Aeon Flux "utopia or deuteranopia?" Epsidoe Analysis part 1

This will be the first part of my analysis that will be a multipart breakdown of the full episodes of Aeon Flux. How many parts each episode will be broken down into, I do not know because each scene is multilayered and way more complex than the shorts, with a runtime roughly 4 times longer and the addition of dialogue. Some people didnt like the dialogue addition to Aeon Flux but Ive actually found that it adds way more to the story than it takes away and they are very clever with overlaying spoken dialogue and giving you a different part of the story to look at at the same time. 

We first get  the title screen along with the image of the tool Trevor always has in hand throughout the  show and this brief explanation of the world we are about to enter into:

"trevor Goodchild has recently seized power in the nation of Bregna. The former leader, Clavius, has vanished under mysterious circumstances..."

The show starts with a voice narrating what could be said to be the theme of the story right from the beginning, this voice who we later find out is Trevor Goodchild seems to be making a case for way he wants to create a surveillance state society. The episode title sums up this by asking the question is this a utopia he is creating or a deuteranopia? 

At first when I read the title I really didnt pay much attention to the word deuteranopia, but when you look it up you see this is the definition and it definitely plays into the narrative:

"Deutan color blindness (also known as deuteranomaly) is a type of red-green color blindness in which the green cones in the eye detect too much red light and not enough green light. As a result, red, yellow, green, and brown can appear similar, especially in low light."

This is interesting and is something to keep in mind about whether or not this plays in on the unconscious level of the viewer through color or if this is just a metaphor. The question that seems to be posed then to the fewer is does the survillence state create a utopia as Trevor Goodchild believes it will or will it create its own form of blindness. 

As we hear the disembodied voice of Trevor Goodchild we see a series of events involving multiple people that only he truly sees the truth of from a distance. We see a man on a truck lose a package and another man above him in a apartment packs a box and leaves it outside which falls down onto the street below and Aeon runs up and picks the box up and loads it for the driver before jumping down onto what we expect is a lower platform and another figure runs out trying to catch aeon, confused as to where she is. 

As he wraps his speech up we see the camera is zooming out of this situation and we see it zoom in on his hand on a railing as he confesses that " Gloves hide dirty hands, and my hands are dirtier than most". We then see a disembodied camera as if it is the bot that we will see in further scenes hovering above him as he looks down on the city below. We get an upshot of him saying "justice will be done" and we zoom ouut to see his hirise as we pull back to see Aeon hiding looking around the corner up at his location as he walks away. 

In each episode I've analyzed so far weve seen Aeon sneaking through a city or location and here we see this again as she spots a guard and instead of attacking him she uses a key in her finger to unlock a secret passage that transports us out of this scene. Weve then seen her state change in this one short scene. 

We then cut back to a wide shot of Terry Goodchild in his office and we get a sense of how important he is by the size of his room. He communicates authority through his hand gestures as the journalist across from him seems to remark sarcastically about how illuminating his remarks are. We are then given the stakes of what this episode is about in the next phrase as she makes remarks about where their former president clavius is after missing for 6 months.

We see she has a camera bot with her and this communicated to us as we switch back to a scene showing people watching the livefeed in the city while Aeon sneaks her way around the screen going in on the leftside, and coming out a door on the right before exiting the scene and reappearing on the left again with a bomb that will become important in the next scene. As we see this we also hear dialogue that doesnt really have anything to do with her sneaking around at first glance but it kind of does.

 Because Trevor is trying to sneak his way out of the implication that he knows where the former president is as he continues his argument for a surveillance state where there will be no secrets. She immediately  gets up and leans  on the table and asks about his secrets and he disrobes claiming he has no secrets and that an open society is a just society. The gesture is both sexual but also reminds me of the remark of the emperor has no clothes. He is telling them through this gesture that he has nothing to hide. 

We cut back to Aeon as she fiddles with her bomb and then is distracted by the gigantic overlooming naked figure of Trevor that stands in the public square as more people watch. The journalist responds sarcastically again and asks where Clavius is. As soon as she does its no coincidence that he puts his robe back on and his body language and lack of eye contact with the journalist communicates that he is lying to us. He is trying to cover up what he knows and we see this in his body language although his tone suggests the same authoritarian feel.

The journalist then shows some video reel  of Clavius claiming that the footage came from his own adminstration and we see the crowds reaction to this piece of information and we see the crowd has grown tremendously. We see one figure in particular that will become another character that we follow in the crowd and the camera rests on him momentarily as he is stunned by the revelation.

The tape is almost immediately taken off the air and Trevorr Goodchild loses his compsure for a moment and begins screaming that it can easily be faked at this point. We follow the character as he walks and leans up against the wall and we see Aeon behind this wall and she is surprised by his presencce and walks away placing the bomb in a removable brick in the wall. The journalists dialogue closes out this scene with the remark many people hate you and would want you dead as the bomb clicks into place behind the wall. 

Continued in Part 2...