We watched the animated movie Ron’s Gone Wrong (IMDb, Wikipedia) over the weekend. It occurred to me that one could read it as a dream in the mind of Bubble, the mega-company that makes Ron and all the other B-bots.
Bubble is a barely disguised Apple/Facebook mashup. Its “B-bots” are a persuasive guess at what Apple-made iBots equipped with Facebook social media surveillance would be like.
Marc and Andrew
The geek-CEO “Marc” (with a “c,” folks, makes all the difference) and business-obsessed COO “Andrew” are obvious dream-personas of Bubble’s. Imagine (if you can) an idealistic, Black Mark Zuckerberg and an evil, moneygrubbing Tim Cook. Older viewers might be reminded of Steve Jobs and John Sculley. They’re archetypes of innocent youth (colorful, naïve, insecure) and bloodless greed (pale, vindictive, calculating).
Marc and Andrew make a good Ego/Shadow pair, with one bobbing to the surface as the other is submerged. Given the villain-hero dynamics, evil Andrew is saintly Marc’s shadow. However, Marc is also Andrew’s shadow, representing values the COO scorns, like naïveté and irresponsibility. This is a reminder that companies-as-entities (orgregores, if you will), just like ordinary humans, are both light and shadow.
(Screenshots courtesy FanCaps.net)
Built Personas
The other obvious ego-image is the spherical Bubble HQ building.
Barney and Ron
The heroes of the story are Barney Pudowski and his (literally) fell-off-the-back-of-a truck B-bot, Ron. As such they certainly are candidate archetypes of the dreamer, Bubble Inc.
Barney goes from being isolated and friendless; to discovering the meaning of “true friendship” through his relationship with Ron; to being more sociable and hanging out with several of his early-childhood friends at the end. Significantly, his arc begins and ends without a B-bot. Perhaps this is Bubble’s dream-self saying that Ron the B-bot, and all it stands for, isn’t key to his (and thus Bubble’s) being.
Ron disappears because Barney propagates his code, all that remains after Ron’s sacrifice to save Barney, to all B-bots everywhere. Quite simply: Ron sacrifices Barney, who had become his best (and only) friend. Is this Bubble’s dream-self arguing that it should give up its attachment to B-bots? A gentler interpretation is that Bubble should let go of B-bots as well-controlled marketing tools (in the image of the evil Andrew) and let the weirdness (Marc, and Ron and his code) reign everywhere.
What Friendship Looks Like
The trite and predictable message of the movie is that friendship can’t be summarized as a two-line equation but is messy and unpredictable.
Ironically, this image of Marc’s epiphany, as he compares his equation with Ron’s friendship map, summarizes the progression of (fashionable) AI from closed-form expert systems to “machine learning” neural networks. Facebook’s AI (and Bubble Inc’s) already looks like the thing on the right, and I’m sure Big Tech’s PR flacks would like us to imagine all the glowy goodness.
This duality also resonates with the two images of Bubble’s infrastructure: the equation implemented in the impersonal ranks of number-crunching servers, and the happily glowing tangle of friendships expressed in the transparent HQ globe with juicy colors
Holding back the waters
The striking image (above) of Bubble’s HQ perched on the edge of a dam is worth contemplating. Water is often taken in psychotherapy to represent the unconscious. We see here a picture of perilous instability: All that water pressing up against an eggshell-flimsy dam wall, and the building balanced precariously on a knife edge. The water pressure is presumably powering all the servers down below (making Bubble a net zero company, ta raa), but it would be catastrophic not only for the HQ building but everyone downstream if all that pressure were to suddenly break through the dam.
This image seems to say that Bubble feels under huge pressure. It probably feels trapped in that situation, too, since that pressure drives its business by powering its cloud and is therefore essential to its existence.
Other characters
In Jungian psychotherapy (as I understand it), every figure in a dream is an image of the dreamer. That means that all the characters in Ron’s Gone Wrong, and not just the leading lights discussed so far, are archetypes in Bubble Inc’s psyche. A few of them:
Bree, the pink-haired store manager who leads the pursuit of Ron and Barney, is at the frontline of customer interaction. She represents Bubble’s distaste for dealing with customers; from Bree’s point of view, customers are an endless source of problems.
Graham Pudowski, Barney’s hapless and overworked dad, struggles to make a living selling novelty toys. His life is a grind, struggling with poor internet connections and impatient customers. Barney tells Ron at one point (in the forest, IIRC) that his dad does his best, but nothing has been the same since his mom died. Dad could be Bubble’s image of itself a pathetic loser, struggling to make ends meet and find time for his family – an experience that many of its employees must know well.
Donka, Barney’s indomitable Bulgarian grandmother, is the strongest female figure in the movie/dream. She nominally plays a Mother role, but is more of a Maker/Jester/Trickster: she’s as comfortable fixing things as she is cooking; she keeps comically producing metal objects at the security checkpoint during the incursion into Bubble HQ (including a spatula, claw hammer, rusty pipe wrench, and a gold tooth filling); and the cleaner's cart she eventually pushes through security conceals Barney, Ron, and Marc.
A central female figure is notably absent from the dream. The absence of Barney’s mother is underlined by figures like Donka, the playground teacher who tries to help Barney make friends, and the middle school principal: they’re all just fragments of what a whole Feminine might be. There is no Muse, either, and certainly no Venus. One could interpret this to mean that Bubble hasn’t yet individuated sufficiently for its Anima to arise; it first has to deal with Shadow.
I'm not going to bother with the other kids in the movie. They seem like stock characters to fill out a roster of classmate types for children watching the movie: the aspiring influencer, the prankster, the video gamer, and the science geek.
Full Circle
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Bubble’s dream is that we returns to the status quo ante at the end, with a few improvements: Barney now has human friends, and hacker-CEO Marc has been rid of his evil capitalist co-founder. Bubble Inc started and finishes as a total monopoly: it still has 99.9% market share among the pupils of Nonsuch Middle School (100% minus Barney). I imagine Bubble Inc woke up with a smile on its face.
Bubble’s persisting monopoly is evidence that this is the company’s dream, not Barney’s. The dream is a story about the struggle between various parts of Bubble’s make-up, not between Bubble Inc and its competitors. Bubble is dealing with an internal struggle, not a fight in the market. The movie would’ve been more plausible to me if Barney had been given a clunky Android bot rather than a broken Bubble bot.
And in fact, perhaps it would’ve been a more positive sign psychologically if Bubble had been wrestling with competitors in the story. The dream is very introverted, compensation for Bubble's extroverted Ego.
Looking back from the end of the story, the changes Ron and Barney wrought are literally at the margins: they only changed the code in the devices at the edge of the network. The core code deep underground hasn’t changed. Barney went down into the cloud-core to find Ron and then distribute his code to all the other B-bots, but there’s no indication that the data collection, device management, and sales functionality of the Bubble network has been altered. The changes were superficial. In psychological terms, the Ego’s personas have shifted a little, but the unconscious is unaffected.
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