your future is metal - Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

migraine! the movie (/complimentary)

Is this the right movie to watch after a week of very little sleep because of the current UK heatwave? Probably not, but here we are then.

Spoilers?! In the usual place?!!! I think?!

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

Written and directed by: Shinya Tsukamoto

Starring: Tomorowo Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Nobu Kanaoka, Shinya Tsukamoto, Naomasa Musaka, Renji Ishibashi

Running time: 67 minutes

Original release date: 1 July 1989

the plot, in brief (sort of… we’ll get to it)

A metal fetishist (Tsukamoto) inserts a large piece of metal into a wound in his leg. Driven mad by maggots wriggling around in the wound, he runs out into the street and is hit by a car.

The driver of the car, an unnamed Japanese salaryman (Taguchi), later finds a metal thorn protruding from his cheek while shaving. This is the start of a bizarre transformation, which will violently warp the salaryman’s body into something twisted beyond recognition, something beyond human…

a note, before we continue

Tetsuo: The Iron Man doesn’t follow a conventional narrative, meaning there is no traditional plot as we know it to dissect. This presents us with an opportunity to do what I like to call a bit of a freestyle yap about the movie and if there is one thing I love to do it is to fucking yap about a movie so let’s fucking go.

the making of the movie

The story of how Tetsuo came into existence is pretty much as fascinating as the movie itself. The seeds for it were planted in Shinya Tsukamoto’s younger years, when he read Edogawa Ranpo’s Shōnen Tanteidan (The Boy Detectives Club) as well as other works by the famed author. He found himself drawn to the darker edges within the books, recalling that he had similar feelings reading his books as he did reading SM magazines in high school.

Tuskamoto also had an interest in kaiju media, and specifically cites the series Ultra Q as an influence, as he felt that the show’s “mismatched elements” gave it a surrealist feel. This led him to become interested in surrealism in high school. When he inherited his father’s 8mm camera, he began making films with his brother. As his stylistic interests grew to include non-kaiju/monster films such as Bitterness of Youth (dir. Tatsumi Kumashiro), and a raft of American cinema, he also found the work of legendary director Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa’s work with light to manipulate images on film would later be a huge influence on Tetsuo.

From there, he got into work on experimental theatre, influenced specifically by the work of avant-garde playwright Jūrō Kara. His time working in experimental theatre, both during his school years and after graduation, would connect him with some of the people who ended up working on Tetsuo, most notably Nobu Kanaoka (who plays the woman who chases the salaryman from the train station) and Kei Fujiwara (who plays the salaryman’s girlfriend).

Upon his graduation in 1984, Tsukamoto entered into work in advertising agencies, hoping this would give him access to professional recording equipment. It took him 18 months to even be allowed to direct a commercial, a time in which he worked immensely long hours and was almost never home. It’s an experience that helped shape the spine of Tetsuo. After a return to theatre work, the creation of a theatre group and his eventual resignation from a job which sucked the life out of him, Tsukamoto made a short film with members of his theatre group. The short was called The Phantom of Regular Size, about a salaryman whose body eventually turns into metal. This narrative would be built on in Tetsuo.

The shoot and post-production for Tetsuo sound like, to put it mildly, a fucking nightmare, with the shoot losing a crew member nearly every day to the point where, near the end, only the actors were showing up and also doing double, sometimes triple duties as crew members. The film’s heightened, theatrical acting style comes from the fact that the cast and crew only had time to do one take, leading the actors to perform their scenes in a more exaggerated, over-acted style. During the editing process, Tsukamoto drove himself to physical and emotional exhaustion, especially on hearing the film’s loud and near constant metal banging sound effects over and over again.

The fact that Tetsuo went on to cement itself as one of horror’s most singular, extraordinary visions then feels like a minor miracle. If you’re a regular reader of this Substack you’ll know that I love dissecting not just the plot of a film itself but also the story behind it, and in this case I could definitely argue that the forging of the film itself, much like the forging of a new way of the body within the film, is a fascinating story.

beautiful black and white body horror

The shot of the young man (or the Metal Fetishist as he’s also known) inserting the scrap metal into his thigh. The Metal Fetishist running the metal rod between his teeth, almost intimate like a kiss. The stop motion shots of the Metal Fetishist and later the Salaryman running down the street. The scenes with the Salaryman and his girlfriend, him watching helplessly as she dies, having impaled herself on his METAL FUCKING DRILLER DICK.

Every transformation, every writhing in pain. The slow, almost sensual shot of the Salaryman’s (although we don’t know it’s him until later) car as it hits the Metal Fetishist, overlayed with the sex jazz on the soundtrack. The shots of the Metal Fetishist watching, as the Salaryman and his girlfriend fuck against a tree, leaving him to die on the forest floor. Every single shot of this film feels like the twisted spawn of Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Is it possible for gore to look beautiful in black and white? Is it possible that the warping of a flesh and blood body to metal can look like art this way? You would think it isn’t but this film makes it so. The grain to the film (Tsukamoto was inspired after seeing some black and white Derek Jarman films in 16 and 35mm projections) gives it a texture that makes the blood and the bones look so unlike anything you’ve ever seen. I don’t think I’ll ever be over just how beautiful this completely fucked in the head movie looks.

metal pipe asmr

Have you ever wondered what it would sound like to push a cart of scrap metal down a very lengthy staircase? Well wonder no more because Tetsuo’s soundtrack will make you hear exactly that for 67 aurally brutal minutes!

Seriously, I made the mistake of going to the supermarket shortly after watching the film and felt so put off by the sound of clanking carts and metal that I nearly had a bit of a sensory panic attack, that’s how fucking effective this soundtrack is. Composer Chu Ishikawa worked off of a brief that basically consisted of “make music only with the sound of metal” and managed to spin these very vague instructions into something of his own (it’s very Great British Bake-Off technical challenge, when Paul Hollywood sets the recipe and the instructions are 1) make the pastry, 2) ?!??!?!?!?!? and somehow at least one person manages to at least come close to the original vision despite working from a brief that is essentially a riddle).

the beauty of interpretation

Given that the film does not follow a conventional narrative and is instead more of a cyberpunk body horror mood piece, Tetsuo lends itself to a number of interpretations. I personally really like this queer reading of the story, and also think that, on a personal level, it reads to me as a film about a body rebelling against a future seemingly set in stone by the corporate world.

When asked about the film's meaning, Tsukamoto himself responded that he felt it was about

"the process in which human beings become 'Iron'; that is, it's some kind of human condition," and that when he made the film, he was "preoccupied with chaos, so I was trying to integrate the horror with the science fiction that I had within me." Tsukamoto expanded on this in an interview with The Japan Times in 1992, stating an interest in the erotic elements of juxtaposing a soft body against hard iron.

(as per Wikipedia)

Whatever you need Tetsuo to be, it probably is. To me, it’s an experimental and malleable movie about bodies both organic and mechanic, about a rebellion of the flesh itself.

Also, about the sound of endless clanking metal pipes! Yay!