Oh, So That’s What the Title of "Tenet" Means

Thanks, Reddit!

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet has been shrouded in secrecy ever since it was announced. Among its many secrets: What the hell does the title mean anyway?

It’s not like we didn’t know the definition of the word. It takes literal seconds to ask Google, which says it’s "a principle or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy."

That certainly inspired some theorising about the film's contents ahead of the picture’s release, but having now seen Tenet for ourselves, we can confirm that the traditional dictionary definition of Tenet doesn’t explain much about the movie at all.

Very, very mild spoilers ahead, but if you don’t want to know anything about the movie ahead of its wide release in Australia on 27 August, don’t read any further.

As we say in our review, Tenet is about an unnamed operative played by John David Washington trying to stop World War 3, armed only with a codeword—tenet—and a hands-clasped gesture to help him extract highly classified information from others in the know.

The villain, revealed early on, is a Russian oligarch played by Kenneth Branagh, and you could argue his intentions to incite this apocalyptic event reflect a 'tenet' of sorts, but that’s a bit of a stretch. Rather, it seems the film’s title (and the codeword) was selected simply because it’s a palindrome (a word that’s the same forwards and backwards), since the film deals with 'time inversion', which results in sequences where characters move forwards and backwards in time.

Of course, if Nolan just wanted to give his movie a cool palindromic title, he could have instead chosen Racecar, or Kayak, or, my personal preference, No Lemon No Melon. Imagine the poster.

So, why Tenet? As one smartie-pants on Reddit deduced, it may have to do with the climactic battle sequence...

Okay, mild spoilers for the final act coming up...

... in which two military troops (a blue team and a red team, as shouted-out on Travis Scott’s soundtrack cut "The Plan") try to defuse a bomb through a "temporal pincer movement", AKA by going in alternate directions, time-wise. One goes backwards from the future; another goes forward from the past. They synchronise their stop-watches: ten minutes until (and from) detonation.

Ten minutes forward. Ten minutes back.

Ten-neT.

Tenet.

This basically confirms Nolan called his movie Tenet because it's cool as s***. That, we can agree. Just like we can all agree the sound mix was no good.

Tenet arrives in Australian cinemas on 27 August, 2020.

Header Image: Warner Bros. Pictures