Tron: The Film That Went Inside the Machine

The most-repeated fact about Tron is that the Academy declined to consider it for a visual effects award because the voters felt that using a computer was cheating. The story has been told so often it has worn smooth, and it has survived because it is both funny and almost exactly backwards.

Tron is not a computer-generated film. Roughly fifteen to twenty minutes of it involved computer imagery, produced by four separate outfits — MAGI in New York, Information International in Los Angeles, Robert Abel’s shop, Digital Effects — because no single company on earth could do the whole job. Everything else, meaning every glowing circuit on every costume and every luminous surface in the electronic world, was made by hand. Photographed on black-and-white large-format stock, blown up to cels, and painted, frame by frame, by hundreds of animators working in Taiwan. The film’s look is a backlit animation technique that predates the computer by decades, applied at insane scale. The Academy passed over a film for cheating with a computer that had, in fact, been made almost entirely by people with brushes.

The pitch nobody wanted

Steven Lisberger had an animation studio and an idea he could not shake: that the inside of a computer was a place, with geography and citizens and politics, and that nobody had ever filmed it. He had been watching Pong through a window. He built a demo — a glowing figure called Tron, done in backlit animation — and spent years being turned down.

Disney said yes for the same reason it said yes to The Black Hole three years earlier: the studio was frightened, its live-action division was dying, and its executives had decided that the way to compete was to find something nobody else had. This time they were right. Nobody else had this. Nobody else wanted it either.

The plot is thin and everybody knows it. Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a programmer whose games were stolen by an executive named Dillinger (David Warner), breaks into the company to find the evidence, and is digitised by an experimental laser into the system his own rival now controls. Inside, he finds a world of programs who worship the Users who wrote them, ruled by the Master Control Program, which has been quietly annexing every system it can reach. He teams up with Tron (Bruce Boxleitner), a security program written by his friend Alan, and they go to the tower.

It is a prison-break picture. It is also, structurally, a religious one: an author falls into his own creation, is taken for a myth by the people living in it, and turns out to actually have the powers they credit him with.

What it looks like, and why that still matters

The design team is the story. Syd Mead, who was designing Blade Runner in the same stretch of months, drew the vehicles — the light cycles, the recognisers, the tanks — and gave them a hard-edged industrial logic that made them read as machinery rather than decoration. Jean Giraud, working as Moebius, drew the costumes and the figures, which is why the inhabitants of the electronic world have the elongated, ceremonial grace of a European comics album rather than the bulk of American science fiction. Peter Lloyd did the environments.

What those three produced together is a coherent visual proposition that had never existed: the computer as a nocturnal city of black surfaces and light. Every subsequent depiction of cyberspace, in every medium, is downstream of it. The glowing edge on a dark plane is now such a universal shorthand for the digital that it is almost impossible to see it as an invention. It was invented here, in 1982, by three artists guessing.

The technical constraint produced the aesthetic, which is the usual way these things happen. The backlit animation process could only add light to black — you cannot paint darkness onto a photographic negative — so the electronic world had to be a world where light is the only thing that exists and everything else is void. The reason the inside of a computer looks like that in the popular imagination is that a hand-animation technique in 1982 could not do it any other way.

The craft: the light cycle sequence

The one sequence everybody retains is the light cycle game, and it is worth taking apart because it is the clearest thing in the film.

MAGI produced it with a system called SynthaVision, which built objects out of combined geometric primitives rather than polygons. That constraint is visible in every frame: the cycles are assemblages of cylinders and blocks, smooth-shaded, with no surface detail at all. In 1982 that read as futuristic. Now it reads as strange and beautiful, because nothing else in the history of computer graphics looks like it — the technique was superseded within a few years and never came back.

The reason the sequence works dramatically is that Lisberger gives it rules first. You are told, before it starts, exactly what a light cycle does: it goes fast, it turns at right angles, it leaves a solid wall behind it, and touching a wall ends you. Four sentences. Then the film plays the game straight, and the audience follows every move, because a chase with clear rules is a chase you can think along with. Half the action cinema of the following forty years does not manage that.

The other craft note is Wendy Carlos’s score, which is doing the opposite of what you would expect. The obvious choice for a film inside a computer is pure synthesis. Carlos writes for orchestra and choir and lets the electronics colour it, so the electronic world sounds vast and liturgical rather than mechanical. It is the same instinct John Barry brought to the Cygnus: the machine is a cathedral, and you score a cathedral with voices.

The ancestor

The temptation is to look for a science fiction parent and there isn’t a good one. Tron is descended from The Wizard of Oz, and once you see it you cannot stop.

A person from the ordinary world is transported by a machine into a bright, artificial land governed by an unseen ruler who is far less than he claims. There they meet doubles of the people they know at home, played by the same actors — Bridges is Flynn and Clu, Boxleitner is Alan and Tron, Warner is Dillinger, Sark and the voice of the Master Control, Cindy Morgan is Lora and Yori. The party travels towards a tower to confront the power. Behind it is a man at a terminal. The doubling is not a flourish; it is the entire structural spine, borrowed wholesale.

The second ancestor is the medieval mystery play, and the film knows it. Programs speak of Users the way the devout speak of God, and Sark’s regime is enforcing atheism as state policy. That is a very odd load for a Disney summer picture to be carrying, and it is why the film has a weight its script cannot account for.

For the technical lineage rather than the narrative one, the relevant relative is A Scanner Darkly — another film built by drawing over photographed actors, another one where the labour-intensive hand process is the point and the reason it looks like nothing else. And the film that took Tron’s aesthetic and sold it two years later, to an audience that had rejected the original, was The Last Starfighter.

The case against

The screenplay is functional at best. The characters in the electronic world have one trait apiece, the dialogue explains the world in blocks, and the film keeps stopping to tell you what a program is. Warner is superb — three roles, all of them arch, clearly enjoying himself more than anyone else on the payroll — and Bridges plays Flynn with a loose, amused physicality that carries scenes with nothing in them. Boxleitner is asked to be earnest for two hours and is.

The real-world scenes are dead. Every minute spent outside the machine is a minute the film is worse, and Lisberger cuts back there more than he should because the studio needed a plot.

And the film is emotionally cold. There is spectacle and there is argument, and there is very little to feel. That, more than the box office, is why it took twenty-eight years to get a sequel: Tron is admired rather than loved, and the people who love it mostly love the light cycles.

Where to watch: Disney keeps it in circulation and it has had disc releases of varying kindness. It rewards a big screen and a dark room more than almost any film of its decade, because it is entirely made of light.

Spoilers below

The Master Control Program’s plan is corporate rather than apocalyptic, which is the film’s smartest decision. It is not trying to destroy humanity. It is absorbing other systems — the Pentagon, the Kremlin, anything on a network — because absorption is what it does, and it has been doing it since Dillinger gave it a purpose and stopped supervising. Warner’s voice for it is bored, patrician and entirely uninterested in the programs it destroys. A monopoly with an appetite is a more accurate 1982 nightmare than a robot uprising, and it has aged into something closer to documentary.

Flynn’s arc is the theological one. He arrives in the system as a User, which is to say a god, and spends most of the film unable to do anything godlike — he plays the games, he loses, he runs. What he eventually understands is that his power in this world is real: he can touch the system directly, reach into it, alter it, because he is made of the other kind of stuff. The last movement has him throw himself into the Master Control’s beam, and the sacrifice is literal. The author dies into the work to break it open.

Then the film does the thing that makes it worth arguing about. Flynn comes back out, alive, at his terminal, and gets the company. The evidence surfaces, Dillinger is finished, and the last shot is time-lapse helicopter footage of a city at night — the real world, with its lights on a black grid, cut to look exactly like the world we have just left. Lisberger’s closing argument is that the electronic city and the actual one are the same photograph.

That is the film’s whole thesis delivered in a single dissolve, and it is why Tron survives its own screenplay. A picture that spends two hours claiming the machine is a place, then ends by showing you that your city already looks like it, has earned its ending. Nobody went. It made back roughly its budget, Disney treated it as a failure, and the aesthetic it invented went on to colonise everything — games, album covers, advertising, the way every subsequent film would draw a network. The Academy was right that something suspicious had happened. It was just looking at the wrong department.