The Temporal Pincer as a Theory of Interpretation: Hermeneutics in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet

There is a particular little pleasure available to the person watching Tenet for the second time, which consists of seeing something that was incomprehensible the first time and feeling, now, that it is obvious. The masked man, for instance. Obviously. The temptation is to look across at the person watching for the first time and perform a subtle facial expression communicating that you possess information. You may recognize this expression from people who have already read the book. It is among the less attractive expressions a human face can make, and one of the things worth asking about Tenet is why a movie apparently built to produce it eventually makes it feel inadequate.

Because the person beside you is having an experience you can no longer have. And the information you possess depends, for its particular pleasure and eventual sadness, on your having had that experience yourself.

Take Oslo. The Protagonist enters the Freeport, encounters a masked man whose movements do not behave correctly, and fights him. There is a machine. Things have happened to the glass which seem to have a less-than-standard relationship to the things happening with the gun. Your working understanding is something like: our man has encountered a dangerous opponent, and the opponent has whatever chronological advantage comes with having read the instructions. This is enough to watch the scene. Your body can get involved before your account of the physics has cleared peer review.

Later, the film returns to Oslo. The masked man is the Protagonist. We have followed him into the position from which his earlier self will experience him as an attacker. What had appeared to be an intrusion from outside the story becomes an encounter between two stages of the same person’s journey. The later scene sends information backward into the earlier scene, changing what its actions mean without changing the actions.

You can almost feel the mental furniture moving.

This is the basic proposition: Tenet makes the spectator perform a temporal pincer. We advance through a sequence whose meaning we cannot yet reconstruct; then, carrying later knowledge, we work backward through what we have seen. Each movement supplies something the other needs. The film puts this relation inside its action, gives it military equipment, and eventually allows us to recognize the procedure we have been using from our seats.

The claim needs a little care, since two arrows pointing in opposite directions do not by themselves constitute a theory of interpretation. They might constitute a parking sign. At Stalsk-12, the temporal pincer coordinates teams moving through the battle in opposed temporal directions. The crucial element is the exchange of information: experience acquired from one direction informs action taken from the other. Difference becomes useful because the accounts can communicate. For the spectator, memory does the communicating. We bring the completed scene back to the remembered incomplete scene and let them correct each other.¹

Which brings us, with apologies for the sudden appearance of a word that seems to require its own departmental administrator, to hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics concerns interpretation and the conditions under which understanding becomes possible. Its familiar circle is the relation between parts and whole: you understand a particular passage through your understanding of the work, while your understanding of the work depends on its particular passages. You therefore begin with some provisional sense of what you are encountering and revise it as the details accumulate. Gadamer describes this process as a continuing revision of our anticipations in response to the text. Understanding involves allowing the thing being interpreted to challenge the expectations we brought to it. This is an account of how understanding happens, rather than a recipe that guarantees the right answer. Truth and Method, excerpts.

At Oslo, the provisional whole is a spy movie: an agent on a mission, an enemy obstructing him, an expensive room in which they can hit each other. That understanding organizes the details efficiently. The later encounter changes the whole, which changes the parts. The opponent’s movements become the efforts of a man trying to get somewhere while another version of himself keeps preventing him. Hostility has acquired a history. And the first scene now contributes to a different understanding of the film, one in which people can misunderstand actions they themselves will perform.

Notice that the first viewing was already interpretation. Nobody sits there receiving pure, theory-free cinema through an uncontaminated pair of eyes. We know what masks do in spy movies. We know whom the camera has encouraged us to follow. We are making provisional judgments almost continuously, even when the provisional judgment is that we need somebody to explain the previous provisional judgment. The retrospective pass makes this ordinarily unobtrusive activity conspicuous. You get to discover an assumption by feeling it give way.

Also, the backward movement can begin before the credits. Oslo supplies its own local return. A second viewing extends the operation, letting later knowledge accompany scenes that originally withheld it. These are overlapping movements of attention, not two neatly segregated jobs, with an EXPERIENCE COMPLETED stamp authorizing you to proceed to INTERPRETATION.²

An objection immediately presents itself. Doesn’t every reasonably competent mystery do this? The detective identifies the murderer and we reconsider the helpful neighbor’s rather excessive interest in the garden shed. A later disclosure reorganizes earlier details. You don’t need an inversion machine to have a flashback, much less a German philosopher.

Quite right. Retrospection is ordinary narrative business. What makes Tenet distinctive is how extensively its characters must inhabit the very change of position that its spectators perform. The Protagonist becomes the figure he previously misunderstood. He encounters his own earlier ignorance as a physical obstacle. The action gives the relation between knowledge and position a body, and then makes that body inconveniently good at fighting. Watching the return to Oslo, we have to hold together the earlier account of a threatening stranger and the later account of a desperate passage through the corridor. We can identify the man correctly while still understanding why he appeared otherwise.

This last capacity matters more than the pleasure of having guessed him.

Suppose we decide that the first viewing is simply a defective version of the second. We could then improve the movie by putting a small explanatory caption over the masked man’s head. FUTURE SELF. TRYING TO REACH MACHINE. PLEASE ADJUST EMOTIONAL RESPONSE. Almost everything necessary to describe the encounter would be available sooner. We would know more facts and undergo less of the film.

The loss would include our access to the earlier Protagonist’s predicament. He has to act with the knowledge he has. The mask is opaque to him. The body is dangerous. Identifying its owner afterward does not make the blows retrospective misunderstandings that somehow hurt less. A complete account must include the incomplete account through which somebody lived the event. If the explanation discards that experience as disposable confusion, it has discarded part of what it claims to explain.

This is where the second-time viewer’s facial expression starts to look a little stupid. It congratulates itself on standing above a condition that the film has made indispensable to its meaning.

Of course the first pass can become self-satisfied too. You can elevate immediate sensation into a principle, decide that the movie is an experience, and treat any attempt to work out what happened as a regrettable invasion by the sort of person who brings a calculator on vacation. But Oslo’s return really does change the encounter. The identity matters. His purpose matters. Refusing the explanation would mean declining something the movie has gone to considerable trouble to give us. The pincer asks the first viewing to surrender its mistaken identification and the second to remember the situation that made the mistake reasonable.

Then Neil makes the whole business hurt.

Near the end, the Protagonist learns that Neil has known him for years. The friendship whose beginning we have been watching is, from Neil’s position, approaching its end. His return to the underground gate connects the companion standing before us with the death already encountered there. We have to carry that knowledge back through his earlier presence, through the ease and familiarity whose full history was unavailable to us. A man who seemed to be becoming a friend has been acting out of a friendship he already remembers.

This is a fairly vicious thing to do to an audience, emotionally speaking, under cover of explaining the plot.

For the recognition works in two directions at once. The ending makes the earlier companionship more intimate; the companionship makes the ending a loss. If Neil were only a solution to an identification problem, recognizing the talisman would finish our business with him. Instead, the successful identification gives us somebody to mourn. Our knowledge improves at exactly the point when the improvement becomes painful.

And the explanation does not supply the years. We learn that a shared history exists without being shown its ordinary contents. Whatever those two did together, however the ease between them developed, the film gives us the difference between a man remembering it and a man discovering that it lies ahead. Enough has been disclosed to transform their relationship; enough remains absent to keep that relationship larger than its tactical usefulness. Neil’s familiarity becomes evidence of time spent with another person.

Consider, too, the peculiar status of his return to the gate. Retrospectively, his death belongs to the operation’s completed history. For Neil, returning still requires an action. Explaining where he fits does not perform the return on his behalf. The diagram has no trouble accommodating the event. The person has to go there. This is why causal reconstruction cannot be the last word about him: the account of how his action contributes to the outcome still leaves us facing what the action costs.

Here the comparison between spectator and operative reaches a useful limit. We do not literally send information into the past. Our second viewing has no influence on the production of the first Oslo scene, and the movie will survive our going to bed without resolving the trucks. The resemblance concerns the coordination of differently situated knowledge. Characters act within the history we reconstruct; we revise an understanding of the work in the present. Keeping that difference clear prevents a suggestive analogy from developing ambitions to run the universe.

There is another limit, closer to home for anyone writing an essay with hermeneutics in the title. Once you begin enjoying the return journey, almost any detail can look as though it has been waiting for your theory. Everything becomes evidence of the Whole. The Whole, conveniently, is whatever your theory says it is. At which point interpretation has achieved the enviable efficiency of a business that manufactures both the locks and the only authorized keys.

The test is whether earlier details retain the power to object. Oslo can correct our identification because the return actually supplies a body, a route, and a purpose. A theory about some additional hidden plan has to earn its connections separately. The pleasure of the first successful reconstruction supplies no advance credit. Nor does seeing how the film supports this account establish that Nolan sat down intending to illustrate Gadamer. The argument concerns what the film lets us do.

The completed film, after all, is not the same thing as a completed interpretation. One is an object with an ending. The other is our changing effort to understand that object, including its ending, from wherever we happen to be. We can settle who wears the mask. We can remain troubled by what it means to recruit a friend whose death we have already witnessed. Precision about the first question gives the second more force.

What I like about the temporal pincer as a model of reading is that it allows understanding to improve without requiring us to despise the person who understood less. You have to return to that person. He noticed things you now risk overlooking because they no longer count as clues. He was frightened in the corridor. He liked Neil before Neil became an answer. His experience supplies the stakes of your explanation, and your explanation lets you discover more of what his experience contained.

So watch the first Oslo fight again. Let the recognition arrive. Enjoy knowing who is inside the mask. Then attend to the man outside it, the one who still has to get through this with no help from your excellent information. You can understand both of them now. For a few minutes, let both of them remain there.

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Footnotes

1. The distinction is supported by the Red-team briefing in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet screenplay, printed pp. 118–20: the briefing incorporates Blue team’s experience of the battle. Oslo’s return appears at pp. 103–07; Neil’s final conversation at pp. 143–45. These references were checked against the repository’s extracted screenplay; they are screenplay references, not timestamps or a claim of fresh frame-by-frame film verification. ↩

2. Another reason to resist turning this into an instruction to watch the movie backward. Reversing playback would reverse the delivery of information, the dialogue, and a considerable amount of perfectly innocent walking. The relevant reversal is what later knowledge does to earlier understanding. Your remote control is excused. ↩