Greetings Programs!
I thought I was done with Tron. If you know me at all, you know I’ve loved the movie “Tron: Legacy” since the day it came out when I was in high school, but if you’ve been around me this year or have seen my Twitter, you know that 2020 was the year I became obsessive. I lost count of the number of times I’ve seen “Tron: Legacy” this year. I would show it to whoever was willing. I’d watch it when I was bored. I’d watch it to fall asleep. I love it still, but after showing it to my girlfriend last month, I figured I might put it away for a while, let it rest. Maybe find something else to obsess over. And then the Complete Edition of the soundtrack dropped.
See, the film’s score, composed by Daft Punk (another high school obsession), was collected into a soundtrack album and released alongside the movie, but is missing about a third of the tracks featured in the film. On the date of the movie’s tenth anniversary, last Thursday, Disney dropped the Complete Edition, featuring almost all of the lost songs. These songs are my holy grails. I’ve been searching for pure versions of the tracks, without dialogue, on YouTube and Soundcloud and torrent sites since 2010, with rare success but mostly disappointment, and now they’re finally here. But not quite perfect — the extra tracks are tacked on to the end of the original soundtrack album, not interspersed in film order. I tried to stop myself from amending this with a playlist, but finally I couldn’t help myself, and there I was this morning, watching Tron again, pausing every few minutes to arrange the playlist based on what I had just heard. The playlist is perfect, but here I am as I always end up; watching “Tron: Legacy,” far and away my most watched film of all time. And I love it.
Most people to whom I show Tron don’t see what I see in it. For starters, it’s a difficult movie to introduce to people because it’s a sequel that is deeply reverent and referential to the 1982 original, “Tron,” while also being thematically unshackled from that movie entirely. Disney definitely intended “Tron: Legacy” to be watchable as a standalone film, and it is largely successful in that regard. “Tron: Legacy” is the rare film that is both sequel and reboot in perfect balance, and so when I show it to someone I usually scramble as I explain that yes there’s a first movie, no you don’t really need to watch it, this is the main event.
The first thing people notice about Tron is the effects. Light cycles and disc wars are awesome, and the movie looks and sounds stunning ten years on. I think the movie was snubbed for multiple categories at that year’s Oscars. For that matter, I think every good thing someone might have to say about “Avatar” can just as easily be said about “Tron: Legacy” if not twice over, and it baffles me why people don’t see the movie in that light. The merging of physical costumes and sets with CGI effects is marvelous to behold, and though the de-aging technology used to create the villain CLU has aged like milk, it prefaced a decade of improvements and innovations on those methods that will profoundly affect cinema and how we cast it for years to come. This action and beauty and spectacle is I think why the movie became a go-to sleep aid for me. It’s action-packed and totally anodyne, bliss itself on a screen. I would fall asleep halfway through and then finish it in the morning. I want my friends to see all of this in Tron, but the difficult thing is I can rarely get someone to see why I keep coming back.
I think I return over and over for the same reason that I’ve only seen the original “Tron” twice, and why that film isn’t essential while the sequel is. “Tron,” if it has any strong theme at all, is about struggling against corporate greed and a fear of artificial intelligence, but I think both of those are a stretch and that film is primarily about a fun adventure on the inside of a computer. “Tron: Legacy,” on the other hand, lives up to its title. It delves into themes of what we leave in our wake as human beings, what we intend to leave for the future, but above all else, what we are to our children. Ultimately, the story is one of fathers and sons, of the distance some of us come to feel from our fathers, and how that gap is eventually bridged. It’s about family redemption. Kevin Flynn spends less and less time with his son as he builds the Grid, a world inside a computer, a “digital frontier to reshape the human condition.” Flynn is a man very literally lost in his Great Work, and it is in realizing that the work is meaningless compared to his son Sam that he achieves his redemption. Our villain with the plasticine computer face, CLU, is a program Flynn creates to help make “the perfect system,” and all these years later cannot come to understand that there is no perfection but the imperfection of reality. He is a twisted mirror of Flynn’s past mistakes, and at the climax the two “reintegrate” and in doing so destroy the Grid, allowing Sam to escape, a scene that nearly brings me to tears every time I watch it. I have my own dad shit. I feel distant from my father. Don’t we all wish we could have some climactic moment with a parent where, by admitting a mistake, they save us from themselves? It’s the stuff of grand myth, and it’s this core of the film that I struggle to get people to emotionally grasp. Or maybe I’ve just seen Tron too many times, and really it’s a movie about an adventure inside a computer.
And I have seen it too many times. I’ve seen it, like, a lot. I for sure watched it more than ten times this year. Maybe 20. Like I said, I’d just put it on whenever and bliss out. I wouldn’t have watched it so many times if not for the pandemic and having nothing at all to do all summer. It has been a companion throughout 2020, a force I gravitate towards and around which I orbit. The four times I’ve shown it to someone this year are firmer signposts for the passage of time than the months, which feel elastic and without meaning. The first time I watched it this year was before the pandemic, when I showed it to two friends who fell in and out of sleep during the final act, which I didn’t appreciate much at all but is a disposition towards the film I have grown accustomed to. Then I watched it with my little brother while I was home for a month at the very beginning of the pandemic, and while he managed to stay up for it, when I gushed about the film afterwards I remember him saying something like “yeah, I guess man.” Next I showed it to another friend of mine, through an online watch party, because I had pressured her on Twitter to watch with me since I knew she was curious. I had just been dumped by someone I had a brief but intense fling with, and was in the deepest throes of Covid loneliness, and while it should have been enough just to share a movie with someone, instead I drank, breaking my sobriety for the millionth time and embarrassing myself in post-film texts to her. I’m sorry. Now I’m over five months sober and looking to keep it that way, and I have been dating someone wonderful who amazes me every day, and it was a joy to watch “Tron: Legacy” with her, even if, like always, she wasn’t quite on the wavelength I am with it, didn’t cry when I cried.
There was something cathartic about watching Tron to put the soundtrack in order. Perhaps because there was a finished product afterwards, or it was satisfying to have something occupy my time during winter break. Or maybe I’ve come to realize that I don’t know anyone for whom the film means as much as it does to me, and that’s okay. It can just be me and Tron, alone in a room, having a blast and a little cry, making some “biodigital jazz, man.” For whatever reason this watch was a culmination, a year end celebration of a film I love above most others. I think I’m ready to put it away, to see some perfection in our imperfect world outside the Grid, For as much as Tron luxuriates in its world of black glass and ribbons of neon, it is a story about breaking free of trying to be perfect and instead living in the world as it is. That’s a lesson I could sorely use, and I’m taking it forward as I leave Tron behind for a while. End of line, man.
