The Tenets of “TENET”
(Warning: The following contains spoilers for the 2020 film “TENET” directed by Christopher Nolan.)
"We live in a twilight world, and there are no friends at dusk.”
A tenet, in general, is a fundamental belief, one that runs so deeply that it alone is responsible for founding any philosophical, religious, or other type of world view. For example, the quote above could be a tenet for either an existential or maybe even a nihilistic world view. By the end of our story, however, we weave quite a different one...
In “TENET” by Christopher Nolan, we find The Protagonist, a secret agent, swept up in a mission to save the world from terrorists attempting to bomb us from the future using a technology known as time inversion.
Time inversion is explained as entropy running backwards, reversing the movement of things. This is further explained in the film as “a type of inverse radiation triggered by nuclear fission.” The results? Time inversion reverses the very law of causality, wherein now effects precede causes. The implications for free will within time inversion also seem to pass beyond understanding, at which point the character Laura explains, “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” The Protagonist sums this up as “instinct.”
This sets up the first major tenet of “TENET”: Navigate your time using feeling and instinct. Understanding will come by the end of the journey.
The infamous philosophical thought experiment of the Grandfather Paradox also shows it’s face in “TENET.” In case you’re unfamiliar, this Paradox poses the question of if you were in fact to travel back in time, could you kill your grandfather, and if you could, what would happen to you? While this is a paradox and therefore has no concrete answer, the character Neil offers up the solution that the outcome of any possibility here, “doesn’t matter.” The Protagonist presses Neil on this issue as he retorts with: “Doesn’t us being here now mean it never happened?” Neil’s resolve to this challenge is one of the more philosophically-laden quips in the film: “In a parallel worlds theory, we can’t know the difference between consciousness and multiple realities.” Given Nolan’s choice in the title of “TENET” (reading the same as it does forward and backward), this parallel worlds theory could also be suggesting that we wouldn’t be able to know the difference between time running forward or backward either.
Neil’s resolve here sets up the second major tenet of “TENET”: Although multiple realities may very well exist given the complexities in our decisions and world events, our very consciousness is our greatest weapon in discerning our true reality. Trust, and defend, your experience.
After the big finale, The Protagonist and Neil have a revealing heart-to-heart we’ve waited the entire film for. Neil leads in the reflection of the whole affair with, “what’s happened’s happened, which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world. It’s not an excuse to do nothing.” When The Protagonist questions Neil on what exactly he means by faith, Neil clarifies with, “reality.”
With that, we arrive at our third major tenet of “TENET”: While we may never be able to change all aspects of our reality, we can always choose to do something to help ourselves and others.
"We live in a twilight world, and there are no friends at dusk.”
This whole time, the fate of the world as we know it is on the line, and it seems like so few are fighting the good fight. Yet, at the closing of the curtain, it comes down to trust in good friendship that saves us all.
It is on the shoulders of friendship that we see a new dawn.
