House of R - ‘Tenet’ With R. F. Kuang | Nolan Revisited

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

A Dream of Nolan Spring continues! As ‘The Odyssey’ approaches, Mal and Jo are joined by author R. F. Kuang to continue their journey through Christopher Nolan’s filmography with ‘Tenet.' They discuss their original experiences with the movie, debate where it stands among the rest of Nolan’s films, and more! Plus, they take a more in-depth look at what to expect from ‘The Odyssey.’ (00:00) Intro(04:39) Opening Snapshot(09:05) ‘Tenet’ revisited(01:07:43) Superlatives(01:47:28) ‘The Odyssey’ hype Explore the exclusive collection at Target.com Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Mallory RubinGuest: R. F. KuangProducers: Carlos Chiriboga and Scott LeeStudio Production: Jacob CornettSocial: Jomi AdeniranAdditional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to House of R. I'm Joanna Robinson. That's Mallory Rubin. And friend of the pod month continues because we have a very special guest for this tenant episode. Mallory, who's here with us today? Oh, my God. We, I think, have been manifesting this since a hype meter. Last summer. Last summer. Yeah. When we talked about one of our most anticipated reads of that year. And not only did we get to read the book and love the book. then you got a note. I did from the author of that book saying, you guys are wrong about tenant. You guys are so wrong about tenant. It could not be more wrong about tenant. Rebecca is here. Rebecca is here.

Author of Catavis is the book we were referring to, but also Babel, Yellowface, just an incredible author who we so admire here to talk about tenant. Welcome to the pod. Rebecca, how are you doing? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.

I always love a chance to get to fight with somebody. So I'm happy for the opportunity to defend what I think is one of Nolan's best works. Amazing. Wow. Incredible. Incredible. This episode of House of R is presented to you by Target.

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with Eye Gaming, Ontario. You're coming to us from the other side of the world, literally. You have interrupted your birthday vacation to come talk to us about tenant and that's how passionate you feel about it.

As I said, it's my favorite movie. And I think one of Nolan's best works. And I think it's very, very badly misunderstood, too. Okay. Since folks know that we are tenant haters, they demanded. I would not say a hater. I would not say a hater. They demanded we get a tenant defender on the pod.

And I think we have picked our champion. Yes. It is Rebecca here with us. quick program reminders we are doing. We have one more Friend of the Pod month episode that's coming out allegedly on Friday. That's right. I don't want to jinx it, so I'm just going to say

it's supposed to happen. We hope it happens. We will be talking about Spider-N-War no matter what. We'll be talking about Spider-Noir-N-Warr. And Frereen, maybe, and some other things, and hopefully with a friend of the pod. We also have our summer hype meter, which we already recorded.

We did. Immediately after recording it, some dates were released, some trailers were released. Very helpful. We knew it would happen. It's always the risk when you bank a pod. Summer height meter. And then we're doing a very musical episode.

While Mallory's out of town, I've recruited a couple of pals to do a very musical episode of House of ours. So that's not to miss it. Okay, spoiler warning for Tenet, all of Nolan's films. And also when we get to the section at the end, where we're talking more directly about the Odyssey, spoilers for The Odyssey. Rebecca, on a scale to 1 in 10, how excited are you for The Odyssey? We have tickets to see the Odyssey premiere. at the BFI IMAX in London.

So I am very, very excited. I would say 12 out of 10. I love it. How quickly did those tickets go? Like how much? Did you guys have to hit refresh, refresh, refresh to get those tickets? Or did you have a nice hookup? Or how did that work out for you?

Well, as it happened, when tickets just globally went on sale, my husband panicked and bought tickets to the London one, which is not a, we live in Boston, but that's not a disaster because we just happen to be in London a lot for work and for conferences. And he is doing a philosophy and conference in Reading just a couple days before. So he got lucky, but we did extend our trip

a little bit just for the premiere. I love that there was a panic. It's appropriate. You know, you can't risk not getting tickets for the premiere of The Odyssey. We don't have tickets. We don't. I was thinking about that last night, actually. It's like, boy, do we fuck this up? Maybe. I think we'll figure something out. This

film, like all the films we've been talking about in this series, is directed by Christopher Nolan's by Christopher Nolan came out September 3rd, 2020, pandemic time. Very famously came out during the pandemic. There was a whole tussle between Chris Nolan and his longtime studio, Warner Brothers, about the release of this movie. I saw it in the drive-in. We can talk about.

Rebecca, where did you see Tenet for the first time? I saw it for the first time on our couch in the living room. So we streamed it, but we've since seen it seven more times. And the second and third times were on the same couch. We were watching it with graphing paper because we thought it would be very fun to track all the forwards and backwards movements and make sense of the interrogation scene in particular. But I've also gotten to see it in IMAX, which I think was a much better experience. And then at many people's homes since then. Wow. Are you just, do you like to go around and spread the good word of Tenet?

Yeah. Are you evangelizing? When you see it at other people's homes, is it because you're making them watch it so that you can convince them? that it's a masterpiece? So we have actually recently been to the home of a philosophy professor who's really the tenant evangelist in his department. And I gather it's Justin Koo, who runs the podcast Koo's in the field, or cows in the field. But I think he just likes to have people over to spread the good words. So it was nice to be evangelized to by a fellow believer. Amazing. Malarie, you were at home during the pandemic when you watched this, right? I was. Yeah.

Yes, this was firmly in the, I'm still afraid to go to the movie theaters. I will not be compelled to go to the movie theater's stretch of the pandemic for me. And so I watched it at home, which, you know, I don't mind. I love to see a Nolan movie at the theater. This is one of the few Nolan movies that I did not see at the movie theater and still have not seen at the movie theater. But I will say that given what I consider the genuine sound mixing, calamities of this film. I didn't mind that I was home so that I could take the opportunity to fiddle with the blend,

turn on the subtitles, etc. It's not necessarily how I want to watch an Olin movie, but I do think it's for me personally required to turn on the gloss captioning for this one. So I saw it at home basically as soon as it was available on demand, I think. And then I had not revisited it until this project, as I think we alluded to a couple times of the rewatch. Like, you know, when we were going through our early, this is maybe like the loose in motion. You know, it's a living document free to amend as we go through the rewatch

power rankings. And I think we both, you know, kind of hinted a few times the tenant was going to be towards the bottom for us. Not in the top half, at least. And then I was very eager to revisit it. And I think as we went through the Nolan rewatch, I became increasingly eager in part because we heard from Rebecca, somebody who's mind we just so admire. We heard from a lot of the bad babies. Yes, a lot of the listeners hit us up and, like, Guys, you're wrong about Tenant. Let me tell you why you're wrong about Tenant. You have some emails today that you're going to share.

Plenty of people, I think, have notes on Tenant. It's a divisive film. It's one of Nolan's more divisive films. But I was very much looking forward to after, like, studying the filmography and the way that we have over the past year to revisit the movie. And we'll talk about how I found it upon repeat viewing. I've watched it a couple times in the last week. Yeah, me too. It's been very interesting to go back to it through this lens.

I will say, to be fair, to Chris Nolan, I saw one time on accident, three times at the drive-in. I went twice to the drive-in, and then the third time, I remember it was an election night, and we were nervous to be home during the election night because we were just too nervous, so we went to the drive-in to watch, I think they were playing Coco, but Coco was just a short film and over too quickly, so we were like, let's just stay, and then Tenet started playing, so we watched Tenet again. But to be fair to Chris Nolan, sound at the drive-in is famously bad no matter what. so tenant really didn't have an option. But I, so I think watching it at home with closed captioning on was very helpful for me.

Budget $205 million, worldwide box office, $365.9 million, which is impressive for the pandemic, honestly. Like, honestly, quite impressive. All of that being said, Rebecca, you are a guest of honor. First and foremost, what does Christopher Nolan mean to you? He's my favorite director straight up. and he's a big part of my marriage. I've never met him personally. I first got into him

because my boyfriend at the time, who's now my husband, was very into him, and we started dating like 10 years ago. And this was a teenage boy from the suburbs raised on the Dark Night in Inception, so a very typical movie, bro.

And I was like, yeah, I'll share your hobbies with you. But then we had very special dates going through Nolan's whole body of work. And I think we really fell in love and bonded talking about the prestige, which might, I think the prestige is my number one in the Nolan rankings, but it's pretty close.

And we've seen every Nolan film since Dunkirk and theaters together. So we're fully a Nolan household, a Nolan apologist. In fact, I think there's nothing that Nolan has to apologize for. We found his alleged faults to be virtues. We find the dead wives very charming.

And I just have huge admiration for the scale and ambition at which no one operates. And I think even when he fails, his failures are fascinating to me. Moment of truth. Give us your big picture. We're going to go in our sort of more granular way. But big picture, give us your tenant defense. Not that it needs defending according to you, but your tenant pitch. Give it to it.

No, I think it needs defending. I think it takes several watches. and I think it's a film that benefits from interpretation and discussion with other people and gets richer every time. But I think there are three reasons why Tenet is uniquely awesome. And the first is that it is truly innovative in how it portrays time travel. In most time travel stories and movies, the traveling happens instantaneously. And then the traveler is moving in the same direction as everybody else, like physically and metabolically. So it's just like sort of portal fantasies.

And I'm reading T.H. White's the ones in Feature of King, right now. And the character Merlin is fascinating because he's supposedly living backwards through time. But this seems to only really apply every time he wakes up and then he moves forward through the day, like with all the other characters. But only in Tenet are they actually causally backwards. And I think the reverse entropy stuff and how that produces such incredible and technical like hand-to-hand combat scenes, that is just so impressive and cool to look at. But I think the main reason why I love it, like, on a thematic level, a lot of people call

Nolan cold, analytic, rational, whatever. And I've seen to say a lot of this film that it is his coldest and most analytic. I don't get that at all. I find all of Nolan's films to be deeply moving on a gut level, especially this one. And you might just have to be the type of person who can be moved to tears thinking about paradoxes of time. but like I am that type of person. And I think Tenet is a deeply moving exploration

on conflicts between generations and what parents owe to their children and vice versa. And I think it's not accidental that the children in Nolan's films are aging up alongside his actual children. And I think that at least in three of his films, I think these three films form like a thematic trilogy,

Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet. I think he's been working through different fantasies about how your relationships with your kids could be different if you could stretch time or dance around its rules. And I adopted this interpretive lens after reading Justin Kuse, the professor I mentioned, his essay, How I Learn to Stop Worrying, and Love Christopher Nolan's $200 million Sudoku puzzles. And he makes the very compelling case that these are three films about parents coming to grasp with the unbreakable constraints of time and their own limits and how they can care for their kids.

So Inception is about what if you can live out your life in a bit of life, branch timeline where you could remain a childless god of creation and escape your toddlers and how guilty should you feel for having that fantasy. And interstellar is about what if you end up younger than your children and what if saving them involves not being there for much of their lives. And tenant is about what if you and your kids can be the same age and go on adventures together? And I think that's gorgeous. And then the third reason is just that everybody's living with such confidence. Like the movie has so much belief in its own conceit. Like say what you want about Nolan, but he doesn't make excuses or apologize for his world's building.

Everybody commits fully to the bit and people just spit out lines like, it's the detritus of a coming war. And that is so, so cool. So that's my big picture argument for Tenet. I love that parent-child argument. I mean, we are so excited to get to the end of this podcast and talk to you about The Odyssey. But now I'm even more excited to talk to you about Talomachus and Odysseus and all that sort of stuff like that. Daddy. Mallory Rubin.

Yes, ma'am. Do you want to give us your sort of big picture tenant thoughts? Yeah. So I love Christopher Nolan's movies. He is also one of my favorite directors, as we have now chronicled on many of these podcasts. We've been doing this for a year. I just, I love his movies. So, you know, it's one of those things where it's all, perhaps in a fitting meta way, it's all relative, right, in terms of, like, how I rank his films.

I think if I saw this movie and it had been made by another director, I might have a different. reaction to it. I hold so many of his other movies in such genuine esteem that it just, like, for me, doesn't measure up to them and to how I feel about them. I think that my relationship to Tenet, I love everything you said, Rebecca, and I think what's interesting about Tenet as a film to debate is that I don't actually, like, disagree, really with any of those contentions. I think those are all really valid, pretty well supported, and things that a lot of people agree with. I think it's very much a like your mileage may vary movie in terms of not only the core offering in a vacuum, but how you consider it as a part of the larger text. So like the Inception, interstellar tenant, the trifecta that you cited, that's just the order of how successful those movies are for me.

And that's really interesting because I think that Inception is in some ways the most obsessed with really outlining the laws of the universe and making. sure that you understand how things work, which sometimes does not go well, but I find mesmerizing in that film. And I think that it's like thematically wonderful. I think the performances are great. I think it's very poetic and like profound. I love it. Interstellar is a little bit in that like middle spot for me where, you know, we had a fun time potting about that movie as we talked about at the time. It's like for a generation, their sacred text. It's beloved by so many people. There are things about interstellar that I really love and admire. There are things about it that don't work as well from which is always surprising to me

because the logline of that movie is so extremely my shit that I'm always like, I kind of can't believe that my reaction to it is not this is my favorite movie ever made. I think that when you watch Understellar, for me, it doesn't matter

it doesn't matter at the end of the day if you understand or care to understand something like time dilation, right? You understand the emotional truth of that movie. You understand the relationship between Kup and Murf. Like, no matter what, right? I think that Tenet doesn't do that for me.

And so what I find is that when I watch it, and this has been now, I've seen it three times now, and this is increasingly true every time. So it's definitely possible that in 10 years I watch this and I'm like, masterpiece. Just no notes. I think that actually is in play that my relationship with Tenet will change over time. I don't know if that will happen, but it's not impossible. I watch it and I have nothing but genuine and sincere admiration for the filmmaking and the craft. the cinematography, the editing. Again, I have notes on the sound mixing,

which I think is like actually, I think I've made it a bit on these pods, but I think is like really kind of a problem. I do think the score is amazing, but like the fact that the first line of dialogue uttered in this movie leads to, from the protagonist, leads to our guy, Tylon Lannister, saying in response, like,

what? I couldn't hear you. Is a real telling on yourself stuff to me? I think that the ambition of the conceit, the premise is to me, like, as a sci-fi fan, as a time travel story fan, um, intellectually intriguing and bold in a way that I admire. Like, Nolan is always a filmmaker I admire and he's a storyteller I admire. I think that this movie is just too convoluted and like a little bit too, um, I don't know. I don't want to talk out of both sides of my mouth because I just said I admire the ambition, but I think the movie is a, for me, a touch too enamored of its own ambition to like totally

work for me in the way that all the other movies just like kind of send me to a transcendent plane of existence as like a person who loves stories and loves this kind of genre filmmaking. The action is incredible. It's visually astonishing. I think that some of the aspects of what we see and hear and how the characters function in the world really interesting. I think that there's a difference between like a movie that is rewarding on a rewatch and one that requires a rewatch.

I just think that's a little bit different. and Tenet falls into the ladder camp for me. But there's a lot about it that I really like enjoy. I think the Patinson performance is Godtier, just unbelievable. I, for all of those critiques, like if they said in the movie basically ends setting up Tenet two. And now obviously, Nolan is left Warner Brothers, Swift Universal, who knows, they made Tenet too.

I would be there on day one. I would be really interested to see him go back into the world. And I think, like, Rebecca, to your point about just the aspects of the, what are we going to do about time and how we move through time and entropy and a version that's different. Like when I think about Tenin is basically a cinematic version or a storytelling version of like open source code, I love that. I'm interested that this could now become a concept that other creators returned to and played with and explored their version of because I do think it's interesting. It is in a weird little space to me of simultaneously like Nolan has talked about I wanted to

make this movie for 20 years. I've been thinking about this since I was a kid. You could tell he's obsessed with it. He wanted to do it. First, pass on this exact execution, would it be better over time? And it's the latest installment of this continuing exploration of these ideas. And I just think sometimes you go back to the well so many times to explore the same thing in a different way. And it was better the first time or maybe the second time. So that's where I'm on tenant. Rebecca, anything you want to say to what Mallory just said. Yeah, I like your point that some movies are rewarding on the rewatch and some demand them. I think of my relationship. I didn't like it.

Tenet the first time I saw it. I was confused. I thought the sound mixing was bad. I didn't know what was going on. And I felt like some stirrings of emotion at random points, but I was mostly left with like, I don't really know what happened. But I think about my relationship with Tenet, like the protagonist relationship with Neil, like he doesn't know what's going on the first time they meet. And then he only discovers later, like he's at the front end for what has been from Neil a long and rewarding friendship. I think of my relationship with that movie as like a summation of all the viewings over the years. And I think, yeah, it does demand a rewatch, but the rewatches get better and better. I think every time I've seen it, I've only enjoyed it more.

So I understand where you're coming from, but I think it deserves all those, you know, the eighth, ninth, tenth shot. For sure. And I love returning to movies and books. So I probably will get to it eight, nine, ten times before we're all set and done. Maybe we'll all gather again to pot at that point. Joe, what about you? Where are you with tenant these days? So, yeah, I've watched it, what, three or four times when it first came out, and then two times this week. And alongside sort of doing my own version of what Rebecca and her husband do with a graph paper, which is just sort of like watching YouTube explainer videos and trying to make sure that I can really understand what's happening on the car chase or, you know, the logic of some of the,

set pieces, especially like any of the temporal pincer moments, I think, require a lot of unpacking for me. And there is a way in which that can stimulate my puzzle-loving brain. And then there are ways in which it can frustrate me and make me feel like I'm stupid and I don't understand. And I think what's tremendously, I would still put tenet at the towards the bottom of my ranking, honestly, I do get emotional. I think without that goodbye scene between the protagonist, and Neil. I think this movie is much more of a failure. But every time I've watched it,

that scene has really gotten to me. I think Pattinson is incredible as Neil throughout. He's very charming and then very emotional there. I think that's John David Washington's best part of the film is his realizations there and the emotion that he expresses there. I think Elizabeth DeBickey's character, Cat, her whole thing, I think is really great and interesting this movie. I love that actress so much.

So like, you know, and then visually, like, we'll talk a little bit about the sort of like the Bond, the James Bond comps. But, like, visually, this is, that's the thing about Christopher Nolan that we love is that the way that he makes popcorn cinema. Yeah. But with these big ideas and big ambitions behind them. And so for something like Inception, which is just a slam dunk for so many people, it's an ambitious puzzle that he's created. there, but he never once loses his audience in the making of it, for the most part, I would say. And so he has taken big ideas or his like hyper-intellectualism because he's one of the smartest people that is out there. But then he's made three Batman movies that people

really love. You know, so to almost Trojan horse smuggle in these huge ideas inside of mass appeal popcorn cinema is what is so admirable about. Nolan, and I just think he lost the bottom fell out of the popcorn bucket a little bit on this one, where he just sort of lost that sort of like general audience, I can come along for this ride. I wanted, we have like a couple listener emails in defense of tenant that I wanted to read. Most of them sort of sending quotes from something else. But our listener, Nick, sent over this 1999 interview. Sorry, the male cow sounds on our ears.

Nick said over this 1999 interview. So this was, I think, around following. So, yeah, before Memento even. And Nolan was talking to Elvis Mitchell, who's this, you know, renowned UK film guy. And he was talking about, he says, quote, you need a simple narrative to take the audience through the experience of the film. So you can have something that's quite complicated. But as long as the audience feels they've understood enough of it, then it's peculiar balance between the sort of productive, ambiguity or confusion, and having given them a story that had a beginning, middle, and end,

and at the end of it, they didn't feel like they hadn't understood it. So that's his sort of thesis in 99, is I want to make a memento, or I want to make an interstellar, I want to make an inception, I want to make a prestige, which is, you know, non-linear storytelling, which we love. But the audience never gets lost along the way. And my feeling on Tenet is that he lost a lot of the audience along the way. And if you are Rebecca and her husband and are quite ambitious and rewatch and rewatch and rewatch, then you can hook into it on a deeper sort of like snow fortress level of understanding of what's going on there.

But like, it's, it's, he drifted from his original intention of being this mass appeal director with these high-minded ideas. Rebecca, do you have any thoughts about that? I guess I'm just grateful that Nolan is so. successful as a director that he gets to swing and miss like this with his audience sometimes and bounce back and then make the Odyssey. Because I really do have a soft spot for the, when directors and writers I love just really get up with their own asses and have clearly stopped caring about the audience and are just pursuing ideas and sort of showing off with rhetorical

flourishes. So I feel a similar way about Jordan Peel's Nope, which I think many people find, find more inaccessible and confusing than Get Out, which has a really tidy hook and doesn't let the audience feel at any point. Like, they don't really get the message. And Nope is about a lot of things. I think it's more ambitious. I think it's harder. I think it lost people.

And I love it. And I think I love Tenet for the same way. And I think it would just be so sad if a director never got a budget to make a huge commercially appealing film again after a miss like that. But because it's Nolan, I'm glad that he gets to make the Dark Night trilogy and then he gets to make this and then go back to the Odyssey. Yeah. I really agree with that. I think that's a great point. And like I, one of the things I'm very conscious of as I critique ten in a film that I still think is really interesting and I'm glad exists, but think is flawed for me, I also feel.

that way about it still. Like, I'm glad I'm, it exists. I'm glad he made it. And one of the things that I find so, I don't know, just like fun and interesting about being in the world when Chris Nolan is making movies is that he's kind of always like, let me go for it in any form, no matter what genre he's playing in, whether he's on his ninth movie with Michael Kane or his first one with DeBecky and Pattinson and John David Washington, whatever the case may be, he's like, this is the story I have wanted to tell, and I know exactly how I want to tell it, right? To the point where he was out there, like, we're going to save movies. This is the movie that's going to save movies, which I think is like, inextricable from the legacy

of the film now, but won't be forever. I think we're still so close to that, that it's like, that takes me, that takes me to another email we got. Our listener, Sam, sent along a great essay by Brennan Hodges called Beside You in Time. It's a beautiful essay. It's quite long about Tenet. But it does touch on that idea of like the sky high expectations that were on Tenet when it came out during the pandemic is just sort of like of all the times for Nolan to get extra experimental and extra up his own ass if you prefer. Though like it's the pandemic and no one's going to the movies.

Here we'll get people to like go out to the drive-in or whatever the case may be. The stakes were just disproportionate for that. And if, like, Inception had come out during that time or one of, you know, the first two Batman or something like that, it would be so much different. This is the section from that essay I wanted to read. So, quote, Tenet was never going to be the savior of cinemas. Chris Renold's impressionistic sci-fi action love story is the most abstract, challenging, frustrating, uninhibited, dissonant, dudes rock, hell yeah, movie of his career. But Tenet is also cold. Cold is ice.

Rebecca says no, but this person says yes. evasive, brutal, and overwhelming. I don't know if the studio or even Nolan himself knew what they had, $200 million, Kureo, somewhere between Misfire and Masterpiece, destined to polarize and attract an uneven ratios. The worst possible framing for Tenet was as a unifying prayer for the enduring strength of a theatrical experience

dropped at a time you could get sick going to see it and confronting audiences with an art house vibes-heavy blockbuster that pauses to ponder metaphysics in quantum agency. Instead, tenants should have been marketed as Christopher Nolan movie that will fuck you up, that our favorite cinematic clockmaker is finally letting his hair down with a sci-fi epic that will make gloriously, rapturously little to no sense. Rebecca, what do you think about that as an assessment? I think that's a good way of putting it.

Nolan has let his hair down. And I just, when I admire somebody's mind so much, I really love the chance to just follow their whimsy wherever they want to take it without the constraints of studio pressure, audience pressure. So I'm so happy for this glorious commercial failure. I think I love it. It's so funny. I'm loving the letting the hair down up his own ass because I hear up his own ass.

I'm thinking, you know what? Let's actually go. Like, to me, the problem's not the movie's up its own ass. Let's go further. Tell us literally if an inverted character sits on the toilet. Does the shit go up their ass? Like, I want to know more. I don't want the like the floor delacour.

to tell me, just like, like, I feel it. I don't know. It's a little bit between between in that sense. I think of the movie a little bit as to use something inside of the movie as a comp. The racing sailboats, like the high speed floating up on the water racing sailboats. Like, I look at them. I don't know anything about sailing, right? Much as I am not a metaphysicist or a physicist. I look at those sailboats and I'm like, those look pretty, those look dope. They look fast. They look fun. they look dangerous, they look scary. I understand without really understanding that only certain people would be able to handle them and only certain people would know how they move, right? That doesn't really compel me to want to spend my time in one of them. And I think that that's part of, so it's fascinating. Like I don't like generally when we're about to pod about something

to hear what a bunch of other people had to say about something. But because of the COVID time capsule nature of this, I like went back to refresh. on what some people were saying at the time. And it was what I, it was what I remember because I was like, am I like exaggerating in my mind how big the specter of how could you or could you not see tenant and what was like, not like Christopher Nolan saying about it, but like Tom Cruise saying about movies, I'm on the phone with the insurance company and I'm saving movies, right? This was just like a thing. And that is inextricable from how people are talking about tenant. So that's just not

going to be the case in 10 years if someone sits down and watches tenant for the first time and has no awareness of and it's not thinking about when tenant was released and how long it was delayed and how it was positioned or any of that. But I have a hot take that I don't know if I totally believe, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway. I think we think that like the COVID timing and thus the, you know, I agree with what you said. Like it's for the pandemic especially, it's actually pretty good box office. But it's not what you would expect for like a Nolan blockbuster. I think there's a chance that actually Tenet would be like more

debated and derided if more people had seen it right away. I actually think like the slow drip of people coming to it slightly muted the volume, just the heft of I don't understand what the fuck is happening in this movie and like why don't the people who made it want me to understand it? Did either of you by any chance watch the making of Tenet featurette that's like on the...

I don't know if it's online, it's on the 4K. It's like an hour and 15 minutes. It's fast. If you watch this movie and you're like, this is the most visually stunning thing I've ever seen, you should watch this. Like the editor and cinematographer or like a lot of the stuff about stunt choreography, all of it. I'm being like slightly hyperbolic here, but not really. I would say 90. None of that is about the story of Tenant.

All of it is about the craft of Tenant, which is very notable, right? And I think that like probably no fewer than 743 times to somebody in the making of Tenant say, here's a story from the set about how I didn't understand the movie we were making. I think that's not great. I think that's not great. I'm glad that you brought up the sailboats. Because I want to talk about this sort of idea that Christopher Nolan always wanted to make a Bond film and he made this movie instead. Rebecca, how much were you thinking about James Bond when you were watching this movie or any of the hallmarks of the Bond franchise inside of this movie?

I thought the bond coding was what made it really commercial and easily digestible. And that was like the candy pill in which you shoved all the metaphysics. But I, yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lot of bond tropes going on. I think in watching tenant in comparison to like an actual bond film, though, I'm really fascinated in what English manners and English, like, genteel culture are doing here. because in a Bond film like Bond does everything that is best about the British like he

he knows how to wear his suit, shaking out stirred but intent of the protagonist is really not that he's an outsider he's a black American he doesn't have the accent but he's still more badass than everybody else and he still knows where to get his own suit he doesn't need a recommendation

for a tailor and there's just this like there's this attitude that you bring them to everything like I think the waiters like serve, blah, blah, blah, I presume. And he's like, presume away. I love that. So in thinking about the comparisons,

I think I found John David Washington even more sexy than Bond, because he's just this like anonymous column of swag in each and every cultural context. And I, for a long time, I've, like, you know, because people talk about

Nolan in the context of not being very good about race or not thinking about race, but I'm fascinated and how his characters operate at these like totally anonymous ciphers in either deliberate ignorance or in a deliberate like flattening of cultural, ethnic, racial context, et cetera. So I think it's like a really interesting counterpiece to bond. But I do think the racial analytics probably ends there.

I do think, you know, he has talked about how he wrote this role for John David Washington out of seeing Black Klansmen. And that's really. rare for Nolan to talk about writing a role for an actor, you know, especially this like central role. And so I do wonder if, you know, I don't think this is a particularly like deep, deep deep analysis of what it means to be a black American and a Caucasian English spy world. But I do think, you know, if he absorbed any of the critiques of how white his films are or anything like that. If he was like, I'm interested in taking this compelling black actor that I saw

in this film, John David Washington, and building this, and making him my bond, essentially. So, you know, I wonder if that was reactionary at all. But when you start to line up the comps, when you have the sort of like opera house cold open mission, fancy car chases that Silver Saab, especially, I would say, globe-trotting locations, a femme fatal, if you want to call Kat that you can, a heavily accented villain, and we will talk about Brana plenty, a gadget download with a queue of sorts, you know, the suits, the watches. Mallory, how much are you thinking about Bond when you're watching this movie? A lot. I mean, I think, and it's fun knowing how influential, how seismic the whole bond has on Nolan is. Of course, that, like, adds an extra degree of kind of having a top of mind. But I think if you didn't know that at all, you would still feel the bond just oozing off of this. You know, you feel the Michael Mann influences. You feel a lot of Nolan's influences here, which is part of what makes it like a really interesting and ripe for, you know, analysis installment in his filmography. I think the, all of the locations that you mentioned. I mean, this is a gorgeous film visually in a lot of different ways. And obviously the globe-trying nature of it is a huge part of that. It's a

travelogue, the idea you believe that these characters would be able to just move about the world in this fashion, right? So that's one of the really fun things about a Bond movie. It's one of the fun things about Tenet. You mentioned the suits. This is a great, I do think this is actually a great example of, not to my influence with a little tweak. Like, everyone is besuited, but then you have the polo shirt as, like, the specific style and specific choice under the jacket. I think that's, like, a great way to give the protagonist his look. And, you know, on the, like, the protagonist is, um, uh, a cipher.

It is, is there to stand in for certain ideas. Um, you know, in many ways, so is Bond, right? Bond is one of the great like archetypes, you know, many different actors. Reboot, reboot, yeah. Come in and inhabit Bond, but we understand who James Bond is, you know, who 007 is. So I think that those comps and influences feel very, very present. And I like what Rebecca is saying a lot about that kind of rapper that allows then no one to explore these really heady ideas.

And even if they don't always all land in every single movie, I'm glad that he has the desire to continue to explore them because we're nerds, right? So it's really fun to have everybody go to the movies and think that they're going to just watch people punch each other, which they do, or rub cheese graters on each other's cheeks, which they do, or flip their cars, which they do, or don't have a plane crash into a free port, which they do. By the way, my favorite single favorite moment in this making of, this was iconic. Pattinson, I'm paraphrasing, it's like, you know, and you're wondering, like,

how are they going to achieve a plane crashing into? this terminal and like the way they're going to achieve it is by crashing a plane into this terminal but he's Robert Patton saying it's very funny. And then they're going to make you think about entropy and inversion and like you know you have to feel what's happened happened right the free will and determinism and how these things relate to each other. I love stories that make us think about those things and ask those things. And I love that for a lot of people this is a movie that not only gets those wheels turning in their brain, but sends them to Reddit,

where they're going to post theories on message boards and talk about those theories with each other. I think, like, for a lot of people, Tennett is a movie that they not only love watching and thinking about,

but love discussing. So I think that's awesome. I love that. Yeah, I do think... Tennant is a movie that I admire more than I like. Yeah. And in terms of the discussion

that it's generated, and this is Nolan's great trick that he does, right? Which is, I think it was maybe from that future that you're talking about, or perhaps a different one. No, it was a Colbert interview where Nolan was talking about how the first greeting they ever did for Momento, he was asked in a Q&A after sort of like what the ending means. And he says, well, I want everyone in the audience to decide for

themselves what it means, but this is what I think it means. And then his brother, Jonathan Nolan, my favorite Nolan, is like, you can't ever do that again. Don't ever, ever tell the audience. And he's like, oh, but I sort of caveat it with I wanted them to figure it out for themselves. And he's like, they won't pay attention to that part. They will just pay attention to what you said. So never explain what the top spinning means. Never explain what's really at the heart of interstellar. Never explain what the fuck is going on in Tenet at all.

I think that's fascinating. All right, Rebecca. Anything you want to say more that we haven't already said about this idea of the protagonist is like a cipher, the, you know, Nolan has cited the prisoner. a beloved sci-fi television show or Sergio Leone's man with no name

or if you prefer more recent the Mandalorian like these faceless put Grogu in Tenant and then we're cooking! Yes! What is the... I mean, because I do think

for a lot of people the fact that the main character of this movie is called the protagonist is one of the easiest things to roll your eyes at but Rebecca fond of people with their heads of their own ass you probably love.

How do you feel about this? Sometimes I just like when Nolan admits his weaknesses. And he's like, I'm not interested in a backstory. I'm not interested in cultural context. There's just this guy and he does stuff and I'm just going to call him the protagonist. And I find that lovely.

But actually, I was laughing, Mallory, while you were talking about how the movie is so uninterested in explaining itself to the audience because I was thinking of the scene where they're in the shipping container, and the protagonist is sitting there, like, begging Neil to explain anything. And just, like, tweet. I have more questions, and Neil's just like, whatever.

Go to sleep. I'm sleepy. Incredible. And I think that's the movie's whole attitude. Like, whatever. Totally. Go rest. You'll feel better in the morning.

No question. I love it. This is sort of more of a visual, harder to talk about. on a podcast, but in case people don't know about the, the Seder Square, there's this curio that has been found at various archaeological sites that is a square that says sort of Sater, Arepo, Tenet, Opera, Rotas, and it's so you can read it across or you can read it down. And there are a lot of theories, none of which are full proof or airtight or solid, about what this particular tablet,

which has been found in many different locations, in a way that historians and archaeologists, cannot create a unifying theory to explain it. But it is never raised in this movie, but obviously, Brana's character's name Sater, there is a character name Areppo, there is Tenet is the center of this, there's the Opera House and Rottis, which is Sater's,

very vain flip of a... own name, name of his company. So it's all of those things are here. And it's that sort of like sideways, upside down, backwards, forward sort of experience. When you think about that, is that the Sudoku of this all? Like, what do you think about that, Rebecca, when you think about the Seder Square? I think there's not a lot to unlock with the Seder Square. I think it's just cool. Yeah. And the words are cool. I do like that he was like, Seder. Arepo, that's clearly Russian and Spanish. That's fine.

We were giggling, thinking about rotas, because we're like, oh, yeah, that's the construction company that makes the turning things. And then we're like, because they rotate, rotas. But I think the only Easter egg I can read in here, which is not even part of the square is I was thinking about why it's Goya, the artist, that a repo gets. Also, like, when you think of Arapo, do you just think of like a faceless, lilless, like, barely alive, like, odd of a... Like, I'm like, what did he do to a rep? He can't walk. He can't talk. What is he up to? But I was thinking about Goya because Goya is very famous for that painting, Saturn, devouring his

young, which is not in the film. But I just... I think it's... It's got to be because of that painting, right? Because it's about older generations, cannibalizing the future that that's the painting that Lizzie Debeke is in trouble for. I love that. As for Tenet itself, as not only the center of the Seder Square and the codename here, but this idea of faith and belief as it pertains to the protagonist, there's this exchange that he and Seder have over the first.

phone towards the end when the protagonist says you don't believe in God or a new future or anything outside your own experience. And Sater says, that's all any of us knows. The rest is belief and I don't have it. Right. And the protagonist says, without it, you're not human. You're a madman. Sater says, or a god of sorts.

And protagonist says, like I said. Just some great accent corner work for you. Thank you. So this idea of like, Sater mocking the protagonist for his faith, for his belief. in the design of, you know, the people who are working in the future, which is a very interstellar concept. Who are these advanced beings who have sent this idea back to us? Oh, it's ourselves. Like, that happens.

And interstellar and it happens here as well. The protagonist we find out is following his own plan because he's the one who created the tenant organization in the first place. But he doesn't know that. And he's sort of blindly believing in this design in this plan. What I think is really interesting is there's a line that comes after this exchange and the screenplay that didn't make it into the movie where Sater says, you know, God, he killed his son too. Like a very, very tough line that Nolan's like, maybe not. Maybe we don't put that in there. Rebecca, talk to me about belief and faith and determinism and how you think about it when you think about this movie.

Yeah, this is the part of the film. that I think is very emotionally resonant for me, because I think that Nolan ends up in this, like, beautifully, like, anti-pessimistic, like, really humanist place. I think going back to interstellar, no one is really interested in the question of agency and freedom within bootstrap paradoxes.

Like, how much do you get to take credit for? If your future self has already fixed things for you, do your choices matter at all? Do you have freedom? Do your choices have normative significance? Or are you just following a predetermined script? Is there anything you can do about your fate? And in Tenet, as well as Interstellar,

the fact that the bootstrap exists doesn't absolve you from choosing to risk your life and give it your all as if you have no knowledge of the outcome. And that's concretized in the exchange between Neil and the protagonist, when Neil's like, well, what's happened happened, which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world. It's not an excuse to do nothing.

And I think that strikes a very nice compromise between determinism and free will. And it's also, so my husband's a philosopher, so I asked lots of questions about how people think about choice and free will. And, you know, if everything we do is a chain reaction of all the molecular interactions that have comprised us since we were born, then like, what significance do our choices have? And exactly what Neil says.

Like, that's not an excuse to do nothing at all. Like, you still have to choose to throw yourself into the black hole. You still have to choose to keep risking your life. life and take bullets and save the future as if you're not sure the future will be saved. So it's a choice to, you can't opt out of the bootstrap, but you still, like, it still exists. You still have to be a part of it. And I think that's lovely. Yeah, I really agree. Like, this is actually something that works really well for me in the movie and that I love. And in general, you know, if it's like a show like Dark that I love, like I love when a movie like a rival, right?

There's the, when a story actively interrogates, if you knew some, if you knew an outcome, would you do these things anyway? And then what does it mean if you do and how do you carry that with you and how do you keep it from other people? The idea that like the, in some cases, just mere awareness. And obviously a lot of tenant is also about that. You have these keywords and these phrases and it opens. Some of the doors that it opens are good and some are bad, right? Like splitting up information, all of that. Just this kind of like, acknowledgement that it's like a quiet like a home in the air in the entire film that awareness of this at all inevitably radically alter something about the way you live your life. How could it not? And so like I love the Neal protagonist relationship and what we learn at the end, which like you feel building, but it's still very satisfying. And that exchange, Rebecca, that you cited is probably my favorite moment of the movie. It's not an excuse to do nothing. Like I think it's great in this film, it's great for those characters, and it's great overall, like, if you're interested in free will and destiny and how these things relate to each other, the idea of, like, I like stories

that make us think about compatibilism and how you can and should exert free will, even if there is something fixed in time. I think the way the movie dabbles with, like, moments where a character very actively, not just, I mean, there's choice everywhere, but, like, can say three or four times throughout the movie, what's happened to happen, but then, like, really in an animated fashion dive forward like Neil does to stop an outcome, right? It's like that shows us the truth of that belief. Like I cannot just stand by and wait for things to play out. Maybe it's because I believe on some level I had always done that thing and so I must do it again. But maybe it's because I'm a human being and I have to take action if I see something happening in front of me. I think that's like

really great inside of this movie. So I love that part of it. And then you have the kind of slight menacing whisper and the undertone of something like Sater also saying later, you know, your faith is blind. You're a fanatic on the call. And it's like, well, that's a little scary when we think about the fact that the protagonist, he's the one, right? When he says to Pri on the card, it's like, I wasn't working for you. We were both working for me.

And it's like, well, right reasons. Wrong outcome. Right outcome. That's when the movie gets my mind racing in a way I like much more so than like, do I totally understand how everyone is moving through this scene and why and why would people choose to do this in the first place if you couldn't breathe? Like that's what I'm like, but just the question about how people behave and why I really like. And I think the overall concept around that of just the future at war with the past,

this temporal war, the temporal pincer movements, the mini actions inside of the larger actions, that stuff's really compelling, I think, as like a tapestry to explore these ideas against. Even something at the end, you know, Ives. Like, I think Aaron Teller Johnson is kind of underutilized in this movie. You know how I feel about him. He's a passion of mine. I wish we got more of Ives and more of him in this movie. Make Craven to happen.

But, you know, the moment at the end, it's like, we've got to divide these. We've got to, it's on us. And, like, we're also, you know, the only people who, people who know about this can't, like, move forward, right? Maybe it's up for that to every man to decide on their own when that time is. You know, like, even the characters who understand more than anybody else what the stakes are, just have that human impulse to say, I'm not ready to die yet. Then you have Neil who's like, I understand exactly the fate that awaits me and I am prepared for it. So that's all great. I do think that Neil's choice, again, that exchange between the protagonist and Neil when Neil reveals

sort of like that they've known each other a long time, that this is the end, that he knows it's the end. And whether or not he figured that out right that very minute of like, I'm the only one who could open that door, or if he's known all along, this is his last mission. That remains slightly unclear to me, and I don't mind that ambiguity.

But the idea that the protagonist will then go forward in their relationship, always knowing what the end was. And, you know, if he's the one who recruited Neil in the first place, it's that very much that arrival question of like knowing that you, this will ultimately lead to Neil's death and recruiting him anyway. You know, the moving in different directions through time relationship that I was thinking about the most and a lot of our listeners wrote in with this comp is a doctor who, the doctor

in River Song, who initially meet the first episode where the character of River Song show up at the end of David Tennant's run is her last day with him, but he's never met her. And so that's very much where we find Neil and the protagonist here on like his, Neil's last mission and the protagonist's first mission. That's like where their timeline coincides. And the protagonist is carrying that knowledge without being able to tell Neil that through the rest of their relationship is so impactful. Rebecca, you are nodding beautifully. Anything you want to add to that? Yeah.

How could anybody say, Tennett's an emotionally cold movie? When Neil walks off and he's like, we get up to some stuff, you're going to love it. I was falling. It's just, it's really gorgeous. Can I ask you, okay, so we've been,

we've been discussing throughout our Nolan run about this idea of the double inside of Nolan, where we are all three huge prestige lovers, so that is obviously like a core, and we've been tracking the various doubles, the various foils throughout this. I think nowhere is it more literalized than in this movie when you have the protagonist literally fighting himself twice inside of this movie. Or you have like six different kneels kind of running all over the place.

He's at the opera house. He's like all over this battle, you know, tons of kneels going around everywhere. You've got most, you know, crucially, cat seeing herself jumping off the ship and being inspired by the freedom of that woman and then finding out that it was her all along who jumped off that ship. All of that stuff is here. And then we've got all these fan theories. Again, like, we love the discussion around the constant Reddit threads that are being generated around this movie. There's a lot of like this character is actually this character. Like Aaron Taylor Johnson showing up with that particular specific accent, I think makes a lot of people wonder if he is actually the younger version of Michael Cain's character, Sir Michael

Crosby, who shows up later, a very, like, that's not Aaron's accent. So he was directed to do an accent that matches Michael King's accent to a certain degree. Barbara, Clemens Poussey, who you call Florida LeCourt, that Barbara is the future scientist, or she shows up and she's pregnant, is she pregnant with the future scientist? Like, is that a connection? But the most compelling one, and the one that I feel like has to be true, and especially as it feeds into what Rebecca was saying about what if you could run around and be the same age as your own kid, is the Neil is actually Young Max theory. So Rebecca, do you buy into anything you want to say about doubles in general or that Neil is Max theory that everyone loves to talk about? I think that's right. I think I clocked that

on my first viewing. I was actually surprised that it was controversial because I think it's like as much as like no one like winks hard about anything. I think there are some very strong links. And The first time I had the gut instinct, it was true, is they're either in the shipping container or they're on the boat at that point. And the protagonist is talking to Kat and she's like, does my son survive? Like, is he going to die? And the protagonist's like, no, he will. And then he looks at Neil, like, very explicitly. And that's the last thing you see before that shot ends. Also, Neil is the last for letters of Max Millian backwards. So I think, yeah. And that's the last. And have this little fluffy hair. Yeah. He has the posh English accent. I just think that's right. I think making Pattinson dye his hair blonde for no reason other than to match that

child is like one of the most, you know, I love. And also to match Christopher Nolan's hair. Oh, yes. Oh yeah. Christopher Nolan's hair, the knotted scarves are very Nolan coat. He's like, what if the coolest character in this movie would look like me? Malware, are you on the doubles and the max is Neil theory? The characters interacting with versions of themselves, despite,

the words of caution from, you know, I mean, McKay is here. What a time to be a fan of the pit. Yeah, Fiona Doris is here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you have your words of caution, but then the moments where, like, I like some of the subtler one,

I don't know if anything's super subtle in the car chase sequence, but like when the protagonist sees him, oh, I was the one driving the sob, et cetera, of course the hallway fight is the best version of it. That stuff's all just, like, I think, none of it, I think, is really surprising.

I don't think it's actually intended to be surprised. surprising even the string on Neal's backpack, you know, we understand right away that like that will be something we're supposed to look for and track and understand that when that character is revealed to us, it will be somebody we have spent a lot of time with, right? So there are only a couple candidates. Right. I like, I kind of like all of those theories about who characters could be. I think it feels very likely inside of a Nolan story that that's true, that maybe all of those are true and right.

I guess the only thing I don't like about it is that I think of Neil as a very feeling character, like a character who is actually like oozing emotional energy throughout the film. And if he's like, I think it's like kind of asking a lot for us to accept that that's his mom who's been torn apart by an inverted ram. and he's like, we should like go about our business. I don't know. I'm not totally sure that I would love that part of it. Other than that, though, it does track for me.

And I feel like if we got Tenet Two, part of the roadmap of Tenet Two would be revealing that all of the characters in Tenet Two were characters we had met in some other form in Tenet One. Like that feels very probable to me. There's this line that Neil has, again, in that scene, which is undoubtedly my favorite scene of the movie, when he talks about going back and weaving, quote, weaving another problem, pass in the fabric of this mission, a really beautiful way to think about sort of these various tenant members of the tenant organization just sort of like, you know, weaving in and out of time on the loom of time. And this idea that like sometimes when you get these theories

that all these characters are connected or, you know, Aaron Taylor Johnson's character is Michael Kane's character. I'm like, that makes the world feel small. Yeah. That's narrow. But I kind of like the idea of tightening the weave on this particular story. And it's just like a very closely woven and the idea of the more characters who are talking to people they already know and pretending that they don't know them or they've just met them or something like that is just like a fun thing to think about. Yeah. And the doctor and River were on my mind too for that same reason. I think it's really interesting to think about, you know, so much of this movie and Nolan's movies are about concepts and intellectual curiosity, but also they are about humanity and how we think about our

own humanity and relate to each other's humanity. And with Neil and the protagonist, the river and the doctor, the idea that like, okay, what is a relationship just at the most basic level? It is, it is getting to know another person and allowing them to, like, discover who you are too. So the idea that that person who you were forming a relationship with could have a different understanding of who you are than even you possess or are aware of is, like, so delicious to play with. And I love the idea, too, that we are witnessing in that very moving sequence. Also, one, really unique in the span of this, like, meaningful experience together, moment of total truth and transparency that, like, there's always somebody who's got to withhold something,

and then here it is, and how rare that is. That's just, like, kind of fascinating and cool. And I think that, like, you know, something about the protagonist as Cipher, like we talked about is compelling, right? I think the thing that is missing is understanding anything about who that character is or why he does the things he does. I think we'll come back to that probably in some of the categories. But like, that could change over time if we like had some of this, this person is revealed to be this person and this scientist is revealed to be the scientist, etc.

Mallory Rubin is just coming out as the number one make Tenet Two happen. Oh, I would love Tenet Two. I would love Tenet Two. And again, I want to keep thinking about the movie over time. I think, like, you know, the way the films are in conversation with each other, as we've already talked about, is interesting, too, in terms of the future and the past. And that's relevant here to what we're talking about. Like, you know, in interstellar, the future is saving, is facilitating the continuation of humanity, right? Which then facilitates those members of humanity. Mm-hmm. Being alive to save humanity. So that's like a very positive view. Horrible things happen. blight, et cetera. We have torn our world apart. Obviously, that's present here too. But the idea that the future of humanity would not only persevere, but care enough about its own past to sustain

itself is like kind of a charitable read, right? I think there's a view of tenant where the idea that the future, obviously everything was stated, like one man who's like, if I can't have it, no one can, very grim. I think totally believable, by the way, but very grim. But the idea that the future is like, grandfather paradox, we're not really worried about it. We can't allow you guys to continue fucking shit up. It feels actually extra important than inside of that for these characters who we've grown attached to to say, our relationship to this is going to try to do something good for the past, to try to keep things going, because otherwise it's just all very bleak. And I think that doesn't feel like actually Nolan's intention. Rebecca, any thoughts

on that? Yeah, I like where all this is going. I think I would add one more interpretive layer on top of what Mallory is saying and point out that Nolan loves nuclear families like thematically he's really interested in a dad trying to get back to his wife who's usually dead and the kids and at Oppenheimer he's just interested in nukes but I think like the the bonds of the nuclear family

being the person-to-person manifestation of these like broader like social obligations I think are another reason I think a strong reason why Max is Neil to bring that back in. Because you do have this sort of like, not edible, but sort of clear like replacing of the father figure where Sater has like renounced his obligations as a father.

He says, you know, the worst thing ever did was bring a child into a world I knew was ending. Too bad for him, basically. But if I can't have the world, nobody can. So he has stopped caring about the future, both for other generations that could come from him and his own son. And then the protagonist steps in. And as Malley points out, we don't know a lot about him.

We don't know his motivations. There's really no reason why we would believe that he cares about saving the future, except that he's already passed a test that he would die just to, you know, obey, to carry out a mission. And because there's no better, there's no other, like, contextual scene in which the protagonists, moral obligations are really displayed. The shortcut to that is his caring about Max and his caring about at least saving the future for this one kid and caring about cat.

So you have this father figure who wants to preserve the figure for the sake of the son. And then you have a mother figure who also wants to fight for the future for the sake of the son. And then beautifully, you have a child who comes back and is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of the parents.

So I think the nuclear family bonds like concretize the rosiest interpretation of how everybody's thinking about their generational obligations. I love that. I love that. We've talked about bootstrapped paradoxes, grandfather paradoxes, all kinds of paradoxes. Any other time travel concepts that you want to bring up here, Rebecca? I will mention that I was so inspired by Tenet that I ended up writing this short story called

Making Space. And I think it's just available as a digital download out there. So I really like the idea of the future taking revenge on the past. And I wanted to use that premise to investigate questions about like parenthood and fertility and what it means to bring life into a world that a lot of people think is ending. So we're this story where essentially this couple that hasn't had any luck with IVF. They find this creepy abandoned child in the forest and then decide to adopt him. And then a series of events happens.

And it turns out that child has been sent back in time as a climate refugee. and he's tainted with this virus that renders all the people he touches infertile. So he's literally making space for all the other kids who are about to be sent back to, like, you know, be found and be cared for. Because all the parents in this time, this generation that are so selfishly destroying the planet can't have kids anymore. So that's my contribution to thematic inquiries. That's awesome. Incredible. Anything else we want to mention?

I will just say just sort of like we've talked a lot about, as we've gone through these Nolan movies, we've talked a lot about the impact of the movie. And outside of like Tenet as this sort of like grand failure to a certain degree, splits Nolan in his longtime studio Warner Brothers, but he goes to Universal and makes Oppenheimer. And when he makes Oppenheimer, he just like wins all the Oscars. And it's a real fuck you to Warner Brothers, honestly, at the end of the day. But to your point, Rebecca, in this sort of blank check way, he can do a huge swing and a miss on Tenet and they get all the resources in the world to make Oppenheimer and somehow, along with Barbie, get everyone out into the theaters to see, of all things, Oppenheimer, and then get to make The Odyssey a movie that we could not possibly be more excited for, 12 out of 10 excitement levels. So incredible work from Nolan.

Anything else you want to say in a big picture way? We've mentioned the sound in the Ludwig Gordson's score, which is incredibly, you know, this is a swing away from Hans Zimmer. Right. He brings in Ludwig Gorensen, who is astonishing and incredible. Anything else you want to say, Rebecca, in a big picture way about tenant before we get to our categories? We did it. We did it. Mallory, you ready? Yeah, I think we did it.

Ready. All right, let's go to our tenant top 13. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes. Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in, loyal, invested. They're called fans.

Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising. You're among fans. As is the case of all the Nolan movies,

we've got categories that all have little Nolan quotes from various movies the front of them. This is an idea I had over a year ago and do I have regrets about it? Who's to say? But here we are. So the first category is, why so serious? Funniest line or moment from the film, Rebecca. What do you think? It's got to be, I ordered my hot sauce in hours. That's a great one. It's really good. I love that one. What's yours, Mallory? Okay, mine is, you want to crash a plane? Yeah. Well, not from the air.

Don't be so dramatic. And then building toward, we'll hop, make a plane. All right, that is a little dramatic. It's great shit. It's very, don't be afraid to dream a little bit bigger, darling. Very Tom Hardy and Inception in that moment. Well, not from the air. Don't be so dramatic.

Really good. There are, I actually, I think this is a funny movie. There are good little moments. Yeah. Yeah. When the protagonist is taking the deep breaths to prep for the gas coming into the room and Neil looks to claws and he's like, yoga. Like, that's hysterical.

You know, the suit conversation that Rebecca, you already alluded to, that whole exchange between Sir Michael and the protagonist is like really amusing, save the world, then we'll balance the books, you know. Well, you're a British son of a monopoly on snobber, you know, and not a monopoly more of a controlling interest. That's wonderful. It's great. I also really love when Sater says, but we do live in a twilight world and the protagonist says, is that Whitman? Pretty. Great. Excellent.

All right. Speaking of, you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling. Sickest set piece. Rebecca, what do you have for this? Well, I have two. I like when the, obviously the whole final fight and when the building like explodes at the top and then the bottom, but like reconstructs. But it took me a while to put it together. But I think the car chase heist scene and then the interrogation when Sater shoots cat with the reverse bullet is really incredible.

And that was one of the sequences that really rewards a rewatch with graph paper because you have to play it back several times and watch it with attention to how it's going from the subjective time of Sater and cat, protagonist. But it all clicks together. It really holds up.

Well, I have a question about that. So as I was trying to rewatch it and rewatch it and dig into analysis of it, what it's hard for me to understand about a temporal pincer movement is that you have, you know, in Seder's Casey as Volkov, or, you know, someone telling him everything that happens on the road so that he can go and inverse and sort of be involved in it. So it's like, this is what you did.

This is what you already did. So this is what you need to do. It always happened. So or with the temporal pincer movement of Team Blue and Team Red in the Stalsk sort of fight at the end, team Blue is like, hey, this is what happened. team red. But like how closely do you need to fall? Like, do you just get a sort of like, hey, you showed up driving this particular car

backwards on the road and is it just sort of like, you as a person are like, okay, well, whatever I would do in that moment is what I'm going to do? Or are his men like, and then he threw you the orange case, but you glanced to the right and saw it was happening in the you know, like how detailed and then how prescriptive is, are the instructions on a temporal pen? or movement. That's where my brain starts to boil, especially if you go to the car chase,

once Sater understands where the McGuffin is, which is it's in the Silver Saab, he still play acts the rest of the car chase already knowing where the piece is. So he has to like pretend with the rest of the car chase so that the protagonist doesn't know that he knows where the piece is already. Do you know what I mean, Rebecca? Do you see what I'm saying there? Yeah, I mean, I do see. It's hard. We were also wondering, like, at the end,

they're just, like, standing there in the shipping container, explaining how the inversion's going to work and how they're going to go back in time to save Kat, which means, like, while the temporal pencil movement is happening, they're just sitting there. Like, they could have run out and grabbed the algorithm piece at any time. So I think that's something that doesn't really hold up by there. Yeah.

Yeah. Or go to, like, it really, it hurts my brain and it makes me feel dumb because I'm like, well, why not just do another pass? Like that, I mean, that's what the protagonist does, allegedly in the car chase is he does, the sob is his other pass to try to like fix things. And then he realizes, I just actually, I was always there. And I just actually made it worse because now he knows exactly where the pieces is in the back of the sob, which is parked back there. And, you know, and Sater does another pass through to grab it from the sob. But I'm like, what's to stop us from just weaving another pass? Why did we stop there?

Why didn't we weave another pass? Is it because we didn't? And so we can't now? And that's the other thing. Sorry. Sorry, guys. But that's the other thing about going through the turn style. An interesting explanation of the turnstile is you always have to check to see that you can, are coming out the other side.

Yeah. You know, so that you can know that you did so you don't get stuck there. That boils my brain a bit, honestly. Yeah. Because you already did it. So you have to do it. what if, you know, I have no choice because I did it, so I have to do it. Well, it's interesting, too, to consider would that be like a...

Not an excuse to do nothing, obviously. Not an excuse to do nothing. But would the level of detail shared? Because part of what's interesting about that sequence that you're choosing, Rebecca, is that, like, there's the setup for that is like, don't paper it. We can't let them know. And then it's very satisfying the idea that, like, everything you do creates a mark. And then that mark is something that people can understand and use.

And it opens, I think, the floor for your question of, like, well, what level? And then the, yes, they send a team and they learn from that team, et cetera. I think it's interesting to consider, we don't get the answer for this, but like, do we, to consider whether the two sides would approach that differently. Like whether maybe a character like Sater would seek to prescribe movement and rob the people in his team. of choice because for him it is about an end goal whereas like we see Neil not tell the protagonist

things even after he has a certain moment of like he knows who the protagonist is the whole time as we've already as we've covered but like in the Freeport sequence the fight which is my pick he pulls the helmet off he sees and he's like oh shit and then he doesn't tell him

anything as the protagonist calls him out and he's like I'm like, we're going to, like, mention that before we went and, like, did that all again, you know? And it's like, well, no, because you've got to do the shit that you've got to do, right? And I have to do the shit that I have to do. So I like, like, that could be kind of a thematically rich thing, actually, if the sides pursued it differently. Ultimately, I am attempting to rationalize something that I don't think the film answers. I think it's a pretty, I think it's a fair question.

Yeah, I don't know. My sickest set piece is the same as Rebecca's, well, one of Rebecca's, which is the exploding bottom of, like the fact that Wheeler and Ives, Fiona Dorif and Aaron Taylor Johnson, part of the red team, blue team gambit, part of this Pinser movement is to create

such a spectacle that everyone will be distracted. And so agreeing to both blow up the building at the bottom and at the top and the way in which they, the filmmakers made several different models of this building and blew it up the bottom and blew it up at the top and then composited together, then

made a bigger version of it so that people could run past it and it all looks, you know, like Inception, the most sort of like Escher-esque mind-bending puzzle, that's definitely my favorite sort of visual. You know, I mean, the car chase is incredible. And the fact, you know, to your point about the making of, you know, all of the stunt driving that they did to accomplish that to make it look like something is defying physics and, you know, like even small details, like the way the trash. sort of like reverse comes out of the wheels of the car,

but you know because they told you that the car is driving reversing. So they had to like sort of either CGI ad or like pull trash out of it to make, you know, like it's quite intricate. It rewards as many watches as Rebecca and her husband and all of their friends have done from their couches. And it's astounding. The reason I am going with the Freeport fight, Yeah. Less for me about the plane crash part of it, though, obviously, that when we go back and do it again, the way that that creates the opportunity to enter and stuff is a satisfying aspect of the story stitching together.

That the ambulance is always there. Exactly. The ambulance is always. So you can see in like one of the shots that they're like, you know, as they're exiting, they're running in and stuff. That's very fun. In terms of just the craft of the movie and the commitment to the way the movie was going to be made. this is like pantheon nolan stuff i think they i believe that he has said that there is only if you map it one shot that they reused when you rewatch the fight the second time because like they wanted to so authentically film it from each perspective that like crab walk like well that that guy did that that's why i how the characters move that way this is in my stunt because like you know which, not to get ahead, but I will just say, for that reason, because watching them

choreographed this fight and watching them figure out how to like flip themselves backwards and all the sort of stuff like that to make it so they're not reversing the footage is incredible. Yeah, it's like we're going to train and study and ask not only of the stunt performers, but the main cast to like learn how to do this and to move this way. It was interesting to hear like John David Washington and then the cast talk about, oh, well, like, I don't normally I want to make a movie. I'm not like sitting down and watching my own tape, but like I had to to understand. It's just kind of fascinating and really audacious, I think.

And, you know, I like, it has a very compelling setup when we're walking in, the split room and like the bullets and the glass. In a way that's actually a little bit of the opposite to me. I still don't understand. I still don't understand reverse bullets. I try all the time. And sometimes my brain like grass on to it. Well, in order to pick it up, you have to have dropped it. So it's turn your eye on like you have dropped it.

But like they walk into that room. They see the bullet holes. It's like, shit is about to. go down. I love that. It makes my heart race in a great fun way. During the car chase sequence, I see, I see the cracked side mirror, and I'm, like, annoyed that the characters don't. You know, so it has a little bit of the opposite effect for me, but I think there's just something in that hallway fight that's like, it's just kind of like rapturously balletic to me and it's choreography, so I love that. None of us picked the opera house heist, which is interesting.

I mean, it looks very cool. The opera scene is so confusing. I, I think, I just, We got her! I'm like, I do not understand what was happening in the opera house. I still don't really understand what that, like, random guy that they were rescued, like, what his deal was. I tried so many times. That he had the piece. Unfortunately, it is the opening to the movie. And I would pause it that that's not ideal.

It just does kind of put you in almost like a defense. I'll speak for myself, almost a defensive position as a viewer. where you're like, oh my God, like, is this going to be that hard? It looks incredibly cool. It does look like everyone's passed out. Like, all of that, you know, you almost looks like time has stopped. Yes. The first time you see the plaster start to move where there's a hole.

And we see the string for the first time. It's got some fun stuff in it. But, yeah. All right. Swear to me. This movie is rated PG-13, which means it could have exactly one F-bomb. Where would you put it, Rebecca? I think when Kat shoots Sater, and he spring.

at her. I think he's already trying to say fuck. He's like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's where I'd put the caption. Also, a bunch of times when Neil is explaining things, the protagonist just makes a face like, what the fuck. Yeah. So I think one of those verbalized would be nice. I love both those. Sater does say it's true fucking nature when he's talking about the tiger. So I think that, like, as he's pouncing pick is a fantastic one. I'm also going with Sater. Let's just spend a moment talking about the fact that this is a scene in this movie. As the kids say, bracket, complimentary. This is great.

We're going to take you there. I'm not going to attempt the accent because I'm not as brave as you. We're going to take you there. Cut your throat. Not across in the middle like a hole. Then we take your balls and we stuff them in the cut, block the windpipe. We've got to pick this for funniest moment. The protagonist replies, complex, which is genuinely hysterical.

It's very gratifying to watch a man you don't like Try to pull his own balls out of his throat Before he chokes Here's the edit We're gonna take you there Cut your fucking throat Not across In the fucking middle

Like a fucking hole Then we take your fucking balls And we stuff them in the cut Block the fucking windpipe Complex It's very gratifying to watch a man You fucking don't like Try to pull his own fucking balls

Out of his own fucking throat Before he chucks It just would have been that Why not? I love that Yeah, great stuff Also in that scene when he says, how would you like to die old?

Was a runner-up I had for Funniest Moment? I thought that was really good. Real Tyrion Lanister vibes there. To circle back to Rebecca's funniest moment, my pick is I fucking ordered my hot sauce an hour ago. Or something like that. Right before he ruined cheese graters for me forever. All right.

You really feel it. Next category was basically created for this movie. Yeah. He doesn't speak English. If he does, it's with an accent thicker than sauerkraut. sauce, which is from Oppenheimer, actually. Most baffling accent, this is where we get to talk about Kenneth Brana, unless someone has a different option.

I will say that when my friends and I went to go see this at the drive-in, we then spent the rest of our lives occasionally saying to each other, you know what I admire about a tiger, which is just one of my favorite line deliveries of all time. Rebecca, want to talk about Brana and his tremendous accent in this movie. No, we could say it a lot, too, but it's... about the last french fry. I can't have it. No one.

I'm not bothered by the accent at all. Like maybe I have a bad ear for accents, but I like that it's like so hand-fisted and cheesy. And like, it's just a really classic bond. And I always like watching movies where the actors are clearly having a great time. And Candice just seems like he's having a lot of fun. So I'm all for it. have come around on Brana in this movie. I hated it at first and now I'm sort of like with it.

Where are you, Mallory? I'll save that. I answer to that for another category. Okay. But I also do kind of like the accent choice because it's so bad shit bonkers that it weirdly like works for me. Yeah. But it's definitely the pick. You know what they hid matter about to take. All right. No one cared who I was until I put on the mask. Best use of a Nolan verse regular. Rebecca, we didn't define this for you, but we're defining this as anyone who's been in two Nolan movies or more. There aren't a ton of options in this movie, but there's more than one. So what do you have here, Rebecca? Always love Michael Kane.

But something I only learned on this rewatch is that the Mater D at the restaurant when the protagonist goes to see Michael Gain is the, I think, the main character of following. That's right, which we just watched. So it's just nice to see him come back. I agree. That was really fun, especially because we had just talked about that movie and been thinking about that as like the Nolan skeleton key. So yeah, that's a great one. And Martin Donovan also brought back from insomnia, like the kind of like figures of Nolan yesteryear coming into this movie is fun. And interesting because actually we haven't talked about this,

but like this is kind of like a reset moment for his cast. You know, he, I mean, obviously we'll go back to like Killian Murphy won an Oscar for Oppenheimer. It's not like he's done with all of his faves, But, you know, this is a newer group of performers who he's working with here in the central roles. I, in a way that I think should be allowed, in the spirit of the exercise for a Christopher Nolan movie, I'm going out of order. And I am picking Robert Pattinson, even though at this point he had only been in one, but he will. I've done the same thing with a different actor. He will be back. So he's thus eligible.

Yeah. Not only cast, but starring in these trailers, generating meme after meme. You're so meme crazed for Odyssey. It's so funny to me. It's like crack to me. I love it. This is where I want to talk about Hamesh Patel, who I love, who I love. He's the best.

And who is going to be in the Odyssey. So he counts and he shows up as Mihir, here, who is part of the plane crash, and then also shows up to drive the boat for Cat at the end of the movie. We are huge Station 11 fans. We love him so much. I think he's so fun and funny in this movie. The way that he calls the guy over to sort of like, check on the vegan meals and he's just sort of like, I don't know, well, I'm just like a real casual

chloroforming of this guy. I just, I think he's very dashing and perfect for a spy mission. And, you know, thinking a lot about inception, when you watch John David Washington, Robert Pattinson and Hamasch Patel sort of like standing in a triangle and the cameras circling around them as they're sort of talking about their plan, that's very like, let's put a team together inception to me. And Hamash Patel would like have, folded in so well to an inception, and I'm just, like, excited to see what more Nolan wants to do. Like, I would love for him to be, like Killian Murphy, like Matt Damon, one of those guys he uses in the background, in the background, and background until he crafts a whole movie for them. But Hemsmatel deserves it, so I would love to see that.

That's my choice. Great one. All right. Is he cast us in The Odyssey? So Hamesh Patel is playing, I believe you pronounce it UriLocas, who is sort of who undermines Odysseus a bunch on the, the mission then I think is like the ringleader of the Circe fuck up is what I believe is his role. Does that sound right to you, Rebecca?

Okay, fun. Yeah. That'll be really fun. So in the trailer, you see him sort of in a lot of the battle flashback stuff, but then I'm curious to see sort of like, you know, what role exactly he's going to play. Because like how much, I'm excited to talk to you about The Odyssey, but like how much of the Odyssey is, is, are we going to hit? How many of the destinations are we going to hit on the job?

journey. We surely don't have time for them all. All right. Why do we follow, sir, so that we can pick ourselves back up. Best Stana already said mine. Rebecca, what is yours? I originally picked that building being blown up in reverse. But also, this time, I was thinking a lot about cats dive. During that whole final confrontation with Sater on the yacht, I just kept thinking the floor must be so slippery. I really hope she doesn't slip. And when she's like dragging him off the boat, I'm like, that's a lot of momentum. I hope she doesn't slip with him. So I think diving from that height and not hitting anything on the boat and like the sheer grace with

which it's got to be a stunt woman. I don't know if Elizabeth Deputy could dive like that. But I thought it was just such a gorgeous, clean line of motion. That's a great pick. That would be sick if DeBecke was like, I did that. And that was my foot that reached across the entire length of the car to touch the steering wheel. Because I look at me. I can do it all.

That would be amazing. I love how tall she is. It's very important. She rules. Mallory. Oh, boy. So as is often the case, we hit a lot of stunt contenders in the set piece category. What haven't we talked about?

Because, like, my pick was going to be the backwards car flip in the Tallinn car chase, the sob. But we've talked about that stretch enough. We also talked about the cheese grater, which I do think there's something about that kitchen fight that's just like, it's just dudes punching each other. Like, it's a very grounded fight, but it is very useful in establishing how capable the protagonist is going to be throughout the rest of the film.

Okay, you know what I'll go? I'm going to go with the bungee jump, the entrance to Sing Tower, because I think the, this is like a small but clever way to really show us how all in Nolan is on the bit, right? Like the idea that even,

before we jump down, we're going to jump up. This isn't actually a moment where we're moving backwards or our characters are inverted, but we're playing with that even still. My favorite part of that is when,

the protagonist jumps off and you just see Neil, like, as he's, like, getting ready to jump, Neil just, like, passes him in the background blurry. It's really good. It's a bunching up. Very cool. Very cool. All right. Rebecca loves the dead wives.

You're waiting on a train that will take you far away. Best Dead Wife slash woman moment. I loved the entire Elizabeth Debugue performance. I really love my cat kills Sater because it's not a dead wife moment. or even a woman moment. It's like being truly terrible at your job and not following instructions. And it didn't click for me until this last time

we watched it. And Bennett pointed out, like, they told her over and over again, you're there in the backstop. Your whole job is to keep him from killing himself. And she's like, I'm just going to shoot it.

So it would have been better if she wasn't there at all. And it like, it just contributes absolutely nothing to the plan. But she's really, for the emotional vindication of getting to stand up to him one more time. And I find like every little emotion that passes through her face in that scene I thought that was incredible acting. I do love the timey-wimmy complexity of like they're both from the future pretending to be

from the past. Yes, this key date, the 14th. Yeah, that he thinks she's already dead. And so he is like cherishing in a twisted fuck-up way, this like final moment with this woman that he has already killed. And then she's like, you're about to die a motherfucker and I will and her whole performance, as you say,

like pretending to be enamored or the way she ducks his gaze and stuff like that. I will say, our listener Leah wrote in, in praise of this performance to say, tenant allows Elizabeth Dickie to be tall. She drove that car with her foot. Yeah, there you go.

Plus the way Kat realizes that she was the anonymous woman, she's been jealous of, was not her husband's mistress and actually her after killing her husband, delightful. It's one of the better arcs-only arcs. Nolan has given a female character, which I love. Rebecca, take a moment to talk to us about why you love the dead wives of Chris for Nolan. I mean, I just don't think of them as inconveniently fridged.

I think Nolan is a man who clearly loves his wife and children. You can tell in how he's written all of his films, he thinks that the worst possible thing that could happen to somebody is losing your wife and children. So naturally all this protagonists are like, I got to get back to my kids and I miss my wife a lot. And like, does it recur with like startling frequency? Yeah, I think that's funny. But I like it's, I think it's a really easy shortcut to creating a sympathetic protagonist. And I think it like it rings true. Like that that would absolutely devastate you. I also like, Maul is an amazing character in Inception. And I really have like so little patience for the dead wife criticism of that film, especially because he gets, like, Don Cobb gets that whole speech at the end about

how she's not his wife. She could, she just a shade. She can never capture Mal and all her complexity and beauty. So I think, I think all of his films are smarter and more sincere about the missing wife than the memes make them out to be. I think it's, I don't mind the fact that we examine it at every turn. I think it is quite funny. I think especially like in a larger cultural context when we still struggle to center films on women, like the fact that, you know, these women die over and over and over again, I think is worth remarking on.

But I do think, you know, some of our listeners have pushed back on this, and I do think it's a valid point to say, apparently for Chris Ferdinolan, the worst fate that you could encounter is to lose your wife. I do think that that is a compelling argument. I still think it's hilarious.

And not always in a way that I love that he keeps doing this. Mallory, what's your pick here? I also think that the cat character is great and very welcome. I think the Debicki performance is fantastic. I mean, she's always great. No surprise, but she's dynamite in this movie. I love the idea that we have kind of subbed the dead wife for the hostage wife.

You know, there's something there's still happening, but it works quite well because it actually allows her to, you know, you talked beautifully about the dive. Rebecca, and like, I love, we've hit it a couple times. Like, I just love, you know, and we know. Like, I feel like, yeah, our first watch, we know that that's going to be revealed to be her, but it doesn't, it doesn't make it any less impactful because it's not really, truly about the plot reveal, it's about her coming to understand that she did this thing and now can do things, right? So, like, the idea that you feel completely trapped in your own life, and then, and this is quite fitting in the larger conversation we're having about free will, right, an agency. It's like, Seder is going to die, right?

This is established what has happened has happened, but also like he is seeking that outcome, right? That's like a great moment when she's like, no, you've missed it. Like this is what he wants, right? And he says about her, if I can't, you know, have her, no one can and about the world. If I can't have it, nobody can. And so she is not at any point diluting herself into thinking

she is ending something that he was not already ending. but it's about doing it on her terms, right? She says to him, it's very satisfying. Like, I'm not going to let you think that you took us with you. And so that is, I think, a good encapsulation of how the movie can say, the sequence of events is set. The bomb that goes off went off and goes off. The death occurs. The dive occurs.

But we have a different understanding, as does the person who is living through it now in this moment. this contemporary moment for what drove that outcome, what is truly responsible for leading us to that place, which is really, really great. And like, he didn't just vanish. He got dragged through the water. His sunscreen sucked back. Like a piece of driftwood tied to the back of the boat.

Incredible. And like I just, I don't know, she has a lot of really good, powerful lines. Like, I like when she says to the protagonists very early in their interaction, you mean blackmail, like, don't be afraid of the word. You know, she's just a badass. She's a cool character. I agree. I'm the venousal bitch you scar on the outside.

I will say, rewatch that scene over and over again, which I did because I liked watching her shoot him. She struggles slightly with getting that button open to have her cool moment, which is not a critique. I'm just saying like, you know, Cat is in her mind.

She's like, I've got the gun and I'm going to, I've got this great line. And then I'm going to like whip my shirt up and show him the scar. And she's like struggling with her button a little bit. I just, I really like it. I think it's very human. It's very good.

All right, I want to make sure we can get to the Odyssey conversation that we want to have with you. So I am going to encourage us to slightly zoom through the rest of these. He's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. Who was regrettably miscast and who would you replace them with? My scorching hot take is I do think John David Washington is, you calling him like a, I think you call him like a column of swag. I think that's very accurate. I think for something this logically complex. When you think about something like interstellar,

Matthew McHanahe's like extremely emotional performance is something in them that really drives us through. And so like Pattinson is showing up giving us a lot of emotion. John David Washington is giving us a lot of cool. And I would like someone who is just a bit more raw throughout this so I could at least as Barbara encourages us, don't try to understand it, just feel it. Like I would like to feel it a little bit more throughout.

So that's that's kind of my hot take on this movie. Rebecca, what's your what's your answer here? Wow, I have the opposite take on John David Washington. I really like his restraint. I like that he's like so well trained that he doesn't betray emotion. And that makes the moments where like his eyes get red when he's saying goodbye to Neil. Like I feel like that makes those emotions hit even harder. But my silly recast was I was going to recast Wheeler because I think Aaron Taylor Johnson is Ives. Like, he's, like, chewing up every line with such a verb, like, me to know and you don't. And I was like, oh, it'd be cool. Like, Wheeler was also, like, a surprise cameo of somebody really liked. But then I recently became a pit fan, and I found out that it's the case. And now

I'm like, Wheeler is perfect. No Aviator Nation zip up puties on Wheeler during the Temporal open store. Could be entirely impossible. Yeah, I think for me, it's the, I think that John David Washington is, as we've talked about, very funny, very sexy, suave. All of my notes on the protagonists are about how the character is written. I think like this, it's just, and as we talked about kind of intentionally, but. I have seen John David Washington give far more sort of emotionally raw performances. So I know he's capable of it. Yeah, I love, you mentioned Black Klansman as the, what, what Nolan saw and knew he wanted to cast him, really wrecked my head cannon.

I loved the idea that Christopher Nolan was the only other person on Earth who had finished all of ballers show that I watched every second of a job David Washington is great. But I actually, yeah, and his performance is every time I watch it because of those little moments.

Like, you know, there's the, you must not, like, you really must not like to the look of me. You're like, well, then he's going to want to meet me. He does, I think he's conveying quite a bit actually in little moments. I like the performance. My hot take is Brana.

I, who I love and think is like a titan and is great. But here's, let me make the pitch. Sater is, and Nolan himself will say this, right? He's not like a villain who has a point. He's not supposed to be empathetic in any respect. He is pure, selfish evil. He is the worst possible endpoint of the great man complex, right, that Nolan likes to study.

I personally think that Kenneth Branagh is just a touch too charming to be like someone I am is supposed to be incapable of being interested in spending time with it all. I need someone just like more, and maybe the accent is helping to get us there a bit. I need like a touch more cartoon evil. Like I can't question at all for a second if I'm supposed to feel that way about that guy. But Brana's like, you know. So do you have a candidate? No, no, just not Brandon.

No. No. That's my take. I don't really have any other candidates was more why I landed on Brana because I think actually it's like a quite well-cast movie and it is just fun to see like a different cast in a Nolan movie

because it's fun that he returns to so many favorites but I found it like quite refreshing to have so many new people in his primary cast. So I didn't really have a candidate other than Brana. I don't really feel strongly about the Brana take though. You don't really want to work it out. You want to be fooled most satisfying twist. There are a lot of twists and turns in this.

Rebecca, what is your answer? here. Yeah. So I like the reveal that he's no Neil for a long time as part of the bigger reveal that this whole movie has been a temporal pizza movement. I love it. I agree. That's a great one, though. I do think it would be pretty funny if on this podcast

we said our favorite twist was that the wife did not, in fact, die. Because it is a twist. It is a twist. One of our listeners is like, have you considered that he hasn't killed a wife in a while that she doesn't die? I'm like, yeah, the wife doesn't die in Oppenheimer, but a lady dies in Oppenheimer. lady that Priya is shot in the back of the head.

You know, a lady does that's movie. We are not all unscathed. No, I might... It's so much more than just the wife. It's true. Yeah, my pick is just, yeah, Neil, having been at the center of tenant, you know, I'm calling him a cabaret, wait, what? You know, all of that.

And just the fact that Neil and the protagonists have known each other for some time. I guess that within that, like, I do think the reveal that the protagonist, like, founded tenant is a pretty, that's a pretty big one. I don't know if it's not as, it doesn't have a grip on my heart the way that the Neal antagonist thing does. I think it's a Neal reveal for sure. All right. It's not who I am underneath, but who what I do that defines me. Nolan, not known for a sexual content, but let's go ahead and try to excavate the horniest moment of this film.

Rebecca, what do you have? All I could think about is how deeply unsexy, the supposedly sexy moments of the film are. Like, I actually burst out laughing at the scene on the yacht when, cats like trying to seduce Sater and make him feel like she loves him again. And he literally goes, a moment, please, madame. He is so uninterested in his own wife and she is so clearly uninterested in him. And it's just absurd watching these two people like rub sunscreen on each other. Like she's like, oh, it'll be fun. He's like, please, please, please. No. Incredible. I have a kind of related pick. It also involves their marriage. After the car flip,

inverted Sater says to inverted protagonist. You did get my pulse above 130. No one's done that before. Not even my wife. Tough. Tough. I will say we got some emails from people. I am such a fervent, you know, believer in the Max is Neal theory that I have not had room for this interpretation of Tenet.

But we got some emails from listeners who interpret Neil's saying. to the protagonist, we get up to some stuff as being a bit spicier than I'm the grown-up version of this kid. But like, let's see he's not Max. I did not read that. And he just looks like Robert Pattinson. And he's like, I know your Diet Coke order. I know everything about you.

Let's fuck. We get up to some stuff. Why not? I would just offer that out there. But again, I'm a believer in the Max's Neal theory. Okay. You think darkness is your ally, but you merely adopt. the doc. I was born in it. Do it in the Bain voice. There we go full Bain. God damn it.

Most devastating moment. This is also Neal for me. Rebecca, what is what is your answer here? Also, Neil, definitely when he turns around and you see the charm on his backpack. I think there's something like really sweetly tragic and nostalgic about Robert Pattinson's performance during the whole movie because I see him wearing the expression that Michael Scott wears on his last day in the office when he knows it's his last day but nobody else does so he's just like being so tender to everybody so in that scene where he's like getting the protagonist of coke and he's like i prefer soda water and he's like no you don't like like he knows his story ends here he must know he must know he spent his whole life building to it and and if we think he's max and the protagonist

sort of raised him we also know that he's grown up knowing who was going to die so there's this like knowing fondness and all the things he can't say that i think that i think he's think make that performance very devastating. He also, if he is Max, which again, I believe in, he would have had to spend so much of his life inverted to get all the way back to the point of being Robert Pattinson's age at this point. He would have spent decades inverted. And so, you know, thinking about that, about, like, how much of his life he has spent,

you know, dedicated to the cause of Tenet. And then, yeah, I find that Diet Coke moment. It's great. So tender. It's great. And also, like, what that would mean for Neil to know that. this is the moment that the protagonist is meeting him for the first time. And there's something kind of subtle in that scene where he's like, you know, would you kill a woman?

Would you kill a child? It's almost like he's testing to confirm that this is like the first interaction for the other person. I really like that. And I agree that's one of the more, that is one of the more satisfying on the like human emotional level aspects of rewatching it is like all those little looks in the moment. Yeah. Again, like thinking about the doctor in reverse song inside of Dr. Who when they, when he meets her for the first time and she's devastated. that he doesn't recognize her. And so I kind of lay that on to Neil

where it's just sort of like whether or not he knows is the first time they're meeting or not, but there's just that sort of like, you don't know me. Yeah. I'm a stranger to you. Yeah.

You know, and you're never going to, if this is my last mission, my last day, you're never going to know me. You know, we're only getting less and less of each other and not more and more of each other as our relationship goes. Well, and the idea too,

I mean, that makes it even more rich that in a story, about being able to invert yourself and move backwards through time and the moments you share with other people are still finite, right? It's like really important because it adds a sense of

we talk about the other side of this that stakes don't only come in the form of death but like the fact that someone at any moment might be out of your life and the part of what makes that end exchange so good between them is like they're both confronting something. Yeah. You know, the protagonist has seen the dead body he has seen the string on the backpack

so when Neil turns he's like oh my goodness when Neil is going back in there and saying he had Ives could anyone else have gotten that door unlocked as quickly no it's got to be me well the protagonist has to make that run that calculus of like I know what the outcome is going to be do I tell him do I say something and then Neil is like

and then he realizes that Neil knows and then he realizes that Neil knows and Neil kind of gives him that gift of absolving himself of the guilt because that's about to be the entire ballgame like every moment is going to be that kind of calculus and assessment as they go through time. So the fact that Neil has like the, you know, it's a very somber scene, but like you've known me for years. For me, I think this is the end of a beautiful friendship. Like he knows definitively that it's over,

but he's giving him the gift of saying like, but for me it's just the beginning. Yeah. For you, it's just the beginning. We get up to some stuff. It's just great. It's great. Last question before we get to talk to Rebecca about the Odyssey, which I'm so excited about. Some men just want to watch the world Byrne, what is the most Nolan thing about this movie, Rebecca? Starting a conversation in one place and continuing it in a totally different location as if it's one conversation for sure. Ooh, that's a good pick. I like that. I mean, my answer is all of it. It's like the most Nolan movie. It's just like Nolan squared. I just wrote time with like 10 eyes in it. Yeah. It's all of it. Okay, this is the moment I've been waiting for. We are now going to talk to Rebecca about the Odyssey, but this is a is a no-holds-barred. All spoilers are welcome, discussion of the Odyssey. So if you don't want to

know about this very ancient text that most of us studied in school, but if you didn't, and you don't want to know, you can peace out and we'll see you soon. This brings us into the Odyssey. Our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us. What aspect of Nolan's the upcoming the Odyssey are you thinking about such most hype for this month? Usually this is just a one answer, but we're going to do a little sub-combo here because we've got a master storyteller here to talk to us about The Odyssey. But I will just say I watched this Colbert interview that Nolan did when he debuted the trailer on Colbert's show.

And he was talking about how the Odyssey is like the original nonlinear story that they all come from the Odyssey. The Odyssey is told non-linear linearly. And so like thinking about that, the song of Odysseus, he wants to start it in Ithaca with the song of Odysseus and then sort of like travel all around through time via that. the idea of faith and divinity inside of The Odyssey and thinking about faith as it pertains to this movie got me really excited.

But Rebecca, why has The Tale of Odysseus and Dirt as one of like these stories of our world? I think two reasons. And they're both very much wrapped up in reasons why I like Tenet as well. And first, it's a story about fate and whether you can be a master of your own future. One of the essential questions in Greek epics,

Greek tragedies is how much your decisions matter when sort of the Olympians have chosen what's going to happen. Odysseus doesn't get home initially because he's angered Zeus and Poseidon. And he only finally returns and beats the suitors because Athena has intervened and it's like it's kind of time to let Odysseus go. So from one perspective, Odysseus the human and his choices don't matter at all. He's just this puppet laying out a drama for the entertainment of the gods. He's just one thread in this capacity of time. But from his perspective, he still has to outsmart the Cyclops. He still has to sail between Silla and Parabdis. And I think Nolan is very attuned to that because one of the taglines that they've been using for the film is defy the gods. So I am very excited to see how he's

navigating that tension between destiny and autonomy. And while we're on the Greek tragedies topic, my deep cut here is that Tenet can be read as a reverse Oedipus Rex. Because in editors, the characters are trying to escape their fates and unwittingly bring it about, even when, you know, what's happened, happened, and it's written. And in tenet, the characters sort of know their fates have been decided. The fact that they're there means that they must have won in the future. But they still have to bring it about and they still have to play their parts. And also there's that nuclear family goofiness involved. So I think, yeah, fate and destiny, whether it's because of the bootstrap of the future or whether because of the gods intervening, I think that's like an endless.

question that people will always be writing stories about. But the second reason why it's just so compelling on a like universal gut level is, and also the reason why the Odyssey is a very natural, like, fit for Nolan's artistic direction is that it's a story about defending house and home. And it's not just a story about a man who wants to get back to his wife and kids. It's about a young man, a son becoming a man in the absence of his father. and a wife missing her husband who has to stay true against an onslaught of suitors. So all three of them have to fight in their different ways for the story to have a happy ending

and bring the family back together. And again, no one's obsessed with that nuclear family and reuniting everybody. And in The Odyssey, finally, you'll have a chance for all of them to be alive and reunite. I love that. God, bring on July 17th. Let's go. What do you, Rick, what do you think people get wrong about the Odyssey? I think there's a lot that we could say just based on the means swirling around.

But I think just like a technical thing that I'm excited to see how Nolan approaches is the timeline aspect. And also where that action really is because people, I think people who haven't read the Odyssey are like, oh, it's all about the journey. It's about Odysseus beating all these monsters to get home. But that's not the focus of the poem, just on the pure like percentages level. The Odyssey doesn't even start with Odysseus. It starts with Telemachus and Penelope at home, sort of dealing with all these horrible suitors who are eating all their livestock and threatening them. And the first four books are about Telemachus setting out from Ithaca to Sparta to seek news of its dad.

And then we don't even get to Odysseus until book five when he's been stuck for years on Pallipsis Island. And then even then, most of the story of the Odyssey has already happened. And we get told about the Cyclops and Circe and Scy and Carybdis as a flashback told to Alcinus, who's the father of Nossica, who Odysseus is sheltering with until he moves on. And then pretty quickly after he's told that flashback, he sets off for Ithaca and then he gets home. And so that journey part, that's the flashback, is only books 5 through 13, which only gets you halfway through the epic. And the majority of the poem is about Odysseus skulking around back home in Ithaca in disguise,

like spying on the suitors and making plans with Telemachus and seeing if anybody else recognizes him. So I think what's really interesting thematically about the Odyssey is not the journey. It's about what happens to you when you finally get home. It's how much you've changed, whether anybody recognizes you, whether you're welcomed. And I think it's telling that the main threat that is foreshadowed over and over again is not any of the monsters on the journey. It's not any of these mythical beasts, but it's the warnings about what happened to Agamemnon. Because the wife character, Penelope, is contrasted with Helen of Troy, the wife of Menelaus, and Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon. Agamemnon gets home first. He and Clytemnestra are already on bad terms because he sacrificed.

their daughter, Evigenia, at Alias, so that his men could sail. So she's, like, at home stewing at him. And she takes a lover, Agisnes. So he gets, Agamemnon, Nenom gets home from Troy, finally. And Agisthus is like, oh, welcome, dude. Let's throw a banquet for you. And then during this banquet, he, like, slaughters him in all of his men, red wedding style. And then finally, Agamemnon and Clyde Nesra's son, Arrestes, gets revenge for his father. So that's the cautionary tale. of exactly what could happen to Odysseus when he gets home if his wife and his son are not true. And I think that's going to be the beating heart of the movie and not the monsters along the way. What do you make of the news that we just got that Lupita Nongo is playing both Clytemnestra and Helen of Troy?

She's like doing a dual role. What do you think is interesting about that? Oh, I had no idea. That's really cool. Yeah. Yeah, I think the standard interpretation of both of these women is that They're the foils of Penelope. Penelope is true. She wards off the suitors. She believes her husband will come back. And I think both Helen and Clyde Mnester are the examples of the bad wives who strayed.

Although I will say the Helen of Troy cameo and the Odyssey is very funny to me because she doesn't get that many lines. So Telemachus goes to the court of Menelaus and Helen and they shelter him and give him some use of his dad. And Helen comes down and she's just like, oh, yeah. Like, that was so crazy how the gods tricked to me. And I went with Paris and I really didn't want to. But I'm home now and everything's okay. Incredible. So Benny Safi is playing Agamemnon and Don with quite a helmet.

Yeah, John Bernthal is playing Menelaus. So that is all very exciting. Grandfell hive rise always. Yeah. Anything, you've already sort of like pushed back on the dead wife trope. But you sent us an even. email a little while ago, letting us know that you got into a fight at a pub about sort of Chris Nolan, Dead Wives, and The Odyssey, and I've never been more jealous of a conversation

in my life. Like, can we go find a pub and have an argument about Nolan and Deadwives and the Odyssey? So, Rebecca, what are you hearing? What's the word on the street about The Odyssey that you're like, hey, man, that's not what we're going to see. What do you think? It was a friendly argument, but I was shouting across the table at a pod. Because I think there's somebody who wanted to perform the classic Nolan Hater line, which I think is just an easy, like, social identity to adopt if

you're just lightly dipping your toes in the discursive waters. And he was like, oh, Nolan hates women. And his Odyssey is just going to have Circe and Calypso and Athena slinking around and being in love with him and being obsessed with him and dying for him. And I was like, first of all,

that's not what Nolan women do because they're typically more busy being dead. but they're also typically not sex objects. Like desire for women is rarely ever driving the bot in a Nolan film. Even in Tenet where Kenneth, like, he's very good at acting Sater's motivations in other contexts, I think. But I think he just can't perform any horniness for cat. And like, yeah, like the women's roles in The Odyssey are going to be restricted.

It's a tale about heroic ancient Greece. I think Penelope is a fascinating character. She is a wife waiting at home. Her avenues for resistance and her axes of freedom of what she can do about it are so socially constricted. But she survives and she is true and she welcomes Odysseus back. And there's a fantastic Emily Wilson essay about the women in the Odyssey where she talks about Penelope performing that role. And also like the female goddesses who get to enact all the fantasies. of freedom and power,

like Athena doing whatever she wants and really driving the action in a way that the human women don't. So I'm extremely excited for the women of The Odyssey. Yeah, I think the, you know, like Charlize their own, Samantha Morton as Circe,

has me very excited because I love a witch, but I love Samantha Morton. So that is going to be like really exciting for me. Charlize, I think, is playing Nossica, I believe, you know, and Zendaya is Athena. Like, you know, if you want to pick, like, a woman who is not going to, I mean, other than the time, she got thrown off a roof in Spider-Man, but, like, is not going to really appear, like, weak or damseld, you're going to pick Zendaya to play Athena.

That's very exciting to me. I'm really, really thrilled. Is there a particular visual from the story that excites you to see executed? Can I just say really quickly? I don't, I need to, like, haven't done my rerit of The Odyssey, so my memory is not perfect. obviously. But when Nolan was on Colbert and Colbert was asking him about Scilla and Carybdis, he was like, he's like, which one's this and which one's this? And Nolan's like, this is Cilla and this is Carybdis. And I'm like, no, it's the opposite. And I just felt, I felt,

I felt for the only time of my life smarter than Christopher Nolan because he got one detail wrong about this massive epic that he has dedicated his life to making. That's the only time all over feels smarter than Chris Rennelan. Is there a particular visual from the story, Rebecca, that you're most excited to see? Yeah, I think like all the action pieces, especially the Cyclops and Odysseus, like going hog wild,

slaughtering all the suitors and like the siege of Troy. I think we have good evidence from the trailers that will see all of this and that will be amazing. But the part I'm most excited for is from book 11 of the Odyssey when he voyages on Circe's administration, advice to the land of Hades to seek counsel from this prophet, Therisius. And I think we've seen hints. I think we see, is it Elliot Page playing Achilles? I think we see Achilles like rising out

of the ground as a spirit. So I'm pretty confident that would be in the film. It's unclear who Elliott Page is playing, but playing a dead soldier. So I think you're right. If it's Achilles or someone else, a dead soldier from the war. So I think that that's right that we are going to go to the land of the dead at some point. Or Elthinar possibly. Yeah. Yeah, I think that will be very cool. Because before Odysseus gets to the prophet, there's like this procession of spirits of first famous women,

like the wives and mothers and daughters of all these heroes. And then there's Agamemnon, there's Achilles, there's Heracles, there's Heracles, he's watching Cisophis. And it's like a who's who of everybody important in Greek myth. And Odysseus gets like overwhelmed. And it's this moment where he's confronting his own fate. immortality and wondering how he's going to stack up in the canon. And then all these ghosts like start crying out to him and he gets scared and runs away. So I think that will be such a gorgeous, surreal,

like overwhelming moment if it's in the film. That section with Elliott Page in the trailer is so spooky and upsetting to me. I'm really excited to see that. Is there anything that you want to shout out, Mallory, that you're... I mean, I'm just excited for all of it. I can't, I mean, I can't wait. It's, this is like, what a time to be a Nolan fan. This is great. I am excited, really excited for Pattinson. The concept of the Trojan horse being like submerged and all the soldiers hidden therein, like the water's rising and they're not sure that they're going to be able to like pull

the horse out of the water before they drown, which is a concept that like Nolan came up, like originally wanted to do if he was going to make Troy a million years ago. And so he's executing here. It's also like he, we talked about this when we did Dunkirk, but like he, he, like did that in Dunkirk? Like they're even in the shot in the trailer and inside of the Trojan horse. They're like, someone, oh, shh. It's like, that's in Dunker.

Yeah, and you're like, where's Harry Styles? That's great. But yeah, I'm really excited about that. We did get an email today. Someone was like, is the Trojan horse not a puppet? And I say, no, the Trojan horse is not a puppet. It's not articulated. I don't think it's a puppet.

I love a puppet. I love the Trojan horse, but I don't. Warhorse. The stage show War Horse is about horse puppets, but not the Trojan horse. Rebecca, anything else, this has been so, it's so fun to hear you talk about The Odyssey. I can't even tell you. I know. I feel like we are so fucking lucky. Is there anything else about The Odyssey that you want to make sure that you touch upon before we go? I would like to predict a twist. Or not so much a twist so much as like a thematic shift. I think whatever the climactic fight is, it's probably going to be at home with all the suitors. I think the focus will not be on Odysseus.

I think Telemachus will strike the final blow. And the movie will end up being about him becoming a man. Because I've made the case for Nolan being very interested in parenting and failures for parenting and time you spend with your kids already. And I think as Nolan's kids have aged, the kids in his films are getting more agency and they're getting older. James and Philippa don't do anything famously. They don't age in Don's visions.

But then Murph saves the world using data that Koup sends back to her. And then for much of Tenet, Max, or Neil, is the mentor of the protagonist. And then they only swap roles at the end. So he gets to be like the dad and the best friend. So I really don't think it's accidental now that no one's getting older. His kids are getting older. That he's chosen a text that opens with the sun and is really, like, as a frame story, actually about Telemachus's manhood and not Odysseus's coming home.

So I think Tom Holland, like whatever it happens, like it's going to be Tom Holland striking the final blow. Yeah, I like that. And I think that track, I mean, you never know when a movie is going into production, into development, casting is beginning and you're hearing whispers, this person's going to be in the movie. You never really know, like, how real anything you hear is. But hearing you say this really does take me back to like the earliest days of stories about how Christopher Nolan was going to make the out of it. was like, Tom Holland's the lead of the movie. Not Matt Damon. That was at least how it was first put out into the world. I don't know if that'll end up actually being true. But for at least a moment in time, that was how it was positioned.

Like, Tom Holland's going to lead Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. So I think that whether or not in terms of like total runtime and screen time that's valid or not, I think it points toward and supports the idea that like he will be very central. And so does the trailer so far. You know, it's very rooted in his. Very much the star of the trailer. Absolutely. No question.

I love this. I can't believe that we just got to like sit here and hear Rebecca. R.F. Kwong sat here with us on the House of Ar and told us about the Odyssey. Incredible. What a treat. One last question for you and for my dear friend Mallory here. In the most recent trailer, we do get some Argos content, which is Odysseus' dog. Are you looking?

forward to the Argos storyline in this movie or how do you, I'm worried about you, I'm concerned. Do you know what happened? Yeah, I do. Same. Yeah. Yeah. It was tough to see that little shot of the, just on my lap, patting you. I mean, as I said the other day, well, actually, this pod hasn't aired yet.

We've recorded it, but it hasn't aired yet. Supergirl. I'm incredibly nervous about Cryptos Fait and Supergirl, too. So I think it's going to be a summer of dog peril. Tough stuff for dog lovers. Thank you, Rebecca, thank you so much For taking the time out of your vacation To defend Tenet to us

To explain The Odyssey to us Has Rebecca changed your mind at all Mallory? I Yes, in the sense that like I feel the way I feel about the movie But my desire to like Appreciate Tenet more and form a deeper connection to it was already there, as you know. And so I think hearing you talk about it so beautifully and brilliantly

and hearing what it means to you and how it has like really gripped you not only like intellectually, but on a soul deep level is like very compelling. And so I look forward to revisiting it again. And, you know, continuing to watch it over time. Like I'm going to watch Nolan's movies until I die. I was one of my favorite filmmakers. So, you know, I'm excited to basically every time he puts out a new one. and his movies are big and they take a long time to make. So we'll have a few years between each movie and just go watch the entire filmography every time, Tenon included. Will I be able to hear a word that any character says?

Probably not. But that's okay. I will say, Rebecca, some of the things that you said, it's similar to this whole rewatch project we've been doing. Like, every time when our colleague Van comes on or when Chris comes on or Mina comes on, and they drop a nugget of a sort of unifying theory of the Nolanverse, it's like taking another path

and weaving back into the fabric. of my understanding. So you making this nuclear family, you know, parents and children comp for Tenet makes it a tighter weave inside of the larger Nolan project in a way, you know, that makes it not like a curio you can just sort of like put aside, but an essential text for their larger Nolan understanding. And so for that, I thank you, among other things, Rebecca. Thank you so much. I do think it all is about the nuclear family.

for him. Like, people are like, oh, the Odyssey, what a swerve, what a surprise. But it's just about a guy coming home to his wife and his kid. And that's sort of what 10 years about as well. So I really like that reading. I thought it was persuasive for you. I love it. All right. Well, thank you to Rebecca. Thank you so much. This was an absolute blast. Thank you to our entire crew here. Carlos Chiroboga is here. Jacob Cornette is here. Chris Wallers was helping us out with some audio here. Scott Lee is here. Arjuna Ram Capowal, Jomey at Dinner on, a whole crew on our ship going home.

Are they our blue team or our red team? They're both. They both went forward and backwards in time in a temporal pincer movement to make this podcast. Thank you, Rebecca. Happy birthday and enjoy the rest of your trip. Thank you. This is such a delight.