Jeff Larsen
Feb 8, 2017
“The penis is evil.” - Zardoz
When was the last time your city was torn apart by a towering metal penis?
A button-down wage earner and his girlfriend are driving in the city when they hit a man. They then cart him to a field and dump him. Seems the two were having sex while driving, and their hit-&-run arouses them still further until they are having sex at the scene in the full knowledge that their (presumably dying) victim is watching them.
The next morning, salaryman finds his cheek has sprouted a shiny metal zit. Soon he'll be having scary encounters with transformed strangers and having sexually charged nightmares of his girlfriend as a demonic hermaphrodite (or at least sporting a bionic strap-on of more than regular size).
What's going on here?
Shinya Tsukamoto's 1989 professional debut is a retelling and expansion of his homemade short Futsu Saizu no kaijin (“Monster of Regular Size”). It's more of a primal scream of suppressed rage and lust than a movie, really. With no budget to speak of, Tsukamoto has drawn on techniques not too removed from early Sam Raimi and applied them to an inspired vision of urban Hell that could the same neighborhood from Eraserhead, with a heavy dose of Cronenberg's body horror, Tetsuo seems to draw influence from manga and the pioneering days of Mtv (think Talking Heads videos). Tetsuo is filmed in stark black and white 16mm, lending a grain to convey the grit and inhuman decay of Tokyo city, and maniacally edited to the point that it's difficult to follow without several viewings. the images are of a world buried in the debris of society, metal refuse of every sort heaped and heaving like a fungus over civilization, nothing natural in sight but for the human body itself. Tetsuo has a sound design that matches its frantic and disjointed look. Feverish in pitch and tone, what not many mention when talking about the movie is that Tetsuo is also wickedly funny. Tsukamoto infuses it with a sick sense of humor from absurdist to slapstick.
So what is really going on? That's up for interpretation. Some see an anti-homosexual plea at work, others see it as pro-gay (Tsukamoto, a humanist with an empathetic bent, is far from the type to deliver a message of intolerance). The director claims that it grew from his love/hate relationship with the city itself, living removed from nature. The facts of the story are that the man hit by the wage earner has a fetish for metal and a sexual appetite for violence. He had already tried to fuse his body with bits of metal inserted under the meat of his limbs. When he sees the driver's lusty response to having hit and nearly killed him, the fetishist sees a kindred spirit and becomes infatuated with the driver. He begins to harass the man through bizarre psychic methods (we see his POV, memories, and messages to the businessman via televisual imagery), an insane courtship aimed at bringing out the salaryman's latent sexual thirst for destruction. The driver's transformation of psyche manifests in the man's biological body becoming more and more am abstract mass of iron. More than that and you're reading what you want into the film. It's highly suggestive but never explicates itself.
Tsukamoto structures his tale around two men and a woman, the same setup he's reused for the bulk of his early screen career with the woman often transformed through her relationships with the men. What I find fascinating in Tetsuo (Is that the name of the fetishist or the salary man? I don't know!) is that the business drone seems to have an ambivalent attitude about sex and possibly women (he flees an encounter with a prim businesswoman in the subway, though admittedly she's pretty damn scary) while the metal fetishist positively identifies with women and female sexuality, choosing to use both the girlfriend and the subway patron as his avatars, and ultimately appearing as an androgynous punk sprite during his final seduction.
Testsuo is not my favorite from Shinya Tsukamoto, but it gets better every time I see it. In fact, the first time left me exhilarated by the ferocity of it but lukewarm to its substance. I've now seen it a number of times, and it...grows on me. Tetsuo would make a great double-feature with Cronenberg's Crash.
