The Genius of Christopher Nolan
By: Karan Acharya
Tags: Directors, Focus, Screenwriting, Filmmaking, Productivity

Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled. - The Prestige (2006)

(No spoilers for TENET)

People watch movies for varied reasons. Some want to just forget reality and have a good laugh and go back home. Some, want to enjoy the adrenaline rush from fast-paced action sequences and larger-than-life stunts. Some, want to appreciate and humanize with the characters on-screen in poignant, emotional dramas. And then, there are movies which push the mental boundaries and ask us to imagine, visualize and comprehend something completely novel, something we could never have imagined before. Welcome to the dimension of Christopher Nolan movies. Space, Time and Gravity will be your friends here.

He’s only directed 11 films until now, and with each and every film, he has pushed the boundaries of the genre it was supposed to belong to. Following was his take on the crime & mystery genre ; with Memento, he revolutionized the structure of film screenplays. The Dark Knight Trilogy was an absolute masterclass in making superhero movies feel relevant and realistic and asking us to keep the popcorn aside and immerse ourselves into the making of a legend, instead. The Prestige was a magic trick that was performed on us. Inception was his take on the heist genre that took us inside the very deep layers of the subconscious which literally bended our minds. With Interstellar he took us outside, beyond the Milky Way, on a mesmerizing, cerebral journey through the universe with a poignant, emotional core at it’s heart. With Dunkirk, he put us right in the middle of World War II and asked us to experience firsthand the thrilling survival of fellow humans in wartime.

And now, with Tenet, he has taken on the spy-espionage genre and added Science Fiction into the mix. And boy, that’s one heck of a ride. You’ve never seen anything like it.

Tenet is a film that feels like it runs at around 1.5 times the processing speed of an average human brain, when you watch it for the first time. “Don’t try to understand it ; just feel it” says one character to the protagonist by just the 20-minute mark. Nolan is being meta-cinematic here — he is asking us to just enjoy the ride. I won’t spoil the plot for you, obviously. (As if you’re gonna comprehend it, even with spoilers).

Towards the end of my first viewing, I could feel my brain screaming at the top of it’s high-functioning neurons while trying to wrap itself around the plot. It’s only when I watched it a second time, that I could spot some clues very cleverly planted. Some crucial stuff even happens off-screen. Some happen right in front of your eyes, but you only get it when you know where to look for it ; like steganography. That’s when I realized — Nolan never spoon-feeds you. He asks you to connect the dots yourselves. He asks you to do the hard work. He is your mental fitness trainer. You have to lift those weights yourselves. He asks you to think along the lines he himself thought while working on those films. He doesn’t underestimate the audience. Welcome to the Active Participation Cinema Experience.

However, we have been getting so used to being spoon-fed all the information every time, that we’ve become lazier, cognitively. When everything is laid out for you on a platter, why would you do the extra work of connecting the dots yourselves? Can you think of the last movie you watched where you had to really think about what happened after the credits rolled? They hardly make movies like that anymore. Plus, it’s easier than ever to just google the plot-points whenever you can’t figure it out. When all the answers we want are available on a single tap, our efficient mental processors decide to save some energy and don’t really want to work it out anymore. Our mind is a fantastic natural example of a Supervised Deep Learning- Reinforcement Learning system, that we go through the ‘training’ phase, every living moment. As we get used to NOT using our brains all the time and learn to outsource that to a Snapdragon processor in our hand instead, we become dumber, day by day.