Imaginary Worlds - Tron: Welcome to the Machine

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

The 1982 movie Tron may seem outdated and even hokey today, but the film was more groundbreaking and prophetic than many people realize. I talk with Tron’s director Steven Lisberger about the challenge of making a movie about computers without the help of computers. Media scholars Lars Schmeink and Sherryl Vint discuss the influence of Tron on our understanding of virtual worlds and our place in cyberspace. Plus, writer Daniel Frey talks about why current sci-fi about Silicon Valley tends to be more “near future” than fantastical, including his novel The Future is Yours. Today's episode is brought to you by Serial Box and BetterHelp. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? We have partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle our advertising/sponsorship requests. They’re great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email [e-mail] or click the link below to get started. Imaginary Worlds AdvertiseCast Listing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. When the movie Tron came out in 1982, it did okay at the box office. Not exactly a summer blockbuster. Critics were underwhelmed. But there was a young boy who saw the movie at a multiplex on Cape Cod, and he loved it so much, he bought the action figures and the toy motorcycles that the characters rode on. And those toys are still sitting in his old bedroom at his parents' house today,

or so I've been told from reliable sources. I still think Tron is underrated. And over the last few months, I've kept thinking about this one scene that I think sums up the moment in high tech that we're going through right now. And I'll talk about that scene later. But first, if you've never seen the movie, here's a quick recap. Jeff Bridges plays a game designer and computer programmer named Kevin Flynn, who's hip and cool in a very young Jeff Bridges sort of way.

Flynn's backstory is that his ideas were stolen and he was pushed out of a tech company, which has now become a mega corporation. But Flynn doesn't realize the company is actually being run by an evil AI program called Master Control. The CEO of the company actually takes orders from this AI program. I think we should shut down all access until we find that Flynn, just to be safe. There's a 68.71% chance you're right. Cute. End of line. In the real world, the Master Control program appears as text on a screen. But there's a world inside the computer, where Master Control is a giant, ominous face. The programs in the computer are played by actors in glowing suits, and they're forced to compete in video games,

but they're literally inside the games, like riding the motorcycles and fighting each other. In the real world, Flynn tries to prove that his ideas were stolen by hacking the system. You shouldn't have come back, Flynn. Hey, hey, hey, it's the big Master Control program everybody's been talking about. Master Control uses a laser to zap Flynn into the computer world, where he has to compete on the game grid to save his life.

And it's a Disney movie, so I don't think it's a spoiler to say there's a happy ending, Flynn saves the day, and he takes down Master Control. But a movie like Tron, you don't watch it just for the story. The main attraction are the visuals. The production design was by two legendary artists, Sid Mead, who also worked on Blade Runner that same year, and the French illustrator Mobius. The director was Steven Lisberger. Steven told me that he tried pitching the movie all around town and nobody was interested except Disney. It was interesting walking into Disney Studios because I had everything. I didn't just have a script. I had budgets. I had test reels. They saw the whole thing storyboarded.

They had production designs. And then the big question was, can you do this? Now, Disney had done one other sci-fi live action movie called The Black Hole, which was an infamous disaster. And a lot of people at the studio were worried they could not afford another flop like that. Disney at the time was a very, it was like the studio that time forgot. It was a family business and it was the two sides of the family were trying to figure out which one was at the helm. Tron became kind of a political football between those two sides. Disney did not have a lot of respect in the industry back then.

You couldn't get any actors to return your phone calls. When you said, I'm calling from Disney and it's a movie about video games and computers, click, they'd hang up. Except for Jeff Bridges.

Jeff came in and was like, this thing is far out. I could totally hear him saying that. I still think the movie looks gorgeous today. It was one of the first feature films to use computer animation. The ships and the vehicles inside the electronic world were completely digital, and they were designed with sleek neon geometric shapes. But the production itself was a logistical nightmare and they quickly fell behind schedule. One of the biggest problems was compositing. Compositing is when you have a character on one level

and a different background behind them. Today, that's done with green screens. Back then, they used blue screens and the fake background would usually be a painting that they would add later. Using computers to create backgrounds was brand new. And back then, a typical sci-fi fantasy film would have maybe 300 shots like that. Tron needed to create a thousand of them. And they discovered...

We couldn't have any hair. You know, blue screens, in the past, it was never able to do hair well anyway. Well, how do you solve that problem? Everyone has to wear a helmet. For years, you know, people have said to me, well, maybe everyone shouldn't have been wearing a helmet. Well, the answer to that is if they weren't all wearing helmets, there'd be no Tron movie. The scenes that are filmed inside the electronic world were actually shot on black and white film,

and the frames were hand-painted like animation cells. The best way to describe it is no one saw what that movie was going to look like or feel like or be like until it was actually done. We did early production paintings. They were all wrong because we couldn't imagine what the visual production techniques were going to do to the visuals. It's funny because what would have really helped you are computers or computer programs, which is literally what the movie was about.

But those computers or those programs didn which is like literally what the movie was about. But those computers or those programs like didn't exist back then. Exactly. That is totally true. I mean, we the guys at the computer labs like Triple I or Magi would take a Polaroid off a monitor and stick it in the mail. And mail me a Polaroid off a monitor and stick it in the mail and mail me a Polaroid. And two days later, I would have this Polaroid and I'd call him up and I'd say, you know, can we change this this way? No. Can we do this, this, this, this? Okay. But that's how we communicate it, by sending Polaroids of screen images through the mail. Cheryl Vint is a professor at UC Riverside. She teaches the depiction of cyberspace on film,

starting with Tron. And she always reminds her students. A very frequently told anecdote within science fiction communities is that Neuromancer was written on a typewriter. Neuromancer was a groundbreaking cyberpunk novel from around the same time. So, I mean, the imaginary is there because you're anticipating where the technology goes. I mean, obviously, being written on a typewriter doesn't have a constraining effect on Neuromancer the same way that it does in a visual medium where you're trying to generate effects.

But the parallel seems interesting. medium where you're trying to generate effects. But the parallel seems interesting. When Tron came out in 1982, less than 10% of Americans owned a personal computer. And that's another reason why I like the movie, because it's looking at these new things, personal computers, home video games, and asking, what is our relationship going to be to these new objects in our homes or in our offices? Stephen says he did not even have the language to talk about it back then. I have the original dictionary of computer terminology that I used to write the Tron script with.

It's the smallest book you ever saw. The word matrix isn't even in there. And the word cyber isn't in there. And the word avatar isn't in there. Back then, the word cyber had a connotation of anything having to do with brains. We were even considering using the word cyberpunk in the film. It didn't fly at Disney. And now, four decades later.

I've had 10-year-old kids say to me, the problem with Tron is that story is just too simple. And I cannot tell you what it was like to have people come out of theaters back in 1982 and say, how dare you? How dare you put the Disney name on something that is this flipped out and then walk out of the theater? Wow. So did you hear people say that to you directly? Or did you hear other people say, you know, I heard somebody say this? People have said that to me directly.

Cheryl Vint says that her students today are also baffled by Tron, but for the opposite reason. They're accustomed to an aesthetic where making it seem as seamlessly as possible like a real reality is the aim of a lot of these CGI aesthetics. of a lot of these CGI aesthetics. Whereas it seems to me Tron wants to keep reminding you you're in a CGI space instead of the idea that you might forget that the space is not real. I kind of like the fact that when you enter into the cyberspace of Tron, it's saying, this is not the real world.

This is very different. Don't get too comfortable here. Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree with you. I'm sort of explaining my students' reactions rather than my own. And that's one of the points I try to make to them is like, we take for granted these technologies that it feels strange to imagine a virtual space as non-real rather than it feels strange to imagine a virtual space as real. I think it's ironic that Cheryl's students were turned off by the way that Tron imagined cyberspace as this really alien world. Because I remember when Facebook came out over 10 years ago,

it felt so new and strange. South Park did an episode where Stan was literally sucked into Facebook and the pop culture reference they used was Tron. Excuse me, could you please tell me what the hell's going on? No, you aren't my friend. Would you like to be my friend? No, I seriously don't want any more friends. Ignore. Okay, okay, I'll be your friend. Confirm.

Ooh, Tom Davis is thrilled to have become powerful by adding a new friend here are some pictures of my dog and here he is in some silly outfits can you comment on these today facebook feels so normal i imagine that a lot of cheryl students aren't on facebook because that's where their parents are hanging out lars schmeink is a journalist who writes about the depiction of cyberspace in media. And he thinks this change in our thinking is not because computers have become so much more user-friendly over the last 40 years. It's because we've learned how to think like computers. Everybody who's using a computer knows this situation where you're kind of, you're saying the computer is supposed to help me do something.

And then you try to do something and the computer says, nope, can't do it, got to do it another way. And you're like, well, no, you're supposed to help me. And in the end, you're the one conforming to whatever the computer needs so that the computer can work with it. And he says that very often in movies or video games, when we see a virtual world that's supposed to be just like the real world, whenever we get a glimpse at the architecture behind the facade, filmmakers and game designers are still relying on the visual language that was established in Tron. like feeling of Tron, the grid and the movements of 90 degree angles, that kind of feeling, the very geometrical forms that are there, the very strict color coding that is going on. All of these visuals are kind of taken from Tron. And he thinks Tron should get more credit for being the first big Hollywood movie about video games. Video games has become the biggest media industry there is.

This is something that Tron foreshadows a little bit and kind of goes into this idea of video games being a very central idea for the upcoming years. And they may have been a bit too early for it, but by now I think this vision has come true. I mean, if you want to really go into one of these open worlds or if these deep adventures or the role-playing games where you can develop a character, I mean, they have playing times of hundreds of hours. Yeah, and they really get lost in a virtual world. Which brings us back to Flynn and Tron. They are also lost in an electronic world. Also, in the electronic world of Tron, the characters that are supposed to be computer programs are forced to compete against

each other in games like racing or the sort of gladiator frisbee. And these are games to the death. And in that sense, Cheryl thinks the movie also foreshadows the gamification of warfare, especially when you think about the giant drones in the movie that are ominously hovering over the game grid. When I teach cyberpunk cinema, one of the things I teach is the sort of relationship between that and things like drone warfare and the sort of ways of remotely piloting

that gives you this bird's eye view of the landscape, the way a film like Ender's Game, which is about a sort of material war, but the kids who are fighting the war play it as if it's a video game. And of course, the novel originally was published around the same sort of mid-80s period as these other things we've been talking about. And the plot of Tron may be very simple, but it did set the template for stories about the tech industry, where a scrappy young programmer goes up against an evil tech corporation. I mean, you can see that in games like Watch Dogs

2 from 2016, where you play an underground hacker who takes down an evil tech mogul in Silicon Valley. But the game is made by Ubisoft, which is a huge multinational tech company. And Lars says... Not to forget that Tron is actually a Disney production. So it's one of the biggest media conglomerates. Actually, at the moment, it is the biggest media conglomerate that we have. Doing a take on, you know, big business is bad and, you know, creatives are good. At the same time, yeah, buy Tron merchandise, go to the Tron ride. Put your quarters in the Tron machine that is at your local arcade at the moment. Yes. And that brings me to the scene that I want to talk about. This is the scene that I keep

thinking about because I think it actually defines the moment we're living in. At the end of the movie, Flynn has defeated the master control program and he got zapped back into the real world. And he arrives by helicopter on the rooftop of the building. He's greeted by his friends and they're all wearing suits now without ties, which is sort of as corporate casual as you can get in the early 80s. And it's implied that Flynn either is now running the company or he's taken his rightful place as a tech mogul somewhere else. And then after Flynn walks off screen,

we switch to time-lapse photography, where the sun goes down very quickly. And at night, the grid of Los Angeles starts to resemble a giant computer grid. It's a very cool shot, but there is something ominous about it because it's implying this system is much bigger than this one company or this one program.

And Flynn is now becoming part of this larger system without realizing it. Steven Lisberger says that was not his intention when he filmed that scene, but he thinks that my theory feels accurate with 2020 or 2021 hindsight. You know, that's been a problem for my generation for quite some time. And I mean, we really followed the Beatles, you know, in the 60s. And, you know, when the Beatles told us to, that we should think this way or that way, or you'd be into this or being that we did those things. And we tried to

emulate them. And when all of a sudden, one day one realized, holy cow, I'm trying to be like them, and they're exceedingly wealthy. And they were anti-establishment. And the Stones were anti-establishment. And Led Zeppelin was anti-establishment. Well, how anti-establishment are you when you're making tens of millions of dollars selling stuff in the marketplace? It's kind of still true. These tech moguls come along and they're anti-establishment and they want to change the world. But then something happens when they get $50 million and $100 million and $200 million and $2 billion and they get shareholders and something strange takes over. What can I say? Fortunately, I don't have that problem. Now, this actually ties into another theory that I have about the sequel, Tron Legacy from 2010. Like the original film, the sequel did okay at the box office and got mixed reviews.

But I think there's a powerful metaphor in the sequel which ties back to that final scene in the original film. The backstory of the sequel is that after the events of Tron, Flynn created a digital doppelganger of himself called Clue. And Clue is literally running the business from the inside, like inside the electronic world. But Clue became a dictator, and he trapped Flynn in the electronic world for decades. The movie is about Flynn's adult son going in to save him. And it's great CGI because Clue looks like Jeff Bridges from the 80s, while Flynn looks like Jeff Bridges now.

In this scene, Clue speaks first. I did everything. Everything you ever asked. I know you did. I executed the plan. As you saw it. You promised that we would change the world together. You broke your promise.

I know. I understand that we would change the world together. You broke your promise. I know. I understand that now. I took the system to its maximum potential. I created the perfect system. The thing about perfection is that it's unknowable. It's impossible, but it's also right in front of us all the time. You wouldn't know that because I did it when I created you. I think this tension between Flynn and his doppelganger works as a metaphor to describe how a tech mogul can still see themselves as a cool CEO wearing t-shirts and flip-flops in the

boardroom without realizing that they've become something even more sinister than the old power brokers that they replaced. Steven Lisberger did not direct the sequel, but he was a consultant during the story development process. It's like somehow to know ourselves, we want to create a doppelganger of ourselves. To know our world, we want to create another version of that world. That's one of the benefits of having artists explore some of these subjects first, because that's what they like to do. They like to find an arena, whether it's space or, you know,

alien life forms or beneath the sea. Before they've been, you know, totally broken down logically by scientists and data crushers. They like to poetically, you know, imagine these things. That was evident to me when we were making Tron. In the last decade, there's been a lot of science fiction about Silicon Valley, but it's nothing like Tron or Tron Legacy. In fact, most of the high-tech sci-fi has been very grounded in the real world. We will click that hyperlink after the break. Introducing Tim's new Infuser Energy Beverages, made with natural caffeine. They come in two refreshing flavors, blackberry yuzu and mango starfruit. Try them today, only at Tim's.

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It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. Daniel Fry is the author of a new novel called The Future is Yours, which he is adapting as a series for HBO Max. It's about a pair of tech moguls that invent a program which can see one year into the future.

The characters think this is a great idea. But of course, unintended consequences happen when the genie gets out of the bottle. happen when the genie gets out of the bottle. The technology in the book threatens to crash the stock market and ignite international World War III and, of course, unravel the friendship between these two guys that started it. I wanted to talk with Dan because he's part of a trend. Sci-fi writers taking on Silicon Valley in a way that does not get too fantastical. It's a genre called near future. There are other examples like the novel The Circle by Dave Edgars, which is about a young programmer who gets her dream job and discovers the company is obsessed with surveillance. There's also The Warehouse, which is a novel by Rob Hart that satirizes Amazon. And of course,

there's a Netflix series Black Mirror. I asked Dan, why are so many writers using near future instead of fantastical sci-fi to try and grapple with what's going on in high tech today? I think that ultimately the reason for that is simply the fact that our world is changing so rapidly through technological innovation that it kind of feels like we're living in a science fiction novel already. There are so many developments in the news, which would have just seemed utterly implausible a couple years ago. But because of technological forces that are fundamentally changing our society and even the way that individual minds are wired, we're getting these outlandish things that are happening in the real world.

And so as writers start thinking about science fiction narratives, it doesn't feel like we need to go so far into the future in order to sort of posit these technological what-ifs. It feels like almost anything you can come up with could happen next year. In writing the book, one of the cliches that Dan wanted to avoid was portraying the people that create the computers or apps or programs that we're all addicted to as evil geniuses or creepy incels. I think that if we look at a lot of these tech companies, the founders of them, in my experience, are genuinely idealists, even utopians about the technology that they're building. Larry Page and Sergey at Google started that company with the model of don't be evil. The Google search algorithm was first designed as a graduate thesis project by

Larry and Sergey, these two engineers. They kind of came up with the underlying code and technology for it and wrote this paper. And in the conclusion of that paper, which is publicly available today, they kind of conclude that ultimately there's no real commercial value to what they've created. Because in order to make money on this, you would have to sell ads. And selling ads would obviously compromise the integrity of the project that they set out. And then obviously they basically go back to that. And just by compromising that one value that they set out there to use YouTube as an example, their business model is entirely built on how many ads they're able to sell, which is entirely connected to how long

people are going to watch the platform. And when you couple that with this AI-driven algorithm that they've built to maximize automatically the amount of time that people are watching, what it ended up leading to was this rabbit hole effect of kind of people encountering increasingly inflammatory political videos and just sort of sliding down this abyss. To be fair, many of these companies are now trying to course correct, or as much as the system will allow them to. The question of free will is one that can feel sort of out there and academic. But as I've been thinking about it recently, it actually feels very immediate and specific. And I think

that so much of us, so many of us have the experience of almost compulsive use of our phones, of our behavior being directed. We can look at other people and clearly identify how their beliefs and behavior have changed as a result of their internet experience. And we can only logically extrapolate that it's happening to us. So I feel like the world of technology that we're living in very genuinely impedes on and endangers or possibly even exposes a lack of free will in our lives. And it didn't take robot overlords or anything. It just took information technology that we were really excited to use. Yeah, it's ironic because like that, I mean, that was the plot of Tron, but they needed this sort of top-down,

heavy-handed AI program to oppress everybody. And then once you topple master control, you know, everybody's free. Yeah, it's not that at all. It is a series of algorithms that are far from being at a level of consciousness or self-awareness that are just very gradually and insidiously redirecting human thought and behavior.

Towards the ultimate goal of selling you stuff or just keeping you addicted to the thing itself? Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. I think that it sort of is like all of them together are conspiring without anyone in charge to keep you addicted to the system itself. There is a phrase in the tech industry called killer app. It refers to an application in a program that is so clever and so unique. Software or the device will always beat its competition so long as it has that killer app. I think the killer app of the master control program is that it was a learning software, and it realized the best way to take over was not with a heavy hand, but to make you feel like you're in charge. You can change its appearance from an ominous big brother face to a cute little icon,

and you can change its voice to make it more friendly, like Siri or Alexa. But in the end, Master Control is changing you, more than you're changing it. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Cheryl Vince, Lars Schmenck, and Daniel Fry. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and imagineworldspot. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you get podcasts or do a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover imaginary worlds.

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