I have no interest in explaining to you why Tron: Legacy is good. It’s a sequel nobody asked for, featuring one of the most bland leading performances in recent memory, and Jeff Bridges pretty much just sits around in the robe he was probably already wearing in his trailer. But the visuals and the Daft Punk soundtrack combine to create a world that, while never completely believable, is fascinating. Daft Punk also makes a cameo appearance, but I don’t know how you could be sure it’s actually them. Anyway, If you don’t want to absorb yourself in this world of candy-coated neon and “bio-digital jazz” (man), then very little I can say here will convince you otherwise. The truth is, I don’t care whether Tron: Legacy is good, but let me tell you why it matters to me. 

This story, and this entire website, begins in 2011, but really it begins, as I did, four decades ago, with a series of worthless, abusive domestic partners endured by my mother, including, naturally, my father. We’re talking a perfect streak of human dogshit which would persist until she met my stepfather Rich in 2003. Rich was a minister at a non-denominational church, which meant that while he didn’t exactly meet the religious qualifications of my devoutly Catholic mother, it was a close enough match. They got to spend hours arguing the finer points of the Reformation and Transubstantiation, all the while secure in their mutual belief in a loving Savior, and the power of their own love. They travelled the country, taking photos and planning novels and poems. It was a life so perfectly suited for the both of them that it’s hard to imagine a heaven more glorious. 

By the time she met Rich, my mom was almost fifty years old. Imagine a life where your own father didn’t care enough to stick around and you’ve spent decades kicked around, cheated on, and gaslighted. Then, after all those brutalizing years, you find a ray of hope. How fiercely would you hold onto that hope? And what would you do if you lost it? 

My favorite part of calling my mom in those years was the beginning of the call, because the phone sat by Rich’s side in his trusty lounge chair, so his was the first voice I heard whenever I’d call. His dulcet, calming tone always put me at peace, often in preparation for the more dramatic conversation I’d have with my mother once she was on the line. In fall of 2011, shortly after starting this website on November 11th, that calming voice quivered with the news that his leukemia, which he’d fought for more than a decade, had spread into his stomach and other systems. The prognosis was clear, and there wasn’t much time left. I consoled them both as much as I was able, and told them that I’d rearrange my holiday schedule to spend as much time as I could with him before the end. 

By the night I arrived, which was Christmas, it was immediately apparent how far Rich had deteriorated. He was confused and scared, and had regressed to a child-like state. He was supposed to stay in bed, but he would get up as soon as we took our eyes off him for a second, even trying to take a bath in their large claw-foot bathtub. Had we not caught him, he could have had a terrible fall. The doctors agreed that in-home hospice wasn’t the ideal situation for him, and so he was transferred to the hospital. 

As it happened, this hospital had a brand-new hospice wing, which featured large individual rooms and a little cubby in which families could sit and even sleep over if they wanted to. The next week was a blur of phone calls and visits with doctors and social workers. Chaplains and nurses became our entire world. I met Rich’s kids and grandkids, and many of his friends and neighbors stopped by. All the while, my mom and I stood watch. I slept, as best as I could, on the padded bench in the cubby while mom never left the recliner next to Rich’s bed. Days and nights bled into each other as we waited for the inevitable. 

Oh, right, Tron. 

Though we were dedicated to being there with Rich for as long as we possibly could, it was hard to get any actual sleep in that room, especially with staff constantly checking in on him. And so, after a few days, some of Rich’s closest friends took up the watch for a few hours so I could go to their house, shower, and get some true rest. As it happened, true rest was still impossible to find. I needed something to focus on that wasn’t Rich’s impending death, so I tried flipping through channels. As it happened, Tron: Legacy, which had bombed in theaters a year before, was in constant rotation on Starz. Out of blank curiosity, I turned it on, and found exactly what I was looking for. 

For two hours, I wasn’t exhausted, I wasn’t grief-stricken, I just was. For two hours I simply existed in a world where heroes rose and villains fell, but absolutely none of it mattered. It was an artificial representation of an artificial world, and the movie was perfectly aware of that fact, as were the performers. Jeff Bridges knows how ridiculous his dialogue is - you can tell by the gleam in his eye as he delivers his lines - and yet, he and all the actors seem enveloped by the wonder of the costuming and the sets and the endless neon. The coldness of the world appealed to me at that moment, because it wasn’t an exhausting world of nonstop action and wall-to-wall jokes, like Fast and the Furious or seemingly every comic book movie. Even the action in Tron: Legacy is meditative and precise. 

And therein lies my point - it’s not just that the movie which soothed me in that horrible week “happened to be” Tron: Legacy, it had to be Tron: Legacy. No other film would have been as absorbing, as calming, as healing. It truly is biodigital jazz. In video game terms, because it seems appropriate, Tron: Legacy restored my health bar. And only that movie could have done that. The other movie in constant cable rotation that week was Easy A, but I won’t be writing an essay about it. 

Of course, the story ends as you know it will. Shortly after the New Year, Rich left the world, surrounded by my mother, myself, his sons, and his friends. We’ve tried as best we can to go on without him in the years since, and sometimes I marvel that such a relatively short time in our lives could have made such a lasting impact, but Rich was like that, an absolute combo breaker of a man, after which your life cannot be the same as it was before. Mom will always mourn Rich, but she has never again chosen a man like she so frequently did before him. 

As for Tron: Legacy, I haven’t seen it in a long time. I’m sure if I revisited it, its obvious weaknesses would stand out to me. But it doesn’t matter. It’s ridiculous to have to defend any piece of work that truly reaches us, for whatever reason it reaches us. It doesn’t make any logical sense that the emotion I feel when I think of this completely unnecessary sequel to an 80’s movie that I genuinely do not like is gratitude, but nobody ever said this world was logical. 

Matt Guerrero is the founding editor of Drunk Monkeys, and producer of the Drunk Monkeys Logcasting podcast. He is currently pursing a Masters in Pastoral Care at Loyola University Chicago.