THE DUKE ON
TETSUO - THE IRON MAN
TETSUO - THE IRON MAN
It seems all the fitting in the world for to be piecing together
an Incisive Critique of Tetsuo – The Iron Man via the process in
which The Duke is currently engaged. Six dozen sheets of A5
notepad paper flung cross the table, and from these
embarrassingly analogous scraps, a glorious digital beast arises.
Just as our hero finds himself eyeball-deep in technological
transitions, so too these hints of reviews to come find
themselves pushed ever-further along the road from the
familiarly ragged, twisted pages, emerging right here in the
ones and zeros, every sentence, every fuckful utterance bursting
at the guts with the reek of progress.
Pages torn asunder with the furious scraping of the biro, a
thunder-fucked urge for to get every thought thunk with regards
the whole wonderfully maniacal enterprise catalogued and filed
and archived.
“Sweet Fuck! Buggered by a writhing metal dildo. . . steam
rising out his arsehole!”
“I dare say I’ve never seen better stop motion in all my born
days, and that includes Harryhausen. Tetsuo stomps Harryhausen
blind!”
“Godzilla for cyberpunk speed-freaks!”
Now, with the comfort afforded by Microsoft Word, knowing that
there ain’t no need for to get all tizzied up the hole with the
race against the relentless pace of the flick, a man gets for to
relax a bit, meditate on these delirious scribblings.
Let the eyes trample cross the notes, let the fingers scar the
notes cross the screen.
Strange how this should prove to be such a pleasurable
experience, since if Tetsuo is anything to go by, the process of
transition should be a ghastly, horrifying, nightmarish
onslaught.
But no. I’m quite happy for to let the cave paintings slide on
into history, and let the technologicization of every damn thing
carry on unhindered.
But what in shitting fuck has this all to do with, anyroad, what
the hell’s this talk about Tetsuo – The Iron Man, is this some
kind of superhero flick, and if so, it better be a fuck of a lot
better than Fantastic Four, which nobody bothered seeing but we
all know sucks anyroad. It had him out Nip/Tuck, far as I know.
Calm down, take a sedative for a second in the form of a neat
slab a Plot Summary, or as close to such as one can feasibly
offer when dealing with such a maniacal piece of motion flickery
as Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1988 skull-filthing masterpiece.
What Tetsuo concerns itself with, is a fella wakes up one
morning with a nasty boil on his face, a metal pin sticking out
of it, a ghastly pus-spewing growth right there on the cheek,
the kinda thing that wants nothing more than to douse a man’s
mirrors in blood-laced gut-spunk. It’s the kinda hellish skin-
fart should pretty much numb a fella’s filthing aspirations for
a time, and yet no, he still gets to share a bed with a lovely
lady, and also, get buggered with a lengthy metal dildo,
buggered with such force that smoke rises out his arsehole.
Turns out this boil is the least of his worries, since he’s also
in the process of turning into a machine beast of some kind,
ending up a mass of wire and iron and steel with a pointed
spinning drill for a penis.
Worse, he’s not the only one this is happening to.
Not only is there a second metal-beast in the making over in the
bowels of some nightmarish industrial area of some kind, but
also, our hero can’t even catch a train without the passenger to
his left turning out to be a she-demon with a buncha steel for
an arm, chasing him about the place in frenzied hyper-real stop-
motion.
When critics say things like “Unlike anything you’ve ever
seen!”, what they mostly mean is “Unlike anything you’ve ever
seen, on account of you ain’t saw a flick in your life that
ain't been shat out Hollywood’s shit-pipe. To be honest, I saw
at least a dozen hyper-real stop-motion metal-man dildo assaults
this afternoon already, and I got fifty more lined up for the
evening.”
Trust The Duke, though, when he tells you that no, it’s safe to
say Tetsuo is unlike pretty much any damn thing out there,
although for sure, a fella can trace its aesthetics and themes
way back to at least 1816, when Mary Shelley and her pals were
locked up out the damn rain for an evening spooking each other
witless with tales of horror most horrid.
Considering the flick is so concerned with convergence and
modification and disparate cultural entities shagging themselves
senseless and birthing a hideous mutant offspring, it stands to
reason that, whilst Tetsuo stands apart from most everything
else, it’s still possible to catch hints and whispers of the
influences here and there.
A fella can smell Frankenstein and Kafka, can smell Raimi and
Burroughs and Gibson and Cronenberg, can smell Public Image
Limited, even, Joy Division and Eraserhead, Manga and ToHo.
It’s possible Tetsuo wouldn’t exist without those folks and
products, just the same as it’s possible Cannibal Corspe
wouldn't exist if the likes of Robert Johnson hadn’t wandered in
fronta microphones way back when. You get the smoke out the eyes
for long enough, you can see the winding passages leading from
Hellhound On My Trail to Force Fed Broken Glass, even if, for
the most part, the latter bears no resemblance whatsoever to the
former, although, granted, musicologists still yack on about how
Robert Johnson did a mean Entrails Ripped From A Virgin’s Cunt
back in the day.
Tetsuo is a cut-up monochrome industrial collage, a sci-fi body-
horror onslaught with a narrative loose as coked-up Hilton. It’s
not impossible for to describe it in words, but chances are the
words’d make not an inch a sense, chances are the words would be
all the pointless in Nevada.
It’d be like trying to describe Bitches Brew with a light-bulb.
It’s an aural-visual affair, a sensual concern, how can a man
properly distill the effect of the clanging grinding chaos on
the soundtrack, the live-action stop-motion metal-bending mania
on the screen, the freewheeling cacophonous noise of it all, how
can a man ever hope to translate this tomfoolery using a
language Tetsuo all but obliterates in the course of its 67
minutes?
Best to note that if the beats read like jazz, Tetsuo plays like
demented gabba techno thundering gainst the blackened walls of a
cum-soaked city-centre nightclub.
What constantly amazes a fella is that the damn thing is almost
twenty years old. If a man didn’t know any better, hadn’t seen
the slightly more linear (and, indeed, full-colour) Tetsuo II –
Body Hammer or Bullet Ballet or Tokyo Fist or any of the other
wonders concocted since then in Tsukamoto’s fevered head-holes,
he’d have no reason not to assume this fucker wrapped last
month. It’s eerily resonant, disturbingly contemporary.
These days a man sees fifty Tetsuo’s by the time he’s walked
round the avenue; folks with phones permanently stuck on side
the head, folks sitting in parks with laptops on knees, folks
with breasts and bums and balls enhanced, rebuilt, folks defined
by the technology they brandish, iPods whipped out pockets like
hundred-foot blades, gibbering wrecks suffering through a
knackered-modem episode.
Whatever else it might be – horror, sci-fi, social commentary –
Tetsuo is also one of the purest distillations of The Nightmare
yet carved on celluloid. Like all nightmares, the plot only
really comes together after the fact, when a man’s sat smoking
and pondering and flicking through this week’s NME, fragments of
those heinous, grotesquely beautiful images rise and dissipate
hind the eyes. A car-crash, something to do with a TV screen,
some sexing filths in a forest, buggered with a metal dildo,
weirdly organic iron tentacles, stop-motion foam, decay,
grinding monstrosities.
And for sure, it ain’t for everyone, like just take a glance at
this well-versed PHD sat quivering in the corner, biting fingers
to the knuckles, muttering on about “Fuck Redux, I’ll never be
the same, never, that motion-flick about Tetsuo done warped me
out my bones.”
I can see where he’s coming from, but still, I can’t do a damn
thing but fling a stereo at him, order him out my house, demand
to know what kind of sick game he’s playing here.
I’ve heard it over and over, see, folks going on about how
“disturbing” Tetsuo is, how it’s the kinda thing burns itself
into the furthest caverns of the head-space, bounding out when a
man least expects it, horrible metallic gnashing wolverines
jumping left and right on the nights when the air reeks a terror.
I just can't get behind that kinda talk.
Of course it's disturbing, but it’s not disturbing in the way
that, say, Mermaid In A Manhole is disturbing, it’s not
disturbing in the way Saló or Cannibal Holocaust or Irreversible
is disturbing. It’s so alive with frantic, kinetic invention
that no matter how grotesque it gets, a fella can feel nothing
but all-consuming giddy delirium throughout. It bruises the mind
in the best possible way, it’s something you don’t want to
forget, as opposed to something you pay a therapist 60 quid a
pop for to clear out the brains.
It’s glorious, so glorious, in fact, that it gets off with the
kinda shit lesser film-folks been hung and quartered for before
now. All that non-linear, handheld, aggressively stylised visual
show-offery could so easily have led to the most pretentious,
unwatchable gut-mess The Culture has ever spawned.
But no, on account of it has thoughts worth thinking, it has a
delirious sense of humour, the special-effects are Special, it’s
made for the price of a quick one off the wrist and yet shames
most any blockbuster a man would care to bother thinking of. It
has more ideas in half a frame than that fucker Lynch managed in
the entirety of his post-Elephant Man career thus far.
The only distressing elements in the whole affair are the
occasional flashes of violent misogyny, most apparent in a
particularly nasty, but mercifully brief, drill-penis filth-
scene.
It’s all just another colour woven throughout, though, another
Beautiful Human Experience reduced to a soulless, nihilistic
process.
Risen Jandek, I doubt there’s a more awe-inspiring meditation on
humanity degraded, or upgraded, in all the swelling earth.
Thanks folks.
BACK TO THE ASIAN HORROR REVIEW CUPBOARD
Drop The Duke A Line or Leave A Message
an Incisive Critique of Tetsuo – The Iron Man via the process in
which The Duke is currently engaged. Six dozen sheets of A5
notepad paper flung cross the table, and from these
embarrassingly analogous scraps, a glorious digital beast arises.
Just as our hero finds himself eyeball-deep in technological
transitions, so too these hints of reviews to come find
themselves pushed ever-further along the road from the
familiarly ragged, twisted pages, emerging right here in the
ones and zeros, every sentence, every fuckful utterance bursting
at the guts with the reek of progress.
Pages torn asunder with the furious scraping of the biro, a
thunder-fucked urge for to get every thought thunk with regards
the whole wonderfully maniacal enterprise catalogued and filed
and archived.
“Sweet Fuck! Buggered by a writhing metal dildo. . . steam
rising out his arsehole!”
“I dare say I’ve never seen better stop motion in all my born
days, and that includes Harryhausen. Tetsuo stomps Harryhausen
blind!”
“Godzilla for cyberpunk speed-freaks!”
Now, with the comfort afforded by Microsoft Word, knowing that
there ain’t no need for to get all tizzied up the hole with the
race against the relentless pace of the flick, a man gets for to
relax a bit, meditate on these delirious scribblings.
Let the eyes trample cross the notes, let the fingers scar the
notes cross the screen.
Strange how this should prove to be such a pleasurable
experience, since if Tetsuo is anything to go by, the process of
transition should be a ghastly, horrifying, nightmarish
onslaught.
But no. I’m quite happy for to let the cave paintings slide on
into history, and let the technologicization of every damn thing
carry on unhindered.
But what in shitting fuck has this all to do with, anyroad, what
the hell’s this talk about Tetsuo – The Iron Man, is this some
kind of superhero flick, and if so, it better be a fuck of a lot
better than Fantastic Four, which nobody bothered seeing but we
all know sucks anyroad. It had him out Nip/Tuck, far as I know.
Calm down, take a sedative for a second in the form of a neat
slab a Plot Summary, or as close to such as one can feasibly
offer when dealing with such a maniacal piece of motion flickery
as Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1988 skull-filthing masterpiece.
What Tetsuo concerns itself with, is a fella wakes up one
morning with a nasty boil on his face, a metal pin sticking out
of it, a ghastly pus-spewing growth right there on the cheek,
the kinda thing that wants nothing more than to douse a man’s
mirrors in blood-laced gut-spunk. It’s the kinda hellish skin-
fart should pretty much numb a fella’s filthing aspirations for
a time, and yet no, he still gets to share a bed with a lovely
lady, and also, get buggered with a lengthy metal dildo,
buggered with such force that smoke rises out his arsehole.
Turns out this boil is the least of his worries, since he’s also
in the process of turning into a machine beast of some kind,
ending up a mass of wire and iron and steel with a pointed
spinning drill for a penis.
Worse, he’s not the only one this is happening to.
Not only is there a second metal-beast in the making over in the
bowels of some nightmarish industrial area of some kind, but
also, our hero can’t even catch a train without the passenger to
his left turning out to be a she-demon with a buncha steel for
an arm, chasing him about the place in frenzied hyper-real stop-
motion.
When critics say things like “Unlike anything you’ve ever
seen!”, what they mostly mean is “Unlike anything you’ve ever
seen, on account of you ain’t saw a flick in your life that
ain't been shat out Hollywood’s shit-pipe. To be honest, I saw
at least a dozen hyper-real stop-motion metal-man dildo assaults
this afternoon already, and I got fifty more lined up for the
evening.”
Trust The Duke, though, when he tells you that no, it’s safe to
say Tetsuo is unlike pretty much any damn thing out there,
although for sure, a fella can trace its aesthetics and themes
way back to at least 1816, when Mary Shelley and her pals were
locked up out the damn rain for an evening spooking each other
witless with tales of horror most horrid.
Considering the flick is so concerned with convergence and
modification and disparate cultural entities shagging themselves
senseless and birthing a hideous mutant offspring, it stands to
reason that, whilst Tetsuo stands apart from most everything
else, it’s still possible to catch hints and whispers of the
influences here and there.
A fella can smell Frankenstein and Kafka, can smell Raimi and
Burroughs and Gibson and Cronenberg, can smell Public Image
Limited, even, Joy Division and Eraserhead, Manga and ToHo.
It’s possible Tetsuo wouldn’t exist without those folks and
products, just the same as it’s possible Cannibal Corspe
wouldn't exist if the likes of Robert Johnson hadn’t wandered in
fronta microphones way back when. You get the smoke out the eyes
for long enough, you can see the winding passages leading from
Hellhound On My Trail to Force Fed Broken Glass, even if, for
the most part, the latter bears no resemblance whatsoever to the
former, although, granted, musicologists still yack on about how
Robert Johnson did a mean Entrails Ripped From A Virgin’s Cunt
back in the day.
Tetsuo is a cut-up monochrome industrial collage, a sci-fi body-
horror onslaught with a narrative loose as coked-up Hilton. It’s
not impossible for to describe it in words, but chances are the
words’d make not an inch a sense, chances are the words would be
all the pointless in Nevada.
It’d be like trying to describe Bitches Brew with a light-bulb.
It’s an aural-visual affair, a sensual concern, how can a man
properly distill the effect of the clanging grinding chaos on
the soundtrack, the live-action stop-motion metal-bending mania
on the screen, the freewheeling cacophonous noise of it all, how
can a man ever hope to translate this tomfoolery using a
language Tetsuo all but obliterates in the course of its 67
minutes?
Best to note that if the beats read like jazz, Tetsuo plays like
demented gabba techno thundering gainst the blackened walls of a
cum-soaked city-centre nightclub.
What constantly amazes a fella is that the damn thing is almost
twenty years old. If a man didn’t know any better, hadn’t seen
the slightly more linear (and, indeed, full-colour) Tetsuo II –
Body Hammer or Bullet Ballet or Tokyo Fist or any of the other
wonders concocted since then in Tsukamoto’s fevered head-holes,
he’d have no reason not to assume this fucker wrapped last
month. It’s eerily resonant, disturbingly contemporary.
These days a man sees fifty Tetsuo’s by the time he’s walked
round the avenue; folks with phones permanently stuck on side
the head, folks sitting in parks with laptops on knees, folks
with breasts and bums and balls enhanced, rebuilt, folks defined
by the technology they brandish, iPods whipped out pockets like
hundred-foot blades, gibbering wrecks suffering through a
knackered-modem episode.
Whatever else it might be – horror, sci-fi, social commentary –
Tetsuo is also one of the purest distillations of The Nightmare
yet carved on celluloid. Like all nightmares, the plot only
really comes together after the fact, when a man’s sat smoking
and pondering and flicking through this week’s NME, fragments of
those heinous, grotesquely beautiful images rise and dissipate
hind the eyes. A car-crash, something to do with a TV screen,
some sexing filths in a forest, buggered with a metal dildo,
weirdly organic iron tentacles, stop-motion foam, decay,
grinding monstrosities.
And for sure, it ain’t for everyone, like just take a glance at
this well-versed PHD sat quivering in the corner, biting fingers
to the knuckles, muttering on about “Fuck Redux, I’ll never be
the same, never, that motion-flick about Tetsuo done warped me
out my bones.”
I can see where he’s coming from, but still, I can’t do a damn
thing but fling a stereo at him, order him out my house, demand
to know what kind of sick game he’s playing here.
I’ve heard it over and over, see, folks going on about how
“disturbing” Tetsuo is, how it’s the kinda thing burns itself
into the furthest caverns of the head-space, bounding out when a
man least expects it, horrible metallic gnashing wolverines
jumping left and right on the nights when the air reeks a terror.
I just can't get behind that kinda talk.
Of course it's disturbing, but it’s not disturbing in the way
that, say, Mermaid In A Manhole is disturbing, it’s not
disturbing in the way Saló or Cannibal Holocaust or Irreversible
is disturbing. It’s so alive with frantic, kinetic invention
that no matter how grotesque it gets, a fella can feel nothing
but all-consuming giddy delirium throughout. It bruises the mind
in the best possible way, it’s something you don’t want to
forget, as opposed to something you pay a therapist 60 quid a
pop for to clear out the brains.
It’s glorious, so glorious, in fact, that it gets off with the
kinda shit lesser film-folks been hung and quartered for before
now. All that non-linear, handheld, aggressively stylised visual
show-offery could so easily have led to the most pretentious,
unwatchable gut-mess The Culture has ever spawned.
But no, on account of it has thoughts worth thinking, it has a
delirious sense of humour, the special-effects are Special, it’s
made for the price of a quick one off the wrist and yet shames
most any blockbuster a man would care to bother thinking of. It
has more ideas in half a frame than that fucker Lynch managed in
the entirety of his post-Elephant Man career thus far.
The only distressing elements in the whole affair are the
occasional flashes of violent misogyny, most apparent in a
particularly nasty, but mercifully brief, drill-penis filth-
scene.
It’s all just another colour woven throughout, though, another
Beautiful Human Experience reduced to a soulless, nihilistic
process.
Risen Jandek, I doubt there’s a more awe-inspiring meditation on
humanity degraded, or upgraded, in all the swelling earth.
Thanks folks.
BACK TO THE ASIAN HORROR REVIEW CUPBOARD
Drop The Duke A Line or Leave A Message
