What Is Tenet About, Anyway?

One day, soonish, perhaps, or just generally in the near future, Tenet will be released. All its mysteries will be unveiled to a curious, eager public. People will sit in the theater and gasp; other people will sit in the theater and get a little teary eyed, but don’t worry about it, there’s just something in their eye. At least one person will embarrassingly jump in their seat nervously, spilling their popcorn all over the floor, but we will be happy to be together again in a darkened movie theater and enjoying ourselves, so everyone will ignore it. Within the first ten minutes, my dad will lean over to ask, “What’s that guy’s name, again?” and I will say, “John David Washington.” He will then ask me, “Is that the vampire from that vampire movie?” And I will say yes. After we leave the theater, we will all race to the internet to talk about this movie, its secrets, and the way it made us feel.

But that day is not today, much to director Christopher Nolan’s continued chagrin. Tenet has ruled over the summer in curious, comical ways — the will-they-or-won’t-they-release-a-guaranteed-blockbuster-in-the-middle-of-[gestures blithely]-all-this back-and-forth, the daylong news cycle when we all wondered if Nolan really doesn’t let actors sit on set at his movies (prompted by an anecdote from Anne Hathaway). Tenet is no longer just a movie; it’s a COVID-era Hollywood white whale: What does its release mean for the future of moviegoing as we’ve known it? Does our hitless summer beget a hitless fall? Those are questions for other people. Today, I have but a simple query. We’ve spent all this time fussing over a film without even knowing what it’s about. So what do we think happens in this movie?

It’s about preventing 9/11, World War III, or some kind of quantum cold war.

Around the end of May, a theory began to gain traction on the internet claiming that Tenet is about stopping 9/11; this was a half-serious bit based on the fact that George Tenet was director of the CIA at the time of the terrorist attacks. “Obviously, it is a biopic about George Tenet, director of the CIA from 1996 through 2004, and the set of catastrophic intelligence failures he oversaw that led to the Iraq war,” Chris Bonanos, the city editor of New York, told me. “It’s the feel-good movie of the pandemic.”