In the pandemic, when everyone was told to stay home when possible and categorically avoid densely populated enclosed spaces, one absolute maniac decided against all odds to throw caution to the wind and release a movie with a theatrical only release, insisting that the only way to properly appreciate it was on the big screen. He asked people to line up and possibly give their lives to keep the magic of cinema (and the studio stranglehold on licensed screenings) alive.
And four months later I brought the Blu-ray because time is an illusion. You’d think he would know that, given that his previous movie Interstellar was about interacting with the past from the distant future (and also something about love and space).
The movie was Tenet and its a great example of how people go wrong in trying to construct a magic trick with a sensible causal premise.
You’d think the screenwriter behind the movie adaptation of the Prestige would do a good job with something like this. It’s a single science fiction concept: Things that travel backwards through time.
If you haven’t seen the movie, this won’t make a huge amount of sense to you but the idea is that some matter can move backwards in time. It’s been inverted, it will react to things that haven’t happened yet. This means that you can hold your hand over an object and it will fall upwards into your hand, as if you had dropped it. It’s reacting to the action of you opening your hand in reverse. Presumably that means in order to put it back down you have to carefully place it, to recreating the actions of picking it up in reverse.
It gets a bit fucky if you think about it too much which is why the movie says not to, and on the scale of time travel setups this one lands on the side of predestination¹. Since inverted matter interacts with things that haven’t happened yet, those actions were predestined. Later in the film we see the Protagonist (which is a hell of a name for the protagonist of a movie) get inverted and interact with things that have already happened and made no sense at the time, kind of like the latter part of Interstellar.
It’s kind of clever actually how there’s a split in the centre of the film where you see everything forwards up to that point, then the Protagonist goes into the inverter and you see the same events in reverse…. then the third act goes all weird but I don’t want to talk about that.
The first introduction we have to inverted matter is when the Protagonist, blissfully unaware of any of this going on, is involved in a raid where he sees a bullet hole close up, as a bullet pops out of it and flies back into someone’s gun. This is then explained in the famous shooting range scene from the trailer, expanded upon with the fight in the airport, and finally there’s a full battlefield scene at the end with soldiers going back and forwards in time simultaneously, having a grand shootout.
I could say something about how a really clever concept pretty much gets mostly wasted on “Hurr durr, bullet go backward into gun,” but I want to instead talk about the airport scene. You know what, here let me show you the bit I’m talking about:
The first 20 seconds specifically is what I’m talking about. An inverted man shoots a bunch of holes in a window, throws away the gun and jumps into the turnstile… from his perspective. From the Protagonists perspective, a man comes out of the turnstile, a gun flies into his hand, he sucks several bullets through a window, closing the holes as they go. The man is inverted, the gun is inverted, the bullets are inverted, that’s why they act in that way.
So how long had they been there, waiting for him? Was it still there when they built the airport? Did they build the room around a discarded gun and bullet? If at any point in the past someone found it and moved it, it wouldn’t be there to get sucked into this gun at this moment. Or if, for example, there was a laboratory somewhere collecting thousands of bits of inverted detritus from a war that hasn’t happened yet, how does that stuff get back to the battle field in time to be un-exploded into whatever inverted weapon it was part of?
A whole bunch of inverted people get shot in these wars. What happens to the bodies? Do they leave them there, rotting backwards in time? They won’t get covered over with dirt and moss because times going the other way, keeping them uncovered. From a normal persons un-inverted perspective a skeleton will sort of coalesce on the ground, followed by bits of flesh composing themselves around it, generated by inverted microbes which sprang to life instantaneously, having died backwards when they ran out of inverted flesh to feast on. This corpse will come together as clothes become less and less worn out and tatty through years of wind and rain, and eventually a bunch of people turn up running backwards, suck a bullet out of it and it springs to life and starts fighting along side them.
Imagine watching even a fraction of that play out.
The only way any of this can work is if you have a whole team of inverted people whose job is to trawl back through these events turning up before the fight to pick up all the inverted garbage and corpses and spent bullet casings and re-invert them back to normal matter so they can decay the right way, like everything else.
And then there’s the window.
When you think about it, a window will break no matter which way a bullet goes through it. The only reason that window would have a hole before the bullet went through but not after is if the glass in the window was inverted too. So the clean up team would need to plant the inverted window with the holes already in it before the fight, as another team takes out a regular intact window which the building presumably already had. But then another inverted team after the fight needs to install the inverted intact window, which from a regular perspective means they took it away, so that a regular non inverted window can be put in its place.
Are we expected to believe that when they planned this time war, the first order of business was to recruit a crack team of hyper-intelligent 4-dimensional glaziers?
This whole concept irritates the piss out of me, and not just because the entire premise of the movie was stolen from a series of beer commericals.
But there’s a reason I say that this whole thing is like a poorly constructed magic trick, and it’s the scene where The Protagonist first has inverted matter explained to him.
At the 30 second mark of this scene the pair look at a pair of small objects on a table and The scientist states “One of these is like us, going forward through time. The other is going backwards. Can you tell which is which?”
When I saw this I felt in my bones that this was the opening line to a parlour trick. There’s even a seating area right in front of them. Fill those seats with an audience and you’ve got a theme show at the magic castle. I’ve since written a whole routine based on this scene, maybe if I get to perform it after this accursed pandemic I’ll make sure the video ends up here. All I can tell you right now is that it follows the same 3 act structure as the film, uses the concept of inversion sensibly, has less loose ends than the movie and makes more sense. There’s also a souvenir at the end.
It was only after I grasped the whole magic-trickness of this scene that I realised what was going on with those bullet holes. We’re expected to understand that the windows aren’t inverted, the bullet holes are. Of course a hole isn’t anything but the absence of matter but when you’re thinking magically, a hole can be a thing. It can be made, it can be moved and it can be taken away. Why not?
And if it were a film about magic I’d say, sure. Backwards holes, fuck it. Maybe there’s another fight earlier in the day when those holes get made in the first place by a regular gun with forward moving bullets, under magical logic that would make sense.
But the important thing about a magic trick is that if you setup a logical causal premise and then part way through you handwave it away, you can’t later rely on it for a further set piece, especially a big finale.
When I took my Magic Circle exam, I presented my set as a scientific lecture. That performance had 3 causal premises, explaining the difference between the notions of quantum, temporal, and 4 dimensional³. After the performance I spoke to the judges to ask for feedback, and the one non-hat related⁴ comment I got was that often when people attempt pseudoscientific routines at exam they have a lot of science talk and not much magic. This makes a lot of sense in hindsight as having watched other people attempt this the first instinct of many seems to be the Tenet approach, of having everything in the routine rely on the same singular causal premise, which as the effects become diversified relies upon more and more explanation as to why it is related to the same effect, rather than naturally building upon what already happened until it no longer holds weight and changing gears at that point.
If you’re looking for a Christopher Nolan film to use as inspiration for applying a causal premise, consider the examples of The Prestige or Interstellar.
The Prestige, aside from being a film about magicians, is a film where the same magic trick is performed multiple times (not always even in the setting of a magic show), first with a bird, and then with people, each time relying on a different method but always with the same basic principle: using a double in an unexpected way.
Conversely Interstellar is a whole series of mysteries ranging from books falling off a shelf to, to the dust falling in an odd pattern, to the existence of a wormhole, to a ghostly being living in the wormhole, each one is answered in a wildly different way and they all have different answers but importantly they are all related in the sense that someone in the future created a thing that we couldn’t explain at the time. Cooper (arguably the audience surrogate in the film) even gets to be the first person to create one of these inexplicable effects, thus opening his eyes to the circular nature of time. However, even though the wormhole, the ghost, the bookshelf, the dust, the tesseract, are related in this way, none of them rely upon a single scientific hook like inversion in Tenet.
¹ There are 3 main time travel setups:
- Self Correcting Offset Ripple as seen in Frequency, Back to the Future and Looper. In this setting if you change something from the past those changes will slowly catch up to you in the present, such as Marty McFly’s hand disappearing, newspaper headlines morphing, but most importantly these changes happen with an offset time such that they change for you at the moment you made the change and not before, even though technically the change happened long ago from your perspective. Interestingly in Back to the Future 2 we see the heroes catching up to a ripple going the other way, when they travel back from 2015 to 1985 and find it has changed, because in travelling back they passed the offset ripple Biff initiated when he went back to 1955.
- The Alternate Timeline as seen in Heroes, Primer, About Time, Avengers Endgame and Looper. This is a setting where whenever you travel back in time, the entire future you left behind essentially doesn’t matter, because what you do now will overwrite those events and they will never have happened. So if you go back to the future it will be entirely different, even though your personal history is unchanged. In heroes this had the fucked up consequence of Peter Petrelli taking someone into the future, accidentally leaving them there, and on his return immediately took actions to stop that future from having ever happened rendering him unable to go back there, trapping her in a shitty alternative reality future forever. The Writers strike of 2007 had a lot to answer for is what I’m saying.
- Predestination as seen in Interstellar, The Time Travellers Wife, Tenet and Looper².
² I really cant state how bad the time travel in Looper is. Bruce Willis goes back in time to change his future, immediately placing him on a different timeline, but the main villain only exists because of this attempt to change things, thus placing him in a predestined self sustaining paradox, but things around him and other loopers seem to update in real time like he’s got an offset ripple. Which is it? Hmmm?
³ If you must know I used sponge balls to explain quantum scale effects such as quantum tunnelling and quantum entanglement, a rope to represent a time line for temporal effects such as the butterfly effect and the grandfather paradox, and card warp to explain 4 dimensional space allowing apparently topologically impossible things in 3 dimensional space. I was apparently like 2 points short of an AIMC on my application, which is pretty cool.
⁴ One of the judges said that the way I wore my hat meant the audience could no longer make eye contact whenever I looked down at the table to pick up a prop, and this loss of eye contact might have cost me the AIMC. I have now burned this hat.