Is Tron Legacy About Socialism?

One of the things I love about WordPress is the site-stats page, which gives you a detailed report on how many people view each page and what search phrases direct people to your site. I noticed one of the search phrases that directed someone to my site today was the question, “is Tron Legacy about socialism?”

I don’t know if you can definitely say the movie is “about socialism,” but you can definitely say it is not very free-market friendly.  One of the memorable early scenes in the movie takes us inside the board room of ENCOM just moments before the launch of their software platform. Ed Dillinger, the chairman of ENCOM’s board, is portrayed as a money-hungry antagonist who wants to exploit the poor by releasing virtually the same platform every few years, with only minor changes, in order to increase profits. Sam Flynn, the youthful ideologue, swoops in just in time to upload the platform to a public domain for the public to download for free. Profits are definitely treated as evil by this film, which is ironic considering the huge profit the film is set to rake in over the holidays.

Also, please remember this film stars Olivia Wilde who is a radical Leftist even by Hollywood standards. However, all things considered, I think it would be more accurate to say that Tron Legacy promotes an “ultra-progressive” agenda than garden-variety socialism. The philosophy spouted by Kevin Flynn is definitely a Utopian view shared by socialists, Marxists and communists, but it takes a much more spiritual (Eastern based) approach than the average socialist could stomach.