Early on in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, the film’s main character, who is given no name or title except “the Protagonist,” finds himself tied to a chair in the middle of a Ukrainian train yard. Facing a torturous interrogation by Russian thugs, the Protagonist stares emptily into space as trains pass him by in both directions. The composition of the shot reflects the mind-bending nature of the sci-fi film’s plot, in which the action unfolds both forward and backward. But the scene’s Slavic setting and its staging as an interrogation recall another work, one that seems to hold a singular power over Nolan’s artistic imagination: the legend of “The Grand Inquisitor” from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
In Dostoevsky’s story, Christ returns to Earth, to Seville during the height of the Spanish Inquisition. There, he is imprisoned and questioned by the Church’s Grand Inquisitor, who vows to burn him at the stake and berates him for resisting the three temptations of the Devil in the desert — to turn stones into bread, to cast himself down from the highest point of the temple so that angels might lift him up, and to bow down before Satan in exchange for all the kingdoms of the world. In so doing, Christ rejected a faith based on “miracle, mystery, and authority” in favor of one based on human freedom. The result, the inquisitor claims, was a disaster, for true freedom is a burden too difficult for most to bear. Fortunately, the inquisitor goes on, the Church of Rome has “corrected” Christ’s mistake, grounding itself in precisely the three tenets he rejected. Rome may be a false church built on lies, but at least it will bring order to people’s lives, letting them live and die in peace. “For only we, who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy,” he explains. “There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the knowledge of good and evil.”
The logic of the Grand Inquisitor’s condemnation is one that Nolan finds fascinating. From his earliest work onward, he has been obsessed with the function of lies and their place in human nature. Can a lie ever be moral in and of itself? Does the fact that a lie can make life bearable justify its use? Many of the director’s most memorable characters seem to think it does.
In The Dark Knight, Nolan’s most popular film, Batman and Commissioner Gordon decide to blame a set of murders on Batman rather than a disgraced Harvey Dent/Two Face in order to cement Dent’s spotless legacy as Gotham’s white knight prosecutor crusading against corruption. To let the truth out could irrevocably demoralize the city. In Interstellar, a declining humanity on a dying Earth teaches its schoolchildren that the Apollo missions were a Cold War hoax rather than live with the unbearable truth that mankind was once capable of such amazing feats as landing on the moon. In the same film, a dying NASA scientist confesses that his “progress” on solving a gravitational equation was a fraud meant to give astronauts exploring potential new worlds for humanity the hope of saving their loved ones trapped on Earth. As another character says of the scientist’s duplicity, “He was prepared to destroy his own humanity in order to save the species. He made an incredible sacrifice.”
Nolan’s wrestling with the question of living by lies is clearest in 2000’s Memento, the movie that put him on the map as a filmmaker. Memento’s protagonist suffers from a form of amnesia that leaves him unable to form new long-term memories and with a short-term memory that resets every few minutes. He is on a quest to find the attacker who injured him and left him with the impaired memory. Once it becomes clear that the identity of the attacker is unknowable — he may already have been killed; he may never have existed to begin with — the protagonist writes himself a note implicating an innocent man, knowing that when his memory resets, he will take the information seriously and finally find closure. At the end of the film, he tells his soon-to-be victim in an internal monologue, “Do I lie to myself to be happy? In your case … yes, I will.”
Of all Nolan’s previous films, Memento is probably the most similar to Tenet in the way its story is told — the plot unfolds both forward and backward. In Tenet, however, lies in themselves are not central to the plot. Rather, Nolan has transposed his fascination with the logic of the Grand Inquisitor from the ethical realm to the physical.
The reason parts of Tenet play out backward is that someone in the future has figured out how to “invert” or reverse the entropy of objects and is sending them back to the present. The second law of thermodynamics, which defines “time’s arrow,” states that absent outside intervention, a system’s entropy (its disorder or randomness) will increase until it reaches a maximum possible value. As past becomes present becomes future, the amount of entropy in the universe inexorably grows. This is why a broken glass doesn’t put itself back together and why spilled milk doesn’t go back into the bottle. By figuring out how to reverse entropy, the future generation has effectively figured out how to reverse time itself. Left unchecked, the entropy inversion process could end up destroying the present. It is up to the Protagonist and Tenet, the mysterious organization he works for, to prevent this from happening.
Later in the film, a character reveals that the future’s motivation to destroy the present is rooted in the chaos brought by climate change: “Their oceans rose, and their rivers ran dry.” Their rage at the disorder wrought by unchecked human freedom in the present echoes the Grand Inquisitor’s indictment of Christ:
To prize order over chaos at the expense of reality and truth inevitably ends in destruction. Just as the Grand Inquisitor has “reversed” the chaos arising from Christ’s embrace of human freedom by destroying the basis of the true church, so Tenet’s future generation will “reverse” the chaos of anthropogenic global warming by wiping out all humanity. If history is anything to judge by, this is a logic as perverse as it is perpetual.
Nat Brown is a former deputy web editor of Foreign Affairs and former deputy managing editor of National Review Online.
