The mystery of time in films —- the powerful charm of traveling through time

Christopher Nolan, one of the most prestigious directors in the commercial film industry today. Since Nolan’s first film, he has been obsessed with various concepts related to time. This has become more and more obvious since the advent of Inception and reached its peak in his TENET released last year. TENET is the most concentrated expression of Nolan’s obsession with time so far, but it deviates from the concept of time in Nolan’s existing films, creating a new film core that can be successful or failed. Through this core, the audience can glimpse the contemporary possibilities of film in the creation of temporal and spatial relationships, and further ponder how the concept of science fiction becomes a philosophical worldview in the film.

Traveling through space and time as a common high-concept theme in a genre of films can almost be regarded as abused, but if carefully analyzed, travel through space and time and only through time correspond to two different presentation methods, there are fewer films purely about time travel than the former. People’s transcendental intuition about space is that people can definitely feel space, and feeling is not understanding. This is the difference between space and time. The knowledge of space in terms of human experience must be based on intuitive or logical geometric concepts. The opposite is the purely sensational nature of time. Humans cannot visualize any direction of time. Even the actual direction of a clock is not a specific time but a calibration of the interval between specific events. The passage of time must still face consciousness directly. Here is the distinction between two different types of films that travel through time and space and those that only travel through time. Space emphasizes the geometric attributes under the space with its externality to the cognitive subject, that is, a certain material or physical characteristic for people that can be visualized or perceptualized. That is to say, the core of the presentation of a film that travels through time and space lies in the changes in the space it represents. The changes in space caused by a certain temporal cause and effect, or changes in external events, are self-evident. The representative of such a type of film is the Back to the Future series of films by Robert Zemigis. Looking at the development of film history, the Back to the Future series of films is not the earliest genre that travels through time and space, but it has one of the most significant characteristics of this type of film. That is, by modifying and observing the specific phenomenon of causality in the time and space where it is, the future will be guided to the result desired by the protagonists. In the Back to the Future series, the protagonists have never worried about the flow of time. The causality established on the time scale caused by their behavior is simply and directly reflected on external events, observable and changeable. Therefore, in Back to the Future, time is only a concept on a scale, a high concept that meets the audience’s rational expectations for rationalizing visual presentation, in terms of its actual performance, it is only space that is really “traversed”, what actually changes are the specific world and events in the space. The specific manifestation of the development of such a story feature to this day is the last Avengers: Endgame of the Avengers series of films. Aside from the film’s dazzling visual effects and various Hollywood-style high-concept demonstrations, its expression of time and space is not essentially different from the “Back to the Future” series. The causal connection in time is constantly presented in the future and can be modify. Out of the inevitable development of such high-concept films to today, in order to avoid such as the grandfather’s paradox and the contradiction in the plot, this film emphasizes the irretrievability of the past by introducing a theory of “parallel time and space”. This in fact emphasizes the fixation of the flow of time in this type of film. Although the parallel world theory allows time to branch at certain key points of cause and effect, its flow is always in one direction, different from the time streams in the parallel world can be viewed as parallel lines that do not interfere with each other. Time can never be changed, what is changed is only the concrete time and space under the time scale.

What about the pure performance of time-traveling films? Before talking about Christopher Nolan’s TENET as the core of this article, it needs to introduce some other types of films with pure time travel to better explain some characteristics of pure time travel.

The first thing that needs to be clarified is that the Groundhog Day is actually a type of film that “travels through time and space”, but it is often mistaken as being only related to the performance of time. The biggest feature of Groundhog Day is the constant resetting of the same day. On the surface, this seems to be a specific cycle of pure time according to certain rules, and this specific cycle has become the main narrative motivation of the film. However, a more accurate understanding of this feature is actually the archive mechanism of modern video games. Players can constantly go back at the archive point to all events before arriving at the next archive point, given that this is related to the time setting of Groundhog Day highly similar, the interpretation of such a worldview is completely reasonable by introducing the mechanism of video games. In fact, whenever the player backtracks at the save point, the previous save is not really non-existent, but is only covered by a new save, but the actual computer mechanism obscures this logical thinking, and it also It can also be understood that the player has replaced a new save. The same is true in Groundhog Day, What the protagonist really experiences is not a retrospect in time, but constantly placing him at the same time and space at the beginning. The change in the direction of time itself is not shown in the film, but only It exists in a conceptual way, only for the theme of the film. There is a very inadvertent example of the expression of a film that is purely on the theme of time travel as an introduction to this concept. In Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban, there is such a fragment, one of the protagonists, Hermione Granger, realized a visually observable time flow at the same time and space through some kind of magic device, helping them to return to a specific time point in the past and their behavior directly affected themselves at the current time point at that time, and even saved themselves. Simply put, the protagonists’ actions in the future go back to the past to save the protagonists themselves, and the rescued protagonists also cause them to return to the past from the future to realize this cycle. This is a major feature of purely time-traveling films. the performance of causality in time is shown in a deterministic or fatalistic way. Although there is no evidence to prove that the director or the original author of the novel clearly realized the characteristics of determinism in the temporal manifestation of causality during the creation process, this film does reflect this very well. Another film that uses the concept of time-causality of fatalism more thoroughly to directly use it as a narrative motivation is Predestination, which is also the key to Dennis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan. Unlike Harry Potter: Prisoner of Azkaban, which actually implies the essence of the deterministic world from the function setting, the world of Predestination is not a truly fatalistic world, but freedom. In the world of will, key behaviors at key time points may directly lead to the production of a parallel time and space, and the focus of this film is precisely on this, that is, how fatalism unfolds under a world view where time runs freely. Avengers: Endgame presupposes that time cannot be traced back through parallel time and space, because different behaviors will lead to the birth of parallel worlds, but the time management department in Predestination found a way and planned a person’s complete life and let this person’s person become a closed loop within the same timeline, thus ending the possibility of parallel worlds. On the surface, it seems that this film has indeed achieved the possibility of realizing the fatalistic life story only through time retrospective under the same time and space, but this is not the case. Regardless of logically it is difficult to explain the source of the protagonist’s lineage (the intuitive representation in the story is that he gave birth to himself, but this is logically impossible. Therefore, this loophole actually first implies the time management department in the film has the ability to manipulate things in different time and space), a more important point is the special nature of the time and space management department. A necessary prerequisite for them to manipulate the protagonist’s life is that they can predict various events in the timeline of the protagonist, that is to say the existence of the time management department is actually higher than or different from the timeline of the event, that is, the existence of the time management department is a more meta-time concept for the timeline of the story. The film’s own story is indeed driven by fatalism, but in the meta-narrative behind the film’s narrative, the shadow of meta-time also exists. This is a more important but usually hidden feature and concept of purely time-traveling films.

This is why it is necessary to clarify some concepts before discussing TENET. The concepts of meta-narrative and meta-time are both importantly embodied in these two films, and they directly assume extremely important functions in TENET so as to even weaken TENET‘s own narrative ability and audiovisual language.

TENET is directed by Christopher Nolan and be released in 2020. It mainly tells the story of a group of agents who have the ability to enter reverse time through a series of efforts to save the world. From the perspective of the story outline, the story of TENET is very simple. In the actual film playback process, the main plot is indeed not the core content of the film. The existence of this plot is basically for the “reverse time” or “reverse entropy”. Concept service. The presentation of reverse time in the film is highly clear and intuitive. Objects move in a way opposite to the current physical law paradigm and present a thermally opposite state. The visualization of this concept makes TENET the first film to clearly show the flow of time under the same spatial category. Everything else in the film is actually persuaded by this concept. Therefore, the concept of time travel described in TENET is also so special, the character needs to go through the same length of “time period” in reverse time to return to the position he wants to reach. The advantage of TENET is not just about visualization. As far as the concept of visualization cannot be visualized in theory, Nolan’s “five-dimensional space” and “gravitational waves” in Interstellar are already A quite successful attempt, but the TENET went a step further. Nolan visualized the concept of time with an expression method that conformed to human experience, thereby realizing the establishment of the audience’s perception of the priori category. When everything in the film screen begins to be presented in the opposite way to the real world, the audience is forced to push back from their own experience to their own feelings. At this time, the narrative of the film is no longer just the images that convey actual information, but also There is a homology between the audience’s intuition that is forced to take effect due to the failure of experience and the temporal and spatial relationships within the film. As a purely time-traveling film, the story in TENET has always happened in the same space, but the narratives of the forward and reverse timelines are constantly intertwined, and the specific perceptions of time and space by the characters in the two timelines are constantly interlacing and even comparing each other. This method leads to the temporary failure of the audience’s concept of experience, and it is impossible to use logic to analyze the narrative structure of the film in the first time and can only accept the information conveyed by the film in the form of vague senses. The director also used the characters’ lines to reinforce this point, “don’t understand, feel it”. At the same time, because of the clear expression of the concept of forward and reverse time, TENET is considered by many people to be a deterministic or fatalistic film, that is, the past of the character determines the future of the character, and the future of the character travels back to determine the character in the past, the role of all the acts that have been scheduled in some kind of cause and effect in a given. But this is not the case. The concept of time travel in TENET is different from Predestination in that the characters in TENET need to experience the same length of time in reverse time when returning to a specific node in the past. That is, although time is reversible, its specific structure (perhaps in a physical sense) that can be perceived by human intuition will not change. Although the physical properties of entropy are indeed reversible, time is not just entropy. The invariance of its length in innate intuition implies a certain concept of meta-time. Although the concept of time and space in the film TENET follows certain laws of physics like all Nolan’s previous sci-fi films, the existence of meta-time (the existence of meta-time is more obvious from the audience’s perspective) makes the film at the character level Perception conforms to a Kantian argument, in which the character does not use “entropy” or physics to understand events in another timeline. With the same light sensitivity and innate intuition, the characters interlaced with each other grasp the other side in the opposite timeline. The understanding of behavior and the world comes from the temporal prior of inner intuition. The character does not establish his own worldview in the film in a priori way of physics (Don’t understand, feel it). The deterministic view cannot be established under such a meta-time concept, because causality is not established through the retrospect of time in an instant, but the intersection of two timelines in different directions under meta-time, for which meta-time is past and future There is no difference, the occurrence of cause and effect is actually happening simultaneously. It goes without saying that this is a super- deterministic Kantian worldview that is closer to “thing in itself.”

The next question involved is whether the role still has its own free will under such super- determinism. This still uses the concept of Kant’s philosophy, but it also has an epistemological aspect. First of all, it is certain that the characters’ thoughts on behavior originate from themselves, and they did not clearly indicate that their thoughts are restricted by a certain established causality or way of thinking. The interlacing of causality may only affect their current decisions. At this critical point, the director used a line to remind him, “Ignorance is power.” As a result, the character remains completely ignorant of his behavior (his future behavior) throughout the entire film. In the film’s superficial narrative, this ignorance is interpreted as a way to fight against the villain who is already completely clear about the future in order to do things he cannot predict. But at a deeper level, keeping ignorance means that rational practice can only keep moving spontaneously through self-discipline. In other words, the protagonist’s behavior is largely out of ego, and at the end of the film, this self-discipline is interpreted as “I am the protagonist” by his own lines, which fits the TENET of the film title. TENET is visually presented as a palindrome structure, which corresponds to the forward and reverse time in the film, but TENET also has a meaning similar to “rules” or “beliefs”, which explains the actual meaning of protagonist’s “I am the protagonist” in a sense. Why is “I am the protagonist” so important? The answer to this question must start from those who hold this belief. For the characters who are highly involved in the narrative in the film, they may be killed by a stray bullet in the next second of the key mission, or they may save themselves by entering the reverse time and returning to the present, and if they can pass through, then cause and effect are inevitable at this moment has been concluded. However, the character must avoid letting himself know whether he has entered the reverse time to return to this moment (“Ignorance is power”). He has to have the absolute confidence in the future and his self under super- determinism that he will definitely reverse time to save himself at a critical point. But this kind of confidence means that he will not encounter anything that will make him lose his life, that is, he actually believes, “I am the protagonist.” This kind of belief is close to the belief in knowledge itself in the epistemology, and it is also close to the universal moral law of self-carried in Kant’s philosophy, and the self-sacrifice of Neil at the end also strengthens the manifestation of this view. But in the final analysis, all of this needs to be built on the world under TENET, which is a pure world where only time can be traversed or reversed. The character must face the reality of the space in which it is located and drive himself in behave in such a world.

Compared with Nolan’s past films that are oriented by story and emotion, and narrative techniques of time and space, TENET is not good or even bad in terms of its script. This is a film whose form is greater than its content. Its excessive manifestation of timeliness and anti-experience of the philosophical core make it impossible for the audience to have a good viewing experience. However, it is worth noting that this film largely abandoned Nolan’s past with suspense as the main narrative promotion feature, it constantly requires the audience’s attention to stay at this moment instead of the next moment, representing Nolan’s new Try to explore. At the same time, this film also pushes the pure film about time travel to a new level.

Perhaps this is the powerful charm of traveling, so that Nolan is not tired of it even in the face of failure in word of mouth.