Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Tomorowo Taguchi -
Man

Kei Fujiwara -
Woman

Nobu Kanaoka -
Woman in Glasses

Renji Ishibashi -
Tramp

Naomasa Musaka -
Doctor

Shinya Tsukamoto -
Metals Fetishist

Tetsuo: The Iron Man is 67 minutes long, which is a good thing. If I had to sit through this heaping pile of twisted metal for just one more minute, I would have given the movie my rare "zero stars" rating and shut it off. Shinya Tsukamoto is the man responsible for this mess, and he has a lot of explaining to do. This is one of the most ridiculous and nonsensical movies I've ever witnessed. There is almost no story here whatsoever, little dialogue and badly handled exposition. At any given moment, I couldn't tell you what was going on.

Basically, the movie is about a man (Tomorowo Taguchi) who starts to grow metal out of his body. A metal whisker appears on his face one morning, and afterwards, his arm and heals show signs of protruding screws, springs and metal plates. We find out later in the film that he got this way because he was shaving with a rust-free razor. That is not a suitable explanation, as far as I'm concerned.

I read Richard Harrington's review in the Washington Post, and he provided me with more story explanation than I got from watching it. (He must have cheated off a press kit or something.) He states that a metal fetishist (Tsukamoto again) shoves a screw into his leg, then runs into the street where the man (Taguchi) hits him with his car. I watched that scene again after reading this, and let me tell you, there is absolutely no way to infer from this scene that it was indeed the man who hit the metal fetishist (we don't see the driver). I actually thought they were the same person. I didn't even know that the guy who drove a screw into his leg could be deemed a metal fetishist. I thought he was performing an operation on himself.

After the car accident, we see the man going nuts in a factory, before we switch to his apartment where he discovers the metal whisker. When he goes out, he's stunned to find that a woman in a train station is morphing into a metal freak and starts chasing him. Why this suddenly happens is not explained. The man returns to his apartment, where he continues to change into some kind of metal beast. His entire body is covered with twisted metal. Much to his girlfriend's dismay, he penis is replaced with a drill. In an abrupt change of scenery, the man finds himself in another factory where he encounters the metal fetishist. It was only here when I figured out they were two different people. We see him throughout the movie in bizarre dream sequences, so there was no way to establish this person as another character.

You want to talk about dream sequences, you should see the ones in this movie (better yet, don't). Nearly half of it is a collection of surreal shots that do nothing more than offer up startling images of rambunctious behavior involving the man and his new metal body. Whether he's lashing about or screaming in agony, we can never be sure what we're seeing. What's worse is that none of it means anything, and the plot, what little there is, grows more confusing because Tsukamoto doesn't establish any kind of method for us to interpret what his intentions are.

Is the point of the movie to admire Tsukamoto imagination? For the entire 67 minutes, one hallucinatory scene follows another. I agree that the images here are peculiar, but that's not enough. Comparisons to Eraserhead are inevitable. David Lynch's experimental film contained a number of strange occurrences, but his film did offer an aberrant logic. When Henry Spencer pulled giant sperm cells out from underneath the sheets, he was illustrating his mindset after he found out he was father to a deformed baby. It looked perverse, but it meant something. Nothing in Tetsuo: The Iron Man means anything. Tsukamoto thought he had something to say with this movie, but whatever that was, he failed.

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