Cinema

Video games

Peter Ackroyd

Tron i ( A', Odeon Leicester Square)

1read somewhere once that the late Mr ,. wait Disney, known as 'Dizzy' to his iriends, had himself frozen in a kryogenic chamber, where he no doubt still lies. He is not dead. He is, as actors say, 'resting' — arid waiting for that time when the in- curable disease of which he was about to die can be treated. That is pure speculation, of course, but it fits the image of a man who !Pent his life defying or distorting nature, fitorianising animals and dehumanising peo- i,e' He would, I imagine, be proud of the ..,7est production from Disney Enterprises, iron.

v, This is a film about computers and those ,A11° operate them. From the beginning, it %low,. 1 " a somewhat spiritual attitude i:ow.ards contemporary technology. There !!■ it seems, a world of 'users' which 'lies on /the outside of the video screen', but there is I also so a world of 'programmes' which 1 esembles our own: 'because the users have icrheated this new world, part of us lives, anserefOre, on the other side of the screen'. I ,-"'. not sure about the haphazard use of cotherefore' but the general description is r.nrreet. The technology which we construct csn'iects our own image of ourselves; the i'MPuter happens to represent the self- till,..age which we have created in the late wentieth century. rate strange chance my thesis was corrobo- ant,,ed hY a report in last Friday's The Times e'' b an equally odd coincidence, it was autacerned With the influence of the late or ..teast lateish Mr Disney. Disney Enter- !rises have recently constructed an 'Ex- ceritnental Prototype Community of

:Morro"; one of the features of this beterDrise is a geodesic dome in which can

.40seen a three-dimensional re-enactment of ,°°°. Years' progress in communications b,,' Is called 'imagineering' and it is staffed isi androids' who mimic the behaviour of Tan beings through a technique known san.dio-animatronics'. prn° It ought to come as no surprise that ge:n is the first example of 'computer- • ,erated Dens , animation', which is what hap- , to,,, woen you subject a conventional car- I po-:' to imagineering. It is set in a contem- 10.karY world where the only business seems at11 tiue hat of computers, and the only relax-

14 is the playing of computerised video-

,. Le A Young programmer — or 'user' an as been defrauded of his inventions by 10 uiuscrupulous colleague; he is attempting I tigacIalmi his rights to ownership by using a th r't IC Computer's memory circuits. But least the are those who want to stop him, not ' the computer itself which, through

some complicated laser technology, dissolves the young man (played by the fresh-faced Jeff Bridges) and reassembles him inside its own micro-circuits.

Inside this computer there is another world, a cross between Wonderland and Star Wars with a bit of Fantasia thrown in, where miniature programmes have taken on the characteristics of their inventors. 'I was an actuarial programme,' one of them ex- plains, 'working for a big accountancy company': he just likes helping people. But if there are good programmes there are also evil ones, reckless creatures who imagine themselves to be self-created and regard the world of the 'users' as a primitive supersti- tion. They seize the good programmes and torture them — 'Send him to the Games', the master control screams; and of course he means the video-games The analogies with early Christianity are not developed, but they are there all the same, adding a somewhat arch tone to what is a conven- tional adventure film, with its heroes and villains, pursuit and suspense. The purpose is, on one level, to humanise computers so that we will learn to treat them as friends and companions — even, perhaps lovers: rather like animals. And it is inevitable that within a few decades cer- tain arrangements of micro-circuits will develop a 'character' which will be associated with human personality. But the other purpose of Tron is to turn contem- porary hardware into a source of wonder part of a purely visual culture in which spec- tacle obliterates everything else, erasing thought and imagination as the eye watches little green signs creeping across the screen.

The director, Steven Lisberger, has in that respect at least done his job well. The screen is bathed in a blue light as vortexes, spirals and graphs of light cartwheel across it. Objects turn into lines of light, and light is transformed into objects. The stomach churns, as it would on a roller-coaster, as the screen shifts and moves so that it seems to hover on two or three planes at once; the camera swoops through whirlpools of light and emerges within a network of dots and bleeps. It is almost as if the crossword at the

'I want something a bit special — will you marry me, settle down and raise a family.'

back of the Spectator had come to life.

Even the human world, which is glimpsed fitfully throughout the film, takes on the cold glitter of this computerised order. Human beings walk down lighted corridors, across polished floor& where they see only their own reflection; the city is seen from the air as a complex assembly of bright points. We are as much part of 'the system', it seems, as the computer program- mes themselves.

None of this would matter very much if it were not for the fact that the fantasy of technology, bearing the coldness of all fan- tasies, did not exert so powerful an in- fluence upon people who should know bet- ter. The world of computers has been the stuff of daydreams and nightmares for some time, but now it is being heralded by businessmen and politicians as the brave new world. The fact that it represents the death of the mind does not seem to trouble them: no doubt they would be perfectly at home in Disney's new city.