Anti-Russian “Argument”
Christopher Nolan's film Tenet was released. In such cases they say something like “the most anticipated film.” Today, in principle, this makes sense - firstly, because any of Nolan’s creations is in trend, and, secondly, because the coronavirus pandemic has made any movie wait.
I will not now analyze this film in detail, but will focus on two key points that the Russian or, let’s say, post-Soviet viewer should understand. I use the last adjective – “post-Soviet” – for a reason. After all, Nolan, in fact, takes us back to the Cold War, where James Bond fought against the bloody and cruel Russians. This is not directorial stupidity, not “spreading cranberries,” but a simulacrum necessary for external design. But more on this, however, a little later.
To begin with, here's what. “Tenet” (in the original Tenet) not only demonstrates, but affirms the dominant trend of modern cinema moving towards external, but not internal, content. A similar thing, by the way, was shown to us by Sam Mendes in “1917.” That is, we are seeing an almost ideal (perhaps even without “almost”) visual canvas, where everything is done at the highest level: special effects, camera work, etc.
However, this leaves us with a vague scenario in which individuals mean virtually nothing. Everything is focused not on the development of personalities, not on showing the viewer how destinies and characters have changed, but solely on their movements in time and space. Regarding time shifts, Nolan especially loves this theme: it is best implemented in “Memento” (by the way, my favorite work of this director).
To put it simply, cinema has completely lost its literary grain. The Word, which, as we know, was in the beginning and which, it would seem, should have existed forever, gave way to His Majesty the Picture.
And from here we move on to the second point. Nolan demonstrated how colossal the gap is between Western and Russian civilization, between their world and ours, and how one absorbs (quite successfully, whatever) the other.
The point here is not that the main character (although in the case of Nolan’s film such a formulation is a slight exaggeration) is confronted by a Russian oligarch, and capsules with toxic substances are scattered everywhere - and the oligarch’s biography is such that, willy-nilly, you will remember the term “cranberry” Well, the guards are a funny character in tattoos. I repeat, this is not the point.
The trick is that even such a powerful director as Nolan couldn’t come up with any other visualization. He chose the most primitive of all possible paths. So primitive that it would not even be worth discussing if the main thing did not figure behind such an approach, namely, their world will never be ours, no matter how much we try to adopt their attributes. They are meaningless and do not work in our own coordinate system, which, curiously, is preserved despite all the perturbations. And it’s not they, but we who look like savages when we try to grab onto something that needs to be thrown away and chopped off.
There is a gap between our civilizations - and the war of the newest generation that is going on today is explained, first of all, by this: they are directed outward, and we are directed inward. That's the difference and that's the dividing line. This will be the case in the near future. Exactly until the gap becomes fatal and absorbs the remnants of what we habitually call Russian consciousness.
As Pelevin once wrote: “Russia was always notorious for the gap between culture and civilization. Now there is no more culture. No more civilization. The only thing that remains is the Gap. The way they see you."
That's right, yes.
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