Writing Analysis
The Secret to “Tenet” is “The Secret”
Inversion is the law of attraction. SPOILERS ahead.
A scientist places two bullets on the table in front of her. One is traveling forward in time, the other backward. “Can you guess which is which?” she asks the man in front of her.
She holds out her hand and summons a bullet. As it makes its way “back” into her palm, we see it wriggle before flying straight up, the reverse of how a bullet in forward-time would drop straight down, then ricochet before settling into a steady state.
The man has trouble re-enacting the summoning. “You have to feel it,” the scientist instructs.
The bullet flies “back” into his hand.
I was listening to “The Secret” when I watched Christopher Nolan’s time-traveling, globe-trotting action thriller, “Tenet.” The book is the reason I understood the concept of inversion so quickly on a visceral level.
“The Secret” is a revelatory book that draws from religious texts, ancient philosophers, and modern practitioners to reveal The Secret: The Law of Attraction.
The law of attraction can be summarized in these two quotes:
- “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” — Henry Ford
- “Ask and ye shall receive.” — Matthew 7:7
The law of attraction states that like attracts like, in a metaphysical sense. If you think positive thoughts, you attract positive people, events, and therefore more positive thoughts. If you’re a bitter curmudgeon, your car breaks down. Whatever you (implicitly) ask for, you receive.
“The Secret” is marketed as a self-help book. Are you unhappy at work? Send out thoughts that you want a fulfilling career and quit complaining. If you keep listing off reasons you can’t leave, you won’t just see more reasons; more will manifest. Namely, in the time you spend stalling, you’ll become more entrenched in your current career, making it harder to leave. You’ll also waste time you could have spent looking for other opportunities.
There are two important caveats. First, the law of attraction doesn’t recognize negations. If you think “I don’t want to lose this relationship,” then by law of attraction, the universe realigns to bring you what you’re focusing on: loss, and the fear, anxiety, and anguish that comes with it. If instead, you think “I want to maintain this relationship” — logically equivalent to the previous thought, the universe brings you what you ask for: maintenance, longevity, and the quietly assured calm that comes with it.
Second, like Christopher Nolan, teachers of The Secret emphasize that we need to feel what we want without getting caught up in the details of how it works. Many of us may have goals or vision boards, but without feeling having what we ask for, the visualization is incomplete.
For years, I told myself to aim for a fulfilling career. It wasn’t until I let myself feel the joy of having one, of waking up excited to start work in the morning, that the universe started to realign itself. I started seeing opportunities: they’d been hidden in plain sight right in front of me. Or rather, I had refused to see them.
Once I chose to see what was right there, I brought more writing into the workplace, volunteering to write up summaries of complex economic phenomena. I brought my academic background into writing to enrich the fictional worlds I created, or to give a more robust intellectual framework to my think pieces. I started attaining a more fulfilling career and living a more fulfilling life.
I had to not only imagine it, but also feel what I wanted in order for my chosen reality to manifest.
This is why Sator is such a terrifying villain. While others are inverting objects or themselves, Sator goes wider: he inverts other people.
The law of attraction is essentially inversion as portrayed in “Tenet.” Characters have to not only imagine their future selves dropping a bullet, but feel the event. Feeling transforms the future from a murky cloud of probability into a substantive possibility that reaches back in time to create the chain of cause and effect necessary to actualize itself.
This is why Sator is such a terrifying villain. While others are inverting objects or themselves, Sator goes wider: he inverts other people. He recognizes the ripple effect of our individual realities: we influence the people around us; it follows that we can influence them going backward.
Rewatch the red-blue scene (the color scheme an obvious nod to The Matrix, a canonical exploration of parallel realities). First, we follow the Protagonist forward in time through the red room. He believes he is negotiating with Sator, who stands on the opposite side of a double-paned window in the blue room. Sator speaks, but the muffled gibberish we hear through the glass doesn’t match what he says over the speakers. We realize the speakers are transmitting a real-time rewind of whatever’s said in the other room. This system allows people going forward in time to communicate with those going backward in time.
But wait — doesn’t that mean whoever’s in the blue room has to follow the conversation backward?
Yes. In the next scene, we follow Sator walking out of the inverting machine into the scene we just watched — from the opposite side of the glass. With chilling precision, Sator says the dialogue backward, line by line. It’s reverse chess. He asks the right question to the answer just given by the Protagonist. This unlocks the next answer — the previous answer in forward-time. He quickly finds out where the algorithm piece is located.
Expecting that the Protagonist coughed up this information only after being threatened, Sator throws his bleeding wife “back” up against the window and summons a bullet out of her stomach into the gun in his hand. He then keeps playing Jeopardy even after he has the information he wants because he knows foreplay is what gets the Protagonist to warm up.
Sator went into that room knowing he would get what he wanted. If he hadn’t felt it with conviction, he wouldn’t have been able to drag the Protagonist along in his chosen reality.
The law of attraction answers a question the Protagonist asked as soon as he learned about inversion: “What about free will?”
The scientist answers: that bullet wouldn’t have flown into his hand if he hadn’t wanted it to. He needed to will himself to drop it in the future.
Of course, Sator actually did not get what he wanted, because the law of attraction works for all of us, conflicts and all. There was a battle of wills. The protagonist was strong. Even without voicing specific desires — to stop Sator, to save his wife, to save the world — the protagonist wielded law of attraction through his moral principles: loyalty and a thirst for justice. The protagonist’s unquestioning belief in these principles manifested a world in which they prevailed.
Do I actually believe in this stuff?
Why not?
I will not claim the law of attraction will help one person overthrow systemic discrimination. I will not claim someone can claw their way out of abject poverty with positive vibes.
I’m just saying the world presents enough obstacles without our help. Why not wield the law of attraction to our advantage?
People perform better or worse on math tests, depending on whether they were primed with their demographics. Asian women, for instance, do better when primed as Asian, worse when primed as women — but only when they were aware of the stereotypes. They manifested the reality they believed in — the law of attraction. Inversion.
Think of it as a placebo effect or a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a speculative fiction nerd, I firmly believe magic is a science that hasn’t been proven by conventional methods yet. We’ve only just realized that meditation actually changes our neuroelectrical activity, for example.
I also believe magic and science can be reframed within the contexts of each other. If I walk out into the street right now and tell a random person that light exists not as a concrete thing but as a cloud of probability that we force into a static state by choosing how we want to observe it, many people would write me off as the village crazy person. Those who believed me might think I’m a witch. A quantum physicist would know I’m describing (or at least trying to describe) delayed-choice experiments.
A coin is neither heads nor tails— it’s always 50% of either; we force it into heads or tails by setting it down on a table. The glass itself is both half-empty and half-full; our reality is which half we choose to see. As the math scores example shows, our perception can affect our actions and therefore affect — effect — our reality.
Thankfully, Nolan makes it easy to suspend disbelief because “Tenet” is fun — remember that thing we used to have as kids before we started over-criticizing everything? The beauty of science fiction and of speculative fiction more widely is that you’re allowed to make loose associations for the sake of storytelling and fun. I’m one of those people that’s a huge fan of how Nolan recreated a black hole and followed the math to an epsilon heading towards zero, only to tell us love is the most powerful force in the universe.
Why not? Try it today — have fun and using the law of attraction, I mean. Aren’t we all the heroes of our own movies?
Choose to believe in your future self; feel what it’s like to be them already so that they can reach out to help you today.
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