How Tenet Fuses White Anglo With Black American Cool

And Why a Black Bond Makes More Sense Than Dumb Racists Think

If you haven’t seen Tenet don’t worry, this essay won’t make any less sense to you than if you have seen it. Rim shot, cymbal splash.

In Christopher Nolan’s arguably most divisive film to date, the auteur even advises the viewer, via exposition to our protagonist within the first 20 minutes, “don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

To which John David Washington responds, coolly, “instinct. Got it.”

Well I didn’t get it Christopher Nolan.

I had no idea what was going on and it felt like I wasn’t supposed to, which kind of made all the supposed-to-be important things happening throughout the film, feel not so important. Which I was okay with.

Guys going backwards fighting going forward guys? Sure, why not.

Barely legal art-warehouse tax havens for the rich filled with gas rooms surrounded by plane explosions? I’m in.

Tenet is a bunch of really cool set-pieces filmed really well, and then…a bunch of other people running around through spacetime, talking about Russian secret cities and trying to grab a knock-off tesseract while mariticiding people.

At the middle of it all, holding together what there is to be held, is a Bond-esque lead turn, put forth by John David Washington who plays (yes, this is his name in the credits) The Protagonist. His cool performance, backed by British-witty dialogue (some of it even fitting to a Black American character), is more historically pre-determined than the casual Tenet watcher might anticipate.

Lester Young and Billie Holiday

Lester Young is a now-overlooked, but inherently influential figure in American jazz. A Saxophonist in the first half of the 20th century, he played with everyone.

The man gave Billie Holiday the name “Lady Day”. (Holiday, in return, nicknamed him “Pres” as in ‘‘the president of all saxophone players’’).

“When (Lester Young was) insulted, he pulled out a small whisk broom and brushed off his shoulder; when a bigot appeared on the scene, he said softly, ‘I feel a draft'” (Dinerstein).

The man literally brushed his shoulders off when you insulted him.

It seems a thing impossible to invent, a phenomena that seems to have always existed: cool, but as Joel Dinerstein argues, in his life-changing-for-me essay “Lester Young and the Birth of Cool”, Lester Young existed at a crossroads, in time, and in the world of jazz, that positioned him to be the prototype of cool in the African American sense of the word.

He had the acumen, the musical chops:

According to Gunther Schuller, Lester Young was ‘‘the most influential artist after [Louis] Armstrong and before Charlie Parker,’’ the creator of the ‘‘cool’’ saxophone style and the father of the ‘‘cool school’’ of jazz with which Miles Davis later became associated.

And he existed at the beginning of the post-minstrel world:

Two strains of the African American historical experience converged in the 1930s that helped create the conditions for the emergence of cool: first, a new impatience among blacks with the historical need to mask their feelings in front of whites; second, the fight for recognition of individual self-expression. As blacks moved north and west and became part of the national social fabric, a new sense of possibility arose along with economic success and this freedom of movement.

For African Americans, “playing it cool” has often been a matter of life and death, and as William Carlos Williams observed, “a way to maintain poise in a world where you have no authority”. A nice way of saying, maintaining your dignity in a world where you could be murdered for looking a White man in the eyes.

The two most important cultural forms of what Cornel West calls ‘‘New World African modernity’’ were ‘‘a dynamic language and mobile music’’; big-band swing and ‘‘hipster jive’’ became the portable expressions of American society’s ‘‘perennial outsiders.’

Lester Young was at the intersection of both aspects of West’s “New World African modernity” and we – White Americans too – are still reaping the benefits of generations of jazz musicians.

John David Washington and The Four Concepts of Cool

All non-Tenet quotes in the next passage are from Dinerstein’s “Lester Young and the Birth of Cool”.

There were four core African American cool concepts alive at the birth of
cool, all of which still influence contemporary ideas of cool. Cool the first: to control your emotions and wear a mask in the face of hostile, provocative outside forces.

During a meeting with the main baddie, Sator, The Protagonist has his life threatened (why they’re meeting, I don’t entirely understand, like I said, it’s a confusing movie).

Sator: We are going to take you there and cut your throat. Not across, in the middle like a hole. Then we take your balls and stuff them in the cut, to block the windpipe.

Protagonist: Complex.

Sator: It’s very gratifying to watch a man you don’t like try to pull his own balls out of his throat before he chokes.

Protagonist: Is this how you treat all your guests?

Cool the second: to maintain a relaxed attitude in performance of any kind.

At one point in Tenet John David Washington walks into a kitchen, right into a circle of baddies with orders to murder him.

His response?

“I ordered my hot sauce an hour ago” before calmly walk-murdering his way through the entire gang, and kitchen, in control of every flying dish, turning cheese graters into face graters. (And for context, this is a super fancy restaurant that no one expects to have hot sauce on-hand).

Cool the third: to develop a unique, individual style (or sound) that communicates something of your inner spirit.

Granted, The Protagonist has his wardrobe largely manicured by the stylists of the film, Oscar-winning costume designer Jeffrey Kurland, but John David Washington is well-dressed stoicism walking.

Carrying suitcases importantly in a perfectly shouldered, very blue pin-stripped three piece; power clashing his way through aforementioned gas rooms being attacked by backward-going future people.

Holding rooftop meetings in auburn polos under grey business jackets, boat deck meetings in black polos under blue blazers.

All pants classically cropped, not slim fitted, as a British traditionalist (if Nolan wasn’t to begin with, he has certainly grown into the role) when it comes to taste would have it.

Palatial lobby rendezvous: cream polo underneath a wicker colored blazer.

Muted black and yellow tie over a soft yellow shirt, mustard on mustard polo/trouser combos.

A three piece light blue silver suit over a white shirt and black textured tie.

The closest we get to giving The Protagonist a Bond Car to drive is when he steers the beautiful Riva 33 Aquariva Super through the bay of Amalfi, along the coast that bares its name, green-silver polo buttoned precisely, and completely, to the top, flag-blowing in the wind.

Standard notch lapels are go-to for Washington’s suits, meant to downplay his character, meant to bring him in to the background, nameless, The Protagonist. But the fit of everything is Anglo perfection strived for, and in ways that our clothes cover our flaws when they precisely cover our bodies, attained.

John David Washington wears everything, standing out the way classic clothing can both make someone stand out, and fit in, wherever they go (a privilege not often granted to non-White men).

Cool the fourth: to be emotionally expressive within an artistic frame of restraint (as in jazz or basketball). (Cool is also the word used to express aesthetic approval of such a performance [‘‘cool!’’].)

Cool the fourth is a meta-label when talking about Tenet, “expressive within an artistic frame of restraint” can be said about Washington’s overall performance.

At one point, Washington sits down with Michael Caine, telling him “the British don’t have a monopoly on snobbery” to which Caine’s character responds, “more like a controlling interest”.

At that point, the waiter at the very posh restaurant the two men are meeting comes back with The Protagonist’s order just as he’s getting up to leave.

Washington’s playful yet reserved, “can you box that up for me?” anticipates the waiter’s cold response, “certainly not”.

Throughout the film, (“Is that Whitman?”) Washington’s performance anticipates the often-angry, cold responses he receives from numerous White men, with a restrained joyfulness he allows to bubble up just enough to let us all know he’s in on the joke.

James Bond and Anglo Cool

Teo van den Broeke writes about Washington’s fits, “many of which look as though they’ve been pulled straight from Craig’s Bond wardrobe”.

The difference between den Broeke’s interpretation and mine – and I’m sure anyone writing for British GQ is more qualified than I to write about fashion – is that I think that’s a compliment.

I think Washington pulls off his wardrobes and den Broeke’s comparison is a perfect opportunity – one set in motion months ago, that I am now running backwards through the internet, very Tenet like, to find and repurpose – to discuss how Washington’s role in Tenet is the test-run for a Black Bond performance.

In Anglo-American culture, the adjective ‘‘cool’’ reflects the ability to repress one’s emotions to think more clearly and to effect a more ‘‘objective’’ intellectual analysis. The archetypal cool characters of American popular culture—the private detective of film noir (Bogart), the western gunslinger (John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, the Lone Ranger), the existential motorcycle wanderer—are untamable, self-suffcient male loners who create and live by private codes of ethics; they exist as ‘‘free radicals’’ on the fringes of society and cultivate a calm impudence regarding social norms.

In the vernacular they were called‘‘cool characters’’—nonconformist, unpredictable, mysterious, adept at violence.

Unpredictable? Our hero runs back into backwards time after being warned not to.

Mysterious? His name is The Protagonist.

Adept at violence? See: basically all Nolan protagonists.

There is an unbroken line from the Enlightenment philosophical ideal
of living in ‘‘the middle state’’ between heaven and earth to the classic composure of the English gentleman and the stereotypical British reserve of fictional models such as Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.

The suits and outfits I mentioned earlier, are certainly British, or at the very least, heavily Anglo-inspired.

But on Washington they find new purpose. They are worn with a subtle swagger, close-cropped polos unstuffy-ing themselves before our eyes.

All of this is to say that the announcement of Lashana Lynch as the next 007 (not the next Bond mind you), makes more sense than racists throughout history have thought.

The arguments we’ve heard for why 007 could never be a non-White male, are the same we’ve heard for why every leading role in every major Hollywood film can’t be anyone but a White male.

Liberals often have a way of reinforcing the racism they claim to be against.

This reinforcement of racism by otherwise thinking-they’re-progressive-liberals can be seen in the popularity of Hollywood’s historical arguments couched in the language of economics, “we can’t have a Star Wars lead be a Black man because White people won’t go see it”.

“We can’t have non-White characters play historical figures because it’s historically inaccurate”, said no one in response to seeing Hamilton or Mary Queen of Scots for that matter.

“We can’t have a Black man play Bond because – enter mixture of historical, traditionalist, and economic arguments”.

Whites, or others, still clinging to this argument today would probably respond, “well, you can’t apply 2021 ethos to past decades”.

To that I respond, 1) thinking a Black person can’t be Bond is – as I hope I’ve helped argue here – historically inaccurate and 2) just downright racist, but also 3) systems that don’t work for all, are often reinforced by the argument that all the successes of the system have been achieved because of all the rules of the system – and that there is no other way to achieve the successes of the system than by keeping the rules of the system completely intact.

You’ll notice how that third argument is an impenetrable loop (where have I seen that before): there is no way to argue your way out, you simply have to go out and prove that the rules aren’t the key to the system. That whatever successes have occurred within the system are not because of the rules of that system. That those rules are often, purposefully, in place to limit the successes of the system (GameStop anyone).

To beat the system, to upend racism, you simply have to go out and travel back through time while also travelling forward through time while both working for yourself and not knowing you’re working for yourself, ideally, with Robert Pattinson as your sidekick.