Fran Magazine: Issue #97
girl that's tenet
📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). The way this works is that Wednesday (regular) issues are free for all and Sunday (dispatch) issues are for paid subscribers only. Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription for access to more Fran Magazine, and feel free to follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd.
Maestro moment
God, I’m tired. Aren’t you? The Maestro of it all! Well, thankfully, we only have one — maybe two — more weeks of the Maestro moment before I can retire this mini-column once and for all.
Everyone has turned on Maestro! The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman published a piece about “wanting an Oscar so bad” that is about a lot of people but it uses Maestro himself as the image for it.
On top of that, Maestro has once again gone the wrong kind of viral for a clip that goes back to October in which he gets choked up talking about how much he misses Leonard Bernstein in front of the Bernstein children. Listen, I love Leonard Bernstein a lot, and every now and then I’m moved — not to tears but moved in general — to feel as though losing him brought on a significance loss and disinterest in classical music in this country.
I have been talking with a lot of movie-going friends lately about “where Maestro went wrong.” I am sort of fascinated by it, not only because I love the movie, but because I’ve tried to figure out what keeps happening to Bradley Cooper’s various Oscar campaigns that he blows it so bad. I don’t think really that he’s saying anything more or less insane than a lot of other people say when they want an Oscar, but there does seem to be an implicit bias against how and what he’s saying. He’s undoubtedly — as he kind of did with A Star is Born — letting his insane pull quotes speak for the movie more than the film itself. You might not like Maestro, fair, but you have to admit whatever you thought of the movie — it’s better than Cooper’s own press tour for the film.
The other thing that’s funny about the “phase two” of the Maestro campaign that friend of the magazine Patrick pointed out to me last night is that it has completely abandoned Carey Mulligan. Remember when he was insisting the movie was about her? Patrick said. He made her first billed! It was really Felicia that the movie is focused on. And now it’s “Leonard Bernstein[‘s ghost?] entered me every day” and “Bradley Cooper is obsessed with meeting Messi the dog.” Well, whatever. I loved Carey Mulligan’s dress at the SAG awards this past weekend.
Does Michael Caine know what he’s saying in Tenet or did he learn his lines phonetically like Marion Cotillard in Public Enemies
Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is back in theaters this week as part of (what I assume to be) the greater campaign for Oppenheimer steamrolling its way through awards season. Sometimes these awards bodies — stupid as they are — decide it is time for a given director to get their due. There were whispers with Interstellar, kind of, and then quiet talking with Dunkirk. Then Tenet came out during the pandemic, which most, if not many, were forced to ignore due to the restrictions of the time. And now here’s Oppenheimer, which is, in my opinion, the worst of those four movies. Sometimes someone rakes in the awards for making a lot of money and putting up with nonsense for a while. That has basically nothing to do with me, and I can live with that.
I was devastated by not being able to see Tenet in 2020, and there were weeks of that fall where I did consider renting a car and driving out to New Jersey or Connecticut to go see it in a 80-seat theater by myself. I’m glad I didn’t. My enthusiasm for Tenet stretched far and wide enough that my friend Spencer Williams (book out this fall) got me a blu-ray of the movie for Christmas that year. I went to Spencer’s apartment, which was known to those who kept up with me as the “poets’ house”1, to watch the movie, and I was laughing so hard I was crying. The film was completely impenetrable to me, deeply stupid and kind of cool, with dialogue that made me want to throw a cup at a wall. I filed the movie away as “about grad school” — theoretical, hypothetical, plain-stated in an annoying way, about learning a trade that isn’t really valuable in day-to-day life.
I’ve seen Tenet a few more times since then — let’s say twice — and on Monday, I got to see as Christopher Nolan intended: not only on the big screen but in IMAX, smacked off two-thirds of a weed gummy with a half-box of Sour Patch Kids and a Cherry Coke. It rocked.
I’ve watched Tenet enough times now to be a full-blown apologist — kind of an annoying position, but I’ll never beat the “Nolan bro” allegations and that’s fine even though I’ve said on numerous occasions that I’m not crazy about Oppenheimer. As has been written about, quite astutely, by both Bilge Ebiri and Dan D’Addario, Tenet lays the foundation for all that Oppenheimer would seek to accomplish. While I don’t see the latter as an improvement, per se, the seeds are there, highly literal and present.
What I prefer about Tenet is that it falls into a sub-genre of Nolan filmmaking that you could qualify as “prank war gone too far” — you see this in The Prestige, most notably, but also The Dark Knight, Inception, and Memento. Maybe even Insomnia also but I’ve only seen that the once. This is different than his “con man” sub-genre (of which I would classify Oppenheimer), and instead, it explores a comedy-like game of building and competing and elevating obscure and stupid stakes before it reaches a jumbled, baffling finale.
When we took the train back from the movie, my friends and I discussed what they understood about the movie this time around. It’s the kind of text that’s just stupid enough that you could maybe convince yourself that just one more viewing will make the whole thing click into view, so to speak. I probably understand the movie on a literal level much less each time. I’ve also stopped trying. By the time the big climax occurs, I am mostly just riveted, locked in and vibing. On this rewatch, and this could be the two-thirds of a weed gummy talking, I found myself almost unfairly moved by all the film’s silly emotional beats: the Protagonist and Neil’s farewell, Kat’s dive off the yacht, Branagh’s sick-minded conniving, Aaron Taylor-Johnson who is also there along with Himesh Patel2. Oppenheimer takes on a scolding sort of tone about something that none of us can really do anything about; he fucked up, he feels bad, now we all feel bad. Tenet suggests our fate is that much more controllable and manipulative, that everything is much more slippery and self-determined but not in the way we think. There is a profound optimism.
It’s also just a silly good time, with a banger score (my watch kept alerting me that I was in “too loud a space), strong editing, and good performances. It’s hard to take your eyes off of Robert Pattinson, in particular, playing the Nolan stand-in in a much more literal way than Nolan stand-ins (JGL in Inception, namely) of the past. I think what matters is that this is the first Nolan stand-in character whose come to the screen after learning that Nolan’s kids call him Reynolds Woodcock when he’s being like that. So you can think of it as Robert Pattinson playing Christopher Nolan being called Reynolds Woodcock as played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Fun!
It is late into this mini-Tenet run to grab tickets, but if you haven’t seen the film, or if you haven’t seen the film on the big screen, I promise that it feels as revelatory and new and baffling as the first time watching Inception. It is a spectacle — shiny, bright, fleeting.
This was basically the apartment around the corner from my own in Jersey City where several of the poets I went to grad school lived and inevitably would say “classic poet” shit to each other and to me.
My two boyfriends.
who ABANDONED carey in the vestibule?
Dang Fran, the "respectively scolding and slipperily-self-determined" line was bone-deep: "Oppenheimer" is twitter and "Tenet" is real life. Boy-howdy, you're onto something there.