TENET (Part VI) The Practice of Worldbuilding
Time travel is as impossible as an Escher drawing. The staircase going up and going down cannot be the same staircase, nor can the mill wheel raise the water to fill the sluice to create the waterfall to turn the mill wheel. Escher drawings are cunning visual jokes that appeal the mathematically minded.
Despite disliking time paradox stories, there is one thing I like about time travel stories: It is the same thing I like about Escher drawings.
Given the logical constraint that the thing is starkly, simply impossible, what tricks of perspective and aspect can the artist employ to create the plausible illusion of the impossible being possible?
Certain themes and settings make the illusion of the impossible being possible more convincing. Establishing or, more to the point, not establishing the rules of time travel are part of the worldbuilding that can aid or hinder the illusion.
We have discussed the theory and practice of time travel at exhaustive length to show the possible ways the world in a time travel story can be built to attempt the illusion. Let us now, at long last, return to TENET to examine how Christopher Nolan practices his worldbuilding.
In this case, TENET avoids or outwits most of the problems of paradoxes by selecting the spy genre as the jumping off point.
And here I doff my cap in humble salute.
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