In the Flesh: Tetsuo: The Iron Man

A sniveling salaryman deformed by parasitic metal implants lurches through his living room, a huge priapic drill jutting from his groin as he alternately blubbers at and berates his girlfriend for being repulsed by his appearance. Like all of Tetsuo: The Iron Man’s bodily imagery, the colossal and deadly drill penis is ultimately a pathetic object, unwieldy and near-useless, confining its bearer to a state of frustrated and humiliating isolation. The intense physical anxiety from which the film’s grotesque practical effects emerge — the opening scene in which an unnamed man inserts an iron rod into his leg suggests he does so in a bizarre attempt to imitate Olympic runners —  and which drives its jittery, reflexive story is a shrieking blur of inadequacy, violence, loneliness, and dissociative self-loathing. The frenetic physical performances of director/actor Shinya Tsukamoto as the Fetishist and Tomorowo Taguchi as the Salaryman are as crucial to this atmosphere of panicked self-involvement as the film’s jaw-dropping special effects, a disturbing mixture of stop-motion and found object sculpture.

Tetsuo is a deeply abject film, focused on people whose bodies are completely subject to the whims of unknowable and uncontrollable forces. They wail and whimper, crawl and hide, unable to exert the least measure of control over their lives. The strange connection the film implies between the Fetishist and the Salaryman — the former is often depicted as being either metaphorically or literally inside the body of the latter — takes the place of more traditional superpowered conflict, emulating the anti-power fantasy of its antecedent Akira with its finale of tangled skeins of flesh and metal. The dissolution of the self in the crucible of modern anxieties over commercialism, self-image, and ideas of social progress animates much of this later material as the Salaryman’s body is wholly subsumed by metal debris, his personality vanishing into his sensual experiences.

Speaking of sensual experiences, the film’s score (composed by the late, great Chu Ishikawa) and Foley work are some of the most daringly abrasive this side of Suspiria, full of metallic shrieks and screeches that set teeth on edge. Ishikawa’s more melancholy tracks, which undergird several of the film’s grisly domestic scenes, are equally affecting in a completely different emotional milieu without damaging Tetsuo’s unique tone. Simply put, there’s nothing quite like this film, which synthesizes the structuring paranoia and failings of an entire generation into a gonzo homoerotic assault on the senses, a movie that scrapes you raw and makes you squirm and shiver, visions of impossible gore and deformity transformed into intimately relatable experiences.