purwansikatalkstenet

[purwansikatalkstenet]

You had to have dropped Him first

The fate of Neil’s presumably dead body isn’t important because of sentiments and subjective ideas about the respectful handling of dead bodies.

The retrieval, or from an alternative perspective, calculated placement of his body in the tunnel isn’t an act of tying up loose ends. It is everything.

No mission is less or more important than another in the world of TENET.

The very concept of significance is trivial if not completely contradictory to the laws this world operates according to. 

Significance is a matter of perception and it is apparent that the world of TENET is not concerned with appeasing our need for sensorial consistency because dead bodies are revived through gunshots and cracks appear on glass “before” it is actually impacted.

What this world seems hellbent on obeying is stillness.

In order for the all encompassing World Image to remain unanimated, the future must return into the past and the past must fall into the future. 

It doesn’t matter that a video played in reverse seems like nonsense to you and I, that retrieving Neil’s inverted body looks like leaving it while one is inverted and feels like dropping him when not inverted.

The World Image cannot become mobile, cannot alter the past and future. Nothing can change. 

Turnstiles and their ability to invert objects and life forms might seem almost supernatural but they are helpless when it comes to breaking this TENET of remaining static. At most they’re a symptom of an attempt at disturbance. 

You might be under the delusion that you’ve achieved the impossible for a minute or two, that you’ve travelled through time and changed the world but you would be wrong. 

You start noticing the oddities, injuries before being injured and ruins before destruction but they’re not oddities—they’re the world reminding you of your place by remaining still and unaffected. It took all of this into account the moment it started existing.

So if the ultimate rule is the lack of change, is the state of being static, that must mean that the algorithm is the way through which we break this rule. 

After all, what exactly does it mean to invert the ��world”? 

We know that inversion doesn’t reverse ageing, it merely allows what is being inverted to travel in the opposite direction of what is dominating “prior”. We’ve only seen demonstrations of this internally, inside the world. 

For a whole world to travel, there must be something within which it exists and by becoming mobile externally, it would break the TENET. 

While this sounds like liberation on paper, how would the breaking of this “constraint” manifest internally? Would it be the End of Play as Neil describes or would it turn the past into an unlimited resource for survival? 

It could even be a third possibility, a possibility where nothing changes internally because observing this external liberation is impossible from the inside.

It is possible that it has been achieved, that the image had been liberated from the beginning and the only glitch the freedom offered internally were the turnstiles that have existed at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Maybe since the beginning.

Similarly to Interstellar, maybe those turnstiles were placed by something larger and the beings of this world, unable to truly confirm whether annihilation was avoided or utopia was achieved or not, are left with no other choice than to fight a temporal war forever. They don’t know that their world was different to begin with and this is the limit of what it could break even with the aid of the unknown.

Every generation looks out for its own survival, that leaves very little time to sit and be amazed by fire. By the time that survival is ensured, the glaring truth can only hurt its elaborate, frail structure. Do we even want to look outside when we can eternally reinforce a structurally unsound home? This helpless, paradoxical situation forces us to resort to forming priorities. 

Is it important to do nothing because of the sadness this lack of free will produces when the things we value might be in danger? Neil thinks it isn’t, in fact no one does. Not really.  We reject the world without subjective certainty even if it does exist, even if it has clearly shown signs of its existence to us. Maybe we’re just fundamentally incompatible with the truth. 

Perhaps Neil was being literal when he said “End of Play”— it didn’t mean the destruction of all that ever existed but the end of comprehension, of narrative. Something we could argue has already happened, multiple times over, and something that could be synonymous with destruction since confirmation of existence is solely dependent on subjective perception. 

[purwansikatalkstenet]

Love Laws and The Triumph

Some years ago, a question arose in my head. Specifically, in 8th grade, a question that I presented to my group of friends. It was an uncomfortable one and maybe not framed the best but looking back at it, what I was really trying to grasp were the “Love Laws”. 

“Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.”

This essay contains discussions of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Incendies(2010), Predestination(2014), Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton, Mickey 17(2025) and TENET(everything).

American philosopher John Rawls in ‘A theory of Justice’ introduces a thought experiment called the “veil of ignorance” or “original position”. It describes an approach to the making of a social contract with impartiality at its core, it asks you to ignore personal circumstances. 

Pretend you are sitting behind a veil that bars you from knowing who you are, where you stand and what advantages and disadvantages you hold in the world. Then think about policies with two principles in mind; the Liberty principle and the Difference principle. As might be apparent from the name, the Liberty principle ensures that everyone enjoys as much freedom as possible as long as it doesn’t infringe on the freedom of others. The Difference principle guarantees that every person has an equal opportunity to thrive and if there are differences, they are for the benefit of the most disadvantaged.  

Now, when this uncomfortable question came to me, you could say I had a veil of ignorance in my mind. I was imagining a hypothetical quite distant from my friends and I and some might even consider it ridiculous. The terrible plot twist in a mediocre movie. Or a certain top-down interactive video game. 

Thing is, it is too often that I have these strange questions that other people on a random evening might not be up for a conversation about. This isn’t a brag or a very subtle way of showing that I’m considerate, it’s merely a matter of the cost of living and the fear of when it might climb to unaffordable heights. As is repeated multiple times in The God of Small Things, two thoughts are to always be kept in mind:

a)Anything can happen to anyone.

and

b)It is best to be prepared. 

When I was 13, I didn’t know how to tell my friends that the idea of someone who wasn’t prepared, who didn’t know things can change in a day made me incredibly sad because I knew that I was no exception when it came to world’s sudden cruelty. Schrödinger’s ticking time bomb of human history’s explosive demonstration in the brain.

It was probably the worst hypothetical to convey this sentiment, especially to a group of other 13 year olds tired from 7 hours spent in hell from 7 am onwards finally getting to relax at home but I’d be lying if I claimed now that I cared. 

No, I cared more for contingencies, for life insurance. I can now understand why little kids are sometimes so eager to have seemingly insignificant questions answered. It’s life insurance! It’s for posterity!

This is a world where uncles rape nieces, husbands beat wives, families practice eugenics in the name of culture and good-intention, homosexuality is considered unnatural(because humans decide what is real) and barely conscious women receive “husband stitches” and, this part is important, a world where all of that is “normal”. Because it is, “normal”, bell-curved.

I, who knew back then what the Love Laws were, who could be loved, how they could be loved and how much they could be loved still needed to know why. If all of that is normal, then why was such a supposedly meaningless social contract signed? My assumption was that it was all about the ever so valuable human disgust and how some human disgust is prioritised over other disgust. But if it was all a sick, simple math equation then my question wouldn’t have existed. My question was about a small thing, love. Even though they’re the “Love Laws”, they’re not really about love. Love Laws don’t talk about the tiny, quantum picture, they talk about the big picture. When you look at the tiny picture, you see that the equation makes no sense and the nomenclature is all wrong. My question about love, repulsive as it was, was a gauging of prioritisation.

I had vaguely thought about before, the tier system on which love is ranked. I thought romantic sat higher than platonic not because I had experienced either in any huge way, only because I had observed the various degrees of prioritisation humans displayed. I knew the wrong kind of prioritisation could cause anything ranging from not a speck of dust being affected to your very own demise, the end of time, maybe.

In the moment before raising this question though, I had realised a tiny thing. I’d realised that my tier system analogy was a complete misunderstanding. The system wasn’t ranking the kinds of love. Because there are no kinds of love, you can never truly separate them. It was stating when love could be prioritised over disgust and vice versa. How love and disgust work to blind us and the ways in which this blindness makes the act of “appropriate” prioritisation difficult. 

I could have asked other questions to gauge this, like-

why we ignored people begging on the street?

why my teacher in the third grade strictly instructed us all to never talk to the girl who “misbehaved”?

why girls and boys were made to sit next to each other in primary school so there was no chatter because girls only talked to girls and boys only talked to boys but in adulthood, live-in straight couples get harassed?

why parents and teachers liked to say that they are not your friends?

why no one dreamed of marrying someone poor and “unsuccessful”?

I couldn’t exactly pin-point why I chose such a jarring question, maybe because I knew on some level that the disgust it would bring out might actually evoke honesty, a correct measurement. A measurement I could then use to understand my place in the world, look at the market and be able to guess the cost of living in any given moment. 

You could say that all that normality that I previously stated was measurement enough but that was a bit lost to me at that age. I needed to know that in a fight between love and disgust, what wins when the disgust is quantitatively high, the reasoning for the quantity was irrelevant for me. 

Because really, so much is disgusting for the people in this world.

Smell, body hair, skin color, voice, wrinkly pugs, the wrong amount of love. The reasons are vast and often incomprehensible. I didn’t care for the reasoning behind the disgust my question might leave someone with because for any of these other disgusting things, people are quick to say it is just preference. A meaningless contract, illogical equation.

Everyone is entitled to preference, right? 

I was curious about the volume of disgust solely, a volume I could be subjected to if I’m not wary of the market and what it requires at a given time to consolidate capital. This was only a year after homosexuality had moved from unnatural to ignorable in India, not legal and not illegal. I knew because of that, and because of everything else of the volatility. This was an attempt at a deeper insight into the ease with which disgust engulfs people and becomes the only thing that matters. The Disgust Laws, not the Love Laws. The laws that lay down when something is no longer human. 

Turns out, the whole anticlimactic “what if two people fell in love but then they found out they were related” scenario isn’t the best way to ask someone if they care about human rights. But it did teach me a few things, like how a lot of people are inclined to think that consummation is the only boundary between what is platonic and romantic when they have to think fast and that every law is somehow structured around this understanding if you truly think about it. 

Trust me, I do cringe when I remember asking this question and being deeply offended when my friend assumed I didn’t know what inbreeding was. I also felt double offended that they didn’t immediately understand that I was in a totally not convoluted way trying to understand if they would believe in the humanity of a person who is in circumstances that the disgust law market currently predicts will cause failure. 

What I couldn’t get my friend to agree on was the belief I held about these two hypothetical people, the belief that these are not bad people. That this is a sad story. The incest bit, although cheap, was really just a placeholder for whatever love is ostracized in whatever era. (I was unfortunately too idealistic to know that second-cousin marriage is, in fact, still legal in multiple countries including this one.)

I wanted assurance that the fact that love can destroy lives is sad and that we can’t look at love as the villain. I wanted to cry about what disgust tramples. All the small things. 

I can admit that at some point of my life, touching a “dirty person” repulsed me and drawing a fat person? Never even crossed my mind. I knew, from within myself, the answer to the question. It’s not preference, nothing dictates that disgust should hold the power to dictate and yet it does. And you can go your whole life never addressing these dehumanising thoughts planted in your brain. 

This is what’s so all-consumingly grim about this book. You don’t need my somewhat improbable hypothetical to realise this, you just need to look around, then invert your head and look inside your flesh. It’s everywhere. It has happened, happening, will happen again and again. There is no comfort in imagining what if things went “right” like there usually is for a lot of sad stories. This is The Sad Story. The loss of what is too fragile but most passionate.

The book is about small things, things so small in fact that you cannot escape them. You may ignore them but the book never lies, it never tries to deceive you about its end so the only reason you finish it, if you are truly being honest with yourself is because you only care about the small things. You know the power small things have.

The loss of the small things, just like their presence, is not something you can evade. I try multiple times to imagine the what ifs, happier ends but it doesn't mean anything. Because Velutha is dead. Ammu is dead. One twin silent, the other empty. The orangedrink lemondrink man can still come to Ayemenem. It's all real, multiply all these to an unthinkably large number and it's all real. Human history, masquerading as God's Purpose, revealing itself to an underage audience.

These are the two ends, one too real and the other too imaginary. Both infinite. 

TENET is like the dreams of chalk, blackboard and proper punishments that Ammu and the twins dreamt, too far away, not within the month-after-next which is basically never. Here, the what ifs, the happiness you can imagine is all that matters. You are dreaming for the world.

While Velutha lay “in-all-likelihood-would-not-live-through-the-night”, awoken by the chill of metal and looked through blood at Estha, Esthappen dreamed that he smiled, not through his mouth but somewhere not broken.

Estha only dreamed for himself, he for a moment was The God of Small Things, just like Velutha. 

In TENET, however, there are only big things. 

The God of Small Things, Incendies, Mickey 7, Wuthering Heights, Predestination- these are all stories where the Big God watches, assured of the plan. We don’t need to know him, we focus on the small things. We watch as Love Laws are broken, lives are changed. They don’t let you grieve. You carry the whole weight as if it’s all your fault, like Estha and Rahel. Some could argue that in Incendies, Mickey 7, there is a triumph. But it’s the kind of triumph that doesn’t make the Big God’s eye pause and suddenly focus on a disorderly miniscule. It is a triumph accounted for. 

TENET is where things get complicated, idealistic, thrilling. For all anyone knows, Big God is dead. Someone killed Big God and now Small God is the de facto ruler. 

“Even later, on the thirteen nights that followed this one, instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things.”

The biggest triumph of this world, the world that allows you to dream for the whole of it, is that seemingly, the small things are the big things and they’re the fuel for the future. Time itself.

“What's happened, happened. Which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world. It's not an excuse to do nothing.”

I know it’s hypocritical for me to say this but in a way, it is not within our ability to observe what the pessimistic and optimistic interpretations of Neil’s words are. A whiff of triumph is enough rush to enable you to do the impossible. And maybe, stories like these are written because that rush does exist without all the time inverting technology, in real life. These aren’t just nonchalant, emotionless accounts of Terror. They’re efforts. And me writing this essay is possibly a way to not see this book about delicate, small things as a reason to give up. To think that disgust always wins. That I have no future. 

When I think about The God of Small Things, I resent Chacko the hardest. Because for the amount of times he talked about the price of inbreeding, the love he held for Margaret Kochamma because she didn’t share the qualities he felt prevalent in the women from his world, he didn’t think once of the silent and empty Twin and the regression he put into motion. 

“Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it. Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much."

However, for practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world… I blame Chacko. For the emptiness he carried deliberately rather than the one that was forced on the Twin. For having left them to cope in ways he decried so often. 

And that’s what I really should take from this story, not a moral but a resentment for the kind of person to not be. 

As tired as Velutha was and as resigned to the small things of those thirteen days, he had that rush for a moment. The rush to say “We’ll see about that”, to feel the anger to rage against the world. The rush John had to know the best thing that ever happened to him no matter how twisted and hopeless, the rush Nawal had to not want to be buried with respect until her story was told, in some way, the one Heathcliff and Cathy had to never truly let go of what once made them children and the one Nasha had to believe in Mickey’s humanity, the one Kat had to aim the gun, the one that makes you think of the Small Things. 

The one Chacko lacked severely. 

[purwansikatalkstenet]

What Happens When Nothing Changes ?

(This essay contains discussions of themes relevant to A Bride for Rip Van Winkle(2016), Asako I and II(2018), The Great Indian Kitchen(2021) but no spoilers. Of course, TENET spoilers ahead.)

Delicate nonchalance tends to suppress the monster. That’s something we try hard to believe when faced with the possibility of permanent dissatisfaction, discontent. Sometimes this act extends to how we react to the screen.

The other day while on a walk, I saw an elderly couple. Later that day, I felt frustration from that observation, or more specifically, frustration from the confusion it erupted in me and wrote down the following-

He holds her hand, her other grips the walker. They walk slowly, both looking different ways or so it seems. It’s aimless but directional, there’s a grocery bag that needs to get someplace.

I can’t see the happiness, the love. I’m so sorry.

Some would call this bitter, it probably would have been bitter if I had a companion to share this remark with in that moment instead of writing it in a diary at night or nearly morning. However, I was alone and I sneaked a glance like a child does at something whose existence she is not documented to be conscious of. Much like Asako in Asako I and II, all I thought of in that moment was me, there was no awe at the resilience or adoration for the bond they must share. There was simply dread. Not dread at the idea of ageing but at the idea that something in me has become fundamentally incapable of seeing purity in affection under the bounds I can see everywhere.

I don’t find myself bitter, I find myself utterly puzzled and would describe it as worse than any outright anger I could feel. 

These films that I watched quite close to one another out of mostly coincidence all share a casual deconstruction of domesticity, something that is soaked in beliefs in the binary and in heteronormativity. As our characters begin to settle into a lifestyle neither chosen nor formulated by one individual but by too many factors to count or comprehend, the film seems to be asking us to warm up to it in one way or another.

For some, warming up to husband and wife and the home she mostly manages, the car he mostly drives is easy but we see too quickly that it isn’t even easy for the two in that situation. It requires a certain blindness to not see the monster of discomfort that forms, these movies initially urge us to adopt that blindness even if it doesn’t come naturally to us. It certainly doesn’t to me but I try, I smile at the little scenes full of supposed love just like I smiled fleetingly at that couple I saw on my evening walk.

But I’m not equipped to ignore the sink that remains unclogged, the growing shame that momentarily transforms into a million declarations of love when faced with the challenge of accepting an act of kindness not as kindness but as duty the other has to you in this unit. The persistent hum in the head that says our protagonists need an escape from something, a “something” they never figure out.

These are not stories of liberation, they are stories that contextualise how small man is in the face of unchanging, unthinking structure. Our vision cannot take in the full picture. We revert to binary when things are too complex, shortcuts and short-lived “rebellions”. If you open the pen and only one of the two pigs escape, barely running any distance, does it mean anything in the grander scheme? 

Producer Emma Thomas labels TENET as a “fun globetrotting action extravaganza” but for all the time zones, (real)Boeing 747 crashes and backward car driving, you ultimately end up in this family, house, society you can’t truly leave, eliminating alleged antagonists to preserve the status quo. Everyone would rather feel than understand because understanding presents the not so unclear reality that we rest under the shadow of that mysterious “something” and are unclear on whether leaving the taxing, cozy shade of it is worth anything coherent. There is no neat social contract with signatures to discover in the past and there is no time altering algorithm in the future.

I don’t want to smile when I see two hold hands. 

[purwansikatalkstenet]

I don't know how to feel It

Is it all just pretend? 

“You had to have dropped it.”

From my point of view…

“From your point of view you caught it,  from the bullets…”

You let me die.

TENET is a movie about “mis”understandings and death. That’s a bit definitive, I don’t actually believe that wholly. I do think, much like its protagonist, called The Protagonist( Or at least that’s what some believe, I think they simply needed a placeholder for the script and the credits) that it’s a blank slate. Or that’s what it wants you to think. We could say life itself is a blank slate, you can do whatever you want with it. That isn’t really true, it’s reductive.

If anything, it’s incredibly oppressive. The movie, that is. (And life too.)

It plays with the idea that your life isn’t really your own, both to shirk responsibility and to take it. In totality, it’s trying to visualise the possibility that cause and effect aren’t real. I think there is a singular interpretation of TENET that encompasses everything meaningful about it. If we’re only looking at meaning in a scientific, empirical way. That interpretation is that the world exists at once, “once” being meaningless because it is only applicable to the way we process things. 

It’s more like,  “the world exists. Whatever, moving on.”

Maybe not even that, that “whatever” can only exist in a context where time is significant to begin with. 

Moving on, there’s no way to really get to that glorious, perfect sentence that explains this interpretation because that would reveal things we as a civilization are nowhere close to figuring out. Maybe that’s where the insistence to “feel it” comes, we all feel it.

That thought spiral where you imagined the home you’re in no longer being there, then the country, the planet, space, matter- what happens now? You don’t know, but you feel it. It feels suffocating and as if time is running out. Tesseract’s closing up. That’s how I’d describe it anyway. 

We don’t know what to think about nothing. Maybe, nothing isn’t the end of understanding but the peak of it. All of this is to say that Christopher Nolan seems to really love, love and he’s pretty scared of death. He’s also scared of dead people being alive and I personally abhor those who pretend the world doesn’t run on love, love really meaning passion(perhaps even obsession, although I think it feels a bit negative), until they’re inclined to make a choice solely based on it. I don’t think we’d have law or science if we were loveless creatures. Would the world even move? Do things beyond our comprehension matter?

Elizabeth Debicki describes TENET as an epic tale of survival within which is threaded an incredibly human story. It’s somewhat repetitive because if you watch the movie or even look at this sentence alone, they’re the same thing. Anything so-called ‘TENET’ accomplishes is intrinsically linked with what Kat wants, time and emotion is irrelevant. There is no cause and effect, we don’t know if all the self-inflicted fate exists because the world needed to survive or because Kat just, really, really wanted to shoot her abusive husband(ex-husband?). Perhaps it exists because of John David Washington’s improvised Hot Sauce line.

Survival is incredibly human. Or incredibly animal. There’s no algorithm that gives weight or mass to survival.

When you’re a child, there is this unspoken expectation of being some sterile, otherworldly thing with all the dreams and none of the complex emotion that propels purpose. The plan cannot bear the weight of a child with adult emotion.

Being former-child, I kind of understand TP’s midlife crisis. It’s nice that he thinks he’s the protagonist now, Neil got his last word in, so did Kat, even Sator. They’re all echoing into infinite nothing.

You said it was all physics and survival but all we’re doing is tying up loose ends to ensure some final violent, bloody battle. Whatever, I’m The Protagonist now.

TENET feels… cross with something. That explains why it irritates some of the audience so much. It’s like that child grew up and doesn’t know who to blame, there is no perfect sentence, the world just is. 

I’m reading a novel currently(This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone) and barely 20 pages in but its description of symmetry got me to start typing this out.

It describes symmetry as agonizing, it calls the future fraying and glorious and crystal. Blue and Red have opposing views, Professor Brand in Interstellar says the past might be a canyon they can climb into and the future a mountain to climb up. Here, the past is the one that goes up and the future the one that you have to fall into. We all pick and choose.

As someone who distrusts their own shadow, not knowing what I will do if it moves without permission; how I will deal with those implications, the world of TENET horrifies me. To see a friend bid goodbye after already having seen them die and the red string rubs it in your face.

TENET is a nightmare, time does run out. And we do need to understand it.