‘Tetsuo: The Iron Man’: The experimental and incredibly influential Japanese oddity
While the likes of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu have depicted ancient and post-war Japan in their own brilliant personal styles, it’s fair to say that there are several other cinematic works of the East Asian country that are highly experimental and incredibly odd in their aesthetic and narratives, and few have marked the strangeness of Japanese cinema quite like Tetsuo: The Iron Man.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a science fiction horror movie by Shinya Tsukamoto, released in 1989. Cronenberg-esque in its approach to visual storytelling, the film plunges deep into the darkest recesses of the symbiosis of the human body and mind and non-human technology while also pushing the boundaries of what’s possible through independent, underground cinema.
Exploring how technology can cause alienation to the point of dehumanisation, Tetsuo: The Iron Man focuses on a salaryman who finds himself transforming into a fusion of man and machine after he is involved in a hit-and-run accident. Pieces of metal suddenly start sprouting from his body, and he’s also plagued by sexual fantasies of a metallic nature.
He then develops a relationship with the victim of the accident, who looks to be going through the same strange process. Shot on a grainy black-and-white stock, Tsukamoto’s film uses frantic camerawork and a gritty visual style to create an unsettling atmosphere in line with the exploration of the dangers and mysterious allure of technology.
As the salaryman’s transformation into the half-man-half-machine continues, the film drives home the fact that urbanisation and industry can have great consequences on the collective human psyche, destroy what makes people human in the first place, proving the consequences of supposed progress to be alienation and a deep-seated loss of personal identity.
While there is certainly an element of cyberpunk to the proceedings, the film also lends heavily to the body horror genre, particularly the work of David Cronenberg and David Lynch. Tsukamoto had, in fact, admitted to being impressed by the Canadian director’s Videodrome, which also dives into the fears and anxieties that technology can cause the human mind to suffer.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man has itself proved to be influential, and one only needs to look as far as Julia Ducournau’s 2021 body horror movie Titane to find its far-reaching inspirational potential. Quentin Tarantino has also expressed his admiration for Tsukamoto’s film and had once been rumoured to be willing to work on a third Tetsuo film following the release of 1992’s sequel Body Hammer. The third film, The Bullet Man, did arrive in 2009, but Tarantino had no involvement.
Asked about the film’s meaning, Tsukamoto said that his film is about “the process in which human beings become Iron,” which is perhaps when they become impervious to emotion, just as a machine is. Growing up in Tokyo, Tsukamoto saw the city life and working conditions that ripped the humanity from his fellow Japanese countrymen and made Tetsuo to try and wake them up from such a form of dehumanising drudgery.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man is typical of the stranger side of Japanese cinema and serves as a nightmarish journey through the meeting of man and machine. Exploring the darker facets of technological and industrial progress, Tsukamoto delivered a terrifying, thought provoking and utterly unforgettable cinematic experience.
Check out the trailer for the film below.
