look, the weird cyberpunk city of bregna, home to the last few million people on earth
oh did a character in the source material have ambiguous morality or allegiances?
what if they didn't?
what if every aspect of metaphor
confusion
was stripped away
minute by minute
bit by bit
no pesky gaps that the audience must fill in
a reminder of the dangers of sanding off so many (intentional) rough edges
that you end up with almost nothing left
i have been wanting to rant about this movie for a while
Æon Flux (2005) is the most Hollywood movie ever made
they took the basic premise of some existing property and then forced it into a Hero with a Thousand Faces template
i did not know that when i first watched it because i did not really know much about Campbell's work, and the distilled version used to create many movies since the mid 20th century often called simply "The Hero Cycle" (or "Hero's Journey" or "Monomyth") based on the Vogler Disney memo and subsequent book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
i will call it the "Hero Cycle" because it is a designed pattern for the purpose of templating stories and it exists to perpetuate eternal cycles more than anything
i liked a lot of the aesthetics and characters of Æon Flux, though i was admittedly unfamiliar with the source material, but then we get to this line of the film:
We're meant to die. It's what makes anything about us matter.
fucking what??
this line is burned into my brain partially because it was sampled by Grendel in their song Remnants which is a solid example of early 2ks ravey electro-industrial aggrotech
and now that i am reminded of it i might listen to the whole album again! the title track Harsh Generation is probably the best track on it but Dirty and New Flesh and ,,,, oh okay the whole album is solid for the genre
the original Æon Flux series has the protagonist dying repeatedly (due to executive meddling which forced the creator to bring the character back - much like Rambo and Ian Malcolm in their respective franchises)
one might assume that to leave room for a sequel they would continue this death loop
but the Hero Cycle is predicated on the the destruction of immortality
Only birth can conquer death.
- Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
according to Campbell immortality is inherently evil, using various examples:
- the myth of Demeter trying to grant immortality to a mortal child and its impossibility as an attempt to avoid an obstacle - obstacles in Cambell's interpretation must always be confronted head on
- he refers to immortality as the "demiurgic powers of the abyss" and connects it to Freudian anxiety about maternal separation even when used in a divide context - it must always be out of reach of our hero
- the myth of the goddess Mahadevi and her realm Manidvipa which he says is surrounded by an ocean of immortality granting nectar but that "She is also the death of everything that dies."
- immortality may be granted to women only if they are sexually subservient to a divide being "whether she will or no"
there are many more, but any time immortality comes up it is always in a negative context, regardless if the original myth carried such a meaning
Vogler specifically uses examples in his book of heroes refusing immortality (one example is Death Becomes Her) and explains that while a hero must defy death (during the classic "rebirth" stage of the Hero Cycle) their true immortality is in the viewers memories of their heroics not their physical self
once i realized that immortality = evil according to the Hero Cycle i could not help but see it constantly reflected in so many films and shows, even when it harshly conflicted with the setting or characters it would be injected out of the blue, sometimes in out of character voice-over, as if to satisfy the template above all else
in the Æon Flux film, there is no real reason to destroy the cloning devices once the people who were killing people were stopped, perhaps the cloning devices could be interpreted as the physical manifestation of the system that held them back, like The Hunt for Red October (1990)'s example of Cortez burning his ships, but for me it seemed a tragic waste, even if there were people capable of procreating finally there was no evidence that there were enough of them to contribute to sustainable biodiversity
now i am getting into the weeds of the lore, but my point is that Campbell said immortality was bad and so now all movies much repeat that aesop regardless of whether it makes sense
Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of
the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul,
within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience
long survival—a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia)
to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.
- Campbell
Now we can move forward to live once for real, and then give way to people who might do it better. ... To live only once, but with hope.
- Æon Flux
Tropes Are Not Bad ... Tropes Are Tools but i believe that the Hero Cycle is one of the main things wrong with modern cinema and why so many shows feel frustrating stagnant - true character development is not allowed
i started doing this research last year as i started working on the storyline for my game
when i saw Dan Harmon's presentation on his even further distilled Hero Cycle he calls the Story Circle it immediately hit me what frustrated me so much about Harmon's work from a character development side
it was built with intent to keep the characters trapped in purgatory forever, with all changes being as limited as possible to a highly specific scenario so that the writers have little to worry about regarding continuity between episodes and they can keep rehashing plots with different costumes over and over again
if i knew nothing about Harmon or his collaborators, this would be enough to steely drop my interest in anything he is involved in
compare Mike McMahan's work with Star Trek: Lower Decks to anything by Harmon to see what happens when characters are allowed to develop and how thrilling it is to go on their personal journey - not a Hero's Journey - with them
