Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Year: 1989
Dir: Shinya Tsukamoto
"Do you see all this rust on my body?"
Now I'm really serious about the whole history lesson thing. I mean eventually I think that I'll have to return to a genre or some specific weird little corner of cinema that I've already shone my piercing light of analysis on and I'll be able to spare you the background junk (I shudder to think what that will do to my post lengths). However, that time is not now, and on the docket today we've got another film that is an exemplar of its genre. Rose Hobart is to American surrealism as Tetsuo: The Iron Man (henceforth known as just Tetsuo) is to Japanese cyberpunk. In fact, the this comparison is perhaps even more useful than simply as an illustration of the relative importance of the two films. In a number of different ways the cyberpunk movement as a whole (and Tetsuo specifically) drew tremendously from the surrealists. Many of the cyberpunk films contain long sequences of purely visual and auditory stimulation with no appeal to character, plot, etc. and at least feel as if they are after the surrealist goal of a sort of purity of the image/experience. At the same time, it is important to note that this sort of almost hedonistic attitude toward images and sensory experience is also partly a product of the movement's links with the Japanese punk culture, which was probably the most purely nihilistic and dionysian of all the punk subcultures that emerged around the world (possibly excepting Sweden). As a general rule (this is, of course, not universally true) Japanese punks got mired in political and cultural struggles much less often than did their contemporaries in Spain or Italy, say, and chose to focus more on bullshit and fucking everything up (this renders the dionysian label even more apt, if we start to think in Nietzschean terms of Apollonian vs. Dionysian force).
So if you want to talk cyberpunk history, just take all that surrealist history we went through last time and add the following punk junk. I won't talk about Japanese punk music (as much as I would love to), but we do need to take note of the punk filmmaker Sogo Ishii. Ishii made some films in the late 70's and early 80's that contributed deeply to the emerging punk culture in Japan, especially the sub-sub-culture of biker punks. Films like 1980's Crazy Thunder Road and 1981's Shuffle really set the standard for breakneck, seizure-inducing punk film early on in the movement. However, it wasn't until 1982 that Ishii would produce his masterpiece, and the film which set the grimy-ass industrial gears of Japanese cyberpunk officially turning. Burst City is essentially a glorified music video/punk musical that was created largely for the purpose of showcasing some of the major punk bands in Japan at the time (notably, The Roosters, The Rockers, and a personal favorite of mine, The Stalin). The film, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic-ish Tokyo, follows a group of biker gangs who are attempting to halt the construction of a nuclear power plant on their turf. The story is told pretty much wholly under the auspices of musical performances and foaming-at-the-mouth, half-psychedelic visuals of concerts, riots and car chases. Bottom line, Ishii got people thinking about new ways to do cinema in Japan.
BURST CITY
One of those people was Shigeru Izumiya (bet you thought I was actually going to start talking about Tetsuo. Yeah right.), who was one of the stars of Burst City. Izumiya, who is a fascinating figure in his own right (he is an established poet and prolific folk singer in Japan), went on after Burst City to direct the next major step in Japanese cyberpunk, Death Powder (1986). The film (which deserves a whole post of its own) follows a group of mercenary soldiers who stumble upon a warehouse, where a corpse sneezes some dust on them. One of the soldiers gets infected by the powder (in some nondescript way) and proceeds to freak the fuck out in the form of hallucinatory Jodorowsky-esque visions and nightmares of hell monsters, slime, disembodied eyes, crude line drawings, etc. The film really represents, as far as I can tell, the height of the surrealist influence on cyberpunk. Burst City was light on imagery, but heavy on punk and insanity, Death Powder is sort of the inverse (though there is no shortage of headache editing and loud music in Death Powder).
The reason I focus on these two films specifically is because, to me, Tetsuo represents a sort of hybridization of the two styles. In one sense, the film drinks deeply of the dirty, dystopian, punk nastiness that had been the bread-and-butter of cyberpunk in Japan since its inception. There are whiffs throughout the film, I think, of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga-opus (GET IT?) Akira, which was first serialized in 1982 and ran through 1990 (the film adaptation was made in 1988). One of the two main characters in Akira is actually also named Tetsuo and ultimately undergoes a violent transformation similar to the one seen in Tetsuo, including absorbing other beings into himself as he morphs. On the other hand, there are significant surrealistic elements in the film as well, including the title sequence itself, which consists of the main protagonist thrashing about in front of/spewing out jets of steam while the title of the film, fashioned out of television static, slowly crawls across the screen. Other surrealistic highlights include cryptic messages delivered to the characters from an unidentified man on a television screen, a funeral in the bathtub that the main character (who is credited in the film as just “Man”, but who I find it more convenient to refer to as the Iron Man) gives to his wife who has just been impaled on his giant drill penis, and a telephone call between the iron man and an unidentified speaker which consists almost entirely of the two individuals saying “Hello” to one another over and over again). And, while it's not explicitly surrealist (or anything else for that matter) it should be noted that Tsukamoto also, in this film, takes the editing styles utilized in earlier cyberpunk films and pushes them even further into nearly avant-garde territory with 16mm zooms, swoops, dodges, ducks, dips, dives, and dodges. This is perhaps most fully realized in his wildly innovative method of filming his characters moving through the streets of the city. Sort of stop motion, but sort of something else, Tsukamoto films the characters standing still or only moving slightly while the buildings and streets rush by choppily and unevenly. It's difficult to describe, so watch the movie silly!
The plot of the film, although this may not be readily apparent from a first viewing of the film itself, is pretty simple and I'll try to boil it down here so we can move along reasonably quickly. We open in some kind of dingy, machine basement, where an individual (credited as the “Metal Fetishist” and played by Tsukamoto himself) is experimenting with shoving pieces of metal into his flesh. Perhaps predictably, one of these insertions doesn't quite take, and becomes infected, complete with crawling maggots and everything. The fetishist has a bit of a freak out and runs out into the street, where he is struck by a car driven by an average Japanese salaryman (who will become the iron man) and his girlfriend (played by Kei Fujiwara, who aided Tsukamoto with filming certain shots and who was really the only person involved with the film to do anything other than act, aside from Tsukamoto, who acted, directed, produced, wrote, edited, and everything else-d the film [the soundtrack, which is a kind of distillation of punk music down to its common denominator of plain racket and metal scraping, was taken care of by Chu Ishikawa, founder of Japanese industrial unit Der Eisenrost], and who would go own to direct a crucial film of her own in the mid 90s, and one you'll see written up on this blog eventually, if you and I both stick around long enough, 1996's Organ). The couple panics and attempts to dispose of the strange body they hit but dumping it into a ditch on the side of the road. Some time later on (there is no real sense in the film of the passage of time), the man is getting ready to go to work and finds a small piece of scrap metal embedded in his cheek while shaving. He attempts to remove it but realizes that it is growing from within his flesh. After this, while waiting in the subway for his train to work, he is attacked and chased by a woman who has become infected by the metal fetishist in some way, and is herself transforming into a big hunk of scrap. The man is able to escape and Tsukamoto-run back to his home, but is pursued by the woman, who has gained huge metal claw hands. He is ultimately able to snap the machine woman's back, but only after he himself begins to exhibit some signs of being infected.
The next major sequence is one which begins as a dream in which the man's girlfriend has grown a large, metal pipe probe in her genital area with which she proceeds to rape the man. After waking from the dream, the man and his girlfriend actually do have sex (and a very bizarre, sweaty meal). However, in something of an inverse of the dream sequence, the metal growths begin to spread rapidly all over the man's body, ultimately producing a fully-functional power drill penis the size of his torso. He becomes very aggressive toward his girlfriend, attempting, it seems, to rape her. Ultimately, she is impaled on the drill and dies, after which the man appears remorseful and gives her a perverse burial at sea in their bathtub. At this point, the man has fully become his iron man form, covered almost entirely by metal, with no recognizable human appendages or features.
The man is paid a visit by the source of his infection, the metal fetishist, who invades the man's television set and plays a recording of the man and his couple hitting him with their car, dumping his body, and proceeding to have sex in the woods mere feet from that body. The fetishist then reanimates the body of the iron man's girlfriend, traveling up through the pipes of their home into the tub to take control of her body, and has her attack the iron man with a knife. Eventually showing himself fully, the fetishist attempts to persuade the iron man that, between the two of them, they have enough power to bring about a utopian world made entirely of metal. The iron man flees but is chased through the streets by the fetishist to a huge warehouse, where the final battle between the two takes place. The fetishist forces himself on the iron man and the two merge together into one colossal metal being with two heads. Finally being able to directly access the vision of the fetishist, the iron man comes to see the beauty of destroying the human world and creating a scrapheap utopia. To a cry of “Our love will destroy this fucking world,” the hybrid machine rolls out to wreak its havoc.
Now this film is usually described as a sort of cautionary tale or parable of some type for a rapidly advancing and industrializing Japanese nation and a culture that was very quickly moving to embrace the new technologies that came along with that that progress. I think that while it is, in one sense, obviously correct to label the film as a type of expression of the fin-de-siecle neuroses of Japanese society, what is more challenging is fleshing out the content of that claim. If the idea is, as seems to be the case in the vast majority of written material on the film online and elsewhere, that Tsukamoto is making a statement about the soulless advancement of machine and digital technologies robbing us of our humanity and dignity and constantly presenting a threat to the safety and sanity of human society, I can't get on board. This seems to me to be a wildly half-baked way of thinking about the film, and has all the markings of what I call stock-analysis, that is, “If a film has characteristics X, Y, and Z, it must be roughly about this!” Here it's something like, Tetsuo is heady, dark, and ostensibly deals with technology, so it must be about technology robbing us of our souls!
I submit that, if we are to make any sense of the film as the unique statement that it is (tossed-off comparisons to Eraserhead or any Cronenberg film seem equally as lazy and pointless as the stock-analysis to me), we need to approach it as a higher-order social allegory rather than as simply a depiction of a nasty possible future (after all, there is no indication in the film whatsoever that it takes place in a future of any kind). Specifically, I believe that Tsukamoto is making a point about the way homosexuals are treated in society, and even more specifically, the role that the AIDS virus plays in that dynamic. At it's core, what is the plot of the film? We have two men, both of whom share a type of strange, incurable infection, one of whom embraces this fact and one of whom tries to run away from it, but both of whom will be shunned by society once they are found out. Furthermore, after becoming disgruntled enough with their cultural milieu, the two men proclaim the fact that their love is capable of destroying the world (both literally in the sense of ending human life, and perhaps as a sarcastic jab at those who predict apocalypse for humanity in a purely moral sense due to homosexuality) and even come to embrace this eventuality. This message at least is clear to me; the effects of the social repression not simply of homosexuality in general, but even more pronouncedly, of the reality of the AIDS epidemic and the lives of those afflicted with the disease can lead not only to self-hatred and self-denial (even the fetishist, who apparently has embraced his status, still actively mutilates his own body) but also to a type of dangerous, but not unwarranted, hatred for the world that has shunned them.
This is the aspect of the film that is most interesting to me; it is not simply that the fetishist and the iron man feel repressed and alienated by their society, but that they come to feel that they can use the very thing that they were repressed for as a weapon against that society. Indeed, the first and perhaps most indelible image that we see of the violent nature of the infection in the iron man is when his penis, the most effective delivery system of the ailment, literally transforms into a weapon, which he uses to kill his girlfriend. In some ways the message is so clear that it seems that Tsukamoto is almost lacking in subtlety. The dystopian world that Tsukamoto points to in Tetsuo is not one in which man and machine have symbiotically joined and man has lost his identity qua man, but rather one in which a large segment of the population has been so mistreated and has become so disgruntled that they opt to engage in a type of genetic warfare against the rest of society, utilizing as their main weapon that which made them outcasts. Tsukamoto actually seems to have been ahead of his time on this point, as I have heard numerous tales (whether or not these are at all credible, though I think some of them are, is irrelevant, as even urban legends can reflect directly the fears of a society) in the last decade or so of people driven mad by their infection with AIDS stabbing other individuals (wives, children, etc.) with hypodermic needs containing their infected blood in hopes of infecting them as well. Tsukamoto offers the idea that this kind of thing could potentially become much more widespread, and perhaps even organized, if homosexual individuals and individuals with AIDS are continually and systematically forced to either live on reservations at the fringes of society or conceal themselves and hide in plain sight, forever keeping their real identity a personal secret.
There are a number of other points that this analysis brings up, none of which I will get into, but a few of which I will mention. Firstly, it is not exactly clear how rational this utopian urge is on the part of the fetishist and the iron man. It may be that they are simply mad with rage at their repressive culture and have become overcome to the point of lashing out, or, perhaps more frightening, they are fully rational and have simply decided that the only way to be accepted in their society is through force and terror (the more general frenzy of the film may be a hint here, although the fetishist is a strikingly calm figure in his discussions with the iron man). Tsukamoto also and importantly leaves the moral status of their behavior open in the sense that it seems possible that the type of holocaust the two characters are about to embark upon is actually justified and perhaps the only way left to deal with their world.
Secondly, it strikes me that there is something unsettling about the way this thought process exhibited by Tsukamoto conceptualizes homosexuals. Certainly the intent seems to be to bring attention to the ways that they are treated in society and the injustices that they have to suffer. However, it's not obvious to me that the best way to gain equality and respect for homosexuals and people infected with AIDS is to point out that if we keep messing with them they could turn into a threatening terrorist force. In fact, I think I'm comfortable saying that's definitely not the best way. Peace through fear of retaliation is not, I submit, the same thing as respect, especially when the retaliation that is feared is genetic, and the fear boils down to one of becoming infected, becoming “one of them.” While it may not be the very worst place to start, it definitely isn't any kind of sustainable way to think about the way AIDS must be dealt with in human culture in a larger sense.
