October 8, 2018
Written by: Shin'ya Tsukamoto
Starring: Tomoro Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Nobu Kanaoka
Budget:
Quote: "Together, we can turn this fucking world to rust!"
Trivia: The film was based on a play that Shin'ya Tsukamoto had written, directed and performed in college.
I watched this movie on Monday and it's already Saturday. Usually, I write these movie writeups the next day, but this movie simply left me dumbfounded. There seems to be so much going on in the film that I cannot put into words. While the movie is at its core a body horror about a man slowly being transformed into a collection of metal, it is heavily influenced by the surrealism of David Lynch's films (especially Eraserhead), the black and white landscapes, lighting, and camerawork of expressionist cinema (Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), cyberpunk fetishism, and the bleak manmade distopian despair in the writings of J.G. Ballard. The movie is both revolting and beautiful. The industrial soundtrack, frenetic acting, and stop-and-go animation give the film an intensity that creates an anxiety in the viewer that never lets up.
The film opens with a character known only as The Metal Fetishist shoving a large piece of metal into an open wound in his leg. The wound begins to fester and attract maggots causing him to run into the street where he is hit by a car driven by a character known as The Salaryman. He and his wife try to hide the Fetishist's body but the Fetishist gets revenge on the man by causing him to gradually turn into a pile of metal. The first moment is while the Salesman is shaving he notices a diode coming out of his cheek. As the film progresses more metal appears on the man's body until the final metamorphosis of the Salaryman into The Iron Man. After the change is complete the Metal Fetishist returns to show the Salaryman, the future world as an uninhabited metal wasteland. A final battle ensures causing the two become one giant monster who agree to turn "the fucking world into rust!"
It is the existential angst of the story that makes it have such an impact. Body horrors thrive on the fear we all have: we know that one day our bodies will begin to decay, they will fail us, and they will eventually disintegrate into nothingness. It is our identification of ourselves with our bodies that create this fear. As the character slowly loses his body and himself, the viewer cannot help but feel his existential anguish. Seeing his bodily changes and the fear, disgust, and shame it causes, it is hard not to feel his worry and pity him. However, it is when the Salaryman accepts his fate as the Iron Man that he can truly become something beyond himself. On a spiritual level, this is the idea behind most eastern religions, the transcendence beyond our bodily vessels and the unlocking of our true potential. Comically, his true potential is to become a two headed metal monster intent to turn the planet into a metal wasteland.
There are some really disturbing scenes in the film (actually the entire 67 minutes of the film are pretty disturbing). Early on, as the Salaryman is still mostly human, he has a nightmare that his wife is an exotic dancer with a metal phallic snake that she writhes around his apartment with. After dancing for a bit, she uses the metal phallus the sodomize the main character. When he awakes he realizes that his penis has turned into a giant metal drill. His wife then has sex with him in turn killing herself. The mixture of technology, violence, and sexuality is both intriguing and revolting. That the are combined into one act is symbolic of the film's cyberpunk fetishism theme. These themes were also looked at in J. G. Ballard's Crash, which was turned into a movie (not the one with Sandra Bullock).
The film is also a statement about modernity. A look at our own cityscapes parallels the dystopian nightmare of the Metal Fetishist, as society quickly replaces natural beauty with manmade creations. The film ironically (maybe?) asserts that nature is an impediment to man's full potential, our destiny to completely conquer this world. Metal is the ultimate symbol of human progress and innovation. The skyscraper, statues to humans, the telephone wires and roads that crisscross our world are singularly human statements imprinted on the land. The movie thus forces us to look at ourselves and our own world. As cities grow and technology increases, we move closer and closer to the Fetishist's nightmare. Also, as we increasingly become more reliant on technology, we become more and more like the Iron Man. It's a bleak future that will often be looked at twenty five years later in Black Mirror. A future that is not that far off. While Tetsuo is a surrealistic look at that future, it might be more realistic that we'd like to admit. We truly have become slaves to our inventions.
...what's your thoughts?
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