by Mark Dery
Tetsuo: Fear and Loathing in the Robot Kingdom
In Shinya Tsukamoto’s cult movie, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), the cyborg is reimagined yet again, this time in an electroconvulsive Tokyo jolted by animated sequences that hurtle the viewer through the city at stomach-lurching speed. Wires writhe like worms; technology sprouts in living flesh. Obsessive, compulsive, often psychotically funny, Tetsuo takes place in a technological landscape that has been annexed by the pathological male ego-an ego that occupies “the space between phallic aggression and the fear of sodomy,” as the film critic Tony Rayns puts it.133 This is the society of media spectacle, fetishized consumption, and infantile sexuality limned by Ballard:
In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles . . . it seems to me, have been reversed.134
This transposition is a hallmark of what Scott Bukatman calls “techno-surrealism,” in which the libido, like the voracious Blob of B-movie fame, moves “beyond the bounds of the individual psyche” to swallow up reality.135 Noting the “fear of aggressive female sexuality,” “willfully hyperbolic violence,” and other dark valleys of the id that have been mapped onto Tetsuo’s overlit terrain, Bukatman argues that the movie is “a discourse both of and about the armored body in technoculture.”136 He maintains that cyborging, in Tetsuo, is part of a strategy “to reseat the human (male) in a position of virile power and control.”137
But while Tetsuo undeniably situates the viewer inside an alienated male psyche whose traditional, “Iron Man” masculinity is rusting through, the movie’s deepest anxieties have less to do with the plight of the male than the perilous state of the human in a world overrun-and, increasingly, run-by technology.
Furthermore, Bukatman’s analysis attempts to neatly schematize a work that defies rationalization. Stock phrases like “over the top” shrivel to understatements when applied to Tetsuo, a movie so mondo it is a genre unto itself. Often compared to David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, it is steeped in the style and subject matter of manga-the ultraviolent, often scatological comic novels devoured by millions of Japanese. And the comic strip götterdämmerung at the end of the film recalls the clobberthons that inevitably ring down the curtain in kitsch classics such as Godzilla vs. Megalon. The film critic J. Hoberman called Tetsuo “an assemblage of textures—less a splatter than a solder flick.”138 Tsukamoto’s own explanation, in a fractured but poetic translation, is illuminating: “My primary concern was to create one sensual imagery on the screen.”139 With only a few lines of dialogue and the barest skeleton of a plot, the hour-long, black-and-white movie is a descent into a maelstrom of body loathing, cyborg fantasies, mechano-eroticism, information anxiety, agoraphobia, castration complexes, and fear of phallic mothers. Biological metaphors for machinery fuse with mechanical metaphors for biology in animated sequences of swarming wires and pulsating metal excrescences.
The movie begins in what looks like an abandoned factory, where a young “metal fetishist” (played by Tsukamoto) acts out his cyborg fantasies in a decidedly low-tech manner, slicing open his thigh to insert a piece of electrical conduit. Despite Tetsuo’s nearly nonexistent budget, the movie’s special effects-created by Tsukamoto, who not only directed but also wrote, cophotographed, and edited the film-are gut-wrenching: Blood spurts out of the gash with a hyper real squelch, and we see the cable being shoved into the gory laceration in a not-for-the-squeamish close-up. Binding his leg, the metal fetishist shrieks at the sight of maggots crawling on the wound. Sick with terror, he runs blindly into the street, where he is bowled over in a hit-and-run accident involving a salaryman (the ulcerated, workaholic company man who is a fixture of Japanese society).
The following morning, while shaving, the salaryman (played by rock musician Tomoroh Taguchi) notices a wire growing out of his cheek. Unable to remove it, he tries to banish his anxiety with daydreams about making love to his girlfriend. In a trope that crosses the cartoon thought balloon with the Terminator’s “Termovision,” his thoughts appear on a TV screen, grainy with snow. En route to work, on a subway platform, he sits next to a prim, bespectacled young woman in sensible shoes. Both notice a steaming glob of technological excrement-wires, scrap metal, bubbling goo-on the ground nearby. Her curiosity aroused, the woman pokes it gingerly and is transformed, without warning, into a spastic, wild-eyed cyborg. She chases the salaryman into what appears to be the men’s room, goaded on by the fiendish will of her hand, which has mutated into a tumorous mass of amorphous industrial rubbish. Hilariously, she pauses to preen before attacking him. Her amok seduction ends when the salaryman snaps her neck with a visceral crunch.
Later, the salaryman relives the attack in a mechano-erotic dream starring his girlfriend as the Monstrous Feminine incarnate: a swarthy succubus armed with a strap-on robo-dildo consisting of a long, floating cable terminating in a drill bit. She vamps her way across the room and, in a masterstroke of perverse hilarity, sodomizes the salaryman with her serpentine sex machine. Steam rises from his flanks and we’re off, flying dizzily through the streets of Tokyo to slam headlong into a NO PARKING sign whose symbolism is obvious in a movie fraught with the fear of sodomy.
At this point, Tetsuo spins out of control, into a giddy wipeout. The salaryman’s wire whisker blossoms into full-blown metalmorphosis: Smoldering circuitry erupts out of his cheek; pipes jut from his back; and his penis mutates into an enormous drill with which he literally screws his girlfriend to death in a scene out of Andrea Dworkin’s nightmares. The last third of the movie is given over to a telekinetic struggle between the cyborged salaryman and the revenant metal fetishist, who is undergoing a similar transformation. The battle is equal parts Poltergeist and Godzilla: Objects are squashed flat by an invisible force and heavy metal ectoplasm oozes everywhere. The salaryman’s girlfriend rises from the dead only to dissolve into bubbling gunk, out of which bursts the fetishist, bearing flowers, his lipsticked lips pursed to kiss the salaryman.
Armageddon ensues, in the course of which the fetishist is repeatedly penetrated by the salaryman’s squealing drill. “His hatred having shaded into a kind of love, the fetishist explains that he needs to merge with the salaryman to overcome the rust that is attacking his frame,” the director’s notes reveal.140 Says the fetishist, “Now that we are fully mutated, why don’t we unite to mutate the world?” When the dust settles, the two combatants have indeed melded into a siege engine made of tangled pipes, twisted wires, and machine parts. As the towering structure rumbles into the distance, its contours finally resolve themselves into a recognizable shape: a monolithic Priapus.
Tetsuo offers poetic evidence that technological modernity provides no bulwark, as Ballard has argued, against “[v]oyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings” and other “diseases of the psyche.”141 In Tetsuo, the repressed returns with a vengeance: The Shinto belief that everything has an indwelling spirit, or kami, brings the inherent uncanniness in machines to life; libidinous urges wriggle free of the propriety that straitjackets Japanese society; and the Japanese woman-the squeaky, shuffling helpmate who smilingly attends to her husband’s every need-mutates into a sexual carnivore with a bionic hand or a fiendish Theda Bara with a motorized strap-on. “In general audience TV cartoons as well as in the comics,” notes the Japanologist William Bohnaker,
the Japanese female is ever more openly portrayed as a gas-underpressure, liable to explode terrifyingly under the incessant pinpricks of her duties and dearths. A recurrent image . . . is of a demure, doting, tweeting mama suddenly transmogrifying into a screaming virago.142
Drawing inspiration from Godzilla as well as the recombinant Transformer and Gobot toy robots that took U.S. toy stores by storm in the eighties, Tsukamoto refracts the body/mind, human/machine dichotomies of cyberculture through
Japan, whose repressive social psyche is frequently at odds with the individual ego-a conflict dramatized by the phenomenon of ijime, or “bullying,” in which schoolchildren harass and sometimes murder classmates who do not conform to the social norm, literalizing the Japanese adage “BANG DOWN THE NAIL THAT STICKS OUT.”
Tetsuo is racked by tensions between technophilia and techno-phobia, between Japan’s self-image as the high-tech, user-friendly robotto okoku, or “robot kingdom,” and an emerging public awareness of de-skilling, technostress, and robot-related workplace fatalities in Japan. “What I thought when I was making Tetsuo,” says Tsukamoto, “was that you can experience euphoria even if you’re being raped by the machine. At the same time, there is always this urge to destroy technology, the industrial world. That conflict was going on inside me when I was making Tetsuo-the feeling that I enjoy being raped by the machine but at the same time I want to destroy the things that are invading me, the human being.”
Biomechanical Tattoos: Totem and Taboo in Technoculture
What will the archeologists of 3001 make of our preserved tattooed hides, decorated with biomechanical alien art? Will they think that we were part machine? Or maybe that we worshipped machines?
—Unbylined editorial, Tattoo Flash magazine143
“We are the primitives of a new sensibility,” wrote an Italian futurist, in the early part of this century.144 Now, a burgeoning underground of urban aboriginals has revived the archaic notion of the body as a blank slate. In tribal cultures, writes essayist David Levi Strauss, “body manipulations are often sacred and magical, and always social;” the body is transformed from its inarticulate, natural state into a communicating, social body through “the marks of civilization”—tattooing, piercing, branding, and scarification.145 In Moby-Dick, the harpooner Queequeg-“a creature in the transition state” between “savage” cannibal and civilized man-reverses the biblical trope in which the word becomes flesh: he is the flesh made word.146 His tattoos are
the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume.147
Inspired by Charles Gatewood’s photos and videos of the body bizarre, the Modern Primitives issue of Re/Search magazine, the Gauntlet (a chain of body piercing parlors), and the illustrated, perforated bodies of MTV staples such as Guns ‘n’ Roses, a groundswell of interest in do-it-yourself body modification has swept taboo practices out of National Geographic and into youth culture. Informed by S and M and biker chic, these practices have surfaced in the solid black “tribal” tattoos-chain-linked Celtic runes, flamelike Polynesian designs-and pierced noses, nipples, navels, and pudenda of “modern primitives.”
Modern primitive is a catchall category that includes fans of hardcore techno and industrial dance music; bondage fetishists; performance artists; technopagans; and practitioners of suspension by flesh hooks and other forms of ritual mortification, or “body play,” intended to produce altered states of consciousness. A polyvalent phenomenon, it is first and foremost an example of what sociologists have called “resistance through rituals.” In their introduction to Modern Primitives, the editors V. Vale and Andrea Juno assert,
Amidst an almost universal feeling of powerlessness to “change the world,” individuals are changing what they do have power over: their own bodies.148
The San Francisco-based tattoo artist Greg Kulz echoes their sentiments, noting, “People want to have control over their [bodies]. Even if you can’t control the external environment, you can start by controlling your internal environment. You can get a permanent mark or marks that no one else has a say in at all.”149
Parallels can be found in the least likely places: Rosalind Coward interprets the upsurge of interest in New Age “body work”—Rolfing, the Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method, and other holistic alternatives to conventional medical treatment-as “a place where people can express dissatisfaction with contemporary society and feel they are doing something personally to resist the encroachments of that society.”150
Coward is rightly wary of this tendency, which she suggests substitutes self-help for political action, shifting responsibility out of the sociopolitical arena and onto the individual:
[S]o strong is the sense of social criticism in this health movement that many adherents proclaim that they are the avant-garde of a quiet social revolution. Yet the journey to this social revolution is rarely a journey towards social rebellion but more often an inner journey, a journey of personal transformation.151
Meaningful change is effected through sympathetic magic, with the practitioner as the voodoo doll representing society-a tactic that bears out the social anthropologist Mary Douglas’s thesis, quoted in Modern Primitives, “Each person treats his body as an image of society.”152 Following a trail blazed by Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille, the Re/Search editors exhort,
By giving visible bodily expression to unknown desires and latent obsessions welling up from within, individuals can provoke change-however inexplicable-in the external world of the social. . . . It is necessary to uncover the mass of repressed desires lying within the unconscious so that a New Eroticism . . . founded on a full knowledge of evil and perversion, may arise to inspire radically improved social relations.153
The phrase “however inexplicable” fudges the all-important but tellingly absent link between personal transformation and social change. By what means the Tetsuo-like eruption of the id into the everyday will “inspire radically improved social relations” and how such changes will affect the lives of, say, the indigent elderly in South Central Los Angeles or unemployed high school dropouts in Long Island suburbs is left to the imagination. A synthesis of the surrealist faith in the radical results of the unconscious unbound and the Dionysian utopianism of sixties counterculture, the Re/Search editors’ politics of modern primitivism founders on the shoals spotted by David Cronenberg in a discussion of his movie Shivers (aka They Came from Within) (1975), about a sexually transmitted parasite designed to reintegrate our estranged minds and bodies. Says Cronenberg,
I had read Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death . . . in which he . . . discuss[ed] the Freudian theory of polymorphous perversity. . . . Even old Norm had some trouble when he tried to figure out how that kind of Dionysian consciousness would function in a society where you had to cross the street and not get hit by a car.154
There can be no denying that feelings of political impotence undergird modern primitivism; taboo practices fortify the border between the self and the social at a time when the political and moral agendas of others are increasingly in conflict with the individual’s right to control his or her own body. Moreover, laws and social conventions proscribing body transgressions are among Judeo-Christian culture’s most deeply rooted taboos (Leviticus 19:28: “You shall not make any gashes in your flesh . . . or tattoo any marks upon you”), and the sociopolitical repercussions of outlaw body practices are a matter of record. In England, the Spanner trial-a controversial case involving consensual S and M between gay men-resulted in the passage of a law that preserves the legality of decorative body alteration but renders illegal the inflicting of “physical damage on each other, whether it’s piercing, tattooing, flagellation, or whatever, for the purpose of sexual gratification,” according to Lynn Procter, the deputy editor of Body Art, an English magazine devoted to piercing, tattooing, and “body decoration.”
Nonetheless, the suggestion that social change and “radically improved social relations” can arise, however inexplicably from mock autochthonous body art veers perilously close to Freud’s “omnipotence of thoughts.” Then again, what is modern primitivism if not the recrudescence, in computer culture, of the “primitive” worldview-“the old, animistic conception of the universe,” with its “narcissistic overestimation of subject
ive mental processes”? Those with New Age leanings might well argue, as Julian Dibbell does when he asserts that the computer operates on “the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word,” that Freud’s “omnipotence of thoughts” has come back to haunt us in the seemingly supernatural agency of the information machine.
Whatever its effects on “the external world of the social,” modern primitivism embodies a critique of the body and the self in cyberculture that merits serious consideration. The phenomenon is often positioned as the return of the repressed primitive-the pretechnological self imprisoned in what Max Weber called the “iron cage” of modern rationality. Fakir Musafar, the prototypical modern primitive, maintains that
a whole part of life seems to be missing for people in modern cultures. . . . Whole groups of people, socially, are alienated. They cannot get closer or in touch with anything, including themselves. . . . People need physical ritual, tribalism.155
Likewise, Jonathan Shaw, the owner of New York’s Fun City Studio and managing editor of International Tattoo Art, holds that “most people have grown up with television, in a world where they can only read about how human beings are supposed to relate to each other. Tattooing and piercing indicate a longing to try to find a way to reject this senseless input that we’re bombarded with, to get back to certain basic emotions that are common to all of us because we’re human.” Such assertions proceed from the assumption that computer culture’s near-total reduction of sensation to a ceaseless torrent of electronic images has produced a terminal numbness (in both the punning and literal senses)-what Ballard calls the “preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen.”156 Renouncing “the wholesale de-individualization of man” brought about by “an inundation of millions of mass-produced images” that supplant embodied experience with passive voyeurism, the Re/Search editors argue that
