Regarded as a surrealist cyberpunk interlink between exaggerated styles and emotions, Tetsou the Iron Man by Shinya Tsukamoto is one of the most hyperbolically nightmarish pieces of cinematic art ever made. After being unleashed to some of the most visually horrific and sometimes paradoxically entrancing oddities put on film, its cult-classic status is rightly earned. It is, essentially, a perverse link between pain and pleasure, exaggerated by its own links between man and metal.
Loud crashing surrealism and vile body horror aside, what immediately sticks out about Tetsuo is its old-style of a 1920s silent film: sporting minimal dialogue, exaggerated acting and the grittiest black and white format you can find. This helps the film find its dark, claustrophobic emotion and brings its unusually frequent stop-motion of wire meshes covering the screen and road-skating in a heavy, metallic feel.
Contrasting to silent film, I also particularly adore the blaring thunderous soundtrack, capturing that feel of hard mechanical clanging throughout the film flawlessly, almost referring a heavy metal heartbeat and amplifying paranoia in scenes such as were our protagonist gets chased by a metallically-possessed woman and when our two metal characters fuse together in the finale. It also furtherly helps draw that odd blur between pain and pleasure in a couple of scenes I’ll be covering.
But after going through such intensely manipulated emotions by the film’s surrealism and gloriously entrancing camerawork and sound, when someone asks what the general plot is, at the end of the day, there’s almost nothing to its emotional power that can be summed up by the plot. It’s more or less just something to tie a few strings together to help deliver the psychological depths more effectively. This is, what I would call, the plot:
A metal fetishist cuts his thigh open and crams a metal pipe down it. After horrifyingly finding it infested with maggots, he madly runs out into the road, only to get hit by a car. Instead of taking him to a hospital, the so-called ‘salaryman’ and his wife dump his dying body into a ditch and shockingly have intercourse in front of him after seemingly getting aroused by the situation. Weeks later, the salaryman notices a shard of metal sticking out of his cheek whilst shaving. After some blood spurts after trying to pluck it out, it turns out that the metal is sticking out from within him. The film’s majority then consists of his gradually horrific transformation curse into a metal abomination, gaining thickened metal skin, jet boosters from his heels and (infamous of them all) a rotating power drill in place of his penis, which comes as a bit of a shock to his wife. Meanwhile, the metal fetishist, after being reborn from an obscure metal mass with powers surpassing his killer, goes to greet the masterpiece of his perfected human.
See how disjointed and unbearably incoherent that sounds from a general film’s delivery? Tetsuo the Iron Man’s true structure, again, lies in its provoked emotions through camera shots, loud grating sound and unpredictable practical effects.
This is proven by how other scenes are just flat-out bizarre and inexplainable with the rest of the film, such as when the salaryman has a homey morning phone call to his wife, only for the two of them to repeatedly say ‘hello’ (moshimoshi) to each other for nearly a full minute. Tetsuo often puts you into illusions of familiarity such as this, only to unexpectedly twist the logics of generalised films, resulting in a constant paranoia to suit its tone. Even if it’s a sunny morning with a cat in the window sill you’re never safe. Sometimes it goes to surpassing normalised pacing, such as slow patient pans across a room being instantly interrupted with a screeching voice and TV buffer, or the music becoming startlingly heavy with a metal monstrosity being thrown into view.
A key scene involving a woman sitting nearby the salaryman at a train station being particularly notable for this, who notices an odd piece of metal that seems to contain a frantic miniature fetishist (implying it holds his curse) and tries poking at it. When the salaryman turns to her, she’s then shown polishing the same chunk which has now become her disfigured hand, to which she zombifyingly trails the salaryman down into the station: one of the most striking extents of this film’s surrealism leading to obscure body horror.
Another heavy element of Tetsuo is its choices of perspective. Mostly we’re shown from the salaryman’s point of view but will occasionally get abrupt views of an old TV screen’s face showing explicit scenes like the salaryman having sex with his wife. I first thought it was a pornographic film before realising it was from an observers’ point of view: the metal fetishist’s. The film has several uses of his view as a buffering TV screen shown in several locations, or sometimes randomly out of nowhere (implying he’s affected your own), showing different past events including a comatose view of his doctor during his recovery.
It’s such a unique way in how the film lays its backstories with another disjointed technology, and the choice of a TV screen infers how deeply our perspectives on life has changed with this technology (keep in mind this was in 1989). The metal fetishist’s rag-dolling duel with the salaryman also involves a lot of these TV shots, this time shown as an ability to replay the car crash that killed him inside the salaryman’s consciousness (implying he has a sort of connected possession). The film fourth-wall-breaks even further with this when the reborn fetishist first greets the salaryman and upfront presents a TV to show his ‘new world’ of an earth consumed by metal. This directly shows his perspective from outside his body using the same TV format, which wonderfully interties this style together.
The bond between the fetishist and salaryman, that finally merges in the finale, suggests we ourselves are split between them in terms of eagerness and paranoia to technology and that the combination of the two will unleash havoc on our society, humorously shown with the fused fetishist’s bizarre last line: ‘OUR NEW LOVE WILL DESTROY THIS WHOLE FUCKING WORLD. LET’S GET ‘EM!’
Contrastingly, the soft, utopian side of this is shown after the two’s fuse, showing them as two normal peaceful beings connected by a single metal umbilical cord in a womb, foreshadowing the birth of this new world. A perversely peaceful conjuring followed by an equally perverse awakening, as the two awaken as a single morbid entity after the morbid salaryman engulfs the fetishist.
Another scene I’m particularly fond of is the title introduction, which also has zero impact on the film’s plot but perfectly lays the tone and atmosphere with an almost dance-routine-like display of the salaryman frantically moving and twitching in a paranoid, sweaty fashion in a sparking mill. The constant close-ups on the noisy works like metal grating and exhaust shooting, with a metallic soundtrack playing, and his agitated display implies he’s mimicking the ugly, disjointed movements of the mill metalwork. Whether this is foreshadowing or something entirely different doesn’t take away that confusedly unique feel of bundled technology being shown through excitement but also disjointed terror.
The film also deals with intense themes of sexuality mixed with sadomasochism, shown beneath the perverse metal growth and spectrum of quirky behaviours. One notably bizarre scene involves the salaryman erotically fork-feeding his wife food, which’s sexual vibes are exaggerated to the extreme, with the salaryman donning expressions of strained suppressed sexual urges while giving her each mouthful. The camera focusing almost completely on the metal fork while paradoxically blissful explosive metal sounds are played bring that sense of wrong pleasure through metal in an entirely new face. To make things a little stranger, a rotating power drill then erupts through the table and is revealed to have replaced his penis, by far his most bizarre feature yet. This is one of the defining moments of pain-and-pleasure, almost showing a game of sexual dominance between him and his wife, given his hostile attitudes towards her after she screams at his deformity, as well as a previous grotesque metal nightmare involving his wife donning an elephant-trunk-like metal strap-on. Supressed sexual tension being shown through machinery is another defining element of Tetsuo.
Perfectionism is another key theme in this film (if that wasn’t enough!). Going back to the fetishist, he isn’t just someone who gets turned on by metal: he sees it as the key way to take humanity forward. The pictures of athletes shown in his room that immediately burn out stop-motion-style after he implants his pipe can be seen as him trying to be the perfect athlete by surpassing flesh. His modification of the salaryman with his brutal athletic, supernatural and sexual abnormalities perfectly represents this perverse idea, not to mention his influence/curse affecting the society surrounding the salaryman shows how this obsession of solving everything with tech is affecting our lives. The little trope of affected characters frantically polishing their rusty metal body parts also hints to that obsessive perfectionism.
To experience Tetsuo the Iron Man in its fullest, you must treat it as any surrealist piece of art and remove all filters to what defines the logics of cinema and acknowledge there just isn’t much intended to be understood. It’s solved emotionally rather than logically as a half-paradise half-nightmare dystopia that’s as much a mesh of cinematic styles and emotional hyperboles as the salesman is of flesh and metal. It has masterful imagination and resourceful, entrancing practical effects that captures that incoherently dark essence of a nightmare you can’t escape. The salaryman’s awesome transformation through a variety of forms, from being hunched and internally-creaking to having wires and metal meshes sticking out and gains more intangible powers, is an absolute spectacle to witness and flourishes the film’s art style.
Shinya Tsukamoto’s most well remembered film ironically nails itself as a cult classic by donning all the essence of cinema’s far-past glory of black-and-white and 16mm with new striking attributes into a fantastical but horrific hybrid. Chu Isikawa’s deafening soundtrack also combines oddly fittingly with the film’s rapidly-shifting shots, most notably in a repeated stop-motion effect that hurtles you down the streets, with the salaryman appearing to be walking inhumanely fast alongside you with deafening jet-plane sounds being heard, signifying a dream-like passing of time.
I recommend Tetsuo to anyone with a remote interest in film (who also has a fairly strong stomach) to truly see the capabilities of imagination and surrealism if you go against all audiences’ expected barriers, and instead build your own steel walls into that of a dangerous, otherworldly machine. It’s one of the greatest apocalyptic experiences to behold that also feels willing and accepting to pass into this bizarre new age.