Charli xcx delivers her TENET

In 2020, the idea of a new Christopher Nolan movie did not charm me. Throughout the years, however, I became intrigued by how dynamically my peers engaged with it. I’ve always been especially curious about the narrative that Tenet doesn’t “make sense” or that it is “weird”—what does that mean? I tried my best to hold out for a theatrical opportunity—and made it six years!—but when I missed screenings in New York last month, I relented: it was time to watch Tenet.

Like my belief that Sean Baker’s impetus for making cinema is to fill pleasurable milieux with women and himself, I believe Nolan’s raison d’être is to test his economic and formal limits as a problem solver. Some (most?) of the time, this is silly, as the limits are entirely self-imposed and arbitrary. But other times—when the Joker becomes a character you want to succeed, or when you feel like you’re watching the first implosion of the atom—you feel that Nolan has finally cracked his own code, and it’s exciting. Nolan is rarely singular, but a good movie is a good movie.

Every Charli xcx single that came out this year made me more excited for her new album, Music, Fashion, Film. In this anticipatory period, my friends were not impressed. In fact, my love of “Rock Music,” a song with the lyrics, “We kiss each other / real incestuous vibes,” made them angry. I have become known as a Charli hater because I am a Swiftie and thought Brat was embarrassing, but that’s not really fair. It’s not my fault that Charli’s relentless efforts to chart have not borne fruit or that “Rewind” is so bad. I never said I didn’t love “Von Dutch.” I even liked “Pink Diamond”—it’s just not my fault. Charli xcx meticulously and continuously positions herself as the easiest target of all time.

As I wrote earlier in her present album cycle, the lyrics of Charli’s newest songs are “quite basic” in their “forlorn, babyish musings,” but in the singles this seemed mostly purposeful: “There is no effort to manipulate lyrics into deeper meanings where it is not necessary for the song to make a cultural or emotional impact.” The basic rhythms and poetry of these songs makes it easier to create a dialectic at the core of Music, Fashion, Film: between the tidiness of successful or satisfying art, and the messiness of human ego. Its final track “No One Lasts Forever” lays this out quite plainly:

Now I’m more confident than ever
Since everyone knows my name
All the parties got better
…And I know deep down that it’s here and now
‘Cause nothing’s gonna last forever

In this I think Charli has reached an artistic pinnacle—through her aforementioned thirst for commercial success, she has found something sonically and lyrically unique to her mythos as a pop star. The premise and content are both quite simple, but therein she flexes every muscle she has, and it sounds like nothing else. It’s interesting, it’s new. Until it’s not.

The first two acts of Tenet are propulsive. Robert Pattinson is launched through the sky with a catapult. Details in these hours don’t really matter, because the story is familiar: there is a bad thing that might end the world, so these experts might find and destroy that thing. Extratextually, however, the premise is special: what if that thing was time? Instead of overly complicated sets, the magic of Tenet’s cinema thereby lies in its ability to be rewound. I thought of Verov’s Kino-Eye, how simple it is to find that emotional possibility in the novelty of reproduced imagery. I giggled at the combat choreography filmed in reverse. Kenneth Branagh plays a truly evil villain who screams at his wife about being a lion—hilarious.

It is barely a movie, with scenes barreling over one another, struggling to keep up. While it’s fascinating for a while, this is ultimately what fells Tenet; the fight-scenes-in-reverse lose their visual logics, and Nolan’s self-imposed game becomes unwinnable. To quote my friend Ben Empey, “who are they shooting at in the final act.”

“Rock Music” : “Card Declined” :: Robert Pattinson catapult in Tenet : the introduction of Aaron Taylor Johnson in Tenet.

As a song with so much poetic promise, the second verse of “No One Lasts Forever” is a thudding reminder of the public identity upon which Charli xcx is commenting:

Everyone thinks I’ve got a problem
Since everyone knows my name
That I’m irresponsible and rude
That I’ll put thе drugs in my veins
So now I’m sitting on the floor of a Parisian apartment
With a Frеnch girl talking ’bout reality
She says, “No one really knows what the future holds
But we know nothing’s gonna last forever”

I struggle to follow this self-guided lore. Brat was the most commercial of her albums, but it peaked at No. 3 in the US and really wasn’t that big of a deal outside X, The Everything App.1 While I welcome and cherish Charli’s musings about ego, the endurance of her obsession with success and legacy is becoming both confusing and redundant.2 And, according to her own relentless reminders, Charli does do drugs. “Everyone thinks I’ve got a problem”—me when I get one negative Substack comment.

In a proceeding spoken-word verse, David Cronenberg says, “some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years… but experientially, for them, they are dead… oblivion is freedom.” These nonsensical platitudes3 are woven throughout Music, Fashion, Film: in the final and worst single “Camera,” she questions, “Do I wanna make music? / Am I being fuckin’ stupid / If I try to be a girl on the screen when I’m turning thirty-four?” No? This sounds like the dreaded Substack personal essay.

I was excited to write about the album, because I thought its spoken-word singles and imagery signaled an exciting departure from the patronizing Brat era. But when it came out, I—and Charli—had very little to say that wasn’t in and around the singles. That doesn’t mean I don’t like it; my earlier praise endures. But the non-singles are even wordier and ergo less impactful: pop music demands to be listened to over and over. If it doesn’t, that exercise must bear some sort of new truth. Music, Fashion, Film posits that “oblivion is freedom,” and also that there are b-sides a few days after the album release that are only available for purchase on iTunes. I famously love when pop stars exploit their genre for money and attention, but I am simply confused about what you are telling me, and what you are doing.

Charli@charli_xcx

you can call me a hypocrite, i don’t mind ;) b sides available on itunes now xx charlixcx.lnk.to/bsidesedition

6:55 PM · Jul 26, 2026 · 2.19M Views

469 Replies · 1.21K Reposts · 22.2K Likes

Christopher Nolan got so lost in his own mythos as the puppet master of cinematic complexity, he fulfilled his own greatness; so much of Tenet is a masterpiece of blockbuster moviemaking, appreciating the medium’s ability to summon attention and awe. But he couldn’t help but graph this very story about prophecy and greatness onto the movie, and that narrative is obvious and cringeworthy.4 The formal achievements also collapse in on themselves, and it becomes aurally and visually illegible.

I texted Ben last week, “i like the charli album but it confirms she thinks brat was the biggest album in the world.” He responded, in reference to the spoken-word of it all, “I simply prefer music.” With regards to Tenet, whose sound was mixed in hell, and story crafted on Mars: I simply prefer movies.

2

This is kind of how staunch Music, Fashion, Film defenders are sounding BTW: