Tenet, Nolan and the questions we no longer ask ourselves

The last movie by Christopher Nolan is like life: you just have to live it. And what follows is not even a Tenet’s review.

When one day George Carlin was asked about the meaning of life, he said:

“The meaning of life, I believe, is life itself”

Nolan is often blamed for the coldness of his narrative, the lack of empathy of his films. I suspect that this is intentional and in any case an inevitable extension of his concept of cinema and narration.

The stories he tells are based on so complex plots to leave no room for much else, certainly not for the psychological introspection of each characters or their emotional geometries. Either one thing or the other: Nolan is not the director of that kind of stories structured by faint vibrations generated by the interaction between humans. No, he tells stories larger than the single human being and his characters are examples of subjects belonging to the human race, but not individuals in themselves.

Nolan humanises ideas, not people.

It’s no coincidence that the protagonist of Tenet — the talented John David Washington — doesn’t even have a name…