Reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZpqpeDNb2c1. I have never felt so called out, and it would be hilarious if this video's script/narration turns out to be AI (there is a cadence to it, a certain way that certain words are mispronounced, that I feel like I'm beginning to spot or clock, if that makes sense.) 2. Regardless, this video is 100% spot on. 3. I too have felt empty and hollow because I was not a person, I was a golem made of media hyperfocuses and references, and this was something that acquaintances were already calling me out on in my teens. 4. This meshes with thoughts I have had about the Tron franchise recently. But Tron was not created by an elite group or focus group, it was created by an artist, co-opted by Disney, and it has succeeded culturally with people despite Disney's failed attempts to market it. It is,
as Damien Walter might say, "The Matrix film that The Matrix did not want them to make. (Even if he might not agree with me in this instance.) But why is this?
The feeling I had last night is one that someone on Reddit expressed months ago: it's like there is another, deeper movie in Tron Ares that is trying to find its way out, or the cut we got was cut down from a longer version that was meant to be way deeper and maybe more surreal/psychedelic/mindblowing. Like how both Beyond The Black Rainbow and Mandy, both by director Panos Cosmatos, felt super-deep and symbolic, despite their simple stories and narrative structures (A girl escapes an institution where she has been imprisoned; a man avenges his fridged partner in a roaring rampage of revenge.) But what gave me this feeling last night was not just the movie itself, but the soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails. So many people have attributed the success of Tron Ares as an artwork (in the areas where it does succeed) to this soundtrack, saying things like "it does a lot of the heavy lifting," etc.
And I think the answer, or common denominator, is how capitalism corrupts and subsumes Art. Art is meant to express the human condition and propagate cultural symbols. Capitalism cheapens it. Capitalism hijacks and commodifies it, and turns it into something designed to make us want or need to participate further in capitalism. Before capitalism, people were shaped by cultural symbols, and this is just how things were. And if you didn't assimilate, you could just leave and survive outside of that structure. And I think this is what everyone who dreams of "Burning it all down" wants to return to. It was capitalism that turned Art and People into something that could be commodified, because capitalism demands assimilation and participation. Capitalism makes participation mandatory.
Disney tries to bury Tron because it does not give them a return for their investment of capital. The symbols spread, but it doesn't translate into dollar signs for them. It's like a pirate signal, in a sense. It's subversive in a way that Disney never meant it to be. (I mean, the first film is a Hacker Polycule thwarting the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.) Tron is massively influential as a cultural symbol, but somehow those symbols are able to permeate culture and spread, regardless of how well or poorly its installments do at the box office. It's one of those situations where the aesthetic is instantly recognizable, even to people who have never seen any of the films.
Ever since the first film, Disney has had this pattern of tentatively supporting it, letting it be greenlit, and then panicking and trying to shove it back in the box the moment it doesn't do Star Wars/MCU numbers. Whether the allegations against him are true or not, Jared Leto was trying to make art. Joachim Rønning was trying to make art, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross were trying to make art. Disney threw another predictable hissyfit, because the art they produced wasn't something that made them a lot of money. But it's too late, those symbols are already out in the wild.
And what do those symbols represent? For me, William Gibson expressed it the best: Tron is how cyberspace looks in our imaginations. It's how we imagine the look and the aesthetic and the sound of the inner world of the computer networks which dominate our lives and culture, and how we relate to them.
As I've mentioned in a previous post, the question Tron Ares seems to be rephrasing from the first film is, "do we want control of the systems that are being used to create and direct our society and our future to be in the hands of principled idealists, or cynical capitalists?" But in the latest film, this unfortunately translates to "which group of billionaires do we want in control of these systems? If we're lucky, it's the principled ones! If we're lucky, it's the meritocratic Rainbow Coalition with high-minded ideals, not the cynical generational aristocratic (white, English) grifters who just want to make a profit." The problem is, as we are finding out, that it may be cynical aristocrats all the way down.
And I think the answer is the 99% taking control of technology back for ourselves. It's rejecting slop, and fighting for control of our own devices, and the right to repair. I think it's in another William Gibson quote: "The Street finds its own uses for things." Unfortunately, with the enshittification of modern tech and the recent attempts to crack down on Linux happening, The Street may find this to be an uphill battle. But I have faith in The Street.
The Street, uh, finds a way.So, what does something like Tron look like at The Street level, when corporations and billionaires currently own the servers and the means of production, and are making it harder and harder for The Street to interact with those networks without complicity and without participation in capitalism?
The Matrix is an important film series in the cyberpunk canon. But though hacking is used as a framing device, these are not really a "Hacker" films, except in an aesthetic sense. Before The Matrix, hackers looked like Kevin Flynn and Alan Bradley and Lora Baines from the Tron franchise in the cultural consciousness. They looked like the crew from the film Sneakers, or the kids from Hackers. Hippies and social outcasts who wound up in the tech subculture because they did not fit in anywhere else. The most important "Hacker" films of the 1990s, and maybe the last 35 years or so, were Sneakers and Hackers (even though actual hackers rather infamously didn't count the latter when it first came out.) Both of them depict regular folks, or little people on the fringes of society, taking on big corporations or shadowy government agencies and succeeding.
And it's a direction that I wish the Tron franchise would go in, or go back in.
Because the moment Kevin Flynn won, he started to become what he hated.
Maybe it wasn't obvious at first. Maybe he was one of The Principled Billionaires. But within seven years in story canon, he effectively shuffled all the way down the Hippie To Fascist pipeline, via his alter-ego CLU. Everything Kevin Flynn did or learned or achieved was ultimately corrupted by his fascist shadow-self, to the point where not even his own son and surrogate daughter could save him. And the Programs on his Grid suffered for a thousand cycles. And a digital race of people, who possibly would have contributed to the next phase of human evolution, were genocided while he went to his mountain retreat and meditated about it, like Jack Dorsey did irl after explaining via bunch of sad zen platitudes why he wasn't going to ban Nazis from Twitter back in 2021.
Tron: The next day depicts his son as a principled outsider, combating the forces of enshittification and cynicism and control - represented, as per usual, by a Dillinger (here portrayed by Cillian Murphy.)
My fanfic, which I am still definitely working on, presents the remaining Dillingers after Tron Ares as struggling with their fanily Legacy of theft, enhittification, cynicism, and control.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
finch!)
