TETSUO

TETSUO (vt or subtitled, THE IRON MAN). Shinya Tsukamoto, dir., script, prod., actor: "Metals Fetishist." Japan: Kaijyu Theater (prod.) / Fox Lorber Home Video and, for USA 1992: Original Cinema (dist), 1988.

The SF scholar Rob Latham found the film initially wince-inducing, but upon second viewing while teaching a class in "Cyborg Culture," the film appeared "hilariously funny. The metallic zit popping, the penis-drill boring through the table, the pipe shooting up the protagonist's bum, all serve to mark the film as a John Waters version of cyberpunk — cyborg camp, a curious genre indeed" (e-mail posting on <iafa-l@wiz.cath.vt.edu>, the ListServ of the International Assoc. for the Fantastic in the Arts, 7 Dec. 2000). See also, TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER. Note here darkly-comic possibilities of "the human/machine interface" in its often horrific mode of the transgressing of organic boundaries by the metallic and mechanical.

Discussed briefly by Allison de Fren in "Technofetishism and the Uncanny Desires of A.S.F.R. (alt.sex.fetish.robots)" in Latham's Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings p. 377. Also Sharalyn Orbaugh's "Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity."

(RDE, Rob Latham, IMDb, 14/XII/00, 27June17)