From: jordan@castor (Chuck Jordan)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.animation
Subject: Re: Aeon Flux trivia factoids :...
Summary: hike up your pants, let the fun begin...
Keywords: Oh is the great Mr. Peter Chung going to direct?
Date: 29 Sep 92 23:58:08 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia

In article <DAN.92Sep29095310@wombat.gnu.ai.mit.edu> dan@wombat.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Dan Parmenter) writes:
>I fear that Mr. Chung may have partially failed in his goals with Aeon
>Flux, since almost nobody I know has commented on the woman's actions
>as anything but incredibly cool.  The people I've watched it with all
>seem to think that her slaughtering people is just great fun.
>Typically, audiences don't realize when they're being manipulated into
>feeling things that the filmmaker finds appalling.
>
>But then most people cheered for the Terminator as well...

Your take on this sounds pretty pretentious, if you ask me.  (No flames
intended, see my explanation starting right now:)

There was a discussion recently in rec.arts.movies about excessive violence
in movies.  One person in the middle of the thread used as an example a
film by Akira Kurosawa (I haven't seen it) in which a lead character gets
shot full of arrows and falls to his death, making a melodramatic speech.
The audience he was watching the film with laughed at the scene.  He claimed
(not in these exact words) that the audience was too boorish and
unsophisticated and desensitized to violence that they didn't understand
the nature of the scene.  How horrible!

But you have to understand that these filmmakers, even Kurosawa and
especially any guy whose project is shown on MTV, are not perfect.  Instead
of saying that the audience failed to recognize that they were being
manipulated, maybe you should say that the filmmaker failed in making the
film realistic enough to generate the emotion he was looking for.

I don't think the violence in "Aeon Flux," or "The Terminator," is way cool.
I think it is taken to such an extreme that it becomes absurd, even funny.
"Aeon Flux" is such a ridiculous film that for anyone to say that it's a 
statement on violence, is either really pretentious or is mistaken as far as
how to make an effective statement.  First of all, it's a cartoon.  It's a
lot more difficult to stir up real emotion from animation than from live
action, especially in places where animation has been traditionally used for
comedy (like the US.)

Also, there's nothing in the film to clue the audience in that all this
violence is really weird.  We're presented in the first few seconds of the
film (from what I've seen, I haven't seen it all in one piece) with this
grotesquely drawn woman who goes around shooting people.  Okay, that's the
"world" of the film, so we just accept it and run with it.  There's nothing
realistic in the movie, so the violence isn't really violence, it's just
action.  The only character we identify with is the woman with the hair 
who goes around shooting people, and even she has a happy ending -- she gets
to go to her foot-fetish heaven.

I have thought before that the film was really ridiculous and over-done, and
that it was all intentional, but I would never have assumed it was a
reaction to excessive violence.  (I thought it was just a kind of parody of
that type of sci-fi genre.)

Geez, I'm starting to sound like a cinema studies major.  Bet you weren't
expecting that long a response?  Stop me before I post again.

Anyway, I think claiming that the audience of Aeon Flux failed to realize
they were being manipulated is a real stretch.  I think the movie failed
to manipulate them the right way.

USENET's Chuck

-- 
                  Chuck Jordan | jordan@castor.cs.uga.edu
SPY Magazine's 1,000 Reasons Not to Vote for George Bush:
NO 318: US Arms sales to Third World countries have increased 138 percent
        since 1989.
Newsgroups: rec.arts.animation