![]() She is less interested in penetrative sex than she is in fetishized withholdings: tonguing, tickling, voyeurism, and other, less-defined pleasures. ![]() The protagonist wears the barely-there bikini and thigh-high boots of many a sci-fi damsel or spy femme fatale, but its patent black leather and restraining straps indicate this is as much about her pleasure (and pain) as ours. Whereas most cartoons of the era, Liquid or not, use sex as a punchline to caricature the stunted pubescence of its manchildren – imagine Butthead mouthbreathing the word “boobs” – or swaps out sex for the noble pinings of a nice guy who maybe this time won’t finish last, in Æon Flux, sex is omnipresent, complicated, and explicitly (albeit abstractly) about power. The fact that the show’s protagonist – a lithe, raven-haired infiltrix who always meets her end in a twist that’s half-poetic, half-slapstick – is a woman is enough to set the show apart.īut the show went much further than that, depicting a woman with a full, complex eroticism. Its concerns are too philosophical, its technique too rigorous, its narratives too surprising, even in what would turn out to be its earlier, more nascent form – a series of wordless vignettes about espionage in a technocratic retrofuture of monorails, penthouses, offshore drilling operations, crashed spaceships, and underground facilities. Though its original conception as a parody of the American action movie would sit nicely among so many spoofs, the end product is less a parody than a critique, and it is much more than just critique. In the words of the creative director, Japhet Asher, it was “part fun house, part laboratory experiment.”ĭespite the inclusivity of this programming model, Peter Chung’s Æon Flux has always parsed as an outlier. There was the boyish ultraviolence of shorts like “Rocky” and “Jac Mac and Rad-Boy, Go!” Arch neonoir vignettes like “Brad Dharma: Psychedelic Detective” and “Psycho-Gram.” There were puppets, live- and stop-action, and plenty of one-offs and classics to help fill the half-hour. Back then, that meant plenty of Gen-X slackerdom and cable-safe versions of the Sick and Twisted, but the show was a true grab bag of styles and formats. Often remembered as the incubator where the beloved idiots Beavis and Butthead were born, Liquid Television is perhaps better framed as forefather to Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim – an oddball, short-attention-span variety show intended to showcase the many talents and aesthetics currently emerging from animation and comedy undergrounds. “Revolutionaries need an oppressive establishment to thrive, just as governments need hidden enemies to justify stricture.” – Peter Chung, creator of Æon Fluxįrom 1991 to 1995, when the network was possibly still culturally provocative, MTV aired an animation anthology called Liquid Television.
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