Read on Twitter
This tweet was of course a way for me to lower my expectations about as far as they could go. And it kind of worked. I enjoyed Tenet, more or less, and was perhaps a little please that I understood nearly all of it the first time. https://twitter.com/Gwyntaglaw/status/1304689412681293826
One thing I had twigged to months ago was the movie's name: TENET. Not only an obvious palindrome itself, I wondered if it might be an illusion to the famed Latin square. When watching, I realised 'of course, TENET is a palindrome inside a larger palindrome', bot not only that
a double palindrome/2D palindrome:
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS
which reads the same across as down, and in reverse bottom up and bottom right. The only known such example at the time, and for all I know, still. The metaphor is obvious and the allusions pretty blatant.
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS
which reads the same across as down, and in reverse bottom up and bottom right. The only known such example at the time, and for all I know, still. The metaphor is obvious and the allusions pretty blatant.
Of course, that's only part of how Nolan is playing this game. He's signalling that his intentions are very self-aware, down to labelling his protagonist 'The Protagonist', a title he has to fight for and claim. And the Russian oligarch at the heart of it? Well - he's The Author.
Both literally (he is controlling events, or believes he is), and he is a joky stand-in for Nolan himself. The running gag about him being unfeeling and never raising a pulse. His cruelty to his characters, especially his wife. And then, in case you'd missed the point, we have
the actual Death of The Author right there on screen. What happens? The world lives on, his characters survive and thrive without him. Or do they? Are the problems of causation solved or reinforced? After all, the many causation related issues in the plot of the movie are null
if you understand that authorial control is the only causation needed. And the loops of events already set in motion still seem to bind the characters even at the very end.
