“One of the most memorable screenings in the early years of Midnight Madness, Tetsuo so stunned the attending crowd that few noticed the print had no subtitles.”–Toronto International Film Festival
DIRECTED BY: Shinya Tsukamoto
FEATURING: Tomorowo Taguchi, Shinya Tsukamoto, Kei Fujiwara
PLOT: A man who collects scrap metal (identified as “fetishist” in the credits) slices his leg open with a knife and inserts a metal pipe beside his thigh bone, then runs into the street when he notices maggots in the wound, where he is struck by a car driven by a salaryman and his girlfriend. The salaryman leaves the scene of the accident, and later finds a piece of sharp metal growing out of his cheek; as the days go by, his entire body begins to transform into a machine. Many hallucinations later, the fetishist, still-alive and also half made of metal, returns to do battle with the now almost completely mechanized salaryman.
BACKGROUND:
- Director Shinya Tsukamoto honed his craft working in an experimental underground theater group, and Tetsuo originated as a play.
- Tsukamoto is also an actor. Besides playing the fetishist in Tetsuo, the IMDB lists thirty-six acting credits for him, including a major role in Takashi Miike‘s Ichi the Killer (2001).
- The Iron Man was followed by two sequels: the less surreal, more action-oriented reworking Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992) and the just-released-on-DVD as of this writing Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009).
- While Tetsuo has become a cult favorite over the years, it was not well-received on release, perhaps simply because it was too strange and underfunded to find its way onto many screens. It won only one major award, “Best Film” at the Fantafestival in Rome (an event that has since disappeared).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Shinya Tsukamoto must have spent hours creating elaborate landscapes full of battered scrap metal and wire, and painstakingly animating sequences where the fetishist zooms through urban streets at the speed of amphetamine-enhanced thought; but no matter how much work the director put in to any effect, it’s the simple picture of the salaryman sporting an unbalanced, rotating drill bit penis that no one can forget.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Tetsuo is a carefully patterned, but effectively nonsensical, barrage
Short clip from Tetsuo: The Iron Man
of images of industrial dehumanization. Men and women extrude cables, wires, gears, drills, threaded pipes, and miscellaneous machine parts from their skin, in glorious showers of blood. Nightmare visions in grainy black and white flow at a breakneck pace to the pulsing beat of an industrial soundtrack. It’s a square plug of a movie forced into the round connector of our cinematic expectations, and it emits dangerous sparks.
COMMENTS: Attempts to describe Tetsuo: The Iron Man to the uninitiated run up against a Continue reading 91. TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (1989)