Hello fellow Earthlings,
It been 55 days since I last wrote here. During this gap, Trump got (and recovered from?) Covid. N flew back in India for sorting out her work visa. I am back to how I was at the beginning of the year, solo in Bangkok. Monsoon rains started to (and continue to) pound Bangkok with a vengeance. Another quarter rolled off in 2020, slowly but surely taking us out of it.
I even did a solo trip to an island where I ended up spending most of the time indoors working even as the rain refused to let up. That’s a story for another day. Hopefully that day isn’t another 55 days away.
Over the years, I’ve realized that’s just how it goes with me. The idea of predictable repetition scares me. At the same time I love to write (period), especially in this medium. It’s a long winded way of saying I tend to get quite lazy at times.
And oh yeah, during this time I also saw a movie after nearly 6 months.
Sometime towards the end of August, I went back to one of my most favorite places. I sat in a dark, cool hall, with a bunch of strangers in front of an incredibly large screen. Like a starving man would feast, I watched a Nolan movie in IMAX after several months of not heading into a theatre at all.
“We live in a twilight world”
2020 has been a long protracted exercise in strangeness and incredulity. But for the 150 mins I was in the theatre everything was alright. Ludwig Göransson’s wicked bass rumbled through my body, larger-than-life action, choreographed like a ballet, played out on the big screen and all the while my mind was trying to unravel the gnarly tale of time and end of the world.
This is not a review of Tenet. To review Tenet would be to deface the joy of watching it. Suffice to say, it involves time. But then, you already knew that when Nolan decided to make another movie. The man, after all, loves toying with time whether it is displacing the chronological sequence of his shots and story or more fundamental realignment of the character’s perception of time.
With Tenet, Nolan wormholes himself back toward his core nerd-ness without any of the cushioning and exposition that he brought to his movies once he became this mega-star director. This is closer to Memento in it’s inexorable tactical momentum, letting the audience run their own parallel track of interpretation. Even the protagonist is this nameless (literally) any-man who helps the audience answer the question of ‘What if this happened to you?’
Net effect: Tenet was a blast and I would highly recommend you watch it once. And here’s a tip: Don’t try to understand it, experience it. The understanding may never come. I just wish Nolan had spent more time on crafting the character and giving him a real purpose.
The space-time of a movie theatre
Let’s talk relative physics for a second. Relativity of simultaneity states that distant simultaneity – whether two spatially separated events occur at the same time – is not absolute, but depends on the observer's reference frame. If you are an observer of two events separated by space but happening simultaneously, another observer in a moving object may not perceive them to be simultaneous and as such it is never absolute to say two events happened at the same time.
A movie hall, however, is a sumptuous attempt at simultaneity. At any given moment, everyone gathered in the hall experiences the same, fixed length feature. It’s a magic that is increasingly difficult to find (except perhaps in sports and live events).
Unlike sporting events though, movies have the ability to manipulate how you perceive time even within this predictably fixed, simultaneous window you’ve loaned them. You have a movie like Forrest Gump that literally spans decades and cuts across historical events and then a movie like Run Lola Run which covers about 20-odd minutes of real-world time in its entirety of 88 minute runtime.
For movies, time is everything. At a crude level, movies have almost always relied on time to create urgency. It feels like my childhood is littered with movies that exploit this - especially the action ones. There’s a meteor heading towards earth, stranded hostages, a bomb that’s ticking or an attack that’s imminent. But this isn’t restricted to action movies. Think about all those rom-coms where the protagonist is trying to get to an airport before the flight takes off to tell the love of his / her life not to go. Or running after a train that’s started leaving the platform.
So it’s not that Nolan is the only director who likes playing with time. He only made it more front and center and as the chief antagonist in most cases. For after all, time is the ultimate measuring jar for our anxieties. It is also the magic wand by which we frame our stories.
Time isn’t what you think it is
I was recently reading Ted Chiang’s collection of short stories. The eponymous short story of the collection ‘Exhalation’ is particularly fascinating. It’s this steam-punkian story about a fictional mechanical being that is trying to find an answer to why things are slowing down. In the process, it discovers that its perception of time is slowing. It is one of the most mind-opening stories I’ve read in a while that made me stop and think about how the passage of time is just the speed at which we perceive a series of events.
We know that people perceive time differently in short bursts known as temporal illusions. Consider 2020. We’ve heard people mention how time has moved too fast or too slow this year. We always are thinking about time and how it passes. But in 2020, since we have this shared global disruption we are just having more of us share this with each other.
For example, consider the oddball effect wherein we perceive the beginning and ends of events or even just the first unique appearance of an event as having taken longer. Think about the movie Groundhog day. By day 5, Bill Murray would have felt his days getting faster. By day 100, it would have been moving at the speed of light. In your own life you would have noticed this. When you do something completely new for the first time, it is extremely memorable and the period seems to stretch out for long. Periods of high level of routine seem to gel together into a fuzzy period when time seemed to just zoom by.
This is not just for short bursts. Older people perceive time to move much faster than those younger. At a psychological level it makes sense: the older you are, the more you have seen and therefore every passing day feels like a shorter span in the context of your life. When you are 5 years old, you live 1% of your life every 18 days. When you are 20, you live the same 1% every 10 weeks. When you are 50, you need to live half a year to live 1% of your life. And when you are 80, that’s 292 days. So, every day would have much less importance.
But there could be a more biological explanation too, not too dissimilar to Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, according to a paper published recently. We think on the basis of electro-chemical impulses travelling in our brain. However, as we grow older, these impulses have to travel further and due to damages to nerves, face greater friction. The result: It takes longer for perception to form and change (impulses to complete the circuit) resulting in what you could simply think of as slowing of ‘frames per second’. As you perceive fewer frames per second, you think that time is speeding up even though the second has remained constant.
So, can you actually reverse time like in Tenet?
This is the kind of question that eternally fascinates me. But the problem with this question is that it is based on nothing. It’s like asking: can we flip over a globigob? To effectively answer that, you need to first ask, what is a globigob?
So, what is time?
This can be a whole new article in itself with no answers whatsoever. For a long time, the only explanation we had for time is that it’s just a notation to represent state change or entropy. E.g. if nothing moved in the universe and the world - no one did anything and no wind blew and nothing absolutely changed, there wouldn’t be time. So, then, time is just a notation and not an actor. Kinda like mathematics. Maths is a notation to represent reality and not the source of that reality itself.
But theoretically if you can reverse entropy and all the states that have happened before in the exact reverse order, you could logically argue that we can watch the whole thing play backwards, seeming like some type of time reversal. In any case, Tenet doesn’t try to explain any more of how or why this is happening and it’s fruitless for us to try and reason it out. It’s just that someone in the future invented this funkytimeinverter4.0 and it magically makes all this happen.
As to the explanation of why this is happening, why this inversion matters to the protagonist and why we should care for him, it is even more inscrutable than the physics itself.
Could be worse,
Tyag