"I can smell Aeon now: leather, gunpowder, hazelnuts...sex."
Aeon Flux is one of my idols. I can't tell if she's a heroine or a villain, but she wears very little but dominatrix leather. She has legs that could rival any James Bond girl and muscles that could knock the skinny arms out of any waif's shoulder sockets. She can handle guns and bombs like they were lipstick, and makes averting or creating danger looks like the floor routine of an Olympic gymnast. She's on no side but her own, double- and triple-crossing whoever she may be working for, and her hobbies range from seduction to assassination to domination. There isn't anyone quite like Ms. Flux in animated sci-fi, much less the inane, testosterone-flavored environs of MTV. She may look like a futuristic version of a Playboy babe, but believe me, this cartoon is more Riot Grrl than pin-up-she'd kill you just as soon as she'd sleep with you.
Aeon Flux may be a mere cartoon, but she and her namesake show have been infiltrating American pop culture since her appearance on MTV's "Liquid Television," a show from the early '90s devoted to introducing avant-garde animation to Disney-raised America. Devoid of dialogue and full of cyber-punk atmospherics, the series of shorts featured a sexy, sinewy leather-clad secret agent/anarchist, intent on an assassination mission never explained, who trapped insects in her eyelashes with the same off-hand poise that accompanied her prolific killings. "ron Flux," with its strange, intriguing central character, never possessed a linear story, teasing the viewer with an overload of bloody action antics and the slightest frisson of futuristic carnality. Needless to say, all that extreme violence and kinky sex was addicting, and after the first season I was hooked.
"Ready for the action now, Danger Boy?"
After "Liquid Television," "ron Flux" became its own half-hour show and morphed from its action-adventure genre stylings into something much more complex. Fleshing out characters with dialogue and psychology and creating an entire almost-mythic realm that seethed with corrupt politics and amorality, the animated show's storylines delved into excavating the terrain of traditional sci-fi and translating themes into the moral vacuums of Monica and Bregna, the two countries Aeon trafficks between.
Along the way, Aeon gained a soulmate, Trevor Goodchild, the Breen autocrat and engineer of its social state-her greatest love as well as her sworn enemy. Taking on issues that ranged from the philosophical (individualism, sexual politics, free will) to the scientific (genetics, evolution, the nature of time and space), creator Peter Chung and his team created some of television's most complex, intellectually challenging writing while retaining its provocatively entertaining gloss of high-octane violence and suggestive S&M.
The bionic Barbie-gone-Blade Runner vaulted above the surreal storylines and skewed sexual dynamics to become a cult anti-heroine endowed with traits no other woman-cartoon or human-in modern pop culture had: free-wheeling sexuality (her interest extends to everyone from her archenemy to aliens), a penchant for casual violence (she accidentally kills someone while shaving) and an almost too-confident belief in her own greatness and intelligence (she tells one soon-to-be lover with smug glee: "I'm commanding your libido under Monican aegis. This is an authorized police action, lover: you are mine!") Half the time, she succeeds in her fantastical missions; the other times, her mistakes are grim and have dire consequences-this is a woman, after all, who killed off the human race with a simple misunderstanding.
She's no simple "good" heroine, but a complex character with both good and bad traits. While endowing a woman character with psychology may not seem revolutionary, when your pop culture female icons are Jenny McCarthy and Jennifer Aniston, well, the kick-ass stylings of Aeon Flux are the proverbial breath of fresh air.
"Pay attention, girl!"
Sad to say, Aeon Flux can now only be seen on home video. (Perhaps the highbrow and feminist tendencies of the show were a little too much for MTV.) "Aeon Flux: Mission Infinite" (Sony Music Video) is the latest video collection, featuring three full-length episodes. Following on the heels of the self-titled bestselling debut, Chung showcases the intricate, unique animation style that made his show so eye-catching: the bodies are drawn in an Europeanized, hyper-attenuated, fluidly graceful style, the surfaces gleam with apocalyptic glimmer, and the aliens sketched with an eye for unruly surrealism.
But it is not only the eye-popping visuals of "ron Flux" that make the show amazing. Seen as a unit, the sequencing reveals a narrative daring that conventional television would never stand for. Storylines and actions remain teasingly elusive; characters are maddeningly neither good nor evil; loose ends of stories flutter in the breeze of machine guns.
"Reraizure," the most conventional of the three tales, spins a web of trust and betrayal around a small, gruesome creature that houses a pill that erases human memory. "Chronophasia" features Aeon trapped in a time loop with a mutant monster-baby and a virus that causes insanity. "End Sinister" features a humanlike alien with no nose or mouth and Aeon's race to save humanity from forced evolution. All three episodes serves as a good intro into a complex, intricate pop culture phenomenon.
"We are what people say we are...they project upon us their convictions. We are nothing but blank screens."
The most brilliant aspect of Aeon Flux that lingers long after the videos are over is the unwillingness of the cartoons to draw conclusions. Instead, Aeon and the cast of characters provoke extreme situations but never explain; they leave it up to viewers to draw their own conclusions about their often cool-yet-disturbing actions. Why is it so sexy when Aeon wants to attach bristling jumper cables onto the leather harness of her lover? Why is the massacre of a thousand Breen soldiers so thrilling? Why does Aeon keep dying, only to reappear again and again? Peter Chung, the creator of the show,leaves the blanks for viewers to fill in for themselves. "ron Flux" is more than a violent, futuristic cartoon-it's a Rorschach test for our culture in the present time.
(All quotes taken from "ron Flux')
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