Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989)

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

Screenplay: Shinya Tsukamoto

Cast: Tomorowo Taguchi as the Salaryman; Kei Fujiwara as the Girlfriend; Nobu Kanaoka as the Woman in Glasses; Shinya Tsukamoto as the Metal Fetishist; Naomasa Musaka as the Doctor; Renji Ishibashi as the Tramp

An Abstract Candidate

 

Our love can destroy this fuckin' world!

Coming to the film which stands out as a metal behemoth in Shinja Tsukamoto's career, his theatrical debut after the films made with his Kaijyu Theatre, I will gladly argue he has amassed an amazing number of masterpieces in his career, with so many layers to those he would make in the decades on. Tetsuo the Iron Man, a “Regular Sized Monster Series” production, is by itself however a true one-off, which you can return to and detonates with an incredible power to it. Even here, layers can be found in terms of this tale of a man’s transformation into metal, not just the obvious one of urbanisation and modern technology as a source of anxiety, something which will be returned to in multiple ways in this director-writer’s career. For starters, the body is a fixation as would be the case onwards, as we encounter a fetishist of metal (Tsukamoto himself) who has cut outs of athletes (track and field) among his coils and scrap in his hovel. Unfortunately, inserting metal into his own leg, the wound becomes infected and full of maggots after a while, and in his panic hobbling for help outside he is run over.

Tetsuo is also subdued in its pace for a chunk of its length - for those unaware of this film, Tsukamoto after a pair of short films created this independent production with collaborators, from their Kaijyu Theatre team, a film which will eventually kick into a hyper intensity but to its credit slowly waits before bolting for the rest of its hour plus length. The fetishist takes his revenge on the salary man (Tomorowo Taguchi) who ran him over, starting to turn into a metal machine man himself and already having an encounter with a woman who, turned into a monster, made the ill advised mistake to stab a weird bio-scrap thing on the subway floor with her pen. With Taguchi to his credit having to work in a giant suit of scrap metal, what can be at times like an ultra violent brawl out of a Power Rangers, shot in the streets of Japan, is yet also a legendary cult film regarded for how distinct and intense it is, a bolt out of the blue when it was released at the end of the eighties in Japanese cinema which caught on globally.

The film is legendary for its intense editing, for Chu Ishikawa's intense industrial score, its monochrome look, and moments which can be incredibly disturbing but forgotten until revisiting the film, such as an entire stop motion moment of a man being broken down (even his skull and flesh) into living wires and machinery in a stop motion sequence, but this can also be subdued, prickling in what is to come with cuts to factory machinery and snippets of Ishikawa's music, taking its time. Even our salaryman's transformation is banal, suddenly the first concern to merely a spike found sticking outward from his cheek when shaving. It can be strange, such as the scene where he merely repeating the same thing over and over on a phone to someone, and it can be funny on purpose. Even the score gets into the tonal change as you can also get sultry jazz sax when the fetishist is hit by the car in the first place, which I secretly hoped that was Chu Ishikawa too playing the instrument.

Throughout the one thing you do not get from the later film is this film’s more playful nature, even in scenes which are meant to be shocking or disarming, such as how that music returns for a proudly homoerotic love between two enemies, the gender subversions and ideas of the body Tsukamoto would elaborate on in his further films already here but matched by the energy of a homemade low budget film which set the bar higher than most for how well made and precise it was. Little details with hindsight cause it to have more edge over other good cult films like this, such as Kei Fujiwara as the lead's girlfriend, who though with a horrifying conclusion to her tale not a damsel not in the least. Partially this is with knowledge that Fujiwara herself, who would go on to direct two cult films in dire need of re-appreciation, was the co-cinematographer on the film with Tsukamoto and a collaborator, alongside how the character in how she is portrayed, the salaryman himself not an innocent in his crimes, is not a conventional archetype. There is even a fantasy scene of her character dancing like in a pagan ritual before a phallic tentacle she is wearing between her legs, like a vacuum cleaner tube, participates in explicit pegging long before the infamous penis drill of the film appears.

Whilst this is a mood piece for a large part of it, little pieces like this, or the sexual licking and castration of a sausage with metal sounds over the noises, do come across showing more to the film over multiple watches, alongside a sense of humour and whimsy that would leave as Tsukamoto would continue. “Whimsy” is an odd choice of word for Tetsuo, but considering this ends with a hybrid man-tank storming the streets of urban Tokyo, the creation of two figures loving each other wishing to rust the world into metal, it is perversely the best choice of word when returning to the film. The deliberateness of the plot, never explaining the transformation of man into metal, does not mean either there is complexity either, as flashbacks to the fetishist’s past which bleed in, such as about a piece of metal in his brain, can be caught out as abrupt and disrupting the plot in first watches, and fire up the imagination when you eventually put together the film over multiple viewings.

As much as I love what Tsukamoto became, this film as the climax of his Kaijyu Theatre work does feel of its own existence, as I miss the stop motion he brought in to this film for its effects, the speeding up effects to make himself and other actors travel at supersonic speed down streets gliding along, and that this does show itself as a genre film which has all the imagination of this type of low budget and creative cinema, not just from Japan, at its most impactful. Thankfully the unpredictability that you get here, and grows as the film goes along, grew in the director’s other work as these traits started to ebb away. Tetsuo the Iron Man is also still an audio-visual experience which has not lost its power – later Tsukamoto films still retained this, Tokyo Fist arguably his best work and matching the intensity (with Chu Ishikawa’s craft) to his greater focus on human drama, but this is nonetheless able to retain its power even after multiple watches.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Grotesque/Kinetic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High