What exactly does Tenet mean ? Over the years, director Christopher Nolan has developed a habit of playing with the meaning of his film titles. Between "Inception", "Memento" or "Tenet", we can discern a kind of continuity of thought. A treasure hunt expertly maintained by the creator of The Following .
Read also: For Christopher Nolan, Tenet owes a lot to James Bond and The Spy Who Loved Me
By using words that have several meanings, the British director wants above all to intrigue the viewer. Nolan thus offers a sort of charade, a riddle which, in the particular case of Tenet , an ambitious spy film, is perfectly justified.
Because the world of espionage has never stopped playing with chiaroscuro, taking advantage of light and shade. The secrets are encrypted, hidden there. Each information is obtained at the cost of a clever decryption. The universe of secret agents always contains its share of coded messages, pitfalls and other trapped rebuses.
This is logically the case with the last Nolan. To clarify the questions offered by this enigmatic title, the Skyscape Spy Museum offers a short history lesson in the form of a three-minute video (recorded with the voice of Hayley Hatwell, the one who embodies the agent Carter, at Marvel).
The video deciphers this word by returning to the very origins of "Tenet". If we learn that in English the term literally means "principle of belief", it also refers to the magic square of Sator. The oldest known square is found in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, where it was buried in 79 AD, during the eruption of Vesuvius.
This puzzle is a square palindrome known as the “sator square”. It can be read from top to bottom, bottom to top, but also from left to right and vice versa. The riddle can even continue to be read if you rotate it 180 degrees.
Many researchers and academics have been interested in its meaning. Literally, the words translated from Latin compose a sentence: " The plowman Arepo uses the wheels as a form of work ". By rearranging the letters so that they form a cross, we also obtain “ Pater noster ” which means “ Our father ”. The letters A and O recall the alpha and the Omega. The word Tenet (from the verb tenere ) can mean: "to hold in one's power".
In the Bible, Jesus Christ declares, “ I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. In 1926, the German evangelist pastor of Chemnitz, Saxony, Felix Grosser, interpreted the square as a sign of recognition used by the early Christians. In addition, TENET forms the image of a cross, which additionally suggests the shape of the T. Archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri deduced the presence of a Christian community in Pompeii.
The meaning of this magic square has never ceased to intrigue generations of academics.
Literally, the words of the square sator, when translated from Latin, compose a sentence: " The plowman Arepo uses the wheels as a form of work ". screenshot.
Even today, these mysterious encoding and encryption games continue to be used by spies around the world. This type of puzzle could not fail to please Christopher Nolan. He made it the enigmatic emblem of his new film, and thus provided the exegetes of his cinema with many hours of perspective analyzes ...
Like Leonardo DiCaprio's spinning top in Inception, Tenet's shifting meaning has not finished spinning in the minds of moviegoers and fans of Nolan's work ...