Tron: Legacy (2010)

1 year ago

Tron: Legacy (2010)

**Daft Punk, Tron: Legacy, Religiosity**

by Evan Bryson

1. Music

Thomas and I were very nervous on the drive down to Bloomington, IN. We were meeting up with our friend Lauren at one of the hipper university bars, and idling down I-65 we contemplated the boring crush of the scene, its loudness and loneliness. In that sweaty mob, we would have to embrace a cohort of vegan gunslingers with turquoise bracelets and tobacco pouches as they canoodled with club kids in black leather thigh-highs and shiny copper lipstick, everyone electrified; “Like fashion cattle grounded to the slaughterhouse floor,” is how Thomas put it. The dazzling interplay of these surfaces generally turns me on; whereas for Thomas, a more serious and sensitive man, and recently off his medication, these signs filled him with dread.

Because Lauren is a mystical presence, a religious experience, we hoped that if we could stomach the four hour drive without turning back then she would protect us once we made it into town. Maybe we would get drunk enough to dance? This usually happens to me—give me two pints and I’ll start stepping on toes. But Thomas has a strange, sad history with Indiana University. He studied music theory there for a year as an undergrad, cohabitant with a girl who broke his heart. He had not returned to Bloomington in five years and if the old filthy feelings of that prior life emerged, bubbling up through the city’s sidewalks “like shit, like cum,” he considered wandering into a field to vanish for the night. “You know, just if things really blow.” (I imagined finding him in the morning sleeping on farmland in Monroe County, dew-covered in clover, and padding him awake with my boot.) Maybe Thomas would meet a pretty American Studies student? She might have red hair and want to redress some of Dick Hebdige’s ideas on subculture; they would speak of beer choice and its relation to social cohesion, and quietly fall in love. “Keep chill, keep chill!” I soothed. “This night can only be rad.” I was in love with a guy who had left for Paris a month before, and wondering what the hell was going on with that. Thomas and I were racing toward the beginning of spring break.

On this fateful drive we listened to Thom Yorke’s The Eraser and a mixture of Daft Punk CDs, including Human After All, a later and less-loved effort by the French duo. Radiohead—and I extend this description to Thom Yorke’s solo work—is said to have integrated technology (modified voice, computer-driven beats, electronic blips and glitches) into their music as reflection of/reaction to a globalized police-state; destructive compulsory consumerism; and, bodies as the site of complete abdication to mass-media, audio, televisual, tactile. “[Radiohead] tilted artificial noises against the weight of the human voice and human sounds,” writes Mark Greif, in his essay “Radiohead, or The Philosophy of Pop.” “Their new kind of song, in both words and music, announced that anyone might have to become partly inhuman to accommodate the experience of the new era.” I was preoccupied with this critique as we moved beyond Yorke’s speculative dystopia to that pristine laser roar of Daft Punk, who, on the other hand, have maintained the dignity of being “daft” throughout, with an ear toward organizing really glamourous, really mind-blowing dance parties, in a space-bass utopia.

I anticipate I will make several factual errors in the following recount, and also maneuver (too swiftly) through the aesthetic concerns of these bands. Forgive me: I am speaking too quickly, attempting to pass through the tedious wiles of nostalgia.

Save for their obvious surface differences, it is worth noting that Radiohead and Daft Punk are nearly contemporaneous in their band formation and evolution of sound; in fact, the electronica/dance duo began as mediocre Euro indie-rockers before abandoning this tepid enterprise for drum machines and synth. Radiohead’s mystical conversion took place in Oxford, a city richly steeped in the dialectic between Enlightenment-informed scholasticism and the ritual brooding of high Anglicanism. In contrast, Daft Punk’s storied genesis finds the duo at EuroDisney, during a rave. Decadence, a certain celebration of tuning-out of everyday banalities and dropping into hedonistic pleasures for their own sakes, is apiece with the cultural milieu of Daft Punk’s aesthetics and audience. To listen to both bands side-by-side—to peregrinate from the 6/4 beats of “Idioteque” into a 4/4 groove on “Digital Love”—is to revel in the seductive tensions of opposing world-views: Radiohead’s deep skepticism of human agency as it relates to imminent technocracy, and Daft Punk’s evocation of a synthetic pleasure craft, shipping us toward the singularity.

Human After All may be Daft Punk’s least successful album, not because its arrangements are simpler than the previous LPs, Homework and Discovery, or that the songs are too computer-sounding and machine chunky to be organically dance-fueled, but because the album asks its listeners to make a remarkable empathic concession. The album asks us to embrace something like a whole new human, butchered and re-processed, repurposed to promulgate literally “Robot Rock,” in the way that novelist Michel Houellebecq, in The Elementary Particles, anticipates a “third paradigm” in world history—humankind bio-engineered to reproduce asexually. Even at its most implicit formulation, hosting an orgy with Human After All as the backbeat confronts participants with an ecstatic, yet awkward air of permissiveness. It takes for granted that we are post-human sex machines.

At that time in our lives, Thomas and I were doing coursework in media theory and digital literacy, dipping into a dark sea of research percolating up from the ’80s, and it was slowly poisoning us, like mercury on the skin.

The prophesiers—they are Jean Baudrillard, Donna Haraway, Paul Virillio and others—advanced on the infant dreams of a technology that only now has matured enough to abandon its wet-nurse of science-fiction. It has surpassed the lunkhead obviousness of “simulations” and “cyborgs” to leave us bereft on far stranger shores. For one thing, the beach we find ourselves on has given us microblogging, that radiant scourge of our critical faculty; who would have imagined Haitian relief efforts would be contingent on “tweets”? Probably Orson Scott Card, that old bird.

Civilization is not, I believe, socio-culturally evolving until we civil-war with our machine-slaves, as Mahiro Maeda would have it in his beautiful short-film “The Second Renaissance.” Nor are we entitled to an apocalypse of Otaku-minded information over-load, the particular passions of each triviality cross-pollinated against dumber others, as Patton Oswald has advocated in Wired. The ascent of Julian Assange and his program for complete transparency in political commerce is not the signal noise of humanity’s defeat—probably only the defeat of a certain stripe of liberal capitalism.

—

Well, Thomas and I felt marooned then, utterly scorched and immobile in the sickly way that impressionable young men can be, amongst the rigor and challenge of texts, and so we traveled southwards. A track on Human After All played, “Make Love.” An electronic guitar car-fuck groove is plucked out of a sliding beat, melodically searching beside a lost piano, while a processed moan flows in and out of the song. The serenity achieved along this small stretch within the album is like lying in bed, breathing beside a lover, touching skin.

“This is fucking—this is just like fucking love,” said Thomas, letting go of the steering wheel to move his shoulders and snap his fingers. “God damn it, if it isn’t love.”

2. Film

I texted a five-word review to my brother: “Tron pretty but not meaty.” I meant that, although watching TRON: Legacy occasioned the plentitude of thought above. So there must be some bacon in it. Or maybe I really needed to address Daft Punk and Radiohead? Let us continue with some general notes.

Legacy, as has been noted elsewhere, is indeed a ninety-minute commercial for Revlon cosmetics, especially mascara. Legacy is also a Ducati motor-sports lifestyle adventure. And Legacy is a sort of sequel to Daft Punk’s other extended music video, Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. That it is these things is better than it being something lesser: promotional material for a gunkier lash-intensifier; a dramatized two-stroke dirt bike competition; its soundtrack composed by down-beat goons, like The Field.

I saw Legacy by myself at early-evening on Tuesday with perhaps five other people trickling in behind me; during the PreFlix show I read from Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief, a book that continues to inform my understanding of the movie. I put on my 3D glasses and took them off intermittently, noticing how significantly the brightness of the picture is reduced with the glasses on. I’ll say it now: I find 3D f/x in movies to be redundant, and as such, a mind-bending annoyance throughout any film. Any image, large enough, projected onto a two-dimensional surface, with enough clarity, will appear to have depth. This has been the case since Filippo Brunelleschi picked up graphite in the late 1300s and this breathtaking effect maintains its luster six centuries later. I am not experiencing a dearth of sensation, that is not why I attend the cinema; if I want the effect of really driving, of really running, of really fighting—I’ll go for a drive, go for a run, hell, I’ll go fight somebody.

Legacy is also its own sequel, although for my purposes—as I’ve not seen the predecessor film—I care much less about the continued aspects of a shared filmic world with an evolving narrative and thematic sequence (which given the leaps in CGI innovation over the past two decades, has essentially hallowed the original TRON into an imperturbable, impenetrable site of cult appreciation, while hollowing out its formal, material devices as such). It tells us something about this grasping for greater depth in the sequel—perhaps “ready-made” depth—that Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Jules Verne are marshaled in as set-dressing about half-way through. They arrive to bring fulsomeness to the philosophic project of the filmmaker, a fuller humanity, richer mystery and moral gravitas to the proceedings. But this amounts to wishful thinking, an impossibility. The story throughout is vibrant and sclerotic—in the tradition of great looking video games that have poor controls or “Engrish” translation issues. The icy glowing lines of Legacy’s “grid” betray an environment perhaps a window-pane in thickness. TRON: Legacy is good old fashion fun, and as such, its seductions are surface-deep.

In truth my mind would not stop glossing as the film proceeded. The slick shine of the flick acts something like a cranial Burt’s Bees Wax, and I used this to wipe my brain. I wondered how Cillian Murphy continues to get work as a stiff Los Angeles corporate-type; maybe after his plane landed in Inception he took work at ENCOM to begin dismantling his father’s empire? I recalled that Garrett Hedlund and his flat butt will be filling the jeans of a young Nashville dreamer in the film Country Strong, co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim McGraw and a young lady from “Gossip Girl.” The longer I watched Legacy the more I was convinced by Hedlund’s beautiful, simple face, with its beseeching blue-green eyes, his windblown hair, and pallid skin, that he is indeed country strong—thus his many heart-rending victories in ultimate frisbee and motocross. (Wasn’t Jeff Bridges just in a country music movie? Is this like, a thing? It’s eerie.) Tron, the warrior, reminded me of Cyborg Ninja in Hideo Kajima’s Metal Gear Solid—a resonant comparison, as CLUE (bizzaro CGI young Jeff Bridges) has transformed Tron’s programming code for evil ends, just as military scientists had dinked around with Gray Fox’s DNA, trapping him in an weaponized exoskeleton. The light-cycles are like Kaneda’s motorcycle in Akira …

—

On and on this interplay of trivial free-association, as the body accepts the contours of the theater’s bucket-seats and the mind attempts to incorporate a steady rain of apparently meaningless plot contortions, hoping to incorporate the self-conscious split of this experience—felt as slowing time—into a salvific whole.

3. Religion

Incidentally, Thomas and I had a transcendent night in Bloomington, IN. There remains of this outing several incriminating photos. In one such, I am shirtless with my eyes closed, holding a small, shivering dog. A year later Thomas began to study the social theory of Niklas Luhmann and fairly lost his mind before, heroically, stepping back from the cliff of systemstheory. And a year later we all departed for elsewhere and now rarely communicate. Lauren remains miraculous.

—

Daft Punk and Niklas Luhmann remain Thomas’; I had never heard of either until I met him, and I had never met Thomas until Lauren introduced the two of us. So you see, this intellectual lineage begins to accrue diversity and complexity. And though he was not present, I watched Legacy with Thomas, both of us slightly incredulous. (It is a sentimental movie; I can be sentimental now.)

I want to suggest that the meaning of TRON: Legacy resides in the transcendent accumulation of its varied surface play. The film posits very little in the way of revolutionary new media or informatics. It accrues diversity in themes and complexity in meaning for me only if I locate them in the inclusion of Daft Punk’s “pulse-pounding” electronic score, and the cultural logic of Daft Punk’s musical popularity. Likewise, I can locate an interpretive richness in Legacy if I consider dear, maddening Luhmann’s systemstheory as an organizing power within the filmic culture of programs in the grid; an ambivalent expression of the spontaneously evolved “isomorphic algorithms” (known throughout as “Isos”), fully human-like creatures developed by the computer software, equipped with DNA. (I pray the editors will kindly link to the Wikipedia entries of these intense, probably silly, posturings.) I want to add that a tertiary, counter-presence can be felt in the film, as if through synesthesia, which is something like the music of Radiohead, in the grid’s panoptic architecture, overwhelming military presence, and menacing basalt hinterlands. These competing textures do not lend themselves to irony.

When the movie is speaking, it says very little—and yet what it shows us, through quotation and allusion, and what we hear—power synth grazing arpeggios—amount to a disquieting spiritual experience. In this way Legacy ismuch like a long Catholic wedding with organ and strings and Latin incomprehensibly mumbled.

Locating Legacy’s meaning through a Luhmannian reading would be particularly useful, not least because it borrows fancifully upon the doctrines of many faiths (the entire system of faith), ranging over Judeo-Christian and Far Eastern religious traditions, with allusions to Norse mythology and Muslim sacred art. When Garrett Hedlund’s character is dressed-down into a pair of modest gray boxer-briefs, four white-haired fembots walk out of nearby statuary to redress him in black-goop and The Dark Knight’s kevlar body-armor. Part of the pop-culture déjà vu I felt in this moment came from a vision of Neo’s ascendence at the end of The Matrix: Revolutions, as Agent Smith plunged his fist into Neo’s invincible carapace, to morph the One into the Many. I also thought of Mary Magdalen washing Jesus’ feet with her hair. Later, Gnostic elements are introduced alongside Trinitarianism, with a generous slathering on of Zen Buddhism. Legacy communicates these pieties with an ever-increasing volubility.

In the end, the last Iso’s digital encryption is made incarnate. Quorra (played with fierceness and fun by Olivia Wilde), hops on the back of Sam Flynn’s Ducati to enjoy a Silicon Valley sunrise. Miraculous! How did a laser create flesh? To paraphrase Hungerford, the filmmakers saturate TRON: Legacy’s formal elements in transcendent terms, conferring upon images a religious value independent of meaning. The independence of this meaning suggests unknowable and ungraspable truths, forever remote to mere mortals; it also suggests meaninglessness.

Science-fiction about computer worlds is often eschatological, perhaps conditioned by the distrust of dissolving our corporeal selves completely to exist as electrons spinning atop a magnet, although technically that is what we already are.

I want lastly to describe the death milieu of The Matrix trilogy and TRON: Legacy. These films are preoccupied with human genocide perpetrated by machines, the end of civilization and of the world. The horrors and injustice of this action is never explicitly stated as an evil fate, but occurs somewhat on a messy coarse that barrels all sides—human and machine—toward redemption. Surprisingly, of the two films, Legacy posits a less subtle, and somewhat tasteless, parallel history of its Isos to the events of the Holocaust. If the free humans of The Matrix find shelter in Zion, the Isos in Legacy painfullyobserve their creator incapable of protecting them, and all save one are destroyed in the pogroms. Kevin Flynn takes a moment to stroke his beard and gnash the air before resuming his lotus-position of impotent presage.

The implications of this theodicy are overwhelmed, thankfully, by another sick action sequence heralded by Daft Punk’s trumpets.

—

Long live pop.

Evan Bryson is a writer living in Indiana. He tumbls here.