Is there an alternative? It seems not. The system as it stands is irrefutable, and while changes for good or ill may occur within it, the logic and the coordinates of life will remain the same. When Sam Flynn (outcast, motorcyclist, millionaire) plunges into the world of The Grid, he appears in a replica of the real world. A monolithic tetris-shape of a craft hovers above and illuminates him, just like an LA police chopper did ten minutes ago. As the board of the company he is ostensibly in charge of have supplanted his authority for nefarious purposes, so the world of The Grid has been taken over by a megalomaniacal dictator. Welcome to the world of Tron: Legacy, a world quite similar to any you’ve ever seen.
It is this similarity which makes this new $200 million Disney Blockbuster so fascinating. Sam is the son of Kevin Flynn, who pulled the same trick in the original Tron of 1982, but is now stuck in the digital world thanks to the actions of the aforementioned dictator: an exact copy of himself but without human compassion, or the capacity to age, named Clu. Sam, after suffering gladiatorial combat in an arena of awesome size and malleability, teams up with his father, and together they do what all good action heroes do, and try to overthrow the status quo while also improving their own lot into the bargain.
The film offers refreshingly direct expression of the ideological structures which underpin almost every piece of cinema of its ilk. The Oedipal trajectory is as usual reconfigured to limit the importance and agency of the female/mother, while stressing the choice between good and bad fathers, here explicit in the confrontation between two versions of the older Flynn. Both played by Jeff Bridges, the villainous Clu is made to look as Bridges did when he was in his late twenties, with special effects that (as in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) don’t quite convince. But this is entirely appropriate – as the character of Clu is a digital copy from a human base, so the representation of him in the film is underscored by an everpresent digital artificiality. He is both more and less than human. All cinema relies on estrangement of a kind – acknowledged but overcome by what has been termed the “willing suspension of disbelief” – but here this rupture between our space and the existence of that viewed has a digital light shone brightly upon it, allowing what is on one very approachable level a Jules Verne adventure tale to also be a full-bloodied and vigorous examination of the tactics of allegory.
The Grid functions as a paraspace in which Sam realises the importance of being an active participant in the world, and settles his issues with his father through his own realisation of himself as an improved version of Kevin Flynn: the ternary relattionship of two fathers and a son becomes a binary conflict between the false and true sons. Rather than simply deploying such psychological halls of mirrors, Tron: Legacy embraces the narcissism inherent in the entire exercise. As God makes man in his own image, Kevin Flynn makes Clu as a duplicate of himself; but the introduction into this closed system of the “Iso’s”, a form of life seemingly ontologically existent only The Grid, initiates a need to conceive of other forms of living, other individuals besides ourselves. Clu, tasked to make a perfect world, eliminates the Iso’s in a holocaustal purge. Thus activating a historical discourse of the history of mechanization (the timeline of which will lead to digitisation, globalization, Tronation), the film admits the culpability of privileged Western interventions “for the making of a better world” in the horrors of the twentieth century. The path which leads finally to spectacular Disney 3D vehicles visits on its way the wholesale slaughter of a scapegoated other. As the older Flynn advocates, in light of such horror, a logical response is to “remove oneself from the equation” – thus inaugurating the death of politics, the waning of affect, the end of history.
“Bio-digital jazz” a character calls the utopian potentials of enacting agency upon The Grid, but the film presents something more like bio-digital stadium rock, its gladiatorial battles evoking (as did the original 1982 film) the narrative of Spartacus, a film in which Christian righteousness is trampled by McCarthyism, and the individual within the system is manipulated, dominated, and commodified. The original Tron was a fascinating demonstration of the inexorably growing truth of this logic, as the individuals in the cyber-world were at the mercy of unknowable gods (users) and a systemic program only interested in furthering its own strength and scope with no regard to human individuality or even world governments, a synonym for the continuing domination of world capitalism even after the global crisis of 1973. In 1999 The Matrix offered something similar, but tendered a glimmer of hope in protagonist Neo’s messianism; the sequels shut down such an avenue of resistance by making Neo’s powers and actions predetermined encodings of the malevolent system itself. “It’s too bad she won’t live,” says a character of a bio-mechanical replication of humanity in 1982’s Blade Runner, “but then again who does?” No one, it seems, at least not by their own rules – in the original cut of this film our romantic heroes remove themselves from the equation by fleeing urban space, in the recut version they simply get into an elevator car, seemingly to be trapped there in a non-living limbo for all eternity, a more logical consequence to any strategy of resistance.
Science fiction is at its best when expressing this allegorical potential. Our world can be better understood through the transplanting of its elements and its struggles onto a future time. We may accuse such spectacle of ‘making-safe’ our anxieties, and the implication that our problems will continue to be problems hundreds, thousands of years into the future as a conservative justification for the inevitable failure of any radical political action. However, the strength of the Tron world is in the opening up of a space in our own time in which to express doubts about the very power of allegory itself. The Grid is a dream, an unreality without spatial coordinates or physical mass, manifesting the ubiquity and immateriality of the system in which we live.
The deployment of visual effects to this end stresses our reliance on such technology (this is the representational flipside to the same conditional coin brandished earlier this year by The Social Network), and does so without pretence: this is not ‘a whole new world’ as in Avatar, this is a world of our making, a world of overt CGI, a world of 2010 and all the baggage that comes with it (in a clear contrast to Inception, the rules of this world are not explained, they are shown or intuited by an audience, a further indication of the innate familiarity of this paraspace).
Thrillingly propulsive, but with a willingness to settle down from time to time, Tron: Legacy’s ability to entertain on a gut level outstrips most of what else was on offer this year. Daft Punk’s score deserves a considerable amount of credit for this, as do the personable performances of Jeff Bridges and Olivia Wilde. Some may find the film alienating, and it certainly is, but only so far as it should be. In its own commitment to removing itself from the equation, the film clears a space for both simple entertainment and genuine intellectual reflection amongst the exploding pixels and bass-filled soundtrack. Indeed, the power it has comes from the revelation that these conditions of spectacular overload can themselves be contributive to such contemplation.
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