What I See: Tetsuo, The Iron Man

"Tetsuo: The Iron Man" is a Japanese film made by director Shinya Tsukamoto in 1989. It is entirely in black and white. It tells a horrifying story about two men whose bodies are taken over by and transformed into machines. This could be seen as a comment on industrialization and capitalism's dehumanizing effects on the individual, since the characters are literally dehumanized. Its plot is not entirely clear, since there is barely any dialog, and since it is made with mostly expressive, rather than explanatory, cinematography.

The first five minutes of the film is a montage of wide shots of factories interspersed with images of a man entirely surrounded by wires, tubes, and machinery parts. All of the shots in this sequence are cropped to avoid seeing this man's eyes. All of the shots that show the man are close-up, focusing on just one body part after another. In each of these shots, the electronics are also in focus, putting equal importance on the man and his electronic surroundings.

Close-ups, ranging from a normal close up to extreme close-ups, are the primary type of shot used in the film. Much of the story is taken up by Tetsuo, the main character, dealing with his body's transformations. Whenever he is discovering a new part of his body that has transformed into machinery, it is done entirely in close-ups, including shots of just his horrified eyes and of his screaming mouth. Staying extremely close to the main character creates an uncomfortable intimacy, which allows the viewer to more viscerally feel the terrible transformation.

By the last third of the movie, Tetsuo has become completely covered in machine flotsam, and he resembles a walking electronics junk yard. It seems as though the camera itself is frightened by him. In a scene where he answers a phone in his apartment, the camera shows a medium shot of his freakish head and the phone, and the shot slowly pans to the left and the right of him, showing the uninteresting domestic background instead, as though uncomfortable with the idea of looking directly at the now monstrous Tetsuo.