MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)

By: Ramona Lyons
March 26, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

ÆON FLUX | 1991–95

The bones of MTV’s Liquid Television animated series Æon Flux are complex and unsettling. Set against the backdrop of two cities — Monica and Bregna — locked in a never-ending war, it chronicles the exploits of Æon Flux, a bondage-clad Monican super-spy determined to take down Trevor Goodchild, the authoritarian dictator of Bregna. Trevor, a smug biohacking ideologue and surveillance kingpin, oozes privilege and misguided intentions, making him the perfect foil and love object for Æon’s chaos.

But Æon Flux is more than just a spy-versus-dictator narrative. The early shorts, with little dialogue and a sparse, incidental score, create an eerie, open-ended atmosphere. The story is driven by an unrelenting Eros/Thanatos tension — sex and death interwoven in each episode, fueling a cycle of twisted humor and occasionally disquieting pathos.

Surveillance is a key theme in Æon Flux, shaping its world and visual style. This dystopian society is saturated with voyeurism, where Trevor’s authoritarian systems of control clash with individual acts of rebellion. The show uses inventive POV shots — from inside a mouth or from a bird’s-eye perch — to reinforce the constant shifts between watchers and the watched.

Desire and impulse rule this world, but there’s also an unspoken expectation of greatness — of the self, others, and the world. Æon Flux oscillates between disregard for human life and moments of emotional vulnerability. Even Æon, the ultimate killing machine, has her vulnerabilities — face-palming over moments of clumsiness or dithering between killing or teasing her jackbooted prey, torn between duty and indulgence.

But what truly sets Æon Flux apart, especially in its early, dialogue-free shorts, is its unapologetic perversity. You follow Æon through her missions, smoothly diffusing booby traps and acrobatically leaping across rooftops, invested in her success, and then — she dies. Senselessly. Sloppily. Ignominiously. But sometimes the story continues. Secondary characters, once dismissed, become protagonists. It’s the ultimate existential statement: in an indifferent world, nothing is permanent or more meaningful than anything else.

In the first short, Æon’s death is disconcerting. She falls to her death and is blown up remotely, her apartment (under surveillance, of course) destroyed by automated flamethrower, and she’s erased by the system. Yet Æon resurrects, renewed. She lands in a chair, extending her feet to be pleasured by a humanoid merman. In the next scene, a boy, seemingly in a different time and place, buys a foot fetish magazine with Æon on the cover. Delighted, he pays and exits.

The series excels in surreal moments like these. In the first full episode, Trevor climbs inside the body of a statesman named Clavius, transforming it into his personal interdimensional playground — one dedicated to Æon. When she discovers this, she mocks him, but there’s no real judgment. That’s the point: moral equations don’t exist in this world. In fact, individuals representing unequivocal moral sensibilities in Æon Flux are often lambasted and then summarily killed or exiled. In this bio-hacked, nihilistic dystopia, the rule is clear — anything goes, as long as you don’t get caught. Æon’s sleek, agile spycraft followed by sudden death serves as a metaphor for this perspective — constantly avoiding consequences, slipping away expertly until a fatal misstep screws you.

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MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)

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