Tet­suo: The Iron Man and the dark side of transhumanism

A crea­ture is spread by sex­u­al con­tact and ends up infect­ing a tow­er block. A fly finds its way into a tele­por­ta­tion device and caus­es strange muta­tions in a sci­en­tist. These are the kinds of images that come to mind when we think of body hor­ror: essen­tial­ly, the ear­ly films of David Cro­nen­berg, what he called the body try­ing to derail biol­o­gy, and, by exten­sion, des­tiny. But Tet­suo: The Iron Man, a puls­ing tech­no­log­i­cal night­mare that cel­e­brates its 30^th anniver­sary in 2019 turns body hor­ror on its head, look­ing away from biol­o­gy and towards tech­nol­o­gy, cre­at­ing a dystopi­an look at how we relate to tech­nol­o­gy, and how it relates to us.

The per­ils and promis­es of the kinds of tech­nol­o­gy that once felt like sci­ence fic­tion but have now become real­i­ty has been a point fas­ci­na­tion for so much pop cul­ture – from the end­less doom and gloom of Black Mir­ror to the pow­er of tran­shu­man­ism in Years and Years. This makes the pre­science of a film like Tet­suo even hard­er to ignore, and makes it even more dis­turb­ing to revis­it now. Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s cyber­punk odd­i­ty turns the notion of tran­shu­man­ism into a body-destroy­ing nightmare.

The very first images we see in the film feel like a kind of crude rep­re­sen­ta­tion of tran­shu­man­ism itself: an unnamed man – cred­it­ed as the ​“Met­al Fetishist” – inserts pieces of met­al into a wound in his leg. He runs a screw in-between his teeth, hint­ing at a fusion of met­al and flesh. While this hap­pens, we see a mon­tage of bod­ies lit­er­al­ly burn­ing as he inserts met­al into him­self, there’s a delib­er­ate rejec­tion of biol­o­gy in favour of technology.

But the Met­al Fetishist isn’t long for this world. He’s run over by an unnamed char­ac­ter – cred­it­ed as Man – although that isn’t the end of his sto­ry. He exacts revenge on the Man after his death, seem­ing to pass on his mechan­i­cal body as though it’s some kind of virus. There’s a dark irony to the fact that the Met­al Fetishist is run over, killed by machinery.

The virus that infects the Man exists beyond just his per­spec­tive. We see events through the lens of strange metal­lic mass­es on train plat­forms, through the handy­cams of a stalk­er in the woods. Tet­suo deeply immers­es itself in tech­nol­o­gy as a way of see­ing the world. These ideas – includ­ing the afore­men­tioned met­al mass infect­ing a woman who prods at it with a scalpel – estab­lish a rela­tion­ship between peo­ple and tech­nol­o­gy where the lat­ter treat the for­mer as hosts, as ways of com­ing to life and tak­ing control.

It’s a dark inver­sion of the utopi­an ideals of tran­shu­man­ism, where instead of humans using tech­nol­o­gy as a way of advanc­ing them­selves the oppo­site becomes true. Humans are used as ves­sels for the advance­ment of rogue tech­nolo­gies, the biol­o­gy of body hor­ror being reject­ed for a night­mare in chrome.

Tet­suo forces mor­bid fusions of biol­o­gy and tech­nol­o­gy through its depic­tion of the mon­strous sex­u­al­i­ty that comes with being infect­ed by the Met­al Fetishist’s virus. In a night­mare the Man has, he encoun­ters a dancer who pegs him with her metal­lic phal­lus. But that’s just the tip of the ice­berg when it comes to the strange sex­u­al­i­ty of Tet­suo – in one infa­mous sequence, the Man’s gen­i­tals trans­form into a drill.

The link between sex­u­al­i­ty and trans­for­ma­tion is an inher­ent part of body hor­ror, and in the case of Tet­suo biol­o­gy is reject­ed in favour of tech­nol­o­gy; the sex­u­al encoun­ters in Tet­suo are sound­tracked by scrap­ing met­al. The idea of the human body being replaced by tech­nol­o­gy also comes to the fore when injuries the Man sus­tains are healed – rather than tak­ing the form of flesh and blood, instead his wounds are cov­ered up by met­al, as if this new lay­er of his body were the next stage in his evolution.

More than stat­ing some of the ways in which tech­nol­o­gy can be con­sid­ered a dan­ger to human­i­ty, Tet­suo presents the loss of biol­o­gy and human­ness to tech­nol­o­gy and machin­ery as being inevitable, the next step in the advance­ment of our species. That this hap­pens to be so dark and mon­strous is what makes the film so fascinating.

At the cli­max of Tet­suo, the Met­al Fetishist, still liv­ing on inside machin­ery con­fronts the Man and tells him that even his brain will turn to met­al – from his skin through to his organs, he has become a machine. His mem­o­ries are even replayed on TV screens, human­i­ty and biol­o­gy are cast aside for a future of machin­ery and metal­lic muta­tion. As Cro­nen­berg once put it, long live the new flesh.