TRON: Legacy (2010)
Last year's TRON: Legacy marked a large step in our cinematic culture. It signified a loss of reverence for the images of the Hollywood vernacular. The question no longer concerns the ethics of exploring the boundaries outside the frame, but rather the boundaries of life and death (time and space) as they exist in the lexicon of our language of images.
We as filmmakers and as a culture have long since been able to see anything we want on screen. Any desire we wish to project can indeed be projected in light and shadows. What has stopped us from exploiting our seemingly limitless grasp of the computer generated image is an arbitrary sense of reverence; an ethical barrier that has, for instance, prevented us from remaking Gone With The Wind in glorious high definition with a cast of computer generated dead celebrities. These images are deified through memory. A fourth generation nostalgia attached to a period in time and a sense of aesthetics.
TRON: Legacy is a step in the right direction. A film that, without remorse, has resurrected a person that existed in a series of finite spaces (frames), and ceases to exist today outside of memory (however repeatable those frames may be). The Jeff Bridges of the past is pit in a duel against his present self, a self that now preserved ceases to age. A battle between a memory and a memory of a memory; essentially a mirror of Hollywood's duel of ethics. The comfort found in the inevitability of aging in our Hollywood relics ("the ethical") vs. the possibility of an ageless, imortal movie star ("the unethical"). The cinema has allowed us to defy the laws of nature, but we are now allowing ourselves to defy our misplaced sense of ethics concerning a reverence for the antiquated. Unwritten guidelines rooted in an invented nostalgia.
When we lose this reverence for the image we can break the image; opening it to deconstruction. The creation of a 'cinema of paradox.' Real/synthetic, aging/ageless, mortal/imortal, etc. Images that at one point existed simply as images (juste une image) now contain an inherent plurality, because of the paradoxes they suggest (une image juste). The cinema in coming years will find itself as a reference point for intersecting histories. A visual accumulation of all that preceded it, as well as the memories and nostalgia, invented or otherwise, that an audience will unwittingly project back towards the screen. The culmination of which is memory projected onto its signifier.
