TRON: Legacy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A light-cycle takes a corner and leaves a wall behind it. Not a smear of light. A wall, solid, and it will kill whoever hits it, including the rider who drew it. That's the image most people keep from TRON: Legacy, and it's the right door in, because it tells you what kind of world Joseph Kosinski built: one where movement hardens instantly into structure. The trail is a debt to Akira, whose glowing vehicle-streaks through black cityscapes these silhouettes echo. The larger vocabulary, luminous linework on black, comes from Lisberger's 1982 TRON, whose backlit animation Kosinski re-skins in hard digital contrast. What's new in 2010 is that the light is load-bearing.

The received verdict was surface over story, with pacing measured to the point of slackness. Fair as description, incurious as judgment. Two films are sharing one set, and they keep different kinds of time.

Sam's film runs on what Deleuze called the movement-image: someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, the act resolves it, and the cutting serves that chain. His plot is the large-form version, where an encompassing world presses on a man until one decisive act transforms it. Threshold crossed, trials in the arena, the light-cycle derby, the father-king found, a portal closing on a clock. It's where James Haygood's editing comes alive, and where speed and geometry and shattering programs do the actual storytelling.

Then there's his father. Kevin Flynn has spent twenty years in a white room that Darren Gilford stages as a monastic sanctuary, straight out of 2001's interiors, and that's the film's second real debt: from Kubrick it takes the confidence that clean architecture and long silent holds can carry meaning where dialogue would. Bridges plays him with a spacey, quasi-Zen calm. He has stopped acting, because his creation feeds on action. Deleuze has a name for this figure, the voyant, the seer: someone cut off from useful action who can therefore only watch and endure, and through whom time begins to be felt for itself instead of as the measure of a chase. Flynn isn't a badly written passive character. He's the other regime, sitting inside his son's adventure movie. The slackness critics complained about is the friction between the two, and heard as friction it becomes the most interesting thing in the film.

They collide at the climax and the adventure movie loses. Flynn against Clu looks like Deleuze's binomial, force against force, maker against rebel creature. But Clu is Flynn, a copy of the man built from his own face, and the ending isn't a defeat, it's reabsorption: one being taking the other back in. Force against force can't describe that. The crystal-image can: Deleuze's term for an image in which a thing and its double stop being separable. Claudio Miranda shoots the whole Grid on wet black glass, so every neon line exists twice, once as fact and once as reflection, with no reliable way to say which is which. Clu is that reflection given a body and an army.

The Grid is a sealed crystal, a world with no outside, which is why the portal carries so much weight. Deleuze would call it the crack, the fissure in a closed totality through which something gets out. What gets out is Quorra, the last surviving ISO, a form of life the Grid generated on its own and Clu then exterminated. The film's politics arrive pre-completed: the genocide is over before we get there, and the survivor is a species of one. Deleuze meant something harder and more historical when he wrote that a people is missing. Few films have made the phrase this literal.

Inside all of it, the Grid asks to be read. Colour is allegiance; cyan or orange tells you whose side a body is on before anyone speaks. The disc on your back is your memory, a file, detachable. Death is deletion, with a crystalline shatter in the mix. Deleuze called an image like this a lectosign, an image that has lost its automatic sense and has to be deciphered instead. His most exact version is the regime he found in Syberberg, where the screen becomes information-space, a surface to be read rather than a window to look through. TRON: Legacy takes that literally. The Grid is rendered, not found; it looks like an architect's presentation, which is what Kosinski trained to make. Even the stereoscopy is legible rather than immersive, the real world flat and the Grid in 3D, a Wizard of Oz trick that tells you which images are the ones to read.

Kosinski's own invention is smaller and better than making it look cool. He treated a digital world as a construction problem. The suits carry working electroluminescent light, sewn into the garment and switched on, throwing real illumination onto real faces. In a world made of nothing, the glow on the actors is the one thing that was actually there.

Which sets up the film's real significance, and it's an accident. Bazin built his account of cinema on the photograph as a trace: something stood in front of the lens, and that's why we half-believe films don't lie. Clu is a photoreal human who never stood anywhere. In 2010 a mass audience watched a lead performance and could see the seam, and every argument since about synthetic actors runs back through this face. Deleuze's powers of the false names falsity used as a creative principle rather than suffered as an error, and the film half-earns it: its antagonist is a forgery of a man, built with a forgery that didn't pass. Villain and effect fail the same way for the same reason. A colder film would have known it.

What it did to filmmaking is easier to state. It proved a nine-figure studio picture could be led by design and sound. The Grid's hum, the crack of the discs, the derez and Daft Punk's score are one continuous fabric rather than music laid over effects, and that fusion (descended from Blade Runner's neon-in-darkness and Vangelis, from The Fifth Element's design-before-logic, from The Matrix's jacked-in bodies and electronically scored combat) became a founding text for the synthwave and outrun revival that ran across music, games and advertising for a decade. Miranda took the same eye to Life of Pi and won the Oscar two years later. And the film stands early in the 2010s legacy-sequel cycle that would run on through the later Star Wars, Blade Runner and Mad Max continuations: returning star, young inheritor, brand as bloodline.

Deleuze said of Kubrick that the world itself has become a brain. Kosinski's contribution is to make that brain a place with weather, cantilevered platforms and a bad nightclub, somewhere you can drive. So watch the trail. Every light-cycle writes a wall it can't unwrite, which is also what a man did to himself when he made a copy of his own face and gave it an army.