Tetsuo: the Iron Man. Terror, metal and love
Japan. 1989. A young film maker called Shinya Tsukamoto. He has been making films for the past 15 years with a super 8mm camera his father bought him.
Tsukamoto grew up in the 70’s, this was when Japan was going through a rapid change in the industrialisation after the end of world war 2, it cannot be denied that this was a huge influence on Tsukmoto’s first feature film Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Tetsuo’s world feels contained in this small Japanese neighbourhood, its tight, compact and feels abandoned, left to the metal that eventually possesses our characters. The film feels still relevant with the idea that the metal will take over the humans that inhabit this space and eventually the whole world. If you switch metal with plastic you have a scarily eerie comparison to where our own world seems to be heading.
The world is falling apart, barely holding at the seams. This is even before we realise who our main characters are. A salary man, someone who is held down by the brutal capitalist nature of 70’s Japan, his girlfriend who seems to be mostly interested in the sexual pleasure he can provide her and our “protagonist” The metal fetishist, a man who spends his days trying to fuse himself with metal by shoving rebar into his gaping wounds, this is what sets the plot of our film in motion when he find maggots crawling inside of his muscles it sends him insane, running into the street where he is promptly run down by the salaryman and his girlfriend. The film continues after they bury the body. As the film continues the salaryman is hunted down by remnants of the metal fetishist eventually attaching parts of himself to him. Our character has dreams of his girlfriend sodomizing him.
Tsukamoto has gone on recording as saying filming Tetsuo was such an ordeal that he “considered burning the films negative” after production had wrapped. Over the 18 months of filming only one person working on the film,Tomorowo Taguchi (Salary man),did not live on set. With most filming done primarily in Kei Fujiwara’s (Woman) apartment, there where days where Taguchi would show up to set and a new crew member had left, culminating in the entire lighting crew leaving, and Taguchi having to light his own scenes. Production on Tetsuo was hell.
Im telling you this so you can understand some context in which the film was made and how this affected the final product of the film. Watching Tetsuo feels like a migraine put onto film, it hurts, its fast and it is constantly attack all of your senses. Tetsuo was made as a rebellion against Japan in the 80’s, Tsukamoto has gone on record to say that he has a love-hate relationship for Tokyo, Tetsuo feels like him trying to release his hate for the city over its 77 minute runtime and the ordeal that the production was would not have been any help for the directors feelings.
The film climaxes in this beautifully horrific fight between our two main characters, where as they come to realise they are more alike than it first seemed, and they merge into a huge penis ready to attack Tokyo, yes it is as stupid and and amazing as it seems. Maybe Tsukamoto was trying to say something with this ending outside of a further push of his disdain for Tokyo, something about LGBT in Japan but I dont think this article is the place for that analysis.
It also cant be denied the role this film played with the creation of Japanese Cyberpunk, combining principles of rebellion against systems and the idea of a dilapidated future where if we want something you are going to have to fight for it until the bitter end.
Tetsuo was (and still is) one of the most unique pieces of film ever created, there is nothing else like it and I dont think there ever will be. The situation that this film was created in would destroy most film makers, living on set for 18 months and seeing your crew slowly leave your project sounds like a nightmare come to life and somehow in the end came out a legendary film, Tetsuo: The Iron man is more than a film, its a declaration. Its an attack on what film can and should be and for that I think it is one of the most important films of all time and one of my personal favourites.
