Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Director: Shinya Tsukamoto
Actors: Tomorowo Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Shinya Tsukamoto
Year Released: 1989
Genre: Sci-fi
See Also: Vital, A Snake of June, Electric Dragon 80000V
Holy shit. Seventeen years on, Tetsuo: The Iron Man has lost none of its impact. It's still just as visceral, challenging, and unique as the day it was released in 1989. That says a lot not only for the singular filmic vision of Shinya Tsukamoto but for the relatively static level of current filmmaking. Maybe computers have made everyone lazy. To make a film like Tetsuo requires endless amounts of energy, dedication, and a willingness to let yourself be wrapped up in pounds and pounds of metal.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man was Tsukamoto's breakthrough work, a 16mm assault of black and white images, stop-motion animation, super gore, and Cronenberg-like biomechanical revulsion. At 67 minutes, it's longer than his previous shorts and yet not quite feature length, a stop-gap between film festival obscurity and the mainstream success he enjoys now (at least in Japan). The man has obviously mellowed. His current crop of films (Vital, A Snake of June) is much less kinetic and exhausting, yet that fascination with the human body and the way it changes (death and surgery, respectively) remains. But for the real stuff, we have to go back to Tetsuo.
Tetsuo is less about plot than it is about pure cinematic energy, but for a point of reference: a salary man and his wife run over a man out running with a piece of metal in his leg. The couple disposes of the body in the forest, not knowing that the man has survived. Meanwhile, the salary man begins to turn into a metallic monster, complete with a massive, spinning drill penis, on which his wife impales herself. The film drives towards the conflict between the man of metal and the man who survived the accident, a metal fetishist who fuses himself into the ever-growing body of the metal man.
For Tetsuo, plot is a mere convenience. Tsukamoto, who directed, wrote, acted in, edited, produced, art-directed, and shot the film (with cinematographer Kei Fujiwara, who played the wife), was much more concerned with creating a hyperkinetic piece of moving art than he was in telling a story. Speed and revulsion, horror and metamorphosis are what Tetsuo is about. You can read all sorts of things into it—urban alienation, the fusion of man with post-industrial society, the fetishization of consumer goods—but, like the early films of contemporary Sogo Ishii, Tsukamoto seems less interested in making a point than in making a lot of noise and doing it very quickly.
I remember how overwhelmed I was by Tetsuo the first time I saw it. Watching it again now, 17 years later, I was just as overwhelmed, if not more. Tetsuo is an incredible cinematic achievement from a filmmaker who, much like the nameless salary man of his breakthrough film, has continued to grow and push the boundaries. Long live the new celluloid.
Otaku Alert: The written characters for the name "Tetsuo" translate as "Iron Man."
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