Can Christopher Nolan Save the Summer?

Two uniformed men under pink lighting.
The director is sticking to a July 17th in-theatre release date for his thriller “Tenet.”Photograph by Melinda Sue Gordon

Ever since Christopher Nolan decided to hold firm to a July 17th release date for his futuristic spy thriller “Tenet,” Hollywood has been speculating whether Warner Bros. would go through with it. Would theatres be open in time? What would happen if the theatres opened but infection rates spiked? In March and April, when studios yanked franchise after franchise from the summer schedule for safer dates later on—the postponements include the new Bond film, “No Time to Die,” Disney’s live-action “Mulan,” Paramount’s “A Quiet Place Part II,” Sony’s “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” and Marvel’s “Black Widow”—Nolan’s determination to stick with his July date, which is right on the edge of the most optimistic reopening scenarios, seemed to reflect a calculus going far beyond that required by the release and distribution of a film. “Tenet” has attained talismanic status as the movie that will not just spearhead a return to theatres and save the summer, but also reboot the entire entertainment industry. “We don’t just owe it to the 150,000 workers of this great American industry to include them in those we help, we owe it to ourselves,” Nolan wrote in a Washington Post editorial in March, after six thousand cinemas had shuttered.

Little is known about “Tenet,” which is described as a “quantum Cold War thriller,” and was shot under the director’s usual cloak of secrecy. But, based on the recent trailers, the movie seems to take place in a quasi-futuristic universe that cleaves to the same set of rules as “Inception,” wherein the tropes of traditional movie spycraft—yachts, private clubs, cyanide capsules, high-security vaults, Russians—rub shoulders with a science-fiction conceit having to do with reversed time, or “inversion.” An agent, played by John David Washington, is seen taking aim with a gun at a concrete target in a firing range; he pulls the trigger, but, instead of a bullet firing from the chamber, a spent cartridge flies into his gun and a small crater in the concrete suddenly smooths itself out. Similar reversals are enjoyed by a huge container ship ploughing backward through waves and an un-crashing car, tumbling end over end to land back on its wheels. “What happened here?” asks another character, played by Robert Pattinson. “It hasn’t happened yet,” replies Washington’s agent. The film’s title, “Tenet,” is, of course, a palindrome, reading the same backward as forward.

Clearly, Nolan is intent on the kind of coup de cinéma that turned “Inception” into a layer cake of converging time lines and “Memento” into a Möbius strip of entwined plots. The idea of reversed photography goes back to Sergei Eisenstein’s “October,” from 1928, in which a shattered statue of Tsar Alexander III is seen reassembling itself to suggest the retrenchment of tsarism. “For that scene, Edmund Meisel recorded the music in reverse,” Eisenstein said, “but I do not suppose anyone noticed this musical trick.” One of the earliest literary instances of the device appears in Mark Twain’s posthumously published novel, “A Mysterious Stranger,” which he began writing in 1897, in which Satan, attempting to explain to a printer that “life itself is only a vision, a dream,” takes them both on a reverse trip around the clock face:

Everywhere weary people were re-chattering previous conversations backwards and not understanding each other, and oh, did they look tuckered out and tired of it all! And always there were groups gazing miserably at the town clocks; in every city funerals were being held again that had already been held once, and the hearses and processions were marching solemnly backwards; where there was war, yesterday’s battles were being refought, wrong-end first; the previously killed were getting killed again, the previously wounded were getting hit again and complaining about it.

As even this short passage makes clear, the device is hard to sustain without falling into inconsistency: Why would the wounded be hit again and then complain about it? Wouldn’t it be the other way around? And why would the backward-speaking people not understand one another? Similar snafus afflict Lewis Carroll’s “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded,” from 1893, in which a dinner is eaten backward (“an empty fork is raised to the lips: there it receives a neatly cut piece of mutton and swiftly conveys it to the plate, where it instantly attaches itself to the mutton already there”) but the conversation flows forward. Carroll’s novel also introduced the idea of semordnilaps, or “half palindromes”—words that create a different word entirely when read backward, like “evil.”

Nolan is fond of such parallelism and patterning at both the macro and micro levels. The action of his first American film, “Memento,” from 2000, is generally misdescribed as proceeding backward, although it is the order of the scenes that is reversed, not the action within the scenes. The device is a surprisingly effective evocation of the discombobulation of its amnesiac hero, Leonard, whose memory wipes every ten minutes, leaving him only his sense memory for guidance. As he explains: “There are things you know for sure. Such as? I know what that’s gonna sound like when I knock on it. I know what that’s gonna feel like when I pick it up. See? Certainties. It’s the kind of memory you take for granted. You know, I can remember so much. The feel of the world.”

On the twentieth anniversary of “Memento,” Nolan appears to have found a way to make inversion the MacGuffin of an entire plot. “Don’t try to understand it. . . . Feel it,” urges Clémence Poésy in the first trailer for “Tenet.” The director’s fascination with the feel of time—its distortions, dislocations, and disquiet—will surely strike a resonant chord with the endless hours of our coronavirus summer. Don’t we all wish we could roll back recent history? An oft-noted paradox of the pandemic is that time has started to behave in mysterious ways: each day can seem like an eternity, yet the hours just disappear, and the months before COVID-19 seem a lifetime ago. The physicist Alan Lightman described the feeling in The Atlantic:

At home, time and space have opened up in our minds. Even for those who continue their professional life working online, schedules have become more flexible. Demands have retreated. Daily routines have been interrupted. We suddenly have unstructured, free-floating, beckoning time. This terrible disaster has freed us from the prison of our time-driven lives.

The actress and singer Bette Midler captured the sentiment more succinctly in a recent tweet.

It’s Saturday. I think. Like you, I find my days a blur, one day very similar to the next . . . news, housework, bad news, emails, worry, phone calls, cooking, eating. It’s surreal, only real. Am I in an episode of a reality show?

Meanwhile, a recent New Scientist article reported that a stratospheric balloon launched by NASA with radio antennae pointed back at Earth detected evidence of a high-energy particle—extremely high-energy neutrinos—coming up from the Earth’s surface, but no source. “Explaining this signal requires the existence of a topsy-turvy universe created in the same Big Bang as our own and existing in parallel with it,” the New Scientist reported. “In this mirror world, positive is negative, left is right and time runs backwards.” When the release of the “Tenet” trailer was delayed by a few hours last Thursday, one of the many waiting fans had this comment about the parallel universe: “Guess that’s where the Tenet trailer is releasing.”

It’s hard to imagine a richer subsoil for a Nolan film to implant itself in. “Tenet” is not about a global pandemic, but the global pandemic has turned us all into Nolanoids—twitchy chronomaniacs stuck in limbo like the heroes of “Memento” and “Inception,” mourning lost time while the cities outside our windows empty of their populations. Many have commented that our lives have turned into a dystopian science-fiction movie. Could “Tenet” be that movie? Among the most intriguing details of the trailers are the oxygen masks worn by Washington and, in another scene, by Kenneth Branagh—surely an accidental echo of the omnipresent imagery of masks in the era of self-quarantine and P.P.E. shortages, but an eerie one nonetheless. Come July, we could be treated to the sight of cinemas half full of patrons wearing masks and cheering on Nolan’s masked heroes as they thwart threats of global annihilation.

Warner Bros. could still push the film back to a safer date—the absence of a release date from last Thursday’s trailer was much discussed online—but plans being discussed by the theatres include an entry kiosk that can scan patrons for possible fever and a checkerboard seating arrangement. This means that “Tenet” could play only to auditoriums running at less than half capacity, but the lack of other films on the release calendar presents an opportunity: if “Tenet” is propelled by good word of mouth, it could play for months, into the fall. The length of such a release would resemble, curiously, the month-long gestation of movies before the era of multiplexes and hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar marketing budgets. In 1975, Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” screened all summer long.

While we all wait for “Tenet” to offer us our first glimpse of the post-pandemic entertainment world, some theatres plan to lure patrons back in late June and early July with screenings of blockbusters past—the “Harry Potter” and “Hunger Games” movies, “Back to the Future,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” and, yes, “Jaws”—charging as little as two dollars per ticket. These are prices not seen since Jimmy Carter was President. Is history rolling backward or stuck on fast-forward? Maybe Nolan’s film will be able to tell us.