Written by Jon Warner in honor of the 5th Annual Allan Fish Online Film Festival
“Your future is metal”.
“We can mutate the whole world into metal”.
“We can rust the world into the dust of the universe”.
From the ominous industrial drum machine thuds and metallic clangs that open the film, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) is a thunderous and bludgeoning all-out assault on the senses. Maybe it’s because of all the Covid waves, death tolls, quarantines, mask wearing, and vaccines, but for some reason I’ve done some binge watching of the body-horror genre this past year. There’s something about our own mortality, our aging, our sicknesses and diseases that finds a logical conclusion in the curiosity and repulsion of the imagery in the genre that provides for some dangerous, yet somehow cathartic film viewing. Tetsuo: The Iron Man struck me a few months ago when I watched it for the first time after stumbling across a countdown of the greatest body horror films. I thought to myself, “how have I never heard of this film?” It is one of the most intense entries in the genre and is one of the great obscure classics in cinema history. It has flown under the radar for decades and is long overdue for discovery.
This art-house-expressionist-body-horror-cyber-punk-black-comedy-cult film is the kind of film you will either be sucked into right away and not be able peel your eyes away, or you will turn it off with aversion once the character known as “Fetishist” slices open his thigh and inserts a metal bolt into his body, (seemingly for the pleasure of being penetrated by it) in an attempt to fuse himself with metal. Things start to go south for our fetishist when the wound begins to harbor maggots. He freaks out and hits the streets (because where else would you go with a maggot infested bolt-leg?) where he gets run over (by whom it will be revealed) and then turns into a sort of malevolent, Lynchian, “man in the box”, capable of inflicting a metal-disease upon people. One of these is a suit and tie Salaryman who is shaving one morning and finds what appears to be a metal prong sticking out of his cheek, which he promptly picks at, spurting blood. He is stalked and attacked by a woman who has been infected by the Fetishist and has a hand that looks like a more grotesque version of “Edward Scissorhands” and body movements that only George Romero could appreciate.
We begin to wonder exactly where this film can go at this point, but we surmise that the Salaryman has begun to succumb to the metal disease, gradually but assuredly turning into an orgiastic assembly of metal detritus. As he is overtaken by the effects of the disease, his arm begins to take on metal plating, his foot springs a bolt, and his cheek starts turning into some weird plasticky-metal shielding. Things really heat up when he’s making love to his girlfriend. Tsukamoto’s dark sense of humor takes over in these scenes as the Salaryman feeds his girlfriend a hotdog on a fork in a weird kind of food-sex moment, but as she licks it, the most ear-splitting metallic shriek sound-effect takes over. When his “manhood” becomes a spinning, rocket shaped auger, we know all hope for this relationship is doomed. Most of the film’s effect relies upon a physical and emotional sense rather than logic, so if you choose to be on any mood-altering chemicals during this film (or even a few double IPAs), you might actually unlock more from it than if you didn’t. Much of this just needs to be experienced as a hardcore dive down the rabbit hole.
In spite of the low budget available to Tsukamoto, (by and large funded by himself) the success of the film is due to the DIY esthetic and tactile nature to the mise-en-scene and filming style. Filmed over the course of 18 months, (which is incredible as the film is only 67 minutes long!), the film’s high contrast black and white images, stop motion effects, and fast motion tracking shots make the film come alive. Tsukamoto’s earlier short film prototype (in color) from 1986 called The Phantom of Regular Size was filmed on super-8 and actually contains many of the ideas he’d build into Iron Man. It’s worth taking a look at as a way of seeing how the creative process works and seeing how he’d improve upon the vision. There is little dialogue of consequence in Iron Man, so it often plays like a late-era silent film, reliant on bravura visuals, sound effects, and a fantastic industrial soundtrack written by Chu Ishikawa that really slams. To my ears, this inspired soundtrack plays somewhat like Ministry circa “1988-89”.
Of particular note is the costume design, which at times is nauseating and grotesque while also being beautifully intricate. It is said that Tsukamoto literally cobbled together all kind of television parts to create the Iron Man costume, which is a collection of metal tubes, coils, and wires that piles up thicker and thicker, to the point where there is very little organic body left. I can’t imagine what kind of undertaking was required to get into this costume every day, but it’s so tactile that you simply cannot look away. Metaphorically, the lingering implications of our industrialized and capitalistic greed slowly consuming our bodies is not so far-fetched. What we do to our planet, we do to our bodies. Biodiversity continues to be threatened every year as technology, resource consumption and urban development drift us ever closer to the abyss. This film’s vision of an organic human becoming diseased and turning into an inorganic, clanging monstrosity sounds more like where we’re headed as a human race than perhaps anything I can think of.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man can be viewed here on YouTube in its entirety with English Subtitles.