It dawned on me as I watched Tron that perhaps the right person was sitting in Encom’s EVP chair all along. Now don’t get me wrong. He was a ruthless, immoral bastard by any sense of the archetype. But consider the following:

It started out with this guy who wrote a couple basic video games. Great, right? Then along comes this guy who steals the video games and sets himself in motion to become an EVP. You know the whole saying, good artists copy, great artists steal, yada yada. Then he invents artificial intelligence.

Yup. Ed Dillinger freaking invents AI.

As someone with a computer science background, it occurs to me how great an achievement this is–granted, the characters live in a universe where they invented a machine capable of transferring a human consciousness into a computer.

Couple this with the fact that the company is doing great, they’ve somehow acquired or developed the most sophisticated laser technology in the world and are no doubt making great strides towards enriching their shareholders. When you get right down to it, Ed Dillinger seems to have some of the basic character traits that correlate with success. He maintains a social network and appearance (as most likely outlined with the CES appearance), he is ruthless, sneaky and ambitious (with Flynn’s programs), he is incredibly intelligent (MCP), and he thinks ahead (you don’t get to EVP from Software Engineer by creating a few video games).

Contrast this with Flynn, who relates to the target audience of the film. He is socially excluded, plays video games, and is pretty much a big kid. But he is moral and is on the side of justice.

Flynn would most likely destroy Encom if put in charge of anything business related. Sure, make him a senior design architect or fellow … but he’s no Ed Dillinger.

-j