Tenet rules

There’s a scene in the movie Tenet, where a scientist is explaining the (ridiculous) premise of the movie - reverse entropy. To demonstrate how it works, she plays a video of a reverse-entropy bullet (a bullet moving “backwards through time”) in reverse. In the reversed video, the reversed bullet looks normal.

In my freshman year college electromagnetism class the professor went a little outside the curriculum to teach us Noether’s Theorem (One of The Deepest and Most Beautiful Theorems in All of Physics) (1). I won’t bore you with the depth and beauty of the theorem here. All that’s relevant is this: He used the idea of a video playing backwards and forwards as a way to help us build our intuition about this deep and important physics theorem (2).

So I get excited when Christopher Nolan uses that same imagery to explain the silly rules of the world in Tenet.

For me this is an example of Nolan infusing the rules of the universe with emotional resonance. I think his movies often work better at achieving emotional impact with their rules than with their inter-character relationships.

The rules of a movie govern what the characters are and are not allowed to do. Sometimes these rules can be the same as laws of nature (relativity in Interstellar) but more often they are fun ideas for rules that are only loosely based on real-life (short-term memory loss in Memento, dream rules in Inception, reverse entropy in Tenet) (3).

Nolan uses the form of his movies to put us in the same position as his characters with respect to the rules of the movie. We are dropped into scenes in Inception without knowing how we got there, then learn they are dreams at the same time as the characters. If you see Interstellar on a big screen you are dwarfed by the enormity and silence of space. We watch Memento backwards, so we feel what it’s like to have to re-orient to each new scene. 

All of this means that when you watch a spinning top, or a spaceship takeoff delayed by 10 minutes, or someone taking all the pens and paper in a room, it hits you on an emotional level (4).

Nolan’s movies can sometimes be cold. But the rules we are governed by in real life - the strict passionless - laws of nature, are also cold (5). But those laws can still inspire strong feelings. And my guess is that the more you care about rules in real life - the more you get excited or awed by things like physics, math, and logic - the more Nolan’s movies work for you.

Or it could be just that I like videos playing backwards and forwards.


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1. I have never heard a professor introduce Noether’s Theorem without immediately afterwards making sure we understand that it is One of The Deepest and Most Beautiful Theorems in All of Physics

2. The intuitive way to tell whether a system is losing energy is to think: “If I watched a video of this playing backwards, would I be able to tell if it was going backwards or forwards?” If the answer is “no” (as in a pendulum that swings back and forth without losing amplitude) then the system is not losing energy. If the answer is “yes” (as in a pendulum that swings back and forth with smaller and smaller arcs until it stops swinging) then you know the system is losing energy and contributing to entropy

   Also this professor, Alan Adams, was one of the coolest guys I’ve ever met and if you’ve ever been interested in quantum mechanics and have 74 minutes to kill you should watch his lecture here

3. Dunkirk isn’t quite as rules-focused, but is still about the cruelty of time marching ever forwards. The Prestige follows the not-quite-so-hard-and-fast rules of magic tricks. Following, Insomnia, and the Batman movies aren’t really so rules-focused and don’t really fit the pattern I’m talking about here

4. “You” being a word which here means “me, and anyone else who feels similarly to how I do when watching these movies”

5. They can’t be reasoned or bargained with

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Addendum (6 December 2021): The Author Cixin Liu also excels at imbuing natural laws with emotional resonance (from The New Yorker via Applied Divinity Studies):

“Liu had an epiphany about the concept of a light-year—the “terrifying distance” and “bone-chilling vastness” it implied. Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional.””

While I’m quoting, I ran across an essay on science fiction films by Susan Sontag. This part jumped out to me in relation to what I wrote above. She is talking here about the morality of technology rather than of “laws of the universe”. But the interest in focusing the emotional weight of the story as outside the characters is common with Nolan and Liu. And maybe the fact that Nolan and Liu shift the focus from technology to the very fabric of reality itself is what makes them interesting within the realm of sci-fi and sci-fi-adjacent narrative.

“Science fiction films invite a dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction and violence—a technological view. Things, objects, machinery play a major role in these films. A greater range of ethical values is embodied in the décor of these films than in the people. Things, rather than the helpless humans, are the locus of values because we experience them, rather than people, as the sources of power. According to science fiction films, man is naked without his artifacts. They stand for different values, they are potent, they are what gets destroyed, and they are the indispensable tools for the repulse of the alien invaders or the repair of the damaged environment.”