Tetsuo the Iron man.
The twentieth century has been haunted by the paradox that the human body was, on the one hand understood phenomenologically as the more or less enigmatic site of all experience, of constructing and perceiving reality and of consciousness and on the other hand was conceived as materialistically as a complicated yet decodable mechanism available for deconstruction and insertion into technical social and other systems. (Lee)
This amalgamation of human with machine has been tinkered with in pop culture media, especially in films for a long time.
In 1989 Director Shinya Tsukamoto produced, Tetsuo the Iron Man. The movie’s prescientific interpretation of new technologies merging with the human body make it very hard to ignore how the new technological advancements have created perils and anxieties explored in pop culture . Filmed in Black and white stop motion combined with a metal scraping soundtrack Tetsuo the Iron Man is a highly sexualized nightmare in Chrome.
Produced on a very low budget, Tetsuo was a first effort destined for cult glory. The film is packed with mutilation, black humor, and sexual perversion .
Tetsuo’s plot, delirious from the very beginning, follows “Salaryman” (Tomorowo Tamaguchi) as he is haunted by the “Metal Fetishist” (Tsukamoto himself). In an act of revenge for running him over,The “Metal Fetishist” transforms “Salaryman” into a hulking monster of wire and junk.
Although Tsukamoto employs the cyborg motif common to cyberpunk, nobody explores it in as a horrific organic way as Tsukamoto.
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.
Tsukamoto’s fusion of flesh and metal is extremely rough and horrific.It is not high-tech by any means, but a harsh and agonizing mutation of a human into a metal monstrosity.
Its dark inversion of the utopian ideals of transhumanism where instead of humans using technology as a way of advancing themselves the opposite comes true.
Humans are used as vessels for the advancement of rogue technologies the biology of body horror being rejected for a metallic phallic horror.
Hammers, Roslyn Lee. “Machine Art in the Twentieth Century by Andreas Broeckmann.” Technology and Culture, vol. 62, no. 4, 2021, pp. 1258–59,
