Very Jerry Cornelius / Not Really Jerry Cornelius

"A character in a film is not someone whose background we need to know in order to consider proceeding in a relationship with him/her. The process of discovery IS the relationship. Explain nothing." Peter Chung.

Aeon Flux: Curious, Anarchic, bumbling assassin. She lives, she dies and she lives again. She is enigmatic, stylish, antiestablishment, and sexual - without being either On-Top or Submissive. Her relationships are as complex as her world, her missions and her antics. The original animated series is dream-like and yet also politically charged. Sounds familiar?

Peter Chung, creator of Aeon Flux notes that in the glossy but ultimately disappointing Aeon Flux film the character portrayed by Charlize Theron "only thinks she is Aeon. Ms. Flux does not actually appear in the movie.'"

"The original impetus behind the Aeon Flux "Pilot" was a critique of the manipulation of sympathy in Hollywood movies. That method is most transparent in the action genre. Aeon Flux was never an action vehicle. The only two episodes in which Aeon does much physical fighting are the shorts Pilot and War -- in which her violent actions are portrayed as preposterous and futile. Not heroic. How can anyone watching those shorts NOT GET IT? 

Creating Aeon was very much a process of elimination. I set myself a rigorous set of restrictions-- of things I'd disallow: not an ideologue, a patriot or a crimefighter; no one giving her orders; no family; no assumptions. I tried to eliminate anything that would allow you to predict her actions.
Aeon has no family, or ties to anyone. Any dramatic points a screenwriter can score by holding family members hostage (or killing!) reveal nothing about her as a unique individual. Too easy. It's shorthand. We assume anyone is going to feel an emotional attachment to their sibling. That tells me nothing about her. 

Her worth (to us) is her responsibility and hers alone. The point is, we all define our own worth. It's the main point of the series, actually.

A character in a film is not someone whose background we need to know in order to consider proceeding in a relationship with him/her. The process of discovery IS the relationship. Explain nothing. What matters is not the names of families, how many years in the future or past. What matters is the structure, the relationship of events, the thread which allows us to accept an unlikely outcome through the carefully delineated (and orchestrated) sequence of causal progression driven by character. You can transpose a good story on any setting, any era."


Peter Chung, Aeon Flux https://monican-spies.livejournal.com/44607.html

IRONIC DISTANCING, EXAGGERATED RHETORIC, SATIRE AIMED IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION


Stewart Lee:

In a piece in the Sunday’s Sunday Times called “It’s A Sick Joke : US Comedians Are Fearless – And Funnier Than Ours”, Jeremy Clarkson selectively quotes a sentence from my 45 minute 2009 about him, in which I said I hoped Richard Hammond was blinded and decapitated in a crash. The routine was a lengthy and cautious exploration of the idea that contrarians like Clarkson, while saying everyone should be free to offend, of course have their own lines in the sand, as Clarkson himself proves here, by being offended by me. Which was sort of the point. The reason the small section of the 45 minute routine he has quoted mentions The Hampster being blinded is because Clarkson and The Hampster had previously joked about Gordon Brown being blind in one eye, as I explain earlier in the piece.

At the end of the 45 minute routine I address the camera directly, and say, ““I don’t really think Richard Hammond should die. What I was doing there, as everyone here in this room now understands, just in case there’s anyone from the Mail on Sunday watching this, is I was using an exaggerated form of the rhetoric and the implied values of Top Gear to satirise the rhetoric and the implied values of Top Gear. And it is a shame to have to break character and explain that. But hopefully it will save you a long, tedious exchange of emails.”

Ironically this didn’t stop The Daily Mail’s Jan Moir writing her identical 2011 generic moan about comedy, back when ‘woke’ was known as ‘right-on’, but the paper at least had the decency to take the piece down when the misrepresentation was explained to them. https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/.../heard-the-one-about-the.../

The Times has described me as “the world’s greatest living stand-up comedian” and I have a greater recorded body of stand-up than any other comedian ever. Allowing an amateur arts critic like Jeremy Clarkson to just dip into it to try and fill up space makes about as much sense as sending me, a man who has driven second hand minis all his life, to a review a performance car.

I would like to close with commiserations to the marvellous Fin Taylor who, having been recommended by Jeremy Clarkson, will hopefully not now find his audience full of moronic Sunday Times cunts.

Stewart Lee (on the facebook, Monday 29th Jan 2024)



Don Cheadle IS Captain Planet: