Echoes of The Tempest in Tron: Legacy

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8Echoes of The Tempest in Tron: LegacyLaura Campillo Arnaiz

Three decades after the success of the ground-breaking science fic-tion movie Tron (1982), Disney released a sequel, Tron: Legacy (2010). A box office success both in the United States and worldwide, criticism of the movie went from mixed to negative. The general consensus on the film review website Rotten Tomatoes was that ‘Tron: Legacy boasts dazzling visuals, but its human characters and story get lost amidst its state-of-the-art production design’.1 Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert felt the plot of Tron: Legacy was ‘a catastrophe’, and that the film was ‘a 3-D sound-and light show that plays to the eyes and ears more than the mind’.2 Indeed, the dismal script of Tron: Legacy was thoroughly resented not only by critics, but by many fans of the original movie.

Tron: Legacy begins in 1989, seven years after the events featured in Tron. Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), the famous computer programmer, mysteriously disappears after intense work on the Grid, a computer-generated world of his creation. His son, Sam Flynn (Garret Hedlund), is brought up by his grandparents and grows into a rebellious 27-year-old youth who is still haunted by his father’s disappearance. Although Sam is the largest shareholder of ENCOM, his father’s company, he shies away from his responsibilities and instead performs daredevil stunts and practical jokes on the board of directors. One night, Sam receives a visit from his father’s friend Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), who informs Sam that he has received a page from a disconnected number at Flynn’s old arcade. After deciding to investigate the arcade, Sam discovers a hid-den laboratory where he finds a computer connected to a laser, which will unintentionally transport him to the virtual world of the Grid.

On the Grid, Sam meets CLU (Codified Likeness Utility), an artificial intelligence program his father designed in his own image to help him build the new world. CLU, who looks visually identical to Kevin Flynn,

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Echoes of The Tempest in Tron: Legacy 121

if at a younger age, has taken his prime directive of building ‘the per-fect system’ to the extreme, purging the native inhabitants of the Grid (ISOS), corrupting the system’s security program (Tron) and betraying his creator. Unable to return to the real world, Flynn is forced into a 20-year exile to the desolate Outlands, the margins of the digital world, where he lives in isolation with only the company of Quorra, his female confidante and apprentice.

Sam escapes the gladiatorial games CLU forces him to play thanks to the timely intervention of Quorra, and father and son finally reunite. When the trio learns of CLU’s plans to launch an invasion on the real world they decide to make it to the Portal, a gateway that connects both worlds and which would allow them to escape the Grid and delete it from the outside. At the Portal, Flynn confronts CLU and merges with him, sacrificing himself so that his son and Quorra make it back to the real world. The film ends with Sam promising Alan he will start working at ENCOM, and then takes Quorra to see the sunrise on his motorcycle.

A very interesting scene in the movie takes place at Flynn’s safehouse, when Sam surveys his father’s library:

QUORRA: Flynn shared them with me. I’ve read them all.SAM: Hum. Light reading. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, I-Ching. Journey

Without a Goal. Must have a killer ending.QUORRA: […] But between you and me, Jules Verne is my favourite.

Do you know Jules Verne?SAM: Sure.QUORRA: What’s he like?!

Jules Verne seems to have a special place in this library, for not only is he Quorra’s favourite author (she keeps a copy of Extraordinary Voyages in the drawer of her bedside table), but there are two editions of The Mysterious Island in Flynn’s library, as CLU’s henchman will later dis-cover. It should not come as a surprise that Jules Verne features so prominently in Tron: Legacy, as he was a visionary pioneer of the science fiction genre who imagined technologically advanced worlds in several of his books. At the beginning of the movie, Flynn informs us that he has spent years dreaming of imaginary worlds, until one day he got inside his computer to create one. In this context, there is a clear paral-lel between Flynn’s character and the books in his library, the already mentioned The Mysterious Island, but also Crime and Punishment and Journey Without Goal: The Tantric Wisdom of the Buddha by Chögyam Trungpa, which clearly point at Flynn losing the war for supremacy of

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122 Laura Campillo Arnaiz

the Grid against CLU, and his later embrace of Zen philosophy during his exile.

The rest of the books in the library, which I was able to spot when the DVD came out (see Figure 9.1), are consistent with the character of Flynn and his journey inside the computer – among these there is War and Peace by Tolstoy, Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Buddhism – Wisdom, The End of Innocence by Edith Wharton, The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, and Alhacen’s Discourse on Place, a key Islamic philosophical text from the tenth century where its author rejects Aristotle’s concept of space on geometrical grounds and effectively foresees Descartes’ notion of place.3 Interestingly, Shakespeare is present in this library, and not only once, but twice.

The two red books in the picture are King Henry VIII. This is a surpris-ing choice, as this historical play is the probably the last of Shakespeare’s works to be expected in a science fiction movie. However, the choice of King Henry VIII makes sense in the context of Flynn’s story, not because of a special parallel with the play’s plot, but because of a certain rela-tionship with the historical figure of Henry VIII. In Tron: Legacy, Flynn has a double, CLU, and both are rulers of their particularly isolated islands inside the computer, the Grid and the Outlands. CLU is engaged in a war for world dominion, and he is intent throughout the whole movie on expanding the frontiers of the Grid; whereas Flynn strives for the legacy he keeps in his safehouse to survive. This legacy, embodied in the character of Quorra, has the potential to change the world and to begin a Golden Era for humankind, very much like Elizabeth I did after inheriting her father’s kingdom. Another book on the shelf, The History of England, seems to support this historical reading.

Shakespeare is therefore present in Flynn’s library, but not mentioned in the movie. It would seem, then, that the English Bard is purposely overshadowed by the European nineteenth-century writers which are explicitly alluded to, especially Jules Verne. In any case, the appearance of literary authors confirms a trend Richard Finkelstein has observed in some of Disney’s animation movies: ‘High art provides a kind of cultural capital that distinguishes Disney’s products in two ways. In combination with animation, this art enables the corporation to please both educated and uneducated audiences. Walt Disney’s appropriations of “timeless” sources also masks his very specific conservative politics’ (Finkelstein, 1999, p. 181).

Finkelstein uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital (1984, pp. 53–7) to describe Disney’s appropriation of Shakespeare,

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and analyses The Lion King and The Little Mermaid in relation to their Shakespearean predecessors, Hamlet and Henry IV in the first case and The Tempest in the second. The critic concludes that ‘Both films use Shakespeare to authorise their arguments’ (Finkelstein, 1999, p. 181). However, a contrastive argument can be found in ‘Disney’s ‘War Efforts’: The Lion King and Education for Death, or Shakespeare Made Easy for Your Apocalyptic Convenience’, where Alfredo Michel Modenessi calls into question Disney’s dependence on Shakespeare, as the connection between the company’s movies and the Bard’s text is usually established post facto:

All of the above [bits of ‘shakes-piration’ found in The Lion King] belong[s] in a circular pattern where bits of dramatic plots, structures, and characters surely but not exclusively informing a Shakespearian text partake in the making of a serial product, are later recognized as found in Shakespeare as a matter of cultural course, and eventually re-inscribed as ‘Shakespearean’, mostly to provide simple yet effective industrial products with proven grounds for their legitimization and promotion as ‘high-minded and universal’. (Modenessi, 2005b, p. 402).

In my opinion, the case of Tron: Legacy is different from what Finkelstein and Modenessi describe. Whereas Disney can be said to be using ‘Big Literature’ and the classics to grant respectability to its movie, the company seems to sidestep Shakespeare in this process. This could make us wonder whether Shakespeare’s name has been so thoroughly used and abused that he is not useful now to provide cultural authority to a popular culture product. Likewise, we could also wonder whether the function of granting literary authority could be better fulfilled by a number of nineteenth-century European authors who are less well known to the Cineplex audience and who may be therefore perceived as less manipulated. Would this be a sign that, as Gary Taylor points out, ‘[Shakespeare’s reputation] has passed its peak of expansion, and begun to decline’ (1999, p. 198)? Would Tron: Legacy confirm that, as Taylor believes, ‘As Shakespeare gets smaller, the available cultural space for other writers … gets bigger’ (1999, p. 205)? The case is not so simple. Paradoxically, whereas Shakespeare seems to have been overshadowed by other names in literature, his influence permeates the movie’s plot to the core. Indeed, the plot of Tron: Legacy, so vilified by critics and fans alike, draws substantially from The Tempest.

As is well known, Prospero is a magician who has devoted time and effort to the study of the liberal arts, which ultimately cost him the

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duchy of Milan: ‘Those being all my study / The government I cast upon my brother / And to my state grew stranger, being transported / And rapt in secret studies’ (1.2.74–7).

Like Prospero, Flynn’s obsession with his digital studies contains the seed of his downfall, for he becomes increasingly isolated from his family and his company while in the real world. On the Grid, Flynn decides to devote his time to the ISOS, a new digital life form that could change the course of mankind, but his devotion ultimately costs him the dominion of the Grid, for his traitorous creation, CLU, plans a coup and betrays Flynn’s confidence in him, much like Antonio did to Prospero:

… in my false brotherAwaked an evil nature and my trustLike a good parent did beget of himA falsehood in its contrary as greatAs my trust was, which had indeed no limit,A confidence sans bound. (1.2. 92–7)

When he takes over the Grid, CLU’s first action is to corrupt Flynn’s security program, Tron, who is transformed into the brutal Rinzler. In this regard, CLU acts very much like Antonio in The Tempest, who, according to Prospero:

My brother] new createdThe creatures that were mine, I say, or changed ’em,Or else new formed ’em; having both the keyOf officer and office, set all hearts i’th’ stateTo what tune pleased his ear. (1.2.81–5)

CLU’s jealousy hones his resentment against Flynn, making it impossible for him to accept Flynn’s forgiveness at the end of the movie:

CLU: I did everything you ever asked! I executed the plan!FLYNN: As you saw it.CLU: You promised that we would change the world, together.

You broke your promise.FLYNN: I know. I understand that now. … I’m sorry, CLU. I’m sorry. (Flynn opens his arms in a father-like embrace and CLU kicks him to the floor).

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Flynn genuinely forgives CLU’s mistakes, very much like Prospero for-gives Antonio’s faults at the end of the play: ‘For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive / Thy rankest fault – all of them …’ (5.1.130–2). However, Prospero’s words belie his deep hatred of Antonio, whose silence may well be interpreted as his unwillingness to repent.

Further analysis of Flynn and CLU shows their similarities and dif-ferences with Prospero. In The Tempest, Prospero is in control of the events that take place throughout the play, a control which he also exerts over the rest of the characters, most notably his servants Ariel and Caliban. Prospero raises the tempest that will bring his enemies to the island and also orchestrates the wedding mask in Act 4, Scene 1, a magnificent visual spectacle which materialises his will and power. Prospero’s agency contrasts notably with Flynn’s passivity in Tron: Legacy – as a matter of fact, it is CLU’s active and aggressive personality that sets the action in motion. It is CLU who sends a message to the real world, luring an unwitting Sam to his father’s secret laboratory and effectively shipwrecking him into the Grid; it is CLU who orchestrates the gladiatorial games to the cheer and awe of a fervent audience; and it is CLU who is in control of Rinzler, his loyal and subservient slave, whose skills are required by his new master very much like Prospero needs Caliban’s work.

Like Caliban, Rinzler shows a deformed physique, which highlights his non-human nature. He wears a jet-black helmet, reminiscent in shape to a wasp or ant’s head. Red bone lines travel through his suit, being especially remarkable on his gloved hands, which give him a skeleton-like aspect. And whereas Caliban could talk, virtually the only sound Rinzler makes throughout the movie is a ceaseless growl like the clicking of a predator on the prowl.4

However, the most striking similarity between The Tempest and Tron: Legacy can be found in the character of Quorra and her relationship with Flynn. If Miranda is Prospero’s raison d’etre, Quorra is the legacy Flynn wants to gift to the world, his promise of immortality. Quorra lives with Flynn in the isolation of their safehouse in the Outlands, and she is his loyal confidante and skilled apprentice. Like Miranda, Quorra behaves as the dutiful (digital) daughter of Flynn, whom she respects, admires and obeys. As one of the ISOS, Flynn describes her as: ‘[a] flower in a wasteland profoundly naïve, unimaginably wise’. Naiveté can be considered as one of Quorra’s major personality traits, her innocence and child-like amazement evident in both her physical appearance and candid statements.

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In the intimacy of Flynn’s safehouse, Quorra resembles the emotional Miranda we meet at the beginning of The Tempest. Raised on the Grid with apparently no other company than that of Flynn, Quorra has no knowledge of the real world, and can only imagine what things are like outside the Grid. In her conversations with Sam, we realise the extent of her innocence, as when she admits she has never seen the sunrise and Sam describes it for her:

QUORRA: (Looking at the blue light of the Portal) It’s how I imagine the sunrise to be.

SAM: Ah, trust me, there is no comparison. QUORRA. What’s it like? SAM: The sun? QUORRA. Yes.SAM: I never had to describe it before. Warm. Brilliant. (Looks

at her). Beautiful.

Miranda’s lack of knowledge and sense of wonder is also present the first time she sees Ferdinand:

PROSPERO. [To Miranda] The fringed curtains of thine eye advance,And say what thou seest yond.MIRANDA.

What is’t, a spirit?Lord, how it looks about. Believe me, sir,It carries a brave form. But ’tis a spirit’. (1.2.409–12).

Like Miranda, Quorra has received a rich and varied education from Sam’s father, and has read all the books in Flynn’s library. In The Tempest, Prospero refers to the teachings Miranda has received from him in the following way: ‘Here in this island we arrived, and here / Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit / Than other princes can that have more time / For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful’ (1.2.171–4).

In Tron: Legacy, it is apparent that Flynn has also taught Quorra his Zen and Buddhist philosophy, and also the game of Go, very much as Prospero presumably taught Miranda to play chess. Quorra is, how-ever, a seasoned warrior and pilot, and although she cares for Sam, her relationship with him is not one of a full romance. These are the two characteristics that differentiate her from Miranda, who keeps a

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meek attitude throughout the play and falls in love at first sight with Ferdinand.

Finally, I would like to focus on Sam, the primary protagonist in Tron: Legacy. Unlike Ferdinand in The Tempest, who has a minor role in the play, Sam is a key figure in the movie, and we follow his evolution from a sad orphan to a rebellious youth and, finally, to a mature young man. Like Ferdinand, Sam is pulled to the Grid against his will, and his experience in the digital world will be life-changing. He will have the opportunity of meeting with his father, and even though their interac-tion is at first cold and strained, they will reconcile at the end of the movie. The tragic loss of his father, who merges with CLU so that Sam can live, has a deep impact on the young man, who returns to the real world wiser and more mature. Not only does Sam finally make peace with his troubled past, but he seems determined to commit himself to a brighter future regarding his personal and working life. In this regard, both Ferdinand and Sam ensure the survival of their fathers’ legacy, which is embodied, respectively, in Miranda and Quorra. The wedding between Ferdinand and Miranda is the culmination of Prospero’s plans and will bring political stability to the kingdoms of Naples and Milan, unifying both families and reconciling the old and new generations. Similarly, although their future is unclear at the end of Tron: Legacy, Sam is committed to safeguarding Quorra, therefore guaranteeing the sur-vival of his father’s legacy and ensuring its continued and renewed life.

QUORRA. What’s next, Sam? SAM. Guess we’re supposed to change the world.

The ending of the movie brings closure to the events initiated by Flynn in Tron, but also poses many questions and purposely leaves many mys-teries unsolved. As much as Prospero’s appeal for applause at the end of The Tempest invites the audience to enter the play’s world and assume an active role in its culmination, Quorra’s final question invites the audi-ence to see the conclusion of this story by buying tickets for the sequel, which is already in the making. Without the audience’s participation, Flynn’s miracle cannot take place, very much like Prospero’s project cannot be fully unravelled: ‘Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project fails, / Which was to please’ (Epilogue, 5–13).

It is indeed ironic that a plot which so heavily draws on Shakespeare was unanimously considered a fiasco. Nobody has recognised the debt Tron: Legacy owes to The Tempest, except maybe movie reviewer Peter Simek, who saw certain similarities between Tron: Legacy and Julie

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Taymor’s The Tempest following the simultaneous release of both mov-ies in his local Cineplex.5 However, if it hadn’t been for this fortuitous coincidence, it is unlikely that a relationship between this sci-fi hit and Shakespeare could have been established outside Shakespearean academia. The reason is that in a movie where there are no textual cues to The Tempest, where no lines from the play are quoted and where no character is named after the Shakespearean ones, Shakespeare, how-ever present, is not recognised by the Cineplex audience. Still, the fact remains that, with a worldwide gross of over $400 million during its theatrical release, Tron: Legacy has been watched by more people than any other Shakespeare-related movie in the past decades.6

The case this movie presents is coherent with the three recalibrations Shakespeare has undergone in mass-market cinema during the late twentieth century, as Douglas Lanier points out in his article ‘Recent Shakespeare Adaptations and the Mutations of Cultural Capital’ (2010). These recalibrations entail, first, that ‘the presence of Shakespeare’s language is no longer the essential element as it once was’; second, that the Shakespearean narrative has been resituated ‘in a new setting or time period’; and third, that the plays have been recalibrated ‘to the concerns and screen styles of youth culture, still the most lucrative market segment for film producers’ (2010, pp. 106–7). Tron: Legacy, although released in the twenty-first century, continues this trend, for it has effectively removed any references to Shakespeare’s language; it has relocated the plot of The Tempest in a futuristic environment and, like most science fiction movies, it has been largely marketed to a young audience.

However, Tron: Legacy takes these recalibrations one step beyond, for not only does it point at the necessity of redefining our sense of what is ‘Shakespearean’, but it also makes us reconsider the relationship between modern popular culture and its continued attraction to Shakespeare’s cultural authority. If, as Douglas Lanier asserts, Shakespearean cultural capital has traditionally been a ‘relatively fixed marker of cultural difference’, in our postmodern age, ‘the cultural prestige attached to Shakespeare, residual now though it may be, has undergone a recupera-tive transformation. Shakespearean cultural capital now moves freely from investment to investment, from one cultural arena or medium to another, in a search for renewed value’ (2010, p. 104). And indeed, it would seem Tron: Legacy presents us with a very interesting develop-ment. The movie still uses Shakespeare as a figure of cultural capital, but this source of literary authorisation seems insufficient and greatly diminished. As a consequence, and as if fearing the investment is not

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solid enough, Disney accrues extra cultural legitimisation by investing in lesser known assets – the European nineteenth- century writers Jules Verne, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

However, the turn of the screw comes when we realise these authors, who admittedly occupy a remarkable position in the shelf of ‘Big Literature’, have a very weak influence on the movie, an influ-ence which doesn’t go beyond an interesting if anecdotal relationship with its main character, Flynn. Shakespeare, on the other hand, seems to have fallen from that shelf of ‘Big Literature’, but in so doing his influence has become far stronger and pervasive, to the point that The Tempest permeates the whole plot of Tron: Legacy.

In my opinion, this movie exemplifies the paradoxical tensions in the evolving relationship between popular culture and Shakespeare. Once a source of potent and unquestionable cultural capital, Shakespeare seems to have become ‘an object of ambivalent desire for popular cul-ture’ (Lanier, 2007, p. 94); a still productive source of cultural authority whose value is no longer measured by the traditional standards of past centuries. We will have to wait until the release of the sequel TR3N to see if this tendency continues, but, for the time being, it seems that with Tron: Legacy, we can have our Shakespeare and eat it too.

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Echoes of The Tempest in Tron: Legacy

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