Christopher Nolan is fascinated by the ways in which time can be used to tell a story, to rejigger narrative, to help us understand ourselves. In a story, time is a tool like any other, a resource to heighten drama and obscure facts to manufacture surprise, all while exploring questions of identity and how we become the people we are. Eventually in Nolan’s narratives time inevitably folds in on itself, collapsing, bringing the story to a single point in . . . time.
Consider Memento. Nolan, adapting a short story by his brother, Jonathan, tells a bipartite story—one strand following Leonard (Guy Pearce) in living color as we travel backwards in time to learn why he has killed Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) in the basement of an abandoned building; the other in black and white as Leonard explains to an unseen antagonist on the phone his “condition” (a form of amnesia that precludes the formation of new memories)—in an attempt to answer a quandary Leonard poses in the film’s final moments: “I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still there.”
Are we defined by our actions or how we think of ourselves? How better to answer that question than by experiencing the world as Leonard does, mucking about with editing and structure and color to allow us to experience the world as he does? By restructuring a noir to show us the world through the eyes of a man with no immediate past and a distant memory revealed to be, ultimately, untrustworthy, we realize the question is even thornier and more complicated than it sounds.
Nolan’s Inception and Dunkirk play with our conception of time as constant. The dream-within-a-dream conceit of Inception and the one week/one day/one hour structure of Dunkirk are not dissimilar, especially given the way that Nolan ends up collapsing these time frames in on each other—literally in the case of Inception, with its perpetually falling van, exploding elevator shaft, and collapsing snow base operating simultaneous levels of the dream; impressionistically in Dunkirk, with the one week on the beach serving as a sort of limbo or purgatory, a realm from which there is no escape. Men stripped of hope stare with dead eyes out into an endless expanse of water, foam flecking up on the beach, awaiting salvation in the form of a ship and a plane that are coming at some point in the future while we watch them languish in the present.
Nolan literalizes the concept of time as a three-dimensional space in Interstellar, a movie about relativity and time slippage and the horror of losing your family due to the vagaries of time. Time, time, time: It’s everywhere in Interstellar, a movie less about movement through space than movement through moments. Nolan literally moves epochs around in a very real sense in this movie, using footage from a Ken Burns documentary about a Dust Bowl past to suggest one possible, blighted future. And that future itself slips and slides in fits and starts, ultimately doubling back to one collapsed NOW—the tesseract, the eternal library, the moment where Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) decides to leave Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and also where he tells Murph (Jessica Chastain) how to save humanity.
As one character in Interstellar puts it, “Time is relative, okay? It can stretch and it can squeeze, but—it can’t run backwards. It just can’t.” What Tenet presupposes is: Maybe it can?
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