Fim Review: Tetsuo: The Iron Man

"Game Over"


When you first watch this movie, you may do as I did and rub your eyes, and stare at the screen with astonishment, wondering "What the fuck just happened to me?" This is a natural reaction to Shinya Tsukamoto's seminal cyberpunk classic, Tetsuo: The Iron Man.  This cerebral, black and white mind-fuck was released in 1989, when the once glorious Japanese film industry was floating dead in the water, and the only director who was churning out half-decent movies, Sogo Ishii, was suffering from a creative crisis. Times were dire, and the nations film-makers needed a miracle.
So out from the dark, came roaring and screaming in metallic tones, Tetsuo, a hyperkinetic, surreal, bleak, sterile, and overly mindblowing piece of art, was born, and sent it's father Tsukamoto into the international spotlight.


The basic plot of the film starts off with a man, The Fetishist (played by Shinya Tsukamoto himself), cutting his own leg open and inserting a piece of rebar. Seconds later, he finds the wound infested with maggots, so he runs out of his junk-filled home, into the street, where he is run down, by the Salaryman (Japanese cult actor Tomorowo Taguchi) who's presence is announced by loud and trashy jazz. Then, later in his home, the Salaryman cuts himself while shaving, discovering that a chunk of metal growing out of his face. From there on out, the film descends into some pretty surreal territory, with a five minute phone conversation consisting of nothing but "Hello?" being spoken, the Salaryman being chased by a woman with a metal hand in a train station, some seriously Giger-esque erotic dreams, a giant metal drill-penis (!), and the grande finale, the showdown between the Fetishist and the Salaryman, in what can only be described as the most overly trippy piece of cinematography ever, period.


This movie covers themes that Tsukamoto will return to in his later films, including heightened eroticism as portrayed by the sodomy dream sequence, urban decay shown through the various sets on in the film are cluttered and strewn with junk, how an urban environment is a hostile environment with the harsh black and white film, the near abandonment of the streets in the film, and also the fusion of man and metal, the final metamorphosis into the Iron Man. Sound is also a very important factor in this film, the soundtrack, composed by Chu Ishikawa, is loud, and abrasive, filled with the metallic noises of industrial machinery, combined with synthesiser and drumbeats. This soundtrack is in turn juxtaposed against the relative lack of dialogue, creating what I can guarantee as the loudest silent movie you'll ever see. Spawning two sequels, Tetsuo: The Body Hammer (1992), and Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009) which have met mixed reviews, Iron Man is by far the best of the the three.


If you want to even dare to compare this masterpiece with the works of others, I guess you could say that  if David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet), and David Cronenburg (Videodrome, The Fly), accidentally got fused together by the Telepods in Cronenburg's The Fly, and they decided to make a movie. While on acid. Apart from that, I don't believe it is actually possible to compare Tsukamoto's films with any Western film, let alone, any film.
Shinya Tsukamoto is a god. 'Nuff said.