In the final week of February 2024, the film Tenet will enjoy a second release in IMAX theaters. Much like time travel, this gives a second chance to everyone who missed it on the big screen due to COVID-19. But even if you think you’ve heard every fan theory about this mind-bending adventure epic, there’s one detail you totally missed.
In Tenet, a hand gesture of interlocking fingers signals to other operatives that you are a part of the Tenet organization that is working both forwards and backwards in time to stop the destruction of everything. The interlocking fingers symbolize how the past and future are interconnected and overlapping from the perspective of a Tenet agent.
Tenet was released in 2020. But five years before that, Robert Pattinson co-starred in a film called LIFE in 2015. LIFE is a compelling film about how photographer Dennis Stock befriended actor James Dean in an effort to advance both their careers — also the subject of a recent book of Stock’s photos.
At 1 hour, 27 minutes, and 21 seconds into this film, Dean and Stock pose for a photo together at a high-school prom in Dean’s hometown in Indiana. Just before the photo is snapped, Pattinson (portraying Stock) interlocks his fingers in the Tenet hand gesture.
Could Pattinson be trying to tell us that he was recruited into the Tenet organization and knew its secrets years before he portrayed Neil? Is Tenet just a science-fiction take on James Bond, or is it a documentary of how Pattinson himself has been moving backward and forward in time? What’s even crazier is that the film’s end-credit sequence featuring Stock’s photographs proves the hand gesture was not invented for the film but based on an actual photo.
To reinforce this odd case of LIFE imitating art imitating life, the film depicts James Dean giving a speech immediately after the photo is taken. Dean begins, “I went to this very ball five years ago. And I know you’re supposed to talk about the future. I’m not so fond of the future to be any authority on that. I’m still working it out myself.”
Spoken like a true Tenet agent: going to the same events multiple times, and still trying to work out the future! Maybe Robert Pattinson inverted himself to go back in time and recruit Dennis Stock and James Dean to the cause of preserving both the past and future from those who would seek to destroy them, planting the seeds for Tenet as far back as 1955, and leaving us a clue in 2015.
Or… maybe it was all a crazy coincidence. But if Pattinson is still looking for people in the past to recruit to his future cause, I hope he signs me up. I would love to kick some ass while moving backwards through time.
“We live in a twilight world,” indeed.