The Terminatrix

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In 1991, Sega released a game that starred a plucky little hedgehog, a lovable Italian plumber was still Nintendo’s de facto mascot, and Capcom’s Street Fighter II was the innocuous, bloodless standard bearer for martial arts games (Mortal Kombat, its more brutal spawn, was still a year away). In the early ’90s video games were relatively innocent. Part of the reason was 16-bit graphics — however impressive for the era, the technology didn’t allow much opportunity for realistic violence or a pixelated sex scene. But even as faster processors were catching up with an accelerated culture, the content of most video games was still more like Saturday morning cartoons than real life.
    Outside the gaming world, however, the public was getting more comfy with kink and violence. Bizarre sex and gore were making their way into the mainstream culture. Capitalizing on the new permissiveness, MTV debuted a show called Liquid Television, a late-night thirty-minute program of avant-garde animated shorts. Most of the show’s sketches were psychoactive stylizations (The Adventures of Thomas and Nardo) or semi-ironic takes on the dopey, grunge-oriented humor of the day (Beavis and Butt-Head). But one show, Aeon Flux, looked like neither of these things, nor like anything most pre-anime-craze American viewers were familiar with. It first aired on Liquid Television in 1991.

    I remember watching. I was twelve years old. I remember thinking that it didn’t seem to make any sense, like Laugh-In and Dr. Who, two other shows I watched but didn’t understand. Who was this freaky lady with the bizarre body, a vulgar tangle of sinewy tendons contorted by a tight suit that seemed made of taut wire and latex? Her concave stomach was stretched tight beneath an outcrop of ribcage, and her muscular ass completely swallowed its thong. At the beginning of each episode, she’d catch a fly with her eyelashes — I remember being particularly creeped out by that.
    In retrospect, what Aeon Flux looked like to me — both the show and the character herself — was sex. I was still young enough to be freaked out by this, and just old enough to want to keep watching. This was sex as I would come to know it ten years down the road: distorted, disorienting, very fast and sometimes painful, frequently weird but always arousing. At twelve, I wasn’t ready to understand it that way. And I certainly wasn’t ready to catch the show’s references to a virus that was, with no truly effective treatment on the horizon, making sex a terrifying endeavor.
    The show also looked like a scarier, more experimental version of the video games I was playing. In fact, the show looked a bit like today’s games: chaotically brutal and orgiastic. So it’s appropriate that a video game version of Aeon Flux was released last month, but unfortunate that this game had to be based not on the old MTV show, but rather on the Paramount Pictures movie released last week. It’s unfortunate because the MTV show was always, at its heart, a video game trapped in a TV program. It was ripe to be transferred to the gaming console — all it needed was the proper

Moral impunity figured into her sex life, which was surreal, fetishistic and not entirely pleasant to look at.

technology. Aeon Flux the TV show, created in the gentle Sonic-and-Mario gaming era, presaged what video games would become years later. The movie’s greatest feat, on the other hand, is inspiring a bad performance by Frances McDormand.
    In the early ’90s, Aeon Flux creator Peter Chung had just finished a Nickelodeon project called Rugrats when he decided to animate something distinctly not for kids. Because Aeon Flux‘s entire first season was only twelve minutes total (broken up into half a dozen two-minute episodes) and, but for one word, dialogue-free, the show’s foundation was never its plot. The foundation was Aeon herself. Her character, an assassin who would massacre hundreds of people at a time, was meant to skewer the concept of the good-guy action-film hero. Aeon was basically an anarchist. Her missions were vague; the killing often led to no clear accomplishment. The show’s lack of linear plot emphasized the idea of violence without apparent purpose, and the fact that you couldn’t quite follow what was going on made you focus on the body count rather than a storyline. And of course, there was Aeon’s death, which would occur at the end of each episode — the fact that you knew it was coming gave her a blank check to act with moral impunity.
    Moral impunity figured into her sex life as well, which was surreal, fetish-based and not entirely pleasant to look at. She’s often described as a dominatrix, but that’s just because of her costume. There was hardly any sadomasochism in the show, and the sex often didn’t advance any human relationship subplot. Like her taste for violence, the sex was rooted in anarchy. In the “Gravity” episode, Aeon and show’s antagonist, Trevor Goodchild, who sometimes fights Aeon and sometimes makes out with her (and in one episode, shoots her point-blank in the face) are traveling in parallel vehicles — he on a bullet train, she in an airplane beside it — inches away from each other, both their heads out their windows, sucking face at a thousand miles per hour. Like a hyperreal depiction of real-life sex, the reasons for the characters’ encounters were usually ambiguous, their relationships unclear, and the act itself rarely pretty. In another episode, Chung films Aeon making out with a guy from inside the guy’s mouth. In yet another, Trevor wriggles his tongue impossibly far into some woman’s ear, like a tapeworm boring into a host.
    Chung is very into tongues, and under his direction, they’re nightmarish appendages. You see every papilla. Usually the owner of the tongue seems to have too many teeth. Aeon licks everything. She licks the shaft of her gun. She licks the hair of a passing blond woman for no discernable reason. The hair is just there, so she licks it. She licks her own hair as well. At the end of the first season, she has her feet licked by some sort of

Aeon Flux embodied both the fear of sex and the fetish-based defiance of that fear.

sea monster. In the “Leisure” episode, we see Aeon’s home for the first time. She opens a locker in her kitchen, and a man — a slave? — is in there, on a leash. He’s bent over, licking goo off the floor.
    These sorts of scenes were analogous to the art in the 1992 coffee-table book Sex, released to conservative fury by another MTV resident, Madonna. Sex was a potent response to the increasingly anti-erotic culture that was developing in the early ’90s — with AIDS drug-cocktail therapies still nascent, for some, sex wasn’t worth the odds. And for those for which it was, it still wasn’t worth the trouble to do yourself up for. Seattle grunge bands adopted a dreary, asexual fashion sense, and their unfortunate lust for oversized flannel was soon co-opted throughout the country. A sexual fatalism was descending, and fetishism reacted against that.
     Aeon Flux achieved the remarkable feat of combining both sides of the debate. While refusing to ignore realities of the day — the deadly, contagious disease in the first season’s plot and Aeon’s own death in each episode both seem to be unmistakable AIDS references — it also refused to be cowed into mopey, life-sucks-and-so-do-I submission. Sex in the early ’90s was Madonna’s book, Gennifer Flowers, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker — tawdry, profane, disorienting, media-amplified public fetishes. But it was also Nirvana’s “Rape Me,” fifty-percent divorce rates and semi-ineffective AZT. There was plenty to be frightened about, and Aeon Flux embodied both the fear and the fetish-based defiance of that fear.
    With only two minutes per episode, the random perversions came fast and baffling, which is part of what made them uncomfortable and, at times, uncomfortably arousing. In the third season, however, the show was given its own half-hour time slot by MTV. A more cohesive plot was created, and Aeon, for the first time, was given a voice: a husky, sultry sort of tenor usually delivered a bit too knowingly. The tone of the show was normalized enough to hold the attention of the twenty-two-minutes-at-a-time consumer, and things in general became a whole lot less confusing — and less interesting. In his commentary on the DVD released last month, Chung said he included so much sex in the two-minute episodes precisely because the show didn’t make sense. Holding a teenager’s attention through even two-minutes of nonsensical animation requires sex; holding it for twenty-two minutes apparently requires a plot as well.
    With more time to kill per episode, the sexual content was elaborated and given more context. This, along with the new dialogue, had the effect of making the sex seem a lot more pedestrian. Suddenly scenes that would have been Aeon silently grabbing a shirtless, leather-harnessed John Doe and zapping his nipple rings with a live electric wire — all in about four seconds — became drawn out “fetish” scenes diluted for a mainstream viewership, somewhat like the kink-lite of Playboy TV. In the "Thanatophobia" episode, John Doe gets a name (Onan, presumably named after the Bible character who masturbates), Aeon helps him choose his fetish wear first, and then they talk about the nipple-zapping for a while before she attempts it on him. Other sex scenes in the half-hour version seem almost romance-novel: In one love scene between Aeon and Trevor, she’s wearing a flowing white dress when he gently embraces her and they descend to his bed in regal fashion. The dialogue doesn’t help:
    “You don’t know what I want,” says Trevor.
    “That makes two of us,” teases Aeon. Touché. It’s no slave in a kitchen locker or lavender-tongued sea monster with thing for feet.
    Whether Aeon is attractive continues to be debated on dozens of internet message boards. She’s a little bit masculine, and her nemesis/lover, Trevor, is a little bit fem. She’s angular and hard-bodied; he’s got big lips

In the movie, sex is treated as a respite from danger.

and lovely hair. This gender-bending is apace with Chung’s appreciation for chaos and disarray. But like the sex, the show’s sense of anarchy softened as well when the longer episodes came along, and the Aeon illustrations lost a touch of their manliness (though Trevor stayed fairly drag-queeny throughout the series.)
    The shift to a full-length program naturally elicited much outrage among the show’s purist fan base, and they’re correct that the addition of dialogue, at least, led to some truly lame pop-philosophy:

    Aeon: “You’re out of control.”
    Trevor: “I take control. Whose side are you on?”
    Aeon: “I take no side.”
    Trevor: “You’re skating the edge.”
    Aeon: “I am the edge.”

    If the cult of devotees found this unbearable, wait till they see the film, an extraordinarily ridiculous spectacle starring Charlize Theron in a depressingly cloistering outfit. The movie half-heartedly tries to achieve the rampant violence of the show, but seems to shrug that it can’t be done without the magic of animation (they should take a fresh look at Kill Bill). There’s one sex scene between Aeon and Trevor in the film, and it’s mind-numbingly unperceptive, entirely eschewing the show’s depiction of sex as dangerous in and of itself. Instead, in the movie, sex is treated as a respite from danger, a moment when rivals can put aside their automatic machine guns and concentrate on fucking. With this, it completely loses the combination of fear, anger and sensuality that gave the TV show’s sex scenes their edge.
    The new Xbox game is even more tedious. Totally linear and driven by an absurd plot (level one is set in some sort of fashion show), it’s bearable for about fifteen minutes. It’s extraordinary that Majesco couldn’t pull this off — Xbox has Doom 3, Grand Theft Auto, and a pile of other games that represent the kind of anarchic, mayhem-driven violence that MTV’s Aeon Flux was all about.
    Aeon’s death at the end of each episode — that definitive GAME OVER sensation — is something any gamer, and anyone who’s had careless sex in the age of AIDS, can easily relate to. Action heroes rarely die; when they do, they go out in a blaze of glory, or are slowly lowered into a vat of molten steel with a soaring orchestral string accompaniment. Aeon Flux dismissed such empty profundity; real life is often interrupted stupidly with a slip in the shower or a broken condom. This is something Chung understood but the movie, of course, ignores. In the last episode of the show’s first season, Aeon is creeping along a building ledge when she steps on a nail, loses her balance and falls to an inept, undignified death. That’s how she’d usually die. In the show’s entire run, Trevor killed her only once. The rest of the time, she’d simply get distracted, and her own carelessness would do her in. And as any real gamer knows, that’s how life works.  n°

Click to buy Aeon Flux – the Complete Animated Collection