Page 154 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Spiraling into Apocalypse 141

‘salaryman’’s progressively radical transformations, as well as the
‘electrifying’ climactic battle between the ‘salaryman’ and the ‘metal
fetishist’, both of whom fully transform into heavy metal war machines.
However, Tsukamoto’s film is perhaps best understood as a text that not
only elides a single cohesive exegesis, but that, through its irreducibility,
contributes a vital perspective to Japan’s cinema of apocalypse. Through
the ‘salaryman’ and ‘metal fetishist’’s desire to unite in ‘love’ so that they
may ‘mutate the whole world into metal’ and, in the process, ‘destroy the
whole fucking world’, the viewer must confront not only the threat of
global annihilation, but also the potential for the emergence of new
cultural perspectives and identities created by such fusion, mutation,
‘love’.
In his essay, ‘Metal-Morphosis: Post-Industrial Crisis and the
Tormented Body in the Tetsuo Films’, Ian Conrich insightfully posits
Tsukamoto Shinya’s ‘nightmarish cyberpunk vision’ as a tale of
‘transformation and incorporation’ that locates images of radical
biomechanical horror within a larger nexus of machine-age super-hero
mythologies, recent urban renewal practices, emerging notions regarding
the mechanisation of the body in production processes, and the
emergence of new economies of eroticism (including techno-
eroticism/fetishism) that confound conventional notions of gender and
sexuality (2005: 95-106). Thus, although ‘monstrous’ hybridity, including
the collision of the corporeal and technological, remains a staple of
apocalyptic horror films in contemporary Japanese cinema, it would be
shortsighted to assume that such works views these ménages as
exclusively horrific.
As Sharalyn Orbaugh reminds us, ‘some of the most pressing
issues’ for contemporary Japanese narratives (including film narratives)
‘have been questions of legitimacy and illegitimacy…, non-normative
forms of reproduction, the hybridity of bodies or subjectivities, and the
ambiguous or anomalous incarnations of gender/sex/ sexuality’ (2002:
440). Furthermore, it is valuable for viewers of contemporary Japanese
horror cinema, as well as readers and viewers of Japanese science fiction,
to remember that Japanese horror and science fiction texts frequently
differ from their Western counterparts in that the ‘other’-ing of the