By Nia Edwards-Behi
Twenty five years have passed since Shinya Tsukamoto unleashed his hellish vision of society on us, in the form of his techno-body horror masterpiece Tetsuo. Arguably the ur-film of Japanese body horror, Tetsuo rightly stands the test of time to remain eerily relevant and one of the finest abstract horror films ever made.
It took me a while to get round to Tetsuo. For a while my first and only experience of Japanese body horror was the wonderfully baffling Meatball Machine. Then followed a modern classic, in the form of Machine Girl, closely followed by the experience of sleeping through Tokyo Gore Police because it was midnight and directly after I’d just been traumatised by Martyrs (ah, festivals…). I eventually got around Tetsuo and its ‘sequel’ Body Hammer on DVD at home and boy, did it blow my mind. Not long after I also saw the other ‘sequel’, Bullet Man, which I’ve previously reviewed here.
While both sequels are enjoyable enough (caveat on Bullet Man, it’s enjoyable if you can get past the terrible English dialogue), neither comes quite close to recreating the sheer visceral power of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The film is brief – its longest cut only 77 minutes long, the standard version only 67 – but it does more in that time than most 90+ minute films come close to. It’s a short, sharp smack right in the face, for sure, one which leaves you reeling and wondering if you might have just nodded off and had one hell of a nightmare.
A synopsis barely does the film justice. The film opens with the Metal Fetishist (played by Tsukamoto himself), a man digging into his thigh with a metal rod. When he notices maggots in the festering wound he screams and runs wild, and is hit by a car. The driver of the car, a salaryman (Tomorowo Taguchi), and his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara), dump the Metal Fetishist’s body and leave him for dead. The Salaryman’s life is irreversibly changed, however, as throughout the film his body slowly transforms, his flesh and bones metamorphosing into scraps of metal. He encounters two others made of metal, namely a madwoman who chases him through the streets and his girlfriend in a humiliating dream sequence. Finally, he meets the Metal Fetishist again, and a final battle leads to surprising results.
If that sounds utterly bonkers, well, it is. A plot like that doesn’t work without the brazen, raw, exhausting style of its telling. Made entirely in black and white, and shot on 16mm, the film’s look removes it far from any semblance of ‘realism’. Incorporating stop-motion animation, rapid editing, expressionist performances and a truly discordant industrial soundtrack by Chu Ishikawa results in a brain-melting experience. Ishikawa’s masterful soundtrack brings everything else together and is one of my favourite things about the film, all clanging sounds and incessantly driving beats. Tetsuo’s the sort of stylistic mish-mash that needs to be experienced to be believed.
Of course, Tetsuo isn’t all about its incomprehensible plot and imagery, even if that is the main appeal. Like body horror across any national filmmaking context, the film abstractly deals with human crisis, psychological conflict or trauma manifest on the body. In the case of Japanese body horror, sometimes referred to as Japanese cyberpunk, this is intrinsically linked with issues of industry and technology. I won’t pretend to be an expert on Japanese history and society, but given the extremely rapid growth of the Japanese economy post-WW2, and the importance of manufacturing, technological developments and corporate rule, it’s little surprise that such industrial concerns emerge in its art. It’s no mistake that the protagonist of Tetsuo is a salaryman, a stereotype figure known for his mundane loyalty to work. The Salaryman becomes the Iron Man, his body as industrialised as his mind – but crucially, by doing so he is freed, and is able to rebel against that which otherwise constrains him. A crisis of masculinity is central to that metamorphosis too, I think, with the immediate narrative contrast of dream sequence Girlfriend and the mechanical penis extreme evidence of that. One of the film’s strongest assets is Kei Fujiwara, who not only plays the Salaryman’s girlfriend – her performance in the dream sequence is surely the spiritual heir to mechanical Maria’s dance in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – but she also shared camera duties with Tsukamoto.
The human body in crisis is always going to be a relevant theme to explore in art, and horror’s one of the best places to do that. Tsukamoto’s exploration of the fine line between body, soul, work and industry is still remarkably topical today. Though we might now be more concerned with issues of surveillance and living in the Cloud and bitcoins or whatever, the physical human body, in relation to these, remains in crisis. I think if Tsukamoto were to revisit Tetsuo once again issues of surveillance and our increasingly virtual existence would be the way forward. At the end of The Iron Man the Salaryman and the Metal Fetishist seem to resolve to turn the world to rust. But at least if we’re made of iron, we’re still made of something, right?