It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with Genevieve Koski and Scott Tobias. On the first half of this episode, we discussed Stephen Lissberger's 1982 film, Tron, in which a programmer is dragged inside a computer to take a symbolic video game journey alongside programs

resisting an evil master computer program. In this episode, we'll consider a film based on a book

that was heavily inspired by Tron. Ernest Klein's 2011 bestseller Ready Player One also features

people entering a video game and fighting the man, but in very different ways and with a lot more

controversy. Recently, Vox.com featured a piece by Constance Grady called The Ready Player

One Backlash, explained, which tried to pick apart how Klein's Ready Player 1 went from being

considered a fun, largely celebrated, largely positively received novel about pop culture, to

being decried as an annoying exercise in empty nostalgia. The book has become kind of a

shibboleth online, a love it or hated experience. People don't just have strong reactions to it.

They often turn those reactions into deep-seated emotional stances. They identify with the book

personally and resent people who don't like it, or they hate the book and get angry with people

who defend it. Grady makes an interesting argument that the watershed moment for the book was GamerGate, the online movement that exposed the deep toxicity, entitlement, and anger within certain segments of the video gaming community. After Gamergate, she says, attitudes like the one that produced Ready Player 1 are no longer in vogue, and its content is no longer approachable as light entertainment. Some of this resentment is certainly slashed over into Steven Spielberg's big-screen adaptation

of the book, which changes a lot of the particulars of the story, but largely respects it

in terms of its broad plot parameters.

In both versions, the world populace is largely retreated into a virtual reality universe called

The Oasis, where they can live out their

fantasies and escape their problems. The Oasis was created by a man named Holiday, who, upon

his death, turned the place into a giant puzzle based around the 1980s culture that fascinated

and obsessed him. Whoever solves his puzzle and wins his quest will gain complete control

...