Tenet Exposes A New Cinema World In The Age of COVID

Over the pasture hill, by the haze of a waste pond, sits the village pest house. Every day I cross a road leading down to that house, and when I return home after plowing the fields, I cross that road again. I see the wheelbarrows stroll the bodies to and fro, and watch their tracks press deep into the mud. This is the rhyme of the plague days, and these are the stanzas of quarantine. Until one day, the town crier comes rushing in amidst a procession of flagellants on wide display, and yells to all the words unthinkable: "The quarantine is finally over!" We drop our tools and stare into the Sun, and realize that the times of the pandemic have come to an end. I toss my hands from the plow and embrace my brother, finally able to hug one another, and for once in what has been many a year, we're no longer afraid to cherish each other. We run down that road with the tracks in the mud, to the center of town where we'll fall with a thud. But I can't help but look back at that pest house behind me, over the pasture hill by the haze of a waste pond, only to see it functioning just the same. The wheelbarrows still outside, ready to carry the dead, preemptively, necessarily: damn near indefinitely. What is the chaos of this world, when entropy fixates onto such cardinal madness? Shall I too follow a similar fate as them? What of time speaks of worlds beyond? To question who they are, who am I? For aren't I just as susceptible?

Nahhhhh.

And so I run into town, my cares all behind me, and buy a ticket to see Christopher Nolan's new film Tenet, now released in select cities. 

It's probably safe to say that Tenet has had its fair share of setbacks this summer. The highly anticipated film, which revolves around inverted entropy and time reversal as methodologies of a potential World War III (and may or may not include a modern-day cinema being sent back to the time of Scottish serfs in the outskirts of a 14th century rural clachan), has been delayed multiple times from its initial July 17th release date, resulting in Warner Brothers Studios releasing the film with a staggered schedule across varying countries. September 3rd marks its established release in the United States, and with COVID-19 cases steadily decreasing, movie theaters and movie goers alike have been confronted with the question of when exactly the nationwide quarantine is ready to end. With sports teams playing for simulated audiences and music award shows being broadcast to virtual crowds, our perception of life appears to be one big never ending video conference call. But in some dimensions of life, "normality" has seemingly reappeared, with some schools returning for in-class teaching even amidst a steady infection rate. Clearly, we're not ready to return to some elements of our old life just yet, so how do we know when it's safe to gradually ease ourselves back into the world of the past? For that, we're forced to experiment.

With this recent vacuum of a summer blockbuster season nearing its end, Tenet is essentially being thrown to the wolves as a sacrificial film to test the waters of the movie-going market. With a Labor Day weekend release, Tenet will serve to see how comfortable moviegoers feel regarding going back to the movies. Not to say that movie theaters are all instantly reopening just for Tenet's sake alone, or that some haven't reopened already. Just look at the rekindled popularity of drive-in movie theaters, which has become a welcome change of pace and return to nostalgic leisure for many, including myself. But most blockbusters have been heavily delayed in the wake of the pandemic, hoping to hold off until the world returns to normal, in order to fully capitalize on their product. Tenet will mark one of the first of those blockbusters to reenter the playing field, hoping to show that the movie-going public is in fact ready to embrace the warm glow of the cinema once again. You know, just like how we were when we went to see Sonic the Hedgehog and Birds of Prey so many decades ago. Oh ... oh, okay ... I am just now being informed that those movies are actually only 7 months old. Wow, if only we could use Tenet's time inversion to go back and watch them again for the first time, huh?

With that being said, there has been a growing source of contention regarding mask policies and the safety of movie theaters ever since the pandemic began. On one hand, many support the reopening of theaters, so long as movie theaters follow and enforce strict safety guidelines. In this regard, many had wanted movie theaters to reopen as soon as possible following the outbreak of quarantines around the world, with some thinking that "normal" life had no reason not to resume if we all just wore face masks. Others wanted to push the quarantine for a wee bit longer, just to be on the safe side, given that we knew so little about the pandemic in those early weeks. Even with masks and social distancing, the idea of being in a movie theater congregated with absolute strangers just seemed ... wrong. And how can cinemas really continually enforce mask policies in a dark theater, with patrons pre-programmed from birth to associate candy and popcorn-eating with the ultimate experience of movie-going? To suggest that people were somehow supposed to keep their masks on at all times while still retaining those evocative hallmarks of movie-going tradition seemed unattainable. Regardless, I don't think either side truly anticipated the pandemic having such a lasting effect as it has, let alone having such an impact on our culture as a whole. The movie industry has had to develop under the pretense of a newfound market, with internet streaming becoming the unknown rookie in the outfield. And surprisingly, it's starting to hit a few home runs.

The barrage of summer blockbusters that seemingly make summer that much more fun for movie-goers was shot dead this year and left to bleed out on the pavement as the major corporate conglomerates scattered to piece together some sense of coherence from their standard release schedules. How does one try to recuperate something as fragile and scrupulous as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially immediately following something as circumstantially significant as Avengers: Endgame. Delays became a namesake for cinema normality, pushing back media empires like Disney's Mulan and Warner Bros.'s Wonder Woman 1984 to wait and swaddle the waters until the pandemic gave way. But it didn't give way. And it still hasn't.

With the ability of streaming, studios like Disney can at least still have some method to release their movies even in the presence of foreclosed movie theaters (because, let's face it ... we are swan-diving headfirst in that direction; case in point, the nearby local theater from my childhood). Services like Disney+ allow for movies like Mulan and Artemis Fowl to still be released via streaming even simultaneously to their theatrical releases, appeasing both sides of the quarantine coin. Video-on-demand services like Google Play, Prime Video, and the iTunes Store have allowed for movies like Scoob! and Trolls: World Tour to still make a substantial return on investment without having to risk a perpetual postponement of their release. And while one could argue that movies like The One and Only Ivan on Disney+ may have made a more lucrative profit if they had just waited to be released in theaters, others could subjectively suggest that, well, sometimes some movies just aren't destined to be blockbusters, are they?

But within the scope of this is the now understood context that stream-able movies can in fact turn a profit, and that releasing movies via video-on-demand is not necessarily the shot in the foot that it was presumptuously thought to be. Will every movie make the exact amount of money it would have if it had been released in theaters? Probably not, but to assert this will be the case for the entire foreseeable future rather than just the mere circumstance of cultural transition is an incredibly bold claim to make. When the popularity of DVDs was in transition to the now iron stronghold of the streaming market, hearing someone ridicule the idea of streaming in comparison to DVD rentals was actually not a rare concept. Hell, Netflix itself used to be a DVD rental service at its start. But hindsight is 20/20, and in the year of 2020, that hindsight is magnified ad infinitum. Times change, methodologies change, and the onset of those changes are not always indicative of the fate of that change forever.

So why are we still so eager to push theatrical releases during a global pandemic? When is it truly considered safe to go back to the movies? And should we even push for going back to exactly how things were, as though nothing had ever happened? What can we learn from this time of reflection, and should we attempt to learn anything at all? Hindsight is a lot like inverted entropy in that sense, where the second law of thermodynamics is forced into reverse. As time moves forward, so does the universe become increasingly disordered. But when time moves back, we too move back into organizational peace. And maybe there lies the heart of nostalgia, for a time that felt less chaotic; where movies encapsulate an untouchable point in time so that it can no longer become distorted by irrepressible chaos. But as much as we would like to invert time to a world before the pandemic, I think the reality of our situation is one that we need to understand and move forward from, not regress back to. Do we really need to force open the cinemas just yet and risk another outbreak? What odds do we play when we roll the dice of Fate? And will we end up looking back from the future, wishing we were able to change our past? Only time will tell.