The young/CGI Jeff Bridges as 'Clu,' dictator of The Grid in "Tron: Legacy."
By Jason Apuzzo. There’s a moment late in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner when Rutger Hauer, playing the doomed replicant ‘Roy Batty,’ turns to Harrison Ford just before dying, and with a mad gleam in his eye ruminates:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time … like tears in rain.”
It’s a wonderful, sad, poetic, insane moment – the soul of the film, actually, as this fantastic and vaguely Nietzschean character expires with unexpected grace, and in so doing teaches his pursuer (Ford, the titular ‘blade runner’) something about the true nature of ‘humanity.’
In trying to summarize what director Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy lacks, it’s precisely such moments – or even one such moment. And it’s a shame, because I think that somewhere out there – perhaps still lurking in the interstices of the director’s imagination, or somewhere on his hard drive – there might actually have been a great science fiction film here, something perhaps south of Star Wars but certainly north of The Matrix. But as things stand, greatness was definitely left waiting on the table with respect to Tron: Legacy – this very big, very stylish and ambitious production that unfortunately never really takes flight as it should.
On the face of it, the idea of rebooting Tron was a decent idea, in so far as the cinema technology (CGI, 3D, etc.) currently exists today to flesh-out the basic Tron story in a more visually satisfying manner than was possible back in 1982. And, of course, since the early 80s we’ve obviously developed a much more precise feeling for what ‘cyberspace’ and the internet mean to us, on both a practical and symbolic level. Even just this week we learned, for example, that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is going to be Time’s Man of the Year – and the movie made about him (the weirdly uninvolving The Social Network) is very likely to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards in a few months.
Baby Boomer Jeff Bridges reflects ad ad nauseum on his legacy in "Tron: Legacy."
So on paper, the timing for this project should have been perfect. And yet I’m wondering if maybe it’s the exact opposite: that the timing for this film, in a sense, couldn’t be worse. Worse not because of the subject matter, nor because ‘computing’ has lost some of its romance and speculative luster since the early 80s – Steve Jobs notwithstanding. Continue reading Totalitarianism, Narcissism & Boomer Anxiety; LFM Reviews Tron: Legacy
By David Ross. What sufficed the growing boy suffices the grown man. I read Ayn Rand’s entire oeuvre between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. It made an enormous impression in the usual ways, confirming my nascent conservatism and even more my nascent romanticism, on which paths, political and literary, I remain to this day. Rand led to Victor Hugo and George Sand, which led to my life’s work as a student of literature and circuitously to my permanent preoccupation with a certain romantic and conservative strand in modernism whose great avatar (if James Cameron has not entirely compromised the word) is William Butler Yeats. Rand also helped engender my reverence for the great achievers and achievements of civilization, which is, I believe, my greatest asset as a teacher to this day. Rand might not approve my heroes, but she would approve my penchant for hero worship. I have never sympathized with industrialism as a symbol or model of human creativity, nor desired to remake myself into an unsmiling and inflexible hero of what Rand calls rationalism, nor felt the need to hammer my haphazard libertarianism into consistent and rigid doctrine, but all the same I am her progeny. For better and worse, I have been formed by her in uncountable ineffable ways.
The Obama era was, for me as for so many others, an open invitation to reread Rand, so thoroughly does she seem to diagnose the psychology of our present slide into statism (Obama’s constant rhetoric about sibling-keeping might as well be plucked from the mouth of Wesley Mouch). News that Atlas Shrugged is finally being filmed also helped inch the book to the top of my pile (see Libertas’ interviews with director Paul Johannson here and here).
I was trepidacious, however, not sure to what extent I might have outgrown Rand. I was not concerned about the palatability of her philosophy, to which I have never specifically subscribed, but about her prose and her craftsmanship, which self-congratulatory journalist types constantly deride as second-rate, the kind of thing that only a teenager or cultist could fail to smirk at. This passing reference in a December article in the Weekly Standard is typical:
Atlas Shrugged, while a perennial bestseller and an important artifact of 20th-century culture, is not exactly great literature (stilted dialogue and cardboard characters have ranked among the defects pointed out by critics).
I have now reread the first half of Atlas Shrugged, and I can offer my very educated opinion that itis great literature, not necessarily at the sentence level, but in the unstoppable propulsion of its narrative (has a philosophical novel ever been so engrossing?), in the massive, dauntless sweep of its ideas, and in its enormous imaginative feat of creating a myth of our entire world (Dante and Milton are Rand’s compeers in this limited, formal respect).
Against the leveling instinct.
Even more, Atlas Shrugged is a great work of literature in its comprehensive taxonomy of modern men, in its comprehension of all their hidden springs and insecurities and frustrations and ambitions. Rand fancied herself a political theorist and metaphysician, but she misunderstood herself; she was a psychologist foremost, and Atlas Shrugged is a formidable system of psychology to contraindicate that of Freud. Eschewing the usual bedroom and bathroom preoccupations, Rand grasps that behavior is driven by what she calls ideals, conscious or unconscious structures of value that provide the context for everything we do and everything we are. Freud tends to reduce these structures to underlying psychosexual dynamics, but Rand insists on their primacy and irreducibility, and she illustrates their role as the ceaseless motive forces of life. She is also a particularly shrewd diagnostician of a certain kind of resentment and leveling instinct – James Taggart is the obvious embodiment– and she is nearly alone in realizing that this mindset is no trivial phenomenon but the rotting core of our world, explaining everything from the Soviet world-blight to our failing schools and lousy art.
Rand’s characters are ‘cardboard’ in the sense that they speak for philosophical positions and represent certain types, but each character embodies something slightly different; there is no overlap or redundancy. In the aggregate, they form a spectrum of humanity – a human comedy – that is convincing and powerfully explanatory. Rand is accused of engaging in moral black and white, but this is not entirely fair; while her scheme is moral in logic and purpose, many of her characters – Dr. Stadler for example – represent subtle, equivocal positions. They are not gray, but an intricate admixture of black and white.
Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart.
Rand sketches her characters in only a few clean strokes, but these strokes are rendered so deeply and forcefully as to be ineffaceable. Who can forget Hank Reardon or Dagny Taggart? Who can forget their triumphant inauguration of the John Galt Line? Who can forget their strange, violent lovemaking? What character drafted by Henry James, by contrast, does anything but deliquesce and drift imperceptibly from consciousness, becoming a vague haze of inflection and velleity?
Atlas Shrugged is a great novel, finally, in its astonishing originality. It has no precedent in terms of style, tone, mood, or philosophy, as far as I know. Victor Hugo may account for its sweep and social engagement, and someone like Zamyatin may have influenced its anti-totalitarianiasm and latent dystopianism, but nothing accounts for its strangeness, for everything powerfully eccentric and not infrequently repellent that Rand herself brings to it, everything rooted in the passionate kinks and quirks of her personality. In the end, it belongs in the category of the sui generis along with modern masterpieces like Ulysses, The Castle, and Pale Fire. It does not rival the artistry of these works, but it similarly emerges from a unique and bizarre mind.
Rand’s ultimate strength is her unswayable belief in herself as an arbiter of value and reality, and her passionate self-investment in every page she wrote. Her intent was doctrinaire, but her triumph is romantic.
Addenda:
See Rand on YouTube in all her rebarbative glory: here, here and here.
Whittaker Chamber’s fascinating, fiercely antagonistic, latently Christian review from the December 28, 1957, issue of National Review.
National Review’s contemporary take, likewise antagonistic.
