Tron: Legacy
Spontaneous vs. planned order.
I have been meaning to write this blog post for some time. In the end of August, one of my best friends introduced me to Tron: Legacy (2010). Even earlier, this same friend recommended to me several songs from the movie’s spectacular soundtrack:
The whole album is written and produced by Daft Punk. It’s awesome. If you’re a fan of Daft Punk, you should listen to every song. If you’re not a fan of Daft Punk yet, you will be after listening to this album.
Music aside, the plot of the movie was strikingly pro-liberty. SPOILERS AHEAD. The big bad is the digital clone of Kevin Flynn, the creator of the Tron virtual reality. Flynn’s clone, known as Clu, short for Codified Likeness Utility, takes Flynn’s command to “make a perfect system” a little too seriously. To Clu, like all high-modernist technocrats, a perfect system is one in which all actors follow the script assigned to them from on high; a world in which no automaton deviates from its programming.
When free-willed Isomorphic Algorithms, ISOs, spontaneously appear in Tron without being programmed by Flynn, Clu is none too happy about this. In fact, Clu carries out an electronic genocide in which he exterminates all ISOs from Tron, save for one, Quorra, who’s rescued by Flynn. Clu’s dastardly schemes are not limited to Tron but he dreams of ordering that place where there is the most complexity, spontaneity, and want of a grand design: physical reality.
I won’t spoil how Clu goes about attempting this or if he’s successful in so doing. The important takeaway is this: the good guys are those humans, ISOs, and programs1 who embrace free will, reject top-down control, and see the beauty of spontaneous order. The homocidal maniacs—in other words, the bad guys—are those who possess the hubris, the sheer gall, to treat others like cogs in a machine, their machine, to be fit, melted down, remolded, or discarded as the machinist wills.
I implore anyone with a couple hours to burn to watch this exciting, thought-provoking romp through digital dystopia.
The free will demonstrated by the programs is a complex conceit that the movie investigates. Viewers should pay particular attention to the character Rinzler.