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.