Page 153 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

140 Nightmare Japan

Given technology’s paradoxical status in the Japanese popular
imagination, specifically its contradictory role as both a gateway to
Armageddon and a means to economic recovery, it should come as little
surprise that technology’s complex impact upon the social and corporeal
body informs much of Japanese apocalyptic cinema in the latter decades
of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most prominent example of one
such film is Tsukamoto Shinya’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988), a jarring,
visceral motion picture that, set in ‘an electroconvulsive Tokyo’ (Dery
1997: 270), draws its inspiration from a nightmarishly surreal
combination of the daikaiju eiga tradition and works of contemporary
science fiction texts ranging from William Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer
3
(1986), to the feature-length anime sensation, Akira (1988). Tetsuo: The
Iron Man’s narrative unfolds like a series of hallucinations, a manic and,
at times, chaotic visual style that has led numerous reviewers and critics
to compare Tsukamoto’s anarchic, techno-catastrophic vision with the
works of maverick Western filmmakers of postmodern body horror, like
David Cronenberg, David Lynch, and Clive Barker. After a ‘metal
fetishist’ with a penchant for violently inserting scrap metal into his flesh
is struck down by a ‘salaryman’ out for a drive with his girlfriend, the
‘salaryman’ soon discovers that his own physiology is steadily and
inexplicably transforming into a grotesque biomechanical hybrid. This
new forum not only confounds conventional binaries of human/machine,
or organic/technological, but also scrambles traditional notions of gender
and sexuality (the ‘salaryman’, in the course of the narrative, both
penetrates others with, and is penetrated by, phallically overdetermined
mechanical devices) in ways that have not escaped the attention of critics
who read Tsukamoto’s breakthrough film as a barometer signalling a
larger crisis in masculinity.
Readings of Tetsuo: The Iron Man as a panicked reassertion of
phallocentrism, or as a homoerotic paean to an increasingly mechanised
society, are equally defensible through a close examination of the

3
Susan J. Napier makes a similar argument when she locates Akira as occupying an important
space in ‘a continuum, both in Japan’s imagination of destruction and ultimately in Japan’s
imagination of itself’ (2000: 239). Specifically, Napier positions Akira as a text that reveals the
‘late 1980s’ as ‘a decade of tumultuous change, both in Japan’s conception of itself and its
relationship with the rest of the world’ (239).