by Perry Ruhland

Let me get this out of the way; Shin'ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man is quite likely my favorite film of all time. It’s a sixty-eight-minute explosion of pure creativity and passion, a genre-bending surrealist horror/sci-fi/action/comedy assembled over the course of a year and a half by a tiny crew with limited funds and boundless ambition. Since its release in 1989, Tetsuo has gone on to inspire everyone from Takashi Miike to Gaspar Noe to Flying Lotus, and has since taken a part in the cult canon as one of the great underground films.

When people talk critically about Tetsuo, most of the discussion is usually centered around the film’s formal qualities - and for good reason. As far as bits of formalist experimentation go, Tetsuo is certainly one of the most striking and unique, utilizing almost every technique under the sun to create a totally unique analog nightmare, but there’s a lot more going on under the hood here than just rapid edits and screeching metal.

That’s not to say there isn’t a good chunk of critical writing on the film’s ideology out in the world (my favorite of which is contained in Steven T. Brown’s Tokyo Cyberpunk), but surprisingly, I’ve found that a good majority of the critical discussion around Tetsuo glosses over what might be my favorite aspect of it - the queerness. Yes, Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a gay film, both in narrative and its presentation of male bodies, and the picture it paints of sexual awakening is one of gore and cum-soaked death, suffering, and rebirth.

The key to deciphering Tetsuo: The Iron Man as a queer film actually comes in the very first scene, a wordless, highly discomforting look at the day in the life of the film’s villain ‘The Guy’. The Guy, played by Tsukamoto himself, lives in tucked away in a run-down steel mill, surrounded by industrial rot and decay. His makeshift living space there isn’t much better either, a cramped mess of a living space that’s barely a step above janitorial closet, overflowing with exposed cables, rusting rebar, and piles of scrap. But in this metal shrine, a few scattered objects stand out. They’re cut-out photos of men. Sculpted athletes dressed in shorts and jerseys, permanently frozen mid-action, muscles strained. The cutouts are scattered among the metal heap, all facing the room’s living space, looming around The Guy. They face him as he enters the room, lowers to his knees, and then punctures his leg with a shaft of rebar, which he lovingly works into a vaginal wound in his leg.

This shocking act of self-mutilation is a marriage of both of The Guy’s objects of desire; metal and flesh. Men’s flesh. He craves it like he craves metal, and much like the perverse Doctor Vaughn of Ballard’s Crash, finds the ultimate pleasure in the merger of body in metal. And like Doctor Vaughn, after he soon meets his end via auto accident, scrambling from his home in a frenzy, only to be struck dead by The Salaryman (Tomoro Taguchi) and his nameless girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara) in their car. The Guy, crushed under the car, spends his last moments watching The Salaryman and his girlfriend engage in a sudden burst of passionate lovemaking over the wreckage. He dies at the hands of the couple - the heterosexual couple - and under the weight of the metal.

But he will rise again, and he will have his revenge.

Thus begins Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and the stage is set, not just for the straightforward surrealist body horror revenge, but for the movie as a hyperviolent work of sexual subversion, fetishizing masculine bodies before ripping them apart, with the villainous Guy serving as catalyst for a complete transformation of The Salaryman - both physically and personally.

After the gory opening, most of Tetsuo’s first act is devoted to seeing The Salaryman’s ordinary life. He lives in a cramped, but comfortable house in Tokyo in what appears to be a controlled, domesticated life. He goes through his daily routine in a haze; wake up, go to work, come home, see girlfriend, sleep repeat. Yet when the film shows his routine, something’s off. Ever since The Salaryman ran down the man in the street, his body has been growing mysterious pimples filled with pus and metal, and people around him have been acting strange. Take, for example, a woman with glasses he sits next to on the train station. After noticing (and poking) a strange metallic growth on the ground, her arm begins to mutate into a strange biometalic construction, and she instantly begins to menace The Salaryman.

The catch, of course, is that the woman with glasses is an avatar for a recently re-animated, psychic version of The Guy, who can now control people to act out his will. Those under his influence gain metallic growths, strange metal makeup, and a consistent tendency to get very, uh, ‘close’ to The Salaryman. Both people we see possessed by The Guy (the woman with the glasses, and later, The Salaryman’s girlfriend’s re-animated corpse) at first seem to be the usual shorthands for heterosexual men’s fears of sexually independent women, but the wrinkle comes from The Guy’s control. With it, the film’s female monsters become less a symbol of The Salaryman’s threatened masculinity, but instead symbols of his metallic sexual awakening, first appearing to The Salaryman as versions of the people he believes himself to be attracted to, before literally transforming into their true metal form the man The Salaryman eventually ends up with - The Guy.

After fighting off the woman with the glasses, The Salaryman dreams of himself naked in his living room, crouched on his hands and knees, molten metal pinning him to the floor. His girlfriend, possessed by The Guy, stands behind him, sporting The Guy’s metallic makeup and a massive, tentacle-esque metalic penis oozing oil and semen. Her new organ, seemingly operated like a limb, stretches out and lovingly caresses The Guy’s body. He shudders, and is then penetrated by The Guy’s metal phallus.

It’s worth noting that the dream, while certainly played as a shock sequence, is filmed in a way that seems to suggest the dream is from the projection of The Guy’s perspective than The Salaryman’s own. Shots of The Salaryman’s naked body slowly pan across his form in a manner similar to how other films sexualize female bodies, and the anal penetration shatters taboo by actually showing the metallic phallus inserting into him. It’s a shot that’s significant not only for the cultural subversion, but for being the only shot of the film that actually shows penetrative sex - and it’s one between a representation of The Guy and The Salaryman.

When The Salaryman awakes, he finds his face slowly turning into metal - becoming just like The Guy. He instantly reacts to the change by having sex with his girlfriend, taking on the dominant role The Guy did in his dreams, almost as if the sex is more of an attempt to reinforce his heterosexuality and perceived masculinity than it is for pleasure. Still, The Guy’s influence on The Salaryman’s body spreads regardless, and after The Salaryman and his girlfriend have sex, The Salaryman’s penis suddenly turns into a massive, whirring powerdrill that rips his Girlfriend apart.

If you know anything about Tetsuo, it’s likely this scene, and for good reason. It represents Tetsuo at its most thoroughly outrageous, taking a horrifying concept, turning it into a crude visual gag, and just running with it until it circles back around to being scary again, with Taguchi’s constant screams and torrents of blood threatening to overwhelm the senses. But beyond its base shock appeal, it’s also one of the most straightforward examples Tetsuo has to offer of its queer symbolism. The Guy is, quite literally, transforming the symbol of The Salaryman’s sexuality and making it murder his partner, leaving The Salaryman only for The Guy. As The Salaryman murders his girlfriend, there are brief flashes to The Guy laughing hysterically from his lair. This was the key phase of his plan, and with The Salaryman’s girlfriend out of the way, there’s nothing stopping The Guy from swooping in and making The Salaryman his.

So he does.

As The Guy awaits his confrontation with The Salaryman, The Salaryman’s body continues to mutate. With his girlfriend dead, the process continues, painfully mutating his body into a new beast. Each change is punctuated by blood and screams as The Salaryman writhes and thrashes, until practically his whole body is one giant heap of rotting metal. Yet while The Salaryman’s body becomes more like that of the re-animated Guy, The Guy readies himself for the standoff with rituals that seem more like he’s preparing for a date than a battle. We watch as he sprays cologne, styles his hair, and applies dark makeup and eyeliner. Even his approach to the showdown assembles courtship more than conflict, speeding to The Salaryman’s house not with weapons drawn, but with a bouquet of flowers.

When they finally meet for combat, their interactions are erotically charged. The Guy doesn’t enter The Salaryman’s home conventionally - instead, he possesses the corpse of The Salaryman’s girlfriend, pinning the transformed Salaryman to the ground before melting his girlfriend’s corpse and re-emerging from the sludge in his true form with bouquet in hand, quite literally taking her place.

Of course, traditional (well, as traditional as Tetsuo can get) combat ensues, but the homoeroticism returns in full force for the battle’s final blow. In the bowels of the steel mill, The Guy braces The Salaryman, and before he can get in a final blow, The Salaryman impales him with his penis, the now-titanic drill ripping straight through The Guy’s abdomen and spewing his guts.

And suddenly, they both change. Both men, bodies broken and bloody, begin to merge. Metal wires from The Salaryman’s body bind The Guy’s limbs as The Salaryman begins to absorb him. Still, in one last desperate attempt, The Guy’s neck and head elongate into a metallic, semen-shaped beast, bursting from The Salaryman’s torso before circling back and smashing head-first into The Salaryman’s head. Metal consumes them both, and in a burst of light, they become one.

The entire fight sequence, from beginning to end is, without a doubt, a perfect encapsulation of what makes Tetsuo’s particular brand of homoeroticism interesting. The shocking violence and homoeroticism are almost always paired together, the romantic gestures or lingering shots of men’s bodies are inseparable from the blood and pain and protruding metal. In fact, in general, there is no image in Tetsuo showing eroticism of any sort that can be divorced from some sort of force or violence.

Except one. Directly after the two collide and metal overtake the screen, we’re treated to a vision of The Salaryman and The Guy, both naked, both conjoined at the arm by a metal fusion. Yet they’re not in pain, they’re not suffering. They simply draw close to each other’s faces as cool jazz plays. We see The Salaryman’s license plate - NEW WORLD. At last, they are at peace. Together.

In the real world, their holy union is complete, and if the film was subtle about the queerness before, it throws all that out the window for the final piercing image - The Guy and The Salaryman, fused together in as one in a massive hunk of flesh and steel that just so happens to be shaped like a giant, erect penis. A giant, erect penis that features The Salaryman’s face painfully bursting from the base of the shaft, and The Guy’s face and arm making up the tip. In this new fusion, The Salaryman is trapped at the whim of The Guy, who commands their shared body to go out and wreak havoc on the world. Or, to use simpler terms, the top dominates the bottom.

Yet, this twisted fate doesn’t bring The Salaryman sadness. On the contrary, the brief closeups of his face we get, twisted and covered with metal, show his mouth wide open, eyes half-closed, a slight smile formed by metal teeth, suggest a mix of pain and ecstasy.

“We can mutate this whole world into metal,” The Guy exclaims. “We can rust the world into the dust of the universe.”

“Let’s do it,” The Salaryman replies, blood and ooze gushing from his mouth.

This is their final form. From all their pain and suffering and mutilation, they’ve finally reached a new, shared life as harbingers of a metal apocalypse. Together, reborn as one, they are unstoppable.

Their love will turn this whole fucking world to rust.