“It’s strange. Part of me loves a city like Tokyo, but part of me would quite happily destroy it.”–Shinya Tsukamoto.

For the techno-fetishist of the 80s cyberpunk culture, Tokyo is the City. It is vast and incomprehensible, yet depressing and exhilarating too. It is the future: a mass of concrete, asphalt, and neon signs that expands almost infinitely–a human creation that has attained an inhuman life of its own. That being said, it is interesting to notice that “Godzillas” and other “ends of the world” have apparently menaced the city throughout its living history. Of all the meanings the super-city embodies, the urge to destroy it is the integral corollary to its allure: a result of all the intellectual machinations–desires, metaphors, elaborations—attached to the juxtaposition of human flesh and urban context.

Twenty years on, the cyberpunk genre, with its often naïve worship of the machine and its peculiar brand of optimism concerning dystopian future vistas, has been declared “dead” by some, deemed one of those literary/artistic visions that has lost most, if not all, of its spunk. The appeal of Tokyo as a futurist city, though, seems rather unchanged. Now, to transition from a sketchy and partial literary history to what is in the interest of this article: one cineaste and his two “cyberpunk” films–Shinya Tsukamoto and his Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988) and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992).
There is no denying that these films are shamelessly utopian. They are a kind of machine fetishist’s deterministic fantasyland, executed with a hectic cinematography and accompanied by a soundtrack that features the screeching cacophony of metal against metal. This unashamed anarchy in visual and audible form has allowed Tsukamoto to address the anxieties of human existence in the megalopolis. The big city’s indifference to the life of an individual makes it quite carnivorous. Better yet, the city’s indifference to individual life conjures up a juicy defensiveness in poor little anxious man.
The menace of Tokyo’s enormity in Tsukamoto’s films is symbolised by the forceful physical transformation of human flesh into metal. Both films deal with organic matter turning into an inorganic “thing”, mirroring the dehumanising surroundings of the megalopolis, its iconic skyscrapers and the endlessly sprawling suburbs. It is a wonderful pathology: in order to attack the city the flesh must first transform itself.
But I’m getting ahead of myself; perhaps you’d care for a brief description of what these films are about?
The first Tetsuo film opens with a metals fetishist (Tsukamoto) trying to insert a piece of scrap metal into his thigh. Driven mad by the pain, he runs into the street and is hit by the car of a salary man (Tomoroh Taguchi) out for a ride with his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara). The couple buries the body in the woods, and, aroused by their action, they copulate, signalling the beginning of a series of disturbing sexual imagery. Soon after, the salary man contracts a disease that transforms his body into a conglomeration of useless scrap metal parts. His transformations are framed by suburban settings and factory warehouses. The metals fetishist’s peculiar revenge culminates in a nonpareil chase sequence among the winding streets of the city’s edge–culminating in the literal fusion of fetishist and salary man into a mass of metal. The scrap metal spire vows to join with everyone else and transform the earth.
Tetsuo II is not so much a sequel as a restatement of the central issues of the first film. It too examines the effect of mindless mechanisation on human life. However–to begin a series of basic distinctions–while the first film also deals overtly with sexuality, the second concerns itself with the nature of family affection. The salary man, (again played by Tomoroh Taguchi) and his family: a wife (Nobu Kanaoka) and son are attacked by a gang of skinheads at the command of their esoteric leader (Tsukamoto). The gang kidnaps the son, inciting a rage in the father that causes his body to mutate into a weapon, or rather, an armoury. The film, like the first one, is largely a pursuit, taking place on top of skyscrapers, on ladders and outside staircases. The filming style is similarly restless, constantly brushing the slick urban surroundings and the peaks of the multi-storey buildings, as if unable to choose a clear focal point.
If you’re looking for convenient conceptual distinctions (like I am), the first film represents the claustrophobic experience of the never-ending, winding suburb of the big city, while the sequel deals with the central hub dominated by skyscrapers. In Tetsuo, the action takes place largely on horizontal planes, in Tetsuo II on vertical ones. The second film presents perhaps some of the most iconic of images: in the last scene, the family finds itself looking at the enormous, deserted wreckage of Tokyo with skyscrapers jutting out of the ground like broken teeth. The carnivorous mouth of the city has been–literally–punched in the teeth.
Imagining this as a showdown battle, a war between flesh and concrete–the big city versus the organic body–comes to be a rather schizophrenic experience (that pet expression of post-modern theory), but the Tetsuo films actually manage to provide it visually. The human flesh becomes a kind of Golem–an updated version of the Jewish legend of a servant fashioned out of inanimate matter getting out of control. The older legend, specifically in its classic form (publicised in 1847), involves a 16th century rabbi, Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, who allegedly creates a Golem to protect a Jewish ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks. The Golem is an urban phenomenon, linked to the city of Prague in particular. Yet the “Golemic” matter does not yet completely transcend the boundary between organic and inorganic. It can be seen as the ethos of Prague come to life, but not quite to flesh. Tsukamoto’s Tokyo, however, has transcended flesh. In the Tetsuo films, flesh is antiquated: it is a strange, sweating, soft entity that jars with the inorganic surface texture of the city, pithily visualised by the metals fetishist’s unsuccessful attempt to insert a piece of metal into his thigh.
The fetishist fails to integrate with metal of his own accord, but his ensuing flight into the street and collision with the salary man serves as the necessary catalyst for him to hybridise, accompanied by the desire to take his assailant with him. The boundaries between the technological world of the city in the form of a moving metal stump and the organic human body intersect. Kaboom! Does metal begin to feel desire or affection? According to Tsukamoto, it is rather the flesh that begins to lose these human qualities. In spite of, as well as resulting from, their overt pessimism in their relation to flesh, the films are not without a brand of humour. The first film, for instance, features a fantastic shot of a power drill replacing the appropriate appendage between the salary man’s legs–leading to a bizarre confrontation with his girlfriend. The metallic form parodies the messy, irrational life of the flesh. At the end of both films, the newly transformed flesh of the metals fetishist/gang leader and the salary man seeks to avenge itself upon the city and the world at large in a very–ahem–vertical fashion, resulting from a contorted integration of two scrap metal men.
Bringing about a conclusion which concerns the terrain covered by the Tetsuo films involves considering that there simply is no Tokyo, because this vast city does not exist on its own right, but in juxtaposition to human flesh and desires. Tokyo could be any big city; it becomes an umbrella term. Parallel to this, the human body is a Don Quixote–an entity that finds its only truths within the fight itself. For the knight it does not actually matter if the giants exist or not, as long as his desire to fight them perpetuates the chivalric fantasy. Similarly, the only exactable truth one can gain from Tokyo is when the city is used as a metaphor: for the future, for the effects of urbanisation, techno-mania and competition amongst human beings at the same level in the food chain. In reference to human flesh, as demonstrated in the Tetsuo films, any megalopolis is Tokyo. The machine form of the fetishist and the salary man seeks to transform the whole world, implying that the urban world inhabited by human beings consists merely of a series of Tokyos–anonymous big city number one, anonymous big city number two…
Herein lies the strength and weakness of the megalopolis concept, when treated by cyberpunk authors or whomever: Tokyo is always trapped within metaphor, merely to prey on human neuroses. The more advanced one of these Tokyos becomes, the more it is to feature the self-referential game of the human flesh. The sheer potential and autonomy of this brainchild of man, the super city, makes him regard it with pride, even as he with desires to restrain, if not destroy it as Shinya Tsukamoto does. In the end, is this just a question of pathology? Yes! Yes! Yes!