Tenet, or am I a bad ally to women?
Tenet is available on HBO Max now. I watched it and loved it. I don’t think it’s confusing at all. I didn’t have any problem understanding the dialogue. Christopher Nolan’s cinematic approach is exactly what my brain likes to watch. Twisty and heady and cold.
But!
He’s just not good with creating roles for women. Elizabeth Debicki plays the lead in this film and she’s good, but the part itself is essentially a prop for men to threaten to raise the stakes (and then they give her a kid to make things even… more important? Which leads to kind of silly dialogue like:
A: He’s going to instantly kill every person that has ever existed.
Debicki: Including… my son?
Like, yeah! “Everyone” includes “your child”.
For me, the lack of good roles for women in a lot of Nolan’s work is something I wish he would improve on, but I still love his movies and think he’s an important director (maybe because he is an important director he should improve on that flaw specifically?).
This is an issue that purportedly I am an ally on, but I’m not directly affected by it. What kind of ally does this make me? It reminds me of, I would say, the majority of my friends, where a project with an all-white cast is not a dealbreaker for them, whereas that makes it much harder for me to enjoy a movie, because I feel personally impacted. Does that make them less of an ally?
I don’t know. I do know that I wouldn’t fault anyone for eschewing Nolan because of this, or harshly criticizing him for it. It’s definitely a problem. But also I’m realizing that as much of an ally any of us want to be, we’ll probably never care as much about issues that we intellectually support versus the ones that are specifically about us. Also could we even sustain the proper energy to fully care about everything? (Sidenote: I canvassed for a total of 6 hours this week and three days later my body is still kind of wrecked.)
Maybe we need to clarify how these issues are connected to more people than we think. White supremacy hurts white people too. Misogyny hurts men too. Homophobia, transphobia, etc, because these systems define roles not just for the oppressed but for the oppressors.
Anyway. I think Tenet is worth watching, but I understand why someone, out of principle, wouldn’t.
LAGNIAPPE: I posted on Facebook that I liked the movie. A friend of mine said “L’il Denzel did a great job.” I privately messaged him to say that calling John David Washington was problematic and he might want to edit it. He replied “But he’s Denzel’s son.” This was new information and I felt properly dumb. Factor this into your calculations of whether I’m actually a good ally or not.
I’ll be in Houston tomorrow and will update with my experience volunteering in Fort Worth and what I learned, and what I was disappointed by, on Friday. Have a great week.