We Thought You Were Dead
One of the few things that irritate me a little about the cinematography of Tron (1982) is that sometimes we don’t see all the cues that make it easy to discern what the characters see and know and react to.
This isn’t a big gripe for me– most of the time I actually like the ambiguity, it makes me think and come up with all sorts of different ideas as I figure out how to interpret things.
But on the first watch, a lot of it was… confusing.
Here’s an example. First, to compare and contrast, here’s a scene that I think actually was pretty clear.
Tank round goes off.
Ram and Flynn’s lightcycles are blown away. Pile of rubble where they landed.
Tron yells, “Ram! Flynn! Do you read me?”
Cut to enemy tank driver saying, “Pursuit force reporting. Two escaped units derezzed.”
Cut back to Tron yelling, “NO!”
It’s easy to see here that Tron believes Ram and Flynn were killed in that tank blast. We see them get hit; we see Tron call to them; we see the enemy confirm their death (unclear if Tron picked up this chatter on the comms, but he seems to have gotten the point somehow) and then we see him react with distress to that confirmation. Pretty clear.
But later, when the tables are turned, and Yori and Flynn are the ones who lose Tron… well, that scene’s less clear, and I had to rewatch it a couple times to be certain what happened.
Yori, Tron and Flynn are on the Solar Sailer, which is traveling along inside a canyon. Sark’s carrier is doing the same, and they’re approaching a point where those canyons converge.
We see Tron, patrolling the end of the Solar Sailer, as he notices the Carrier about to collide with them, and yells, “Sark!”
The moment when the collision happens, slicing the end of the Sailer with Tron on it apart from the rest, and sucking the ruins inside the Carrier– is just a few frames. We barely see that Tron is separated from his companions, and that he disappears behind what appears to be the advancing bulk of the Carrier.
Yeah, this looked to Yori and Flynn as if Tron was getting killed. And it is clear, if you pay close attention. But for someone who tends to watch character interaction more than special effects, it’s easy to miss on the first watch.
A moment of character response, maybe someone yelling “No!”, like Tron in the lightcycle, would have helped.
But we don’t see either Yori or Flynn react to the loss of Tron, at all.
Not until the following scene when they’ve been taken captive in the Carrier, and Yori reunites with Dumont who’s already captive there, and informs him “Tron is dead.” That was the first it became really clear to me that she believed that.
And here, incidentally, we get another slightly ambiguous scene of characters making assumptions.
Sark says: “We have erased that program.” Then, seeing Flynn, he does a double take, saying “No! You were derezzed.”
(The subtitles from my DVD here don’t catch it, but he also goes on to add, “I saw you!”)
Flynn just replies, “Not me, Sark.” To which Sark begins ranting, “There’s nothing special about you, you’re just an ordinary program!”
My initial interpretation, here, was that Sark had thought Flynn was derezzed when his and Ram’s lightcycles were hit. And that he called him “an ordinary program” just as an insult, and probably an attempt to break Flynn’s confidence in having any extra advantage as a User (since his body inside the computer system was basically that of a program.) Which was why Flynn later told Yori, “I still have power. Sark doesn’t know that.”
But this would raise a few questions.
First, Sark did not actually “see” Flynn get derezzed on the lightcycle. It was reported to him, and he seems to have believed it– during his last scene with the MCP on the Carrier, Sark does claim he “took care of that User you sent us.”
To which MCP responds: “Incompetent zero. Now you’ve got two renegade programs flying all over the system in a stolen simulation.” Meaning that they know about Flynn and Yori in the Solar Sailer– they just seem not to know that it’s Flynn there.
So who did they think it was?
Well, that never becomes clear– but the novelization version gives us a hint. Excerpt:
Suddenly, light came up to full intensity in the cell; they all looked to the door. Through it came Sark, filled with an appalling glee. He swept them with his stare, saying, “So, we have erased the program that-”
He stopped as his eye fell on Flynn. When he’d been informed of the capture of the Sailer’s crew, he’d assumed the other program to be of no significance, since he wasn’t Tron.
But now his eyes widened in disbelief. “You! No!”
He’d never seen Flynn close-up, and thought now that Clu had somehow returned from oblivion. “You were de-rezzed,” thundered Sark, “I saw you!”
Flynn looked him over, the tall figure in elaborate armor and vaned casque-helmet, the Dillinger face which now held surprise and confusion, and even a touch of fear.
Flynn smirked, not sure what Sark meant, but quick to play the debonair ghost. “That’s never stopped me before.” Sark reasserted control over himself. “Well, we can take care of that soon enough.” After all, the program had been captured and confined, proving that he had no supernatural powers. This time Sark would see to it that the job was done properly.
Basically: Sark never knew this was Flynn. (Maybe didn’t even know the User was named Flynn, for that matter; I don’t think MCP ever told him.) He didn’t know what Flynn looked like; he’d only seen him from a distance on the Game Grid.
So he thought this was some unimportant rebel program… and then, upon seeing him, thought he was Clu.
(Who’d been derezzed on the torture wall– in the movie, we don’t see proof that Sark was present for that, but he could have been).
So, if we are to take the novelization as a reliable source– this is why Sark doesn’t know that Flynn has power, and why he calls him “an ordinary program.”
Anyway. Back to the topic of Tron’s “death.”
Right after Sark leaves Yori and Flynn on the Carrier, telling them it will derezz with them on it, that’s when we, as the audience, find out that Tron survived. In this scene where he appears climbing on the outside of the Carrier, still unseen by anyone else.
(A scene mainly of interest to the true Tron fan because of the… very lovely view of his backend code. BUT I digress.)
As of this point, everyone else still thinks he’s dead. Yori is pretty much going through the horrors, trying to mourn Tron, not even sure she wants to be alive, while Flynn keeps dragging her along and making her help with stuff. “C'mon! The door!” “Do something with these controls!” ALAS POOR YORI. how she suffers.
MCP and Sark, meanwhile, are busy setting up their zoetrope-of-doom full of Tower Guardians.
That’s when Tron comes along and obliterates Lieutenant Neck-Circuits with his disc, leading MCP to “feel the presence of another warrior on the mesa.”
Yep, he’s on the Black Mesa and he’s Still Alive. And Sark only wants him gone.
But their fight doesn’t last long. Sark becomes Cutty Sark, with his piñata-candy brains spilling onto the floor. And so the MCP resorts to giving him all the power, making him Giant Zombie Sark, to try and distract Tron from his insistent attempts to disc MCP in the neck.
And this, I think, is probably the moment Flynn and Yori become aware that Tron’s not actually dead.
At least, this is the first moment we see them showing any awareness of the battle happening down there.
I mean, there’s a possibility their realization might have come earlier, or later.
(They might have seen Tron fighting Sark and the MCP before they saw Sark go all giant. Or they might not have noticed Tron being there until some time after they noticed Giant Sark.)
But we’ll never know just from the scenes in the movie… because we never once see either of them actually express the realization that Tron’s alive.
However, at least we know that it must have come at some point before Flynn jumped into the MCP.
Because he says he’s doing it “to help Tron”– which Yori later clarifies meant, “to distract the MCP long enough for Tron to get the disc in.”
…Which means that Flynn and Yori’s goodbye kiss happened with full knowledge that Tron was down there waiting for her.
(As I’ve said before, I lean to the interpretation that Program intimacy is non-monogamous by default… and that Yori didn’t know and/or didn’t care what kissing meant to Users… and that she approached the experience mainly as a chance to learn something new that she could try out on Tron later.)
Which all means, thank goodness, that Yori’s “We thought you were dead!” was an expression of relief… and not an attempt to explain to Tron why she’d been learning makeout techniques from Flynn in his absence.
(Would’ve been a pretty terrible excuse for that, honestly.)