil). When the Protagonist is inverted and steps through the airlock into the world where time flows backwards, he is told "You may experience distortions to vision and hearing." No sh*t! Let's look at this comment in more detail.
We see because photons are emitted from a light source, strike an object, and are reflected as visible light (with spectral shifts seen as colour depending on which wavelengths have been reflected). Now imagine that in reverse: the photon travels from the eyeball of someone living in the inverted time (a native invert) back to the object, has its wavelengths restored to those of the light source, and travels back to that source. To give an example, from the eye to a flower, from the flower to the sun. Now to see the flower, an inverted extratemporal alien has to intercept the shifted light ray after it strikes the object and before it returns to the source. In other words, if you want to see a flower, you have to stand with your back to it so that your retina collects the rays of light radiating backwards to the object: you see what is behind you. Another consequence of intercepting the 'retreating' photons with your inverted body is that I think you might cast a shadow towards the light source. Hearing works in effectively the same way: when time travels forwards, someone whacking a hammer on your right sends sound waves travelling outwards in all directions, but since we have two ears, let's say we're standing side on to them and the sound travels right to left. When inverted, those sound waves travel back to the source, so you would collect the sound waves as they retrace their paths. In other words, you would hear someone hammering on your right with your left ear, as the sound waves travelled backwards along their path from left to right. Complicated? Yes. Unworkable... Erm, no, but it's way more complex than running film backwards as Nolan does (albeit in some highly imaginative and impressive ways), and that's also true of cause and effect in general, as we'll see later.
This problem of reverse energy flow bedevils everything. There is a scene in which the inverted Protagonist is trapped in a car fire: the fire causes the water vapour in the air inside the car to freeze, and when the Protagonist regains consciousness in safety sometime later, it's explained that he suffered hypothermia not burns from the fire, because the flow of energy is reversed. OK. That seems logical, but... That means that the sunlight striking the inverted Protagonist cools him, not warms him, and his own sweat rather than cooling him will heat him up - either could be deadly over even short periods of time if your inverted biology is still working 'forwards' to give you a subjective sense of moving into "the future in the past". Friction works in reverse too, and trying to push over an object, or pick one up, will not work: the pushed object will pull, picking up will push down. In other words, an extratemporal alien cannot interact with objects in the inverted world in any way as they would normally. By the way, the car fire scene is one of the worst in the whole film. It looks cool, and it's necessary from a narrative perspective to see the Protagonist deal with being inverted alone before we see the big battle at the end, but not only does the scene highlight the physical inconsistencies of the way time inversion is portrayed, it also ends with the Protagonist blacking out and then waking up having been mysteriously rescued. In other words, I don't think Nolan knew how to link it back into the rest of the story, and it shows.
Let's get on to cause and effect. If time runs backwards, then effect precedes cause. The scene which explains this has the Technician catching a bullet which leaps up from the table, and also the Protagonist firing a gun 'in reverse'; I'll get to the gun in a minute, but for now, let's stick with the leaping bullet. The Technician shows a film running backwards and forwards of the bullet jumping into/falling from her hand, and says of cause and effect that it doesn't really matter which way we view the event. This is correct as an observer watching film being run backwards, but it's not true for someone living in inverted time. A native invert would already remember having dropped the bullet. As the bullet leaps up into their hand, so too the memory of them dropping it (in the past, but what seems like the reverse-flowing 'future') is present in their head, but it's being 'unmade'. That means that native inverts have a memory of the 'future cause' of current events; an extratemporal alien invert would not have those memories, and so cause would seem mysterious. Again, this is something which works in film where we see events portrayed from outside; if 'Tenet' had been a book, the rather boring fact that native inverts simply remember the 'future cause' of current events would be obvious. As long as you don't think about the film and just watch it, all is well; but Nolan wants you to think about it, and as soon as you do, such inconsistencies start to build up. And that gun: squeezing the trigger of a non-inverted gun will not fire an inverted bullet. You need an inverted gun, and you'd need to 'release' the trigger for the whole mechanism to work in reverse: more inconsistencies.
I'm going to finish with some points about the events in the film rather than the idea of time inversion. The first point is about Neil's statement that "What's happened's happened." The second point is about 'Tenet' being a work of cinematic fiction rather than a truly insightful investigation into time inversion; this latter point reinforces the idea that thinking about 'Tenet' as a consistent work of logic is pointless. My third point contradicts that previous statement, and I try to think logically is about the stated in-universe timing of events, and what that might mean for the Protagonist and the whole idea of a 'temporal pincer movement'.
First, Neil. One of Neil's roles in the film is to explain (to the Protagonist, and to the audience) how time inversion works; Ives and Wheeler get some credit for that too, but it's Neil who most often takes the lead in explaining stuff, because despite his recruitment being apparently later than the Protagonist, he knows more about time inversion (he says he has a Masters in Physics). Most of the time, Neil's pronouncements about how time inversion works are valid, but this is, in my view, a trick to set up the audience so that they believe him when he says "What's happened's happened" to suggest that events cannot be changed; in fact, we see repeatedly in the film that Neil is wrong / lying here. We see very early on that someone - later suggested to be Neil himself - rescues the Protagonist at the opera siege by 'inverse' shooting of an assailant who has the Protagonist at his mercy (the saviour is wearing a mask so we don't see their face, but we do get a close-up of the string hanging from their bag which suggests Neil; the mask means they could be inverted. It's notable too that if inverted, their actions run in the same 'direction' as others around them: they do not run backwards). So, here Neil has changed events to save the Protagonist. At the end, the Protagonist saves Kat from being shot by Priya's hitman, another indication of intervening in the past to change things. The exploding building in the battle at the end is another example: it can only exist because the sequence of events has been changed. These events, plus the scene with the car fire and the loss of the algorithm, show that Neil's statement is a lie: we can change the past. This perhaps also explains why Neil is so unconcerned about his upcoming death - "I'll get them on the next pass" he says, and this time maybe he means it. The way I view this is like when you build a Lego model and get to the end of the build with a vital piece still not in place: you misread the instructions, and way back on page 5 you did something wrong and omitted the unused piece. You can correct this by completely unbuilding the model or, as I usually try first, you work out how to break the model minimally to fit the piece in, then make further repairs as you go. Sometimes, this requires several different 'waves' of breaking and repairing. In the same way, changing events in the past, Tenet-style, involves fixing one thing at a time, until eventually the model is in one piece. Multiple iterations are required to get to the stage where maybe the Protagonist doesn't even attend the opera siege, or Sator isn't recruited in the first place. "It's the bomb that doesn't go off that has the power to change the world," as Neil says. Or the organisation which was never created.
Second, the cinematic aspect of the film should not be ignored. Take the scene at the end with Kat in danger from Priya's hitman. Would an organisation like Tenet seriously shoot Kat in broad daylight outside her son's school just before she picked him up? No. They'd stage a break in at Kat's place at night when she was asleep, and make it look like her death was the result of a botched burglary (with enough hints to those in the know that there was a connection to Sator and his past to cover Tenet's tracks twice over). So that scene is pure cinema. Similarly, the car fire scene which I've criticised above: it's there to give the Protagonist a solitary experience of inversion, but it's poorly done in terms of how it ends (why doesn't Sator just shoot him?) and what happens next. These observations show that, despite Nolan's alleged respect for the audience, some aspects of the film - and there may be another one coming up - do not make logical sense in-universe. Added to the problems with the physics discussed above, we can see that trying to understand Tenet in logical terms may be doomed to fail.
Finally, applying logic anyway! When the Protagonist meets Sir Michael Caine (ahem, sorry, Crosby) in the restaurant, Sir Michael gives us a fixed timepoint for the opera siege: two weeks ago. Nolan did not have to give us this information, and if he felt it was necessary, he could have picked any number: 3 weeks ago, 6 weeks ago, 6 months ago. He says '2 weeks'. Now, in those 2 weeks, the Protagonist has 1) been captured and tortured at length, 2) 'died' for an unspecified time, 3) been rescued and conveyed to what looks like the Baltic/North Sea, 4) had his mouth rebuilt from the torture and had time to heal perfectly, 5) spent at least one and maybe two nights in a wind turbine, 6) travelled ashore to meet the Technician for a detailed briefing, 7) travelled to Mumbai, 8) met Neil and prepared the incursion to meet Priya, 9) carried out the incursion and talked to Priya, 10) flown to London to meet Sir Michael. I would suggest that doing all this in 2 weeks is impractical/impossible, and the single event of healing the Protagonist's wounds alone should have taken at least 12 days even before anything else happened. So is this just shoddiness, like the car fire scene? Is it deliberate misdirection, like Neil saying you can't change the past? Or is it an indication that the Protagonist had already been inverted then 'reverted', 'changing gear' like Neil does at the end, to heal in time to tidy things up? I'd like to think the latter is true.
(I should add here: there are plenty of other examples, like the Protagonist driving the non-inverted car, the air inside freezing even though it was non-inverted, etc. etc,; that for the Protagonist to meet Neil in the past he has to live backwards for many years (ageing as he does?) and then revert; and that you can only change the past if you invert and then 'change gear' to act forwards again. In other words, the post above deals only with the most obvious bits).
So, 'Tenet': a great idea, an intriguing cinematic spectacle, but something that falls far short of a logical investigation of inversion as a novel way of looking at time travel.
So, Christopher Nolan's 2020 'Tenet' is a film, not a book, but as I'm lining up a read of This is How You Lose the Time War it's kind of vaguely relevant. Vaguely. Plus, I wanted a rant about the over-hyped mess that is 'Tenet'. It's a cool film in many ways but a disaster in others, and that's all down to two things that any story in any medium has to get right: in-universe consistency, and decent plotting. 'Tenet' fails on both scores, and watching people try to make sense of something which was put together without any true adherence to logic is frustrating (like the often violent debates about the nature of the Trinity in Christianity). Spoilers aplenty coming up: you have been warned.
The basic idea of 'Tenet' is very cool: that the flow of time can be reversed for objects or people, such that they move backwards against the forwards flow, essentially experiencing sequences of events in reverse. I love how this constrains the way time travel works - it's a breath of fresh air (you'll see later how clever this particular comment is) compared with the staid old 'time-teleportation' idea of something like Dr Who's Tardis. But the problem starts because Nolan cannot leave the idea at that: he has to bring the physics of reverse entropy into it, and as soon as he does this he causes major issues for himself and the way the film works.
It is explained that inverted people (maybe we should call them 'extratemporal aliens') cannot breathe uninverted air because of the way energy flows. This 'fact' means that anyone who is inverted has to wear a facemask with a similarly inverted oxygen supply, which is a great visual clue that someone has been inverted (alongside people moving backwards, which inverts do not always do; see below on Neil). When the Protagonist is inverted and steps through the airlock into the world where time flows backwards, he is told "You may experience distortions to vision and hearing." No sh*t! Let's look at this comment in more detail.
We see because photons are emitted from a light source, strike an object, and are reflected as visible light (with spectral shifts seen as colour depending on which wavelengths have been reflected). Now imagine that in reverse: the photon travels from the eyeball of someone living in the inverted time (a native invert) back to the object, has its wavelengths restored to those of the light source, and travels back to that source. To give an example, from the eye to a flower, from the flower to the sun. Now to see the flower, an inverted extratemporal alien has to intercept the shifted light ray after it strikes the object and before it returns to the source. In other words, if you want to see a flower, you have to stand with your back to it so that your retina collects the rays of light radiating backwards to the object: you see what is behind you. Another consequence of intercepting the 'retreating' photons with your inverted body is that I think you might cast a shadow towards the light source. Hearing works in effectively the same way: when time travels forwards, someone whacking a hammer on your right sends sound waves travelling outwards in all directions, but since we have two ears, let's say we're standing side on to them and the sound travels right to left. When inverted, those sound waves travel back to the source, so you would collect the sound waves as they retrace their paths. In other words, you would hear someone hammering on your right with your left ear, as the sound waves travelled backwards along their path from left to right. Complicated? Yes. Unworkable... Erm, no, but it's way more complex than running film backwards as Nolan does (albeit in some highly imaginative and impressive ways), and that's also true of cause and effect in general, as we'll see later.
This problem of reverse energy flow bedevils everything. There is a scene in which the inverted Protagonist is trapped in a car fire: the fire causes the water vapour in the air inside the car to freeze, and when the Protagonist regains consciousness in safety sometime later, it's explained that he suffered hypothermia not burns from the fire, because the flow of energy is reversed. OK. That seems logical, but... That means that the sunlight striking the inverted Protagonist cools him, not warms him, and his own sweat rather than cooling him will heat him up - either could be deadly over even short periods of time if your inverted biology is still working 'forwards' to give you a subjective sense of moving into "the future in the past". Friction works in reverse too, and trying to push over an object, or pick one up, will not work: the pushed object will pull, picking up will push down. In other words, an extratemporal alien cannot interact with objects in the inverted world in any way as they would normally. By the way, the car fire scene is one of the worst in the whole film. It looks cool, and it's necessary from a narrative perspective to see the Protagonist deal with being inverted alone before we see the big battle at the end, but not only does the scene highlight the physical inconsistencies of the way time inversion is portrayed, it also ends with the Protagonist blacking out and then waking up having been mysteriously rescued. In other words, I don't think Nolan knew how to link it back into the rest of the story, and it shows.
Let's get on to cause and effect. If time runs backwards, then effect precedes cause. The scene which explains this has the Technician catching a bullet which leaps up from the table, and also the Protagonist firing a gun 'in reverse'; I'll get to the gun in a minute, but for now, let's stick with the leaping bullet. The Technician shows a film running backwards and forwards of the bullet jumping into/falling from her hand, and says of cause and effect that it doesn't really matter which way we view the event. This is correct as an observer watching film being run backwards, but it's not true for someone living in inverted time. A native invert would already remember having dropped the bullet. As the bullet leaps up into their hand, so too the memory of them dropping it (in the past, but what seems like the reverse-flowing 'future') is present in their head, but it's being 'unmade'. That means that native inverts have a memory of the 'future cause' of current events; an extratemporal alien invert would not have those memories, and so cause would seem mysterious. Again, this is something which works in film where we see events portrayed from outside; if 'Tenet' had been a book, the rather boring fact that native inverts simply remember the 'future cause' of current events would be obvious. As long as you don't think about the film and just watch it, all is well; but Nolan wants you to think about it, and as soon as you do, such inconsistencies start to build up. And that gun: squeezing the trigger of a non-inverted gun will not fire an inverted bullet. You need an inverted gun, and you'd need to 'release' the trigger for the whole mechanism to work in reverse: more inconsistencies.
I'm going to finish with some points about the events in the film rather than the idea of time inversion. The first point is about Neil's statement that "What's happened's happened." The second point is about 'Tenet' being a work of cinematic fiction rather than a truly insightful investigation into time inversion; this latter point reinforces the idea that thinking about 'Tenet' as a consistent work of logic is pointless. My third point contradicts that previous statement, and I try to think logically is about the stated in-universe timing of events, and what that might mean for the Protagonist and the whole idea of a 'temporal pincer movement'.
First, Neil. One of Neil's roles in the film is to explain (to the Protagonist, and to the audience) how time inversion works; Ives and Wheeler get some credit for that too, but it's Neil who most often takes the lead in explaining stuff, because despite his recruitment being apparently later than the Protagonist, he knows more about time inversion (he says he has a Masters in Physics). Most of the time, Neil's pronouncements about how time inversion works are valid, but this is, in my view, a trick to set up the audience so that they believe him when he says "What's happened's happened" to suggest that events cannot be changed; in fact, we see repeatedly in the film that Neil is wrong / lying here. We see very early on that someone - later suggested to be Neil himself - rescues the Protagonist at the opera siege by 'inverse' shooting of an assailant who has the Protagonist at his mercy (the saviour is wearing a mask so we don't see their face, but we do get a close-up of the string hanging from their bag which suggests Neil; the mask means they could be inverted. It's notable too that if inverted, their actions run in the same 'direction' as others around them: they do not run backwards). So, here Neil has changed events to save the Protagonist. At the end, the Protagonist saves Kat from being shot by Priya's hitman, another indication of intervening in the past to change things. The exploding building in the battle at the end is another example: it can only exist because the sequence of events has been changed. These events, plus the scene with the car fire and the loss of the algorithm, show that Neil's statement is a lie: we can change the past. This perhaps also explains why Neil is so unconcerned about his upcoming death - "I'll get them on the next pass" he says, and this time maybe he means it. The way I view this is like when you build a Lego model and get to the end of the build with a vital piece still not in place: you misread the instructions, and way back on page 5 you did something wrong and omitted the unused piece. You can correct this by completely unbuilding the model or, as I usually try first, you work out how to break the model minimally to fit the piece in, then make further repairs as you go. Sometimes, this requires several different 'waves' of breaking and repairing. In the same way, changing events in the past, Tenet-style, involves fixing one thing at a time, until eventually the model is in one piece. Multiple iterations are required to get to the stage where maybe the Protagonist doesn't even attend the opera siege, or Sator isn't recruited in the first place. "It's the bomb that doesn't go off that has the power to change the world," as Neil says. Or the organisation which was never created.
Second, the cinematic aspect of the film should not be ignored. Take the scene at the end with Kat in danger from Priya's hitman. Would an organisation like Tenet seriously shoot Kat in broad daylight outside her son's school just before she picked him up? No. They'd stage a break in at Kat's place at night when she was asleep, and make it look like her death was the result of a botched burglary (with enough hints to those in the know that there was a connection to Sator and his past to cover Tenet's tracks twice over). So that scene is pure cinema. Similarly, the car fire scene which I've criticised above: it's there to give the Protagonist a solitary experience of inversion, but it's poorly done in terms of how it ends (why doesn't Sator just shoot him?) and what happens next. These observations show that, despite Nolan's alleged respect for the audience, some aspects of the film - and there may be another one coming up - do not make logical sense in-universe. Added to the problems with the physics discussed above, we can see that trying to understand Tenet in logical terms may be doomed to fail.
Finally, applying logic anyway! When the Protagonist meets Sir Michael Caine (ahem, sorry, Crosby) in the restaurant, Sir Michael gives us a fixed timepoint for the opera siege: two weeks ago. Nolan did not have to give us this information, and if he felt it was necessary, he could have picked any number: 3 weeks ago, 6 weeks ago, 6 months ago. He says '2 weeks'. Now, in those 2 weeks, the Protagonist has 1) been captured and tortured at length, 2) 'died' for an unspecified time, 3) been rescued and conveyed to what looks like the Baltic/North Sea, 4) had his mouth rebuilt from the torture and had time to heal perfectly, 5) spent at least one and maybe two nights in a wind turbine, 6) travelled ashore to meet the Technician for a detailed briefing, 7) travelled to Mumbai, 8) met Neil and prepared the incursion to meet Priya, 9) carried out the incursion and talked to Priya, 10) flown to London to meet Sir Michael. I would suggest that doing all this in 2 weeks is impractical/impossible, and the single event of healing the Protagonist's wounds alone should have taken at least 12 days even before anything else happened. So is this just shoddiness, like the car fire scene? Is it deliberate misdirection, like Neil saying you can't change the past? Or is it an indication that the Protagonist had already been inverted then 'reverted', 'changing gear' like Neil does at the end, to heal in time to tidy things up? I'd like to think the latter is true.
(I should add here: there are plenty of other examples, like the Protagonist driving the non-inverted car, the air inside freezing even though it was non-inverted, etc. etc,; that for the Protagonist to meet Neil in the past he has to live backwards for many years (ageing as he does?) and then revert; and that you can only change the past if you invert and then 'change gear' to act forwards again. In other words, the post above deals only with the most obvious bits).
So, 'Tenet': a great idea, an intriguing cinematic spectacle, but something that falls far short of a logical investigation of inversion as a novel way of looking at time travel.
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