Saving Schrödinger's Cat

Tenets of Time Travel

“Life can be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”

-Søren Kierkegaard

With the plague raging around us I find that I don’t have much in the way of personal activity to write about with everything being more or less in stasis. That said, I recently went to see “Tenet” in a more or less empty theater and tried not to cough. To say that Christopher Nolan’s latest offering was mind-bending would be an understatement of the highest order. I suspect that I will have to watch it again to understand it completely, a goal which still might not be achievable.

This movie played with the concept of time travel in a unique way, in which people and objects could be put through a machine that would cause them to start moving backward through time. I won’t leave any spoilers here in case anyone reading this plans to see it, but suffice to say that some very strange scenes were shot and I will definitely be buying the blue-ray just to see the behind-the-scenes material that will no doubt be included. This is not the first Christopher Nolan movie that used non-linear storytelling, but it is the first to actually have scenes running backwards.

But I was also fascinated by the existential question posed by the plot. What if you could see your own life running backwards and relive every moment, every decision you made in reverse-real time? Your own perspective will always be running forward in time, but of the rest of the world? It might be possible for us to remember things out of sequence or to attribute the wrong cause to a particular event, or to even get cause and effect out of sequence. Imagine actually being able to watch previous events happen.

The movie also touches on free will, implying the question as to whether we can choose to do something differently if we have knowledge of the future. While he doesn’t explore this in depth, Nolan seems to suggest that there is no free will, as the characters end up doing the exact things that they saw themselves doing in reverse. Paradoxically, this seems to conflict with another concept the movie addresses: the idea of faith.
The word “tenet” itself refers to a core value of any faith. The protagonist is Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith,” freed of worldly constraints by, oddly enough, technology. He is free in a moral sense to act in furtherance of his mission, secure in the knowledge that the moral scales are in his favor. In this case, he is already aware of victory. But he is not free in the metaphysical sense, because he has already seen the future and still can’t deviate from it. The outcome of the events cannot be changed because his inevitable actions cannot be changed. It is a weird pairing of concepts.

I don’t know if Nolan had Kierkegaard in mind when he wrote Tenet, but I’m certain that he will have many armchair philosophers (aren’t they all armchair philosophers?) tumbling down rabbit holes to pick apart the story.

I know that this is all rather heady stuff and will probably bore a lot of people, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and thought I would share those thoughts here. Congratulations if you made it this far, and if you find this subject matter to be a snoozer, know that Tenet is also an adrenaline-fueled action fest worthy of Christopher Nolan’s best efforts and will entertain, with or without any deep dives into the movie’s … er … tenets.

Enjoy!