With its stuttering, flashing rhythms and cut-scapes, the celluloid frame of Tetsuo: The Iron Man echoes the imagined epileptic fit, or sustained orgasmic seizure, of some overgrown perverse robot.
Shot in 1989, the film’s soundtrack consists mostly of (peculiarly un-dated) prototypes of industrial electronica, while the film’s grainy feel is a premonition of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, still a decade away. Shooting it in black and white was a masterstroke, amping the ambiguous distance between industrial and human forms, machinistic and biological excreta: Tetsuo’s world has machines coughing blood while humans bleed oil; veins tremble with volta, while tools crave human flesh.
For someone who is a committed technophobe (not that I’m locked up or anything) the unrelenting rupturing of flesh and dear skin with unforgiving angles and talons of steel and iron, erupting electricity during Tetsuo: The Iron Man was almost traumatic.
A very prescient nightmare, Shinya Tsukamoto’s film is a twitching metaphor for the days when our financial transactions and online shopping will be done from the internal PC (very personal) of our own bodies. (Remember Checkers’ tagline: “Just up your street”? They’re updating it to “In your fingertips..,” no keyboard required.) It’s an age which is just around the digital corner.
David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Ken Russell – unsurprisingly – are all acknowledged via clever allusions. Pi aside, Tetsuo: The Iron Man also contains accurate anticipations of such diverse fare as The Blair Witch Project and Ringu. That’s a testament to its sustained impact.
Lovers of the dark. Fans of Industrial. And all ye Cyberpunks take note: This is movie heaven. Blistering stuff, see it before it sees you!
[First published in Muse magazine.]
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