'Tron: Legacy' and the Jewish Question

'Tron: Legacy' and the Jewish Question

Forget about the rerelease of Shoah; for a Holocaust film geared towards the digital generation, go see Tron: Legacy.

Much like the 1982 original—one of the great, unheralded masterpieces of contemporary American cinema—the sequel is, in large part, a tale of religious persecution. The movie’s villain is Clu, a computer program run amok; much like anyone who’d ever been exposed to Windows 7, Clu is enraged by the existence of glitches and errors, and dreams of a perfect world. His first step en route to world domination is capturing his programmer, Kevin Flynn. His second step is genocide, directed against the ISOs, sophisticated and self-generating programs that are human, all too human, and therefore imperfect, all too imperfect. Flynn and his son, aided by the last of the ISOs, battle Clu and his minions against a backdrop of Wagnerian religious imagery that includes an Olympus-like mountain abode, a character named Zeus, and Jeff Bridges in white clothes and a white beard, looking a lot like what we, in our happier moments, imagine God to look like.

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