Film Review: Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Stories of change and transformation, or setsuwa (apparently), are an old tradition in Japan: the crossing of boundaries between the human and the non-human; tales linking the animal and human worlds that overlap, on occasion, with Western mythology. It’s tempting to cite salary men morphing into slobbering, giggling, schoolgirl-hungry creatures from a netherworld twenty minutes after kampai as the most obvious example, but narratives often found in Japanese anime (animated movies) presenting fluid subjects (transforming robots, humans turning into demons, that sort of thing), whose very identities are unstable, paint a (slightly) more sinister vision.
It was exactly a diet of anime and far too much coffee that informs independent director Shinya Tsukamoto’s dysptopian (and now very cult) movie: Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989, b/w). Though Japanese directors are, on the whole, pretty damn adverse to realism, Tsukamoto goes to extremes to show a dizzyingly kinetic, convulsive and disturbing explosion (for want of a better word) of techo-pop visuals. It shows the fragile equilibrium of young people living on the edge of disaster where soulless machinery is taking over.
Prosperity abounds, as it did before the recession, yet Japanese businessmen are jaded with their lifestyle, and food etc.; it simply isn’t as oishii as it used to be. The unnamed salary man of the movie is subjected to a hysterical mental assault afer he collides with a metal fetishist in a car crash and reimagines himself literally as part metal, part man. Needless to say, the scene in which he brutally impales his (quite) surprised looking girlfriend on the end of his spinning “drill” doesn’t exactly constitute the stuff of Disney movies. The twinned protagonists set out to mark the beginning of a huge metal matrix that’s waiting to supplant the natural world as we know it, eventually melding into a tank-like two-headed beast that zooms insanely through Tokyo proclaiming the whole world will be mutated into metal.
Feeling like an extended acid trip at times, movies like Tetsuo — or its colour sequel — are not the most obvious entry points into Japanese cinema but do, at least, support my belief that Japanese movies are among the most imaginative, engrossing and wildly different in the world. If only the TV shows could catch up even a little bit.