Lander, WY – Christopher Nolan’s new “event film” Tenet has taken the nation, the world, and Lander, Wyoming in particular by storm over the week according to local reports. Students at Wyoming Catholic College, inclined towards nerdom by nature already, and often more so by their own choice, have in particular been both extremely obsessed by and affected by the time-twisting epic that finally came to theaters just over a week ago. On average, each student has already gone to see it three times, professors six times, and Dr. Stanley Bolsson, thirty-two times, a feat that required him to be absent and out of town for an entire week in order to find theaters showing it enough.
“It really encapsulates the math and science curriculum here at WCC,” Bolsson says. “Maybe even the whole curriculum. Inductions in there. Arts in it definitely. The music’s a combination and transposition of everything from neo-rock-baroque to inventive romantic, and with all the scenes out there in wilderness, it’s pretty much an exposition on our Outdoor Program as well.”
To 2020 graduate Parker Eidle, Nolan’s new film is almost like his favoirte book of all time, Homer’s ancient epic, the Iliad. “I’ve seen it five times already,” he told media. “And it has just as much depth, complexity, and meaning. You’ve got cosmic order, you’ve got love, you’ve got villains, you’ve got battles. You even have this angry guy sitting on a beach.”
But beyond just being incredibly interested in studying what the movie has to offer, dozens of students have started to apply its ideas to their daily lives. “Which direction does time really go anyway,” asks senior Marcus Gardner. “We drive cars, while I guess for me motorcycles forward and backward, left and right. So why not the same for time? Shouldn’t it just be as easy as flipping the motor around in our clocks?”
He and many of his friends have started walking backwards everywhere they go, taking food off of their plates in Frassati Hall rather than being given it, and for freshman Caitlyn Hunter who works in the school kitchen “unwashing dishes” so people can “undirty them”.
Janitors have begun collecting dirt and grime out of trash cans and then sweeping it out into hallways, using a blower instead of a vacuum on carpet, and arranging for trash collection to deliver trash instead of collecting it so they can spread trash back out around campus.
Members of the school’s choir, already accustomed to hypercomplex instructions, are finding singing every song backward during Mass quite easy while librarians are finding their jobs easier as student’s “unborrow” books and put them back on the shelves themselves.
School psychologists can’t exactly explain why students are behaving so weirdly, besides the fact, simply put, that they’re at WCC to begin with, but outside commentators think some sort of environmental factors may be at play in causing them to start to live out whatever weird new philosophical ideas they come across.
“The Evangelium Andreii two years ago, lots of weird ‘barefoot’ feelings among students, the complexities of dating at WCC, all of them point toward WCC students being attracted to and literally falling for the latest new ‘weird idea’ they come across,” says Dr. Jeremiah Baur, a certified psychologist in the college’s employ. “Usually the weirder the better, or at least the weirded the idea is, the more they fall for it. And with Tenet and its ideas being as crazy as it is, the pattern continues.”
A school official corrected Jeremiah saying that students are not so much falling for the ideas of the movie, but rather are “unfalling” as in some point in the future they are “attached to its ideas” and are slowly “unfalling for it towards the objectively termed past direction as the time relation axis nears Septermber 3rd, the movie’s release date.”