‘Tenet’: The film Christopher Nolan intended to be “productive ambiguity”
In cinema, there has always been space for ambiguity. Some writers and directors excel in making films that ask the audience questions but don’t necessarily give them all the answers, and this is the sweet spot that often leads to impassioned debate. However, there’s undoubtedly a fine line between aiming for ambiguity and creating something that simply makes no sense. Christopher Nolan has ridden both sides of this line pretty expertly in his career, but one of his films arguably leaned too far into being nigh-on incomprehensible for many viewers. To Nolan, though, this is OK – because he doesn’t think it’s supposed to be understood.
From the very beginning of his career, Nolan has been borderline obsessed with the concept of time. It crops up in every one of his movies in some way. In Memento, it’s baked into the format of the film, whose story simultaneously moves backwards and forwards; in Inception, he plays around with the concept of how time elongates and contracts in different levels of dreams, and he repeats virtually the same trick with space travel in Interstellar. Batman Begins, The Prestige, and Dunkirk all also tell their stories in non-linear ways.
However, perhaps Nolan’s biggest time-related gamble in his career came in 2020’s Tenet. To most people, this globetrotting spy-fi thriller will forever be known as the complex and excessively loud movie in which Robert Pattinson and John David Washington wore nice suits, time travelled, and moved backwards. However, when the film was released, it didn’t hit with audiences in quite the same way as most of Nolan’s other efforts – mainly because they felt it didn’t make a lick of sense.
In truth, a huge swathe of critics and fans were left baffled by the central conceit of ‘time manipulation,’ and a scene in which Nolan has a scientist tell Washington’s Protagonist, “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it” didn’t exactly help matters. Was this Nolan’s method of excusing that his story wasn’t fully formed and didn’t add up to a satisfying whole? Or was he trying to let the audience know that he didn’t want them trying to solve Tenet – instead, he wanted them to embrace it in a different way.
Handily, Nolan finally addressed this disconnect when he appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in early 2024 – and confirmed that, yes, Tenet is a vibes movie. “If you experience my film, you are getting it,” Nolan insisted. “I feel very strongly about that. I think where people encounter frustration with my narratives in the past; sometimes, I think that they’re slightly missing the point.”
Amazingly, the director, whose movies have always inspired Reddit threads, explainer videos, and wild theories, was adamant, “It’s not a puzzle to be unpacked. It’s an experience to be had, preferably in a movie theatre, but also at home, hopefully in an unbroken period.”
He then told Colbert, whose eyebrow was quizzically raised, “You’re not meant to understand everything in Tenet. It’s not all comprehensible.”
Ultimately, Nolan believes that trying to answer all of Tenet’s machinations with absolute certainty is akin to asking him precisely what the spinning top at the end of Inception means. “I have to have my idea of it for it to be a valid, productive ambiguity,” Nolan explained. “But the point of it is it’s an ambiguity.”
In truth, it would be churlish to deny Nolan’s “purely vibes” approach in a cinematic landscape where directors like David Lynch and Charlie Kaufman have regularly presented surreal, abstract films that fly in the face of conventional understanding. On the other hand, though, it does feel like there’s every chance he just never quite cracked Tenet’s logic – and decided to play into it.
