Less a coherent movie and more of a deranged art installation, Shinya Tsukamoto’s utterly insane Tetsuo: The Iron Man is something of an enigma.
Welding and riveting together various forms of inspiration from the new flesh worshiping body horror of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, the monochromatic fever dream stylings of David Lynch’s Eraserhead and the manic energy of various instances of Anime, The Iron Man doesn’t so much feel like a normal film production, but more like the images were pulled directly from its director’s neocortex and recorded from his thalamus directly onto grainy film stock much in the same way that Jörg Buttgereit’s jaw dropping Nekromantik wriggled into seedy existence.
The result, obviously, is not for everyone – but aficionados of extreme cinema will no doubt appreciate its… mettle.
Stripped back to the point that it’s characters aren’t even given actual names, Tetsuo: The Iron Man introduces us to a quite obviously insane man the titles worryingly describe as The Fetishist (played by Tsukamoto himself) who we first meet forcing metal piping into a wound on his leg as he squats in an apartment filled with scrap iron and rusty spare parts. However, the man runs screaming from his decadent surroundings once he finds the wound crawling with maggots and is subsequently struck by a car.
Elsewhere, we meet the suit wearing Salaryman, a tie, specs and briefcase wielding office drone who desires a seemingly normal life despite acting out numerous sexual fantasies with his girlfriend that could be hardly be descibe as conservative. One day, Salaryman notices a small metal spike protruding from his cheek while shaving that has the rather unnerving reaction of squirting blood when touched, but as he still has a job to do, he covers it up with a plaster and heads off to his commute. However, the sexually violent nightmares he’s been having seemingly start coming to life when, on his trip to work, a random woman pokes a steaming lump of flesh and metal that attaches to her arm and makes her attack the Salaryman who flees all across town to escape her. While he eventually manages to somehow defeat his bio-mechanically controlled foe with a burst of super strength, he finds that the flesh on his arm has turned into metal – and the transformation doesn’t stop there.
After an altercation with his girlfriend that involves suggestive eating, sex and the the subsequent transformation of his penis into a monstrously oversized drillbit, sanity desides to take a well deserved holiday as Salaryman finds that his metal-tinged woes are the doings of The Fetishist, who’s vengeful targeting of the still-changing businessman hints at a fateful encounter from their past and a terrible destiny they’re going to invoke.
Utterly dedicated to making you squirm, Tetsuo: The Iron Man was made over a period of 18 months in conditions so difficult, almost every member of the crew save the minimalist cast and the director had quit the production. Well, it seems that the uncomfortable nature of the shoot managed to bore it’s way into the fabric of the movie as this ode to extreme technophobia is a tough and grating watch. Shot in grainy black and white and bathed on expressionist lighting that gives proceedings the feelings of a crudely drawn example of a colourless issue of Manga, the movie impacts your consciousness like the piercing sound of screeching, rusty steel, keeping you in a constant state of unease for its brief, 67 minute running time. Adopting an industrial look so extreme it looks like a third of the movie was shot inside the intestinal tract of Megatron from Michael Bay’s first Transformers, the tone is so overwhelmingly oppressive, you fell it could have inspired H.R. Giger to take a break and go out and paint a field or a puppy or something.
As expected for a film that feels wildly experimental, it unleashes numerous outraged howls against numerous aspects of society such as our desperate need for technology veering into literal fetish as we actually become one with our various time saving dohickies (as prevalent now as it was back in ’89) and the movie also hefts about an impressive nod to fluid sexuality that as are about as subtle as a sizable drillbit dick. As Salaryman’s transformation takes him from everyman to a clanking, living junkyard, it seems that his sexual preferences shift also with him having dreams of being sodomized by his girlfriend with a writhing, metallic tube that emerges from her bathing suit area and the climax sees him literally merge and become one with his spikey haired foe with both loudly remarking that they’re throughly enjoying the experience. In fact, as their final form zooms off to infect the rest of the world, in case the influx of Queer themes has somehow been too subtle, Tsukamoto makes sure that we get a good look at the fact that they’ve become a giant, nitro powered phallus on wheels – an actual cock rocket if you will.
The production is, predictably, primitive; but the various low-fi methods used to panel beat Tsukamoto’s primal visions onto the screen are secondary to the manic energy the film puts out. Using crude stop motion using his actual actors to show then hurtling through town after sprouting boosters on their heels works in a strange, violently comic book kind of sense and while some of Salaryman and The Fetishist’s more mechanical forms often look like someone’s slipped acid onto the set of the Power Rangers, it still totally fits the grungy, oily, DIY look Tsukamoto had to scrape together to achieve.
Plot details are purely incidental, with the barest nuggets of story sprinkled around to keep the thing rumbling along, but even the threadbare side-plot that reveals that it was Salaryman and his girlfriend who accidently runs The Fetishist down with their car and then chooses to have sex within sight of where they dumped his “body” has metallic tang of perversion pumping through its tubes.
An uncompromising wince-fest that not only fully realises the wanton desires and unseemly fascinations of its characters, but hot wires us directly into their POV whether we like it or not with flashbacks and memories rendered on fuzzy, static dusted television screens endless close ups of distorted, screaming faces.
Essentially the last twenty minutes of Akira if it had been directed by Andy Warhol, Tetsuo: The Iron Man is the cinematic equivalent of a lead pipe to the back of the noggin.
Steel yourself for the experience.
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