Friday 31 December 2010

Tron: Legacy makes a point about the nature of evil

Saw Tron: Legacy.  Like the reviews say, it looks pretty cool (for about 20 minutes) and the music is even cooler, but it really fails on the story level.  You don't care about the characters at all, or like them much.  And nothing they say sounds natural or convincing.  And their success or failure doesn't mean anything to you either way.  Also, Hollywood?  Every villain can't just be Adolf Hitler.  That's getting very old.  There are many flavours of evil, and many evil people to draw inspiration from.  The throngs of people in perfect rows, shouting and wearing black suits with bits of red?  Seen it.

But I could watch a movie with Olivia Wilde's eyes in it for quite a while(d).  And her freakishly wide, alien-beautiful face. Some of God's best work.  (even in a "1920s flapper hairstyles are so futuristic!" wig)

One thing that interested me is that they got The Nature of Evil down perfectly.  From Milton and Dante on, the motivations for characters like God and the devil and angels and so on have made no sense at all.  In the bible, it is very clear that God is the source of all creativity, the spirit which inspires (inspires: gives ideas, gives life/a spirit, breathes in) and is the source of all creativity.  He is the Creator with a capital C, who makes enough kinds of butterflies, beetles, berries and fruit, that Dylan Moran said in his standup routine "fruit is just God showing off.  Saying 'Look how many colours I know!' "

In the bible, God creates, and He destroys.  He destroys stuff that's been created and which is not working out, isn't growing, is going in a bad direction.  He does this so He can replace it with other, newer and better stuff.  The bible suggests He's already got His plans together for Earth Mark II, once we've fully wrecked this one, because we're dumbasses and because He's always coming up with new ideas.

Equally clear is the role of Satan in the bible.  He is from Accounts, from the bean-counting division.  He delights in meaningless time-wasting, traditional, bureacratic, systematic ritual orbiting an empty core of nothingness.  He tattle-tales, accuses and lies about people.  He tries to make God give up on people through his "Oh, that guy's not so great.  If you hadn't made him rich he'd be a right bastard.  Can I take away his wealth and prove my point?" nonsense.  He does not have the best tunes.  He does not improvise fun, innovative and unique riffs on the fiddle better than a human being.  He does not create Hollywood blockbusters, heavy metal and Harry Potter "to lure children."

No, he's the one saying "Oh, you can't call it Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.  Kids will never read a book with 'philosopher' in the title.  No kid will ever read a book this size anyway.  Give up.  Kids these days don't read.  They're all retarded.  And you're just not good enough.  Who do you think you are?  You're wasting your time and will never connect to anyone.  Doubt, doubt, doubt.  Be realistic."

He's the one telling Kevin Smith "Moby...which?You can't have a character reference Captain Ahab in this movie's dialogue.  It's about teenagers.  No one knows who that guy is.  I have an MBA and I don't know who that is.  And we need some tits in the film as well.  See to that. And get a token black character to say 'Sheeeit.  This just got real' and a funny gay sidekick."  In the bible, Satan doesn't so much destroy people and things as he gets other people and things (or the people themselves) to do it for him.

The slow erosion of health, sanity and functionality seen in demoniacs portrayed in the bible?  Shells of people left empty by parasitic things which slowly wear them down to nothing?  We'd recognize that in anyone who is addicted to something like crystal meth or crack.    You take a perfectly sane, healthy, living, breathing, thinking, feeling creature (a creature is a creation of a creator, of course) and turn them into an inert wreck that's not long for this world.  (the picture seen here is of the "Bob" character from the show Twin Peaks, which is partly about how this parasitic spirit erodes Laura Palmer by childhood trauma, molestation, drug addiction, promiscuity and so on until eventually the erstwhile prom queen becomes a worn down, soon-to-be murder victim who finally seeks death)

And yet, in the work of Dante and Milton and other idiots who can't get their character motivations to add up, Satan is actually God's trusted employee, stationed in Hell where he's in charge of things, and job #1 for Satan is making sure that sinners are properly punished, because We All Know how much the devil hates sin and the people who...wait?  What?  That makes no sense.  At all.

In the bible, of course, Satan is wandering around free in our fucked up world, making sure it's getting increasingly fucked upper, which it looks to be getting.  He doesn't seem to need a ouija board or talisman or that kind of thing to exert influence here.  He is here personally.  And there are a myriad people doing his work, appearing as pious, religious, successful, upstanding people, who then screw up other people's confidence, self-image, dreams, health, sanity, welfare and lives.  This voice can be heard every time someone says "Be realistic.  You can't do that.  And besides, you're a weak person, and a bad person whom no one likes.  You'll never amount to anything."  (Satan's work is certainly being done in classrooms across the country.)  Some people succeed anyway.  The message to them is a bit different: "You don't have to help other people, because you're better than they are.  Also, somehow, you are worse than they are.  Have fun.  You deserve it.  Also, you deserve to lose everything because you're a bad person.  This makes you miserable.  Try heroin.  And hookers."

The message is also "If you want to be OK, you need to be more or less like us.  Lacking originality, creativity, imagination, empathy and hope.  Being idealistic is cute, but ultimately fatal in the end."

In Tron: Legacy, Jeff Bridges has (partially) created a virtual world.  He makes a digital version of himself while still young, foolish and ambitious.  He calls it Clu.  Eventually, Clu goes all Hitler and starts enacting genocides and trying to stamp out impurity.  Jeff Bridges' character tells his son something I remember as "Clu can't create.  He can only destroy or re-allocate existing data and programs."

C.S. Lewis said something like that too in his sci fi trilogy.  Good isn't just the counterpart, the opposite partner of Evil.  Evil isn't Good turned inside out.  It isn't a case of Good creating good stuff and Evil creating evil stuff.  It's Good creating, building and destroying and rebuilding, and Evil not creating a damned thing, but instead corrupting, warping, eroding, inhibiting, nitpicking, accusing, judging, backstabbing, devouring and trying to make doubt win out, all while Good is at work trying make things that can last.

So, the bible does not present a black/white, yin yang universe with good and evil, creativity and destruction needing to both exist, being equal complimentary opposites.  In the bible, good actions and intentions can create or destroy (or both), while evil intentions are not well-rounded like that.  In movies like The Matrix and Tron: Legacy, Creator/God figures are always dressed in white and live in big white featureless rooms and zone out a lot when they're not saying enigmatic things with a little smile.  Good is passive, gentle, inactive, boring, uninvolved and "zen."  It has no real capacity to destroy, or even to get involved, except in a purely advisory capacity.  Evil, on the other hand, is witty, sardonic, exciting, fast, active, mobile, innovative, charming and dangerously cool.  It is completely involved. In everything. Tends to wear cool black outfits too.

But in the bible?  The guys dressed in white (the "angels of light"), shining nobly and pointing the finger at people screwing up and judging them to be failed, guilty screwups?  A common guise of the devil (and his minions), walking around seeing who he can get to listen to him and fostering feelings of entitled superiority (and closed-hearted judgmentalism) in the rich and successful.  Evil devours the innocent and makes sure the guilty get no forgiveness.

By contrast, walking around with dirty feet treating whores, drunkards, homeless people and thieves like human beings and listening to their stories while dissing the religious establishment?  Jesus.  He doesn't judge adulteresses, thieves and drunkards.  He judges religious leaders only.

Characterised by "thick blackness," fire, smoke, a sword that leaps out of His mouth and cuts people to the quick if necessary, terrifying eyes that devour in flames everything they see?  God.  God, it seems, is far more "heavy metal album cover" than anyone wants to depict.

In the bible, God is, obviously, behind all creating/creativity/creative expression. Some people's efforts fall a bit short, but He wants them to succeed.  God is a creator and a destroyer.  Creations are usually to express something deep that was in the heart of the Artist.  We are no exception.  Satan is only a defiler of good stuff, a poisoner of wells, an accuser of people who are trying to get by, Grima Wormtongue whispering your own inadequacies in your ear, a cancer, a rot.  He tries to tempt God to repent of having made people and things, and get Him to make/let entropy flood back in and make chaos of it all.  God, for His part, likes good things to last.  Even with music and movies, stuff that is any good at all, tends to last.  No matter how hard they market the shit out of utter crap, no one's even going to remember to try to keep selling it fifty years later.  And stupid little shows that people loved and no one wants to sell anymore? They last.

There are four books of the bible about Jesus walking around just being a guy.  When he wasn't helping people out, he was repeatedly pointing his finger and disapproving and judging.  But it was always the same guys he was pointing at: the pious, religious folk who judged everyone and made them feel guilty and demanded accolades for their piety (which is what they were really in it for), and the exploitive rich, who had the law on their side like trained attack dogs, keeping them rich and protecting their ill-gotten gains from poor people who the law will keep poor.  He and fictional characters like Robin Hood would have agreed about a number of things.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

happy new year