Pride Month! Tetsuo: the Iron Man (1989)
Reflections on personal growth and the anti-social thesis in queer theory
Dir: Shinya Tsukamoto
Starring: Tomorowo Taguchi, Shinya Tsukamoto, Kei Fujiwara
I love this movie. There’s something about a film that really just dives head-first into the industrial ethos and sees its connection to queerness that really speaks to me as a kind of visceral artistic experience. Some part of me is tempted to just make this blog post incomprehensible and grating as a kind of show of solidarity with the movie’s overall vibe. Seriously, if you haven’t watched this movie before, every single part of it seems designed to generate a migraine in the viewer. The audio blows out the microphones, the soundtrack is cacophonous, the visuals are frenetic and may even be a problem if a viewer has epilepsy. However, it all works to a point that is articulated by the story, and does so in a way that, at least for me, doesn’t veer into the unbearably sententious (*cough*Noe*cough*). Tsukamoto is able to keep the irreverence of punk throughout the work, and the absolute absurdity of the costumes helps so much with that.
If you’re one of the people who hasn’t seen this movie, I won’t spoil you too much since I think the movie is really best experienced just as the high-octane roller coaster that it is. That said, I want to hone in on a particular expression of queerness that’s held throughout the movie, tie it in with some personal reflections about pride month and the question of orientation, and offer a comparison between this film and the two other metal-fetishist films I’ve covered, Crash and Titane.
When I first started getting into kink, I noticed a habit in my fellow young kinksters of attempting to pinpoint a moment in their personal histories when some inclination or early expression of kink began. “I always liked to be tied up in jump rope,” “Ever since I was little I liked spinning until I couldn’t stand,” that kind of thing. Minor attempts to locate one’s emergent interest in BDSM in childhood interests or actions, seemingly, I felt, for the purpose of answering the question of why they would do this. Why was meeting with other adults to be whipped or tied up something that made sense to them, and something that they felt was appealing? At the time, in my early 20s, I felt a discomfort with such stories. Why would it matter? What function did these stories serve? Were these tales of an early fondness for playing the damsel tied to the train tracks behaving as some sort of guarantor of legitimacy? Would someone’s kink identity be less valid if, per one group title on fetlife, they were mainly in the lifestyle to “get their brains fucked out?” I wouldn’t think so, but given the insistence among some that kink was “NOT NECESSARILY SEXUAL,” I felt like these stories attempted to locate kink in some sort of innate psychology (or even biology) in the way that queer desire often was, and still is located.
My initial reaction to these questions was to develop a kind of anti-social kink thesis, which I later learned paralleled the anti-social queer thesis that Leo Bersani articulated in 1995. I called the attempt to locate queerness in early childhood experiences, genetics, or chemistry a retreat to “the fortress of biology.” Why should it matter if one man’s desire to sleep with another consenting adult man was innate or a choice? The subject seemed to me to rely on a kind of normative morality that went unarticulated but assumed in the premise. By ceding that one couldn’t help but be gay, there seemed to be the implicit statement that if one could choose to be straight, they would.
Granted, I don’t doubt that many queer people go through that thought process. However, the idea that one would deny their desires in that way always seemed to arise more out of a consideration of social mores and unsupportive families than a judgment on queerness as such. Only the most dyed-in-the-wool natalists would view same-sex attraction as maladaptive beyond the level of facing greater discrimination from bigots.
Graduate school mellowed me out in some ways. Stressed me out in others, but I read Butler and Foucault and Halberstam and others, and I met plenty of queer people who had been out and proud for a long time, who had grown up in areas where queerness was much more accepted, and who had thought about these questions for a long time already. It was enlightening, radicalizing, and ultimately nourishing. The “anti-social thesis” posed by Leo Bersani in his 1995 book Homos questions the strategy of respectability and assimilationism used by LGBT groups at the time in advocating for rights. This spectre of respectability politics still issues forth from its grave every June during pride, as worried church-going folks question the “optics” of shirtless men in speedos at Pride, and conflate Folsom Street with the Castro in a way that would make the Reagans proud. I tend to think it best to ignore these types, as many may be new to queer organizing and not know the history of kink and queerness, nor be aware that attempts to mollify the more conservative elements in culture are not going to be met with good faith because the goal of cultural conservatives, in this context, is not a respectable gay movement, but the erasure and non-existence of LGBT people as a whole. While I wouldn’t say the two are synonymous or interchangeable, I do not think it is possible to extricate kink and queerness from one another—at least not in the U.S.
Why do I make that caveat? Well, because one thing I also picked up in my studies was a general attention to the ways that sexual desire maps differently across time and place. U.S. culture, with its neat little hetero/homo split that has recently expanded thanks to the efforts of the latter group, does not always neatly map onto other cultures or parts of history. I sometimes quibble when the question of the sexuality or gender identity of Roman emperors comes up (Elegabalus, Hadrian, etc.), but don’t usually come in with the “umm actually” because while terms like gay or transgender may not neatly map onto classical notions of sex or gender, these folks definitely wouldn’t be considered “straight” in today’s anglosphere. That’s really the crux of it—sexuality is messy. Attempts to categorize it into neat little boxes ignore the sheer ambiguity and messiness that comes into play when our linguistic tools seek to capture those unruly anatomies and emotions that bang together… not to even mention how ambiguous a tool language quickly becomes when you start to study linguistics.
I’ve gotten away from the movie at this point, I realize, and that’s mainly because I wanted to use this space to introduce the anti-social thesis as its presence looms whenever the “kink at pride?” discourse emerges. Tetsuo is, along with the works of John Waters, one of the great works of the anti-social thesis. The Salaryman (Taguchi) attempts to run from his desires, to mask them in a heterosexual (ish?) relationship with his girlfriend (Fujiwara). But his true desire, his fetish for men and for metal, always bubbles just beneath the surface of his skin. The Metal Fetishist, played wonderfully by director Tsukamoto, appears to make this metaphor plain, treating the Salaryman as he would a mid-day hookup, even bringing flowers (that quickly turn into metal).
And speaking of metal, I think this forms an interesting comparison with Titane and Crash. Largely represented through aluminum folds and flexible metal tubing, metal in Tetsuo is, ironically, incredibly liquid and mutable. The metal in the characters and scenery bubbles, it courses through walls and setting, it consumes and coughs, it scratches into things and corrodes, it grates and rings in a way that really makes Tetsuo stand out as both an industrial (as in the music genre) film, and a Futurist work of art. Here, as in the other two films, metal acts as a signifier for taboo desire. However, where the metal in Titane was more internal (rim-shot), and the metal in Crash reflected a societal transformation (at least in the film), the metal in Tetsuo seems to stand in for the futility of repression. Metal hurts when one tries to repress it and doesn’t let it spring forth.
I’m sure I’ll return to this film with a more thought-out articulation of its relationship to the anti-social thesis, but I just wanted to make a quick post about it because it’s been on my mind with my recent viewing of Titane and Crash. Plenty more to write about, for sure—the scene where it’s implied the Metal Fetishist became himself after being attacked as a child, the use of puppetry, the girlfriend character, and the later career of Kei Fujiwara.
Stray Thoughts
There’s a short film version of Tetsuo that you can find online called The Phantom of Regular Size. It also features Tsukamoto, Taguchi, and Fujiwara, and notably includes tracks by Throbbing Gristle in its soundtrack. This makes me realize that I need to find some excuse to talk about Genesis P-Orridge in the course of this blog.
Yet another movie that I can tie in with Revolutionary Girl Utena, as the final scene of Tetsuo echoes some characteristics of the film Adolescence of Utena.
That scene where the Metal Fetishist drags the threads of an oversized bolt between his teeth will never not be upsetting to me. It’s so good.
Kudos to this film for having its characters just be unapologetically freaky. Even when he’s repressing his desires, the Salaryman still goes to his girlfriend’s house to get pegged by her and surreptitiously live out his real fetish by observing her chew forks.