Yes, even a CGI-filled big-budget glowing Disney spectacle can provide opportunity for theorization. Of the recent Internet-themed blockbusters – namely, Avatar (2009); The Social Network (2010) – Tron: Legacy (2010) best captures the essence of this blog: that the digital and the physical are enmeshed together into an augmented reality.
This seems surprising given that the film is premised on the existence of a separate digital world. Indeed, the first Tron (1982) is all about a strict physical-digital dualism and the sequel plays on the same theme: physical person gets trapped in a digital world and attempts to escape. However, Tron: Legacy explores the overlapping of the physical and digital. The story goes that Flynn, the hero from the 1982 film, develops a digital world that does not have the imperfections of its physical counterpart. His grand vision was to gloriously move humanity online. Simultaneously, the beings in the digital world want to export their perfection out of the digital world and to colonize the offline world, removing all of its imperfections (i.e., us). Flynn comes to realize that enforced perfection (read: Nazism) is unwanted. Instead of a highly controlled and orderly universe, what has to be appreciated is what emerges out of chaos. And it is here that the film makes at least two theoretical statements that are well ahead of most movies and popular conceptions of the digital.
First is the tension between (1) top-down order and restricted information flows to create profit versus (2) generative spontaneity and the information-should-be-free ethic of what has come to be known as “cyberlibertarianism.” This is Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0, and the Tron sequel is fundamentally a Web 2.0 movie. The movie begins by showing a super-powerful software company overcharging for a stale product. One might be reminded of Microsoft here, and that fits, but what is more fitting is Apple. Apple exerts far more top-down control over their products and software, e.g. its walled-garden Apple Store. In fact, the software giant in the movie refers to their main product, an operating system, as simply “OS”, just as Apple does. This Web 1.0 software giant is the enemy in the physical-world and the enemies in the digital world are those who believe that information should be ordered and perfect. Instead, the heroes in the film are hackers who make the software available for free and believe that all information should be free. They believe in spontaneity and the generative power of chaos –the cyberlibertarian/hacker ethos of Web 2.0.
Second, the film updates the digital-physical dualism of its characters. In the 1982 version, one was either a digital “program” or a physical “user”; or as is the case of Flynn, a user transformed into something digital. The dualism remained strict. The purpose of this blog is, in part, to describe the ways in which the physical and technological and digital have all enmeshed together creating an augmented world occupied by cyborgs. And Tron: Legacy takes this directly into account by introducing revolutionary (and perhaps emancipatory) cyborg beings that are part digital and part physical –what Flynn (Jeff Bridges) describes as “bio-digital jazz, man.”
While The Social Network suffered from a severe misunderstanding of the Internet and social network sites specifically, Tron: Legacy seems to get it. Yes, the plot is weak and the dialogue is often cringe-worthy. However, one can instead focus on the theoretically-forward conceptual decisions that went into the film, to say nothing of the head-thumping Daft Punk soundtrack and the amazing neon head rush visuals that CGI was made for.
Comments 6
Will — January 10, 2011
I'm not usually a big fan of movies like this, but after reading what you had to say about it, I think I'll go see it!
Lori — January 17, 2011
Fantastic theoretical discussion of what's happening in that movie! I had similar (but much vaguer) thoughts as I watched it over the holidays. Those implied theoretical underpinnings definitely helped me make allowances for the more cheesy elements (and a little Daft Punk never hurts!), since I could see what they were doing on a more ideological level (Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0 ethics). On this line of internet-themed movies, how would you find Avatar stacks up on the Web 1.0 - Web 2.0 continuum? Or does it fall into that continuum at all? Avatar seems to espouse a more liberal sentiment (the natives beat out big business), but as I watched it, it seemed to me that the dualism set up in it actually supported many of the more conventional and conservative ideologies surrounding issues of colonialism, and did not speak to a more sophisticated or complex rendering of colonial/postcolonial issues (unlike District 9 which took them more to heart). I was disappointed with Avatar, because I felt there was a lot of potential to open a discourse on the "other" and the cyborgism of several characters in way that would be productive and relevant to today's culture, and I didn't see that Cameron attempted that at all. Well, that was much longer than I had anticipated my comment would be. Sorry! I'd appreciate your thoughts at any rate!
Elizabeth — January 19, 2011
I really agree with everything you have stated, and I would like to hear more.
What about the relationships within the film? Did you find them to be symbolic? Perhaps a rejection of the "Anxiety of Influence?" What about Bridge's relationship with his leering doppelganger- Clue?
Unlike Avatar, program+user=termination, but, we embrace the so called "bio-digital jazz"y hot chick. And for that matter, what about the treatment of human bodies in the film? Do you think the audience left celebrating spontaneity, or (as in most block-busters) worshiping the dominating idealization of the human form?
What about the whole path-of-least-resistance ("You are messing with my Zen thing, man.) stuff? Can one "follow the course" of that philosophy in our ocean of digital globalization?