His Zen Thing, Man

The itinerant 90's. I carried with me, from state to state, nation to nation, a copy of the Tao Te Ching. In hindsight it wasn't necessary, it was really one passage that hit home every time:

The Tao is like a bellows:
It is empty yet infinitely capable.
The more you use it, the more it produces;
The more you talk of it, the less you understand.
Hold on to the center.

I take these words to heart, and consider them with the Gospel of John the finest examples of spiritual wisdom produced by our race. Because I'm qualified to make such assertions. Back off.

Something else on which I'm an authority, and I think readers will agree, is TRON. The main character in both films knows a little something about spiritual wisdom.

Zen hacker Kevin Flynn is unique in the annals of science fiction. Nowhere else can you find a guy so actively indifferent to his circumstances. Zapped into the computer? No problem. Improvise a solution and don't sweat the small stuff.

Trapped in the computer for twenty years? Pfft. Catch up on yoga. Grow a beard and wear white Zen-appropriate robes. Do the Yoda thing, man. Don't play by the so-called rules of the game and remove your self from the equation.

Of course, any resemblance to Jeff Lebowski is pure coincidence. Played by the same actor, true, but Jeff Bridges has played many kinds of dudes and Kevin Flynn just happens to be the top of the pig pile.

I went through my dude phases. I'm not an actor, in the theatrical sense. Usual stuff people do, stumbling around trying to grab onto something, anything that makes sense. Even came up with a word for myself: idiosyncretic. A funky portmanteau, I know. What do you expect from a blog called zeitheist? This is where language comes to be mangled. Like Stephen Hawking's theory of black holes, where information is sucked in and spit out in a state of violent rearrangement. That's this blog all over.

Idiosyncretic is what today people think of as the mashup, in spiritual rather than musical terms. Silly word, representative of piling up wisdom from every corner of every belief system you get your hands on. Sooner or later that pile starts to make sense and you realize that you own it. Takes some dude phases (and phrases) to do it, but you get there.

Anyhow.

Flynn takes it all in stride. Whatever misfortune falls his way, he goes with the flow. Chips are down, he leaps to do the right thing. "You're messing with my Zen thing, man," but he goes to it. Things calm down. Flynn goes back to meditating, to "knock on the sky and listen to the sound." Not many sci-fi heroes talk like that.

Knock on the sky and listen to the sound. Probably sounds like a pile of mixed-up something. That's what is so weird about Kevin Flynn: he's not trying to tell you what you want to hear, not like every other hero you encounter. How many of them talk in such a way it makes you think?

How many people talk like that?

TRON: Legacies

The countdown is over. Have you seen it? After decades of anticipation I found TRON: Legacy entertaining, thoughtful and, with the exception of a computer-generated face that looked like a computer-generated face, everything I hoped it would be. Travelling hundreds of miles to see it with my oldest friend and his son skewed my objectivity and in all honesty it would have had to be an unmitigated disaster to rate any less, but I liked it. A lot.

It was the Year of the Geek when we met, my friend and I, the same year of the original TRON's release, yet 1982 seemed a long time ago in a galaxy far away as we stood at the front of the line for its sequel. His seven-year-old son brought an identity disc along, a toy replica from their summer visit to the elecTRONica exhibit at Disneyland, and afterward as we ate dinner and digested what we had seen kept it close at hand like he was ready to dive back into the game grid at any second.

For sights and sounds a peerless spectacle, were it not for one glaring problem we'd have unanimously embraced TRON: Legacy right then and there as the first great sci-fi classic of a new generation. It doesn't cross the uncanny valley. Common to animation, the uncanny valley is what you get when a face doesn't look real. The more animators attempt to realistically render a face, the steeper the valley wall. Pixar manages to climb out every time, but they are alone in this category.

The adversary in TRON: Legacy wears a computer-generated face that looks uncanny as can be. Every time he appears, you want to reach up and slap that stiff mannequin face. Every movie has its flaws and this one's has cartoony eyes and a stiff upper lip that imitates a gumming action when rubbed against its stiff lower lip, like the villain just put his dentures out. Weird. Distracting. Less Grandpa Tron and more light cycles, please!

Was that all we talked about over dinner? Of course not. Between bites of taquitos and tacos, we griped briefly about the uncanny valley problem and then got back to remembering the movie's many fantastic scenes. It was a great movie. The legacy of 1982 lives on.

TRON: Legacy has so much that is entertaining and fun. The breathtaking light cycle sequences could go on forever. Jeff Bridges is terrific as an aged Zen hacker. Balletic scuffles with discs flying hot and furious are dazzling. Great stuff. Honestly, I can't wait to see it again.

One Week!!!

Legacy vs Lebowski

What's Your Definition of Cool? My attempt at machinima polemic tackles the timeless question: