One more thing I love about the 1982 TRON movie (yes, yet another thing!) is how subtle some details are.
This is, of course, in addition to all the parts that feel genuinely unfinished and not-well-thought-out, or are unintended side effects of some technicality in filming. I mean, I love those parts too! I love trying to figure out exactly where in between scenes Flynn could have asked Ram about Tron, since we see Ram claiming he did, even though he clearly didn’t during either of the two times he was in the cell with Ram (because the part where he did ask him was cut from the script)…
…I love theorizing about the program Sark defeated in the lightcycle battle of the first scene, and whether he really reappears as a warrior-elite lightcyclist in the scene where Flynn breaks out of the game grid? (The same actor seems to reappear, probably because of limited cast. But, in-universe, does that mean he’s a different program by the same User? Or did Sark spare his life on the condition that he’d defect to the MCP?)…
… And I love trying to come up with a reason why blue is the Bad-Guy color for lightcycles, despite being the Good-Guy color for armor circuitry (the out-of-universe reason is they decided on Blue=Good after all the computer animation on the lightcycles was done already, but… couldn’t there be a reason within the story as well?)
My pattern-recognition-program brain loves all of that– to me it’s just a bunch of neat puzzles to solve!
And in addition to those accidental puzzles, there are also plenty of details that clearly had thought put into them, but in return also require some thought from the viewer.
Ram’s User is one example of that. Even though he’s just credited as “Popcorn Coworker” at that point, it must have been intentional that he’s played by the same actor as Ram and is also cubicle neighbors with Alan, in a “mirroring” of their programs being cellmates. But in the original movie, this goes by in a brief, easily-missed scene, and wasn’t made any clearer until Legacy and The Next Day came out. Audiences in the ‘80s could have figured it out, paying enough attention, but it’d take effort.
There are plenty of other examples of stuff like this, many of them just in the props and scenery– Alan’s “Gort Klaatu Barada Nikto” cubicle sign; Yori’s name appearing on the monitor when the laser activates, and so on.
And the Bit thinking that Flynn is its program, with the reason implied by the unspoken fact that Clu was its program and they look the same. The scene of Flynn absorbing circuit-color from a guard, clearly without meaning to or understanding how it works– but it makes perfect sense when you realize he probably intended to steal a uniform for disguise, and his User-Power acted on his intent to disguise himself and simply transferred the red color to him. It’s a beautiful goldmine of puzzles!
And then… then there are the social subtleties; the puzzles of emotion and intention, half-concealed within the acting.
Now, as someone who’s spent a lot of my life struggling with social challenges and unspoken, unclear social rules, that sort of subtlety is… not always my friend.
But, in a movie like this… a beautifully complex film that’s already such a wealth of half-hidden mysteries… I can, on occasion, enjoy the emotional subtlety, seeing it as just another puzzle to figure out.
There are so many cases of a character expressing something, on the surface, that may not be quite what he’s feeling deep down. For instance…
Flynn and Lora are amicable exes, seeming to harbor no resentment about their breakup. When Lora brings her new guy, Alan, to visit Flynn at the arcade, Flynn is all laughs and smiles, showing nothing but happiness…
And yet, later, we see that laughs and smiles from Flynn don’t always mean happiness.
After seeing him use a cheerful face to cover up whatever anger, fear and despair he must be feeling about Dillinger and the MCP, we start to wonder… how many of the darker feelings about his past with Lora might be covered up in the same way?
Tron, too, is a master of repression. Honestly, sometimes I think he took the directive “Secure and Protect the System, Stop Bad Things from getting through the Walls!” and applied it disproportionately to the walls of his own dingus self.
Look at him speedrun a dozen stages of bottling-up-the-grief, upon learning that Ram didn’t survive:
And then, look how calm and cheerful he seems to be, when faced with the potentially faith-shattering revelation that the gods don’t know WTF they’re doing.
Now, I personally think this isn’t a case of emotional repression; it’s a case of “Tron does not actually believe that for a second.” He is not, at this point, at all convinced that Flynn really is a User.
His choice to say “Stranger and stranger!” instead of “Bullshit!” is the only repression here, and, in my opinion, it’s an act of diplomacy on Tron’s part. Tron knows that whoever this guy is, he’s gonna have to keep working together with him for at least a while, so he decided not to start any unnecessary conflicts over whether he believes the User thing.
Here’s another subtlety, at the end, when Tron and Yori are reunited.
Now, I don’t mean Yori’s explanation of what happened to Flynn, which is unusually non-subtle here. With so many details of the film’s plot so expertly revealed through Showing rather than Telling, it’s a surprise to see Yori explain in such clear detail just what Flynn did, and just how it helped Tron defeat the MCP… when we, as the audience, already saw all that happen, and could figure it out as well as we could figure out any of the other, more subtle bits of the plot that aren’t outright explained to us.
No, the subtlety here is in Tron’s reaction. He’s happy to see Yori, yes– but when she starts talking about how great Flynn was, he gets a stone-faced, tight-jawed look to him, like he’s… really not all that happy to see his partner fangirling so hard over that doofus.
He looks like he might be giving some very critical thought to just where Yori might’ve learned that “kissing” thing she just taught him, and struggling with some… complicated feelings about that.
Really I think there is lots of evidence that the Programs (Tron, Yori and Ram) all have complicated feelings about Flynn. To me it seems clear that even when they don’t realize he’s a User, all three feel the pull of his User-power, perhaps to the point of overwhelming their better judgment.
All three have scenes where they seem irresistibly attracted to him. Though of course Yori’s the only one who actually went through with the kiss that… all three of them seemed to be gearing up for.
But just because Tron understands what it feels like to lose control a little, getting swept away in the attraction of a User’s energy…
well, that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it happening to Yori.
Personally I don’t see it as jealousy, in the traditional monogamous User-world sense. I see it as more of:
“you do realize that guy is kind of a dumpster fire of a person, even if he is a User? I know what his energy does to you, I felt it too, and that is why I’m… concerned. He has God Powers, but by his own admission he does not really have a clue what he’s even doing with them, so… well, I don’t know if he’s gonna come back here again, but if he does, please please be careful around him, okay?”
I swear. This movie has infinite subtext to explore. I am gonna keep finding things for YEARS.
Oh! The kissing thing, also, has an element of subtlety to it.
We are never explicitly TOLD that kissing didn’t exist between Programs until Flynn introduced it.
But we readily accept it as canon, because of the combination of
Tron’s surprised-and-delighted reaction to Yori’s kiss:
and
2. the almost-kisses that kept happening before Yori learned to do that (and I’m not just talking about the ones between Flynn and his dudes-being-bros)…
My headcanon (I’ve written fanfic on this, so sorry if this is old-infodump, but I love this headcanon) …is that there was something screwed-up with permissions in the System until Flynn helped fix it.
Kissing didn’t occur to anyone until Flynn showed up– but that was just because the permissions on it were blocked.
And, out of all the programs, Yori (the laser-program, whose job involves being aware of the Veil Between Worlds) had the clearest sense that something was up with that.
It ended up taking the combination of Yori and Flynn’s awareness to identify and fix the problem.
“Hey, Flynn?”
“Yeah, Alan?”
“What’s with this latest patch note on the ENCOM system?”
“What patch note do you mean?”
“The one that says 'kissing is now allowed’?”
“Well, ah… all I can say is that I took the time to make a little bugfix while we were breaking in last week.”
