Videodrome & Tetsuo: Iron Man

(The following was written in March '07 for a class I was taking, "Art in the Age of Electronic Media." It's an analytical essay rather than a review, but perhaps you'd like to read it while I find more movies to critique. Yes, I did get an A.)

Human culture and its reflection within the arts have long been fascinated with representations of living people created artificially, going back to the myth of the sculptor, Pygmalion, who fell so deeply in love with his own statue that it was granted life. With entry into the Machine Age, such humanoid automatons began to be depicted as the product of contemporary or futuristic technology, growing more commonplace as the possibility of true-life artificial intelligence continued to grow more and more feasible. Such a possibility is portrayed especially well within the visceral experience of cinema, in which such creations may become indistinguishable from “real” people: in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, for instance, the “replicants” are made to appear so human that they spurt blood when shot and can only be identified through psychological testing, further blurring the line between human and machine.

Two films, Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983) and Tetsuo: Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989), examine the concept of the Mechanical Man in a different manner. Both explore ideas of ordinary human beings who are transformed into amalgamations of flesh and technology, a transformative process that is messy, painful, and ultimately destructive to the protagonist and the outer world, reflecting anxieties about modern society.

Videodrome centers around Max Renn, owner of a local television station that emphasizes sexual and violent content. He catches sight of a pirate TV station known as “Videodrome” devoted solely to genuine footage of torture; wishing to air such footage on his own station, he gathers information from others in the TV business as to the nature of Videodrome and its creators. Renn discovers that the mere act of watching this channel has been causing him extreme hallucinations and physical changes to his body through the transmission of hidden signals. He is thus “programmed” by different sides of a cultural debate about the potential uses of Videodrome signals, becoming an ideological assassin with no mind of his own.

Tetsuo is far more abstract in its methods and may require multiple viewings to discern a legible plot. It begins with an unnamed man generally known as the “metals fetishist” forcibly inserting a metal pipe into his thigh in a cramped room full of discarded technology and paper cutouts of athletes. When he notices maggots squirming in the open wound, he becomes so distressed that he runs into the street and is hit by a car. The car’s driver, the “salaryman,” believes he has killed the metals fetishist and dumps the latter’s body into the woods. In actuality, the metals fetishist has survived, albeit with a piece of rusted metal immovably implanted into his brain that causes his body to rust. Meanwhile, the salaryman notices an odd bit of metal poking from his cheek, which causes pain and bleeding on attempted removal; he gradually sprouts more and more iron appendages throughout the day, during which he has two threatening or outright violent encounters with women (as both victim and perpetrator), ending up as an amorphous mass of soldered metal with whom the metals fetishist banters and battles. Eventually both salaryman and metals fetishist merge into a phallic mound of rusted iron.

The synthesis of these respective protagonists with the technological world is achieved through quite different means and processes. Videodrome in particular has much to say about the use of technology, specifically television, as an interactive cultural medium: for example, one of Max Renn’s contacts, a man named Brian O’Blivion, has founded the Cathode Ray Mission, which provides television cubicles for the homeless out of the belief that TV watching is a means of communication and integration with society at large. O’Blivion himself only interacts with his audience through monologues on videotape; in fact, he has died several months earlier and a large storeroom of such tapes serves to keep him “alive.” Prior to his death, O’Blivion developed a hallucination-inducing brain tumor brought on by Videodrome signals, although he believes that the visions were the cause of the tumor and not vice-versa. He believes this tumor to be a new organ, evidence of a further stage of evolution referred to as the “new flesh,” in which experience and perception become one. His rival, Barry Convex, also supports the idea of mind and body modified by television signals, albeit with a far more fascistic mindset: the use of such technology to program human beings into biological weapons. Max Renn ends up a pawn of Convex and O’Blivion as both sides “program” him to assassinate one another’s allies using videotapes physically inserted into his body and television broadcasts that speak and act directly to or upon him.

Videodrome’s human-technological fusion is clearly the result of external forces acting upon an individual under the influence of a complex network of major cultural players; it speaks of anxieties about the potential misuse of a specific, widespread medium. Tetsuo’s struggle is more intrapersonal, focused on the various torments of the salaryman’s psyche: his transformation occurs from the inside out, its origin never truly explained, possibly symbolic of sexual confusion or guilt over involvement in a hit-and-run. His antagonist, the metals fetishist, is given only a patently absurd explanation for his own synthesis, that of rusted metal in his brain “infecting” the rest of his body. This also gives him abilities that the salaryman lacks, such as his power to travel through metal pipelines and to temporarily “possess” various characters such as a businesswoman sitting beside the salaryman on a public bench and the corpse of the salaryman’s girlfriend.

The transformative processes, and indeed general themes, of both films also involve a highly literal melding of sex and violence. On a first date with radio personality Nicki Brand, Max Renn is invited to cut her on the shoulder with a pocket knife; later, during intercourse, he pierces her ears with long needles. She also states that she is so excited by Videodrome’s sadomasochistic content that she wishes to audition. In Tetsuo, the salaryman’s girlfriend is so aroused by the car accident that she initiates sex within view of the metals fetishist’s presumably-dead body. She later dies after impaling herself on a gigantic drill-penis that has sprouted from the salaryman’s torso. There is also a distinct homoerotic aspect to the conflict between the salaryman and the metals fetishist, with the latter greeting the former with a bouquet of rusted flowers at one point and taunting the salaryman in an often-flirtatious manner as they fight.

Androgynous qualities are shown as particularly threatening. One scene in Tetsuo depicts the salaryman on hands and knees before his girlfriend, who inexplicably bears a prehensile phallus that resembles a vacuum hose. She uses this to anally penetrate the salaryman, who has a distinct look of agonized pain on his face as she does so. Max Renn’s Videodrome-induced fleshly conduit takes the form of a vertical slit from chest to navel with a rather vaginal character. Others use this aperture to program him with pulsating videotapes; he also uses it to conceal a handgun, which later merges with his hand completely, and it transforms the intruding hand of one enemy agent into a literal “hand grenade.”

The fusion of organic and synthetic aspects is depicted as ultimately destructive to both the individual affected and to the greater world, with which he inevitably wishes to spread this transformation. After their final battle meshes the salaryman and metals fetishist into a throbbing tower of iron, the protruding head of the latter expresses a desire to “rust the whole world and scatter it into the dust of the universe” (which “sounds like fun,” according to the salaryman’s grimacing face); the newly-amalgamated creature then propels itself through the streets of Japan to initiate this goal. After murdering Barry Convex in a particularly gruesome manner in which Videodrome tumors burst through his skull, Max Renn climbs aboard a condemned ship (a remnant of older technology) where a television set gives him his final instructions. To fully integrate himself with the “new flesh,” he is to shoot himself (his “old flesh”), as demonstrated by a doppelganger on the screen whose action causes the TV set to explode as human organs fly out of its shattered display. Renn’s last words are, “Long live the new flesh,” as he pulls the trigger. Our own screen goes black and the credits proceed to roll; we are left to wonder if he has succeeded or simply died.

The directors of Videodrome and Tetsuo: Iron Man both return to ideas of human-technological transformation in later works, in a genre that might more accurately be labeled techno-biological fantasy rather than horror or science fiction. Tsukamoto directed the sequel Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, a cult favorite that essentially re-makes the original Tetsuo with a more audience-accessible storyline and action-oriented style. Several of Cronenberg’s films deal with disconcerting hybrids of the organic and synthetic, perhaps most famously in his remake of The Fly; however, some of his most obvious parallels to Videodrome are in eXistenZ, released in the same year as The Matrix. In eXistenZ, players of a virtual-reality game system plug themselves into living pods through ports installed in their spinal cords. The resulting experience is essentially indistinguishable from that of reality, raising questions of whether it is safe or acceptable to spend excessive time in a mentally-based world that so closely replicates the physical, external one, and also prefiguring immersive online gaming experiences such as World of Warcraft and Second Life in which many players are known to spend nearly all of their free time.

With their usage of contemporary or pseudo-contemporary settings and protagonists who initially seem to live fairly ordinary lives, Tetsuo: Iron Man and Videodrome emphasize the idea that we must be aware of the world around us or it might come back to consume us entirely.

Funny Games and Prurient Interest

Ah yes, this review has been terribly late in coming--a full month after I saw the film--as the circumstances of my life still haven't settled down yet. I've been staying on friends' couches since January, since I lack a steady income to pay rent; speaking of which, I went to a job fair about three weeks ago, handed out 18 resumes, and only got one response . . . from someplace that could only offer a $25 stipend. I was only asked to interview by a clothing store, and that opportunity got blown when I showed up at the appointed time of 4 PM only to have the interviewer bitch at me for not coming at 12 like "everybody else": apparently, it's my fault that I was told the incorrect time over the phone. One place I applied to more recently gave me a brief phone interview yesterday, though I'm sure I blew that one royally as I was caught off-guard (weak responses) in the basement (poor phone reception) of a library (distracted by people and the need to stay quiet).

Other than my struggle with the piss-poor economy I graduated into, my birthday was last week, which gave me a brief respite from the Sisyphus-like effort to constantly disperse resumes for nothing but negative, perfunctory, or nonexistent responses. I took the opportunity to buy some DVDs, including the two-disc edition of There Will Be Blood (which, thanks to those categories meant to praise technical prowess, actually ended up winning fewer Oscars than, of all things, The Bourne Ultimatum--and I'm willing to bet that latter film will have "Winner of 3 Academy Awards!" prominently emblazoned on its DVD case). In my spare time--isn't it all spare time nowadays?--I've been shooting and editing concert footage of bands I particularly like (mostly friends' bands) that have played shows at SUNY Purchase. Really, it's in your best interest for me to like your music because I might just post your show on YouTube and give you some worldwide publicity (see for yourself: Abattoir; The Dandy Lions; Jangula; Teeny Bopper). Now, on to the review!

I’ve been known to turn up my nose at those overgrown adolescent boys who will pay to see a movie, no matter how mind-numbingly shitty it is, just because some actress or other might get topless in it: i.e., all the revenue for Good Luck Chuck from those pathetic saps who flocked to the box office for even the slightest possibility of Jessica Alba in her underwear. If you’re going to be that transparently desperate to see an unclad, at-least-reasonably-attractive female, you’re better off staying home and downloading pornography, for free, like an honest man. Hey, if you're lucky, you might even come across a pixelated image of Jessica Alba's face crudely Photoshopped onto the orange-tanned neck of a generic porn actress with a painfully-enhanced rack!

And yet, I admit, a good part of the reason why I wanted to see Michael Haneke's recent remake of his own Funny Games was because, well . . . those guys are hot.

In my defense, the premise did sound interesting on its own, and director Michael Haneke had been recommended to me by a film-aficionado friend of mine. The only movie of his that I’d seen before was The Piano Teacher, and it’s one of the extremely few films I’ve seen that I really can’t say whether or not I liked. I mean to say that the viewing experience itself was--surely intentionally--uncomfortable and not hugely enjoyable: something that begins as, what might be in other directors' hands, a relatively conventional Oedipally-tinged romance between a middle-aged piano teacher and her student becomes a study of the sadomasochism inherent in human nature. Isabelle Huppert's title character eventually gives student Benoit Magimel a detached, awkward restroom handjob; later, when she (no pun intended) whips out some fairly tame bondage equipment, he looks on her with disgust. Make no mistake, the piano teacher is pretty royally fucked-up in the psychological sense, but it's hardly due to her interest in sexual kink . . . and in the end, that "nice" vanilla boy who prefers the standard penis-vagina games reveals himself to be a different sort of sadist. (Fun fact: The Piano Teacher also features a small role by Udo Samel, the star of Killer Condom!)

But really, just look at these guys:



I mean, clean-cut, quietly-authoritarian prettyboy madmen-next-door, complete with blond Hitler Youth side parts? With the possibility of some Leopold and Loeb action (and I don’t mean lustmord)? Good god, I’m all over that. As far as offbeat, potentially inappropriate criminal-character attractions, I must admit I also had rather naughty thoughts about Alain Delon in Le Samourai and, more obscurely, Vincent Kartheiser in Crime + Punishment in Suburbia, although he was just the Loner With A Camera in that one and didn’t actually kill anybody.

Prurient interest aside for the moment, I've seen many derisive, dismissive reviews of this film that focus primarily on dissecting the "Message" Haneke intended to convey with Funny Games, often unfairly neglecting to analyze whether or not it was a good movie in general. As I already stated, Haneke's earlier Piano Teacher had a relevent message, but didn't make for a viewing experience I'd want to watch again any time soon, and I wondered if this would be the case when I went to see Funny Games. (It's worth noting that I saw the matinee showing of this film on the very first day it came out in my area--March 14th--and there were literally only five other people in the theatre with me.)

I think an important factor in one's opinion of Funny Games lies in which characters one is driven to sympathize with, something that hinges heavily on who you are as a viewer. My own perspective is that of a fairly eccentric 23-year-old who grew up with horror movies, many of the schlocky, over-the-top '80s variety, and at age 14 was interested in reading about the lives of serial killers, although I'm far from the "standard" American torture-porn fanatic Haneke supposedly seeks to scold: I tend to prefer the displays of actual violence in my horror films to be so over-the-top and cheesy as to become cartoonish (Lair of the White Worm or Hellraiser III), or just flat-out bizarre (Videodrome), and I thought Hostel was more interesting for its underlying social commentary about Western tourists than for any graphic depictions of torture and murder. And, as I said before, I think Funny Games's villains are hot and want to bang them . . . so one might say my perspective is a bit more skewed than that of, say, a fortysomething, heterosexual-male filmgoer with a wife and two kids, who found Crash (and I don't mean Cronenberg's version) to be terribly profound and subtle. Whereas I read J.G. Ballard's Crash when I was 16 and thought it was awesome.

From the moment we're introduced to the doomed family, driving to their lake house in a series of Shining-style shots while playing a classical-composer guessing game in their car, I was inclined to think of them as standard, smugly self-assured members of the sort of upper-middle-class yuppie suburbia I despised living in as a teenager. I was neither actively rooting for these people to die nor automatically projecting my own life onto theirs: I actually became much more sympathetic to this family once they were in real danger and well out of their mundane happiness.

Also, as someone with a good amount of video shooting and editing experience, I was impressed by Haneke's techniques. First of all, there is his use of subtlety. He intentionally begins the story with a sort of bourgeois banality, with repetitive, frivolous family small-talk; many shots in the first few minutes of the film focus more on the characters' hands and feet than on their faces, with a particular emphasis on the family dog, who proves a nuisance to the motions of unpacking until the gradual realization that it has disappeared. Passing the neighbors, whose words and actions seem rather stiff and strained, the family is unsure of why they seem a bit odd . . . but we, the viewers, do, because we've seen the previews and the ads, we know that those two young men standing calmly in their yard are murderers (spree killers, as it turns out). Haneke shows that he's "in on it" with the viewer. More on that later.

This blissfully banal existence continues with the initial, seemingly-innocuous introduction of Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet's characters. These killers are charismatic Nice Guys: young, quiet, handsome WASP types with impeccable manners and immaculate white polo shirts. Even Hannibal Lecter had a straitjacket and that infamous mask to make his appearance more menacing. When their sadistic manipulations begin, they act as if it were the most natural thing in the world to accuse their victims of rudeness for not showing appropriate gratitude to the torturers. I mentioned Leopold and Loeb earlier, the real-life murder case that became the inspiration for, among other things, Hitchcock's Rope and Michael Pitt's previous teen-crime drama, Murder By Numbers (ugh); Funny Games doesn't state explicitly what the relationship between the two upstanding young gents actually is, yet at times their banter seems, well, rather familiar, if you get what I mean. (Or maybe it's just me.) Their actual identities are constantly and deliberately kept in flux, referring to each other variously as "Peter"/"Paul", "Tom"/"Jerry", and "Beavis"/"Butthead;" at one point, Michael Pitt rattles off a litany of possible back stories meant to "explain" their sociopathic tendencies, inviting the family to pick whichever one appeals to them most (which reminded me of a common criticism of the movie Elephant: that it "didn't explain why" that film's own young Ambiguously Gay Duo decided to embark on a killing spree).

Pitt does make a handful of direct comments to the audience regarding the onscreen torture, but these asides were not as blatant as I'd feared: they're casually conspiratorial quips, acknowledging the audience as Pitt's second partner-in-crime. Yes, you're "in on it" with him, all right. This technique of Haneke's, already well remarked-upon by other critics, strikes some as being too overtly propagandistic and insulting in its insinuation that the audience might identify with the tormentors, but I find it far too simplistic to focus only on this attribute of the film as Haneke deliberately subverts a lot of standard horror clichés that a typically "sadistic" audience would be expecting. For instance, at one point, the family's son conveniently finds a shotgun and aims it at Pitt. Ordinarily, this would be the payoff: he shoots the killer, he survives, he presumably grows up to play football and go to college and take on a wife and kids of his own. But here, the kid not only doesn't know how to shoot a gun--Pitt cynically instructs him how--but is terrified to discover at just the wrong moment that the gun isn't even loaded . . . and that he's unwittingly given the killers another "toy."

We actually see very few acts of violence onscreen; instead, it's often clever editing during the act itself and then a shot of its aftermath. Fairly early on, Tim Roth's husband-and-father character gets cracked in the leg by one of his own golf clubs, wielded by Pitt; this happens in a split-second shot of Roth doubling over in pain. We never see the wound itself, although we do see a large, dark, heavy bloodstain spreading through the fabric of his pants, with only the power of our imagination to guess at how painful and awful his injury really is. Later, when a character is shot, we see only a blood-spattered television set broadcasting some banality. As a friend of mine remarked when I told him about this film, it's being "sadistic to the sadists" by not actually showing the violence.

Speaking of denied gratification, prurient interest is also denied the viewer. At one point, Pitt requests that Roth order his wife, Naomi Watts, to strip, or else he will torture and possibly kill their son. Here Haneke does something I thought very clever: we don't actually see Watts take off her clothing, we never see the actual nudity. Instead, the camera focuses on Watts' face, reddening and in tears, as she strips out-of-frame. This is in stark contrast to a lot of previous hey-bitch-take-your-clothes-off scenes I've watched, in which the woman's visible nudity might persuade the viewer to sympathize with her exposure and vulnerability or it could provide the viewer with a source of titillation, intentionally or not.

A couple of years ago I saw a really shitty Italian-produced movie from the '80s, I can't remember the name, about a serial rapist and his good buddy who crash an upscale dinner party to assault the guests both physically and sexually: what I most remember is a scene in which a young woman who arrives late to the party is revealed to be a virgin, to the delight of the villain, and what follows is a fairly lengthy shot, lingering on the woman's breasts and pubic hair, as he ironically sings a lullaby while tracing her skin with a large knife. Being young and female myself, that kind of exploitative ambiguity makes me much more uncomfortable than anything in Funny Games did. (There was a "payoff" at the end in which the rapist gets shot several times, but compared to all that came before, it wasn't anywhere near as satisfying as I'm sure it was meant to be.) The torture in Funny Games isn't sexy: even when Watts is tied up in her underwear, she's wearing a plain, mismatched pair of bra and panties (yes, filmmakers, women don't always wear matching bra-and-panties sets of satin or lace every time they go out), and when she later has the opportunity to escape and search for help, she grabs the first clothing item she can find, which happens to be her husband's sweater-vest that hangs off her like a tent.

I have to admit that certain aspects of Funny Games were, actually, pretty funny, in the way that a lot of Kafka is funny: it's so absurd and wrong that you have to laugh or else go mad. (Or maybe it's just me and my sick sense of humor; I sort of wonder what the guy sitting behind me in the theatre thought of my occasionally chuckling to myself.) Most of this came from various juxtapositions, beginning with an early shot of the smiling family in their car, obscured by the stark red Helvetica of the opening credits, as a loud, chaotic metal song suddenly blares away the calm Handel on the soundtrack, which seemed to me like a parody of the all the flash-in-the-pan nü-metal and "modern rock" songs that tend to clutter up the soundtracks of studio slasher movies. There's also the scene in which Tim Roth, his leg recently broken, sits at the kitchen doorway beside his terrified son, and Brady Corbet, idly keeping watch, requests that the boy make him a sandwich, "please."

I thought this movie was excellent, although it's hardly something I would recommend to everyone. Essentially, if you insist that a movie be full of fluff and smiles, wrapped up with a happy ending; if you disdain any sort of misanthropy and insist that, deep down, People Are Good And Nice; if even the hint of violence or sadism is repellent to you, I think you would probably hate Funny Games. But neither would you be that fond of it if you watch films just to see shit get formulaically blown up, or to admire the special-effects or CGI artifice of a graphically mangled limb. Funny Games is an unusual creature nowadays: a horror movie with a brain in its cracked skull.