Abstract
It is no exaggeration to say that Tsukamoto Shin’ya is one of the quintessential experimentalists of contemporary Japanese cinema. Other directors might also be added to this list, including veterans such as Suzuki Seijun, Ishii Sogo, and Miike Takashi, as well as relative newcomers Aoyama Shinji, Sono Sion, and Toyoda Toshiaki, but few can match the energy, inventiveness, and sheer audacity of Tsukamoto’s fiercely independent filmmaking. His work pushes the boundaries of contemporary Japanese film, not only transgressing the conventions of genre and investigating the limits of cinematic form, but also offering biting social commentary on some of the most pressing issues confronting Japan both before and after the collapse of the bubble economy, including the breakdown of the family system, the alienation of Japanese youth, and the increasing disillusionment with urban life and the mechanisms of advanced capitalism.
I am one of Cronenberg’s disciples.
—Tsukamoto Shin’ya
I tried to make an erotic film by way of science fiction, to express eroticism through iron.
—Tsukamoto Shin’ya
As the city grows bigger, it seems that people re-evolve, lose touch with their bodies, become disembodied almost, live only through their brains. I’m interested in how we learn to survive in the city. At times I find it beautiful to ponder destruction. It’s strange. Part of me loves a city like Tokyo, but part of me would quite happily destroy it.
—Tsukamoto Shin’ya
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
On the collision of the Gothic and the modern in Metropolis and the figure of Rotwang, see Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 64–65.
Some of the most famous examples of the Surrealist fascination with the subversive potential of eyes include Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s collaboration Un chien andalou (An Andalusian dog, 1929),
Salvador Dalí’s Le Jeu lugubre (The lugubrious game, 1929),
René Magritte’s Le Faux Miroir (The false mirror, 1928),
Claude Cahun’s Object (1936), and
Guillermo Meza’s Ojos-paranoia (Eyes-paranoia, 1941). See
Sidra Stich, Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art (Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1990), 32, 128, 227.
Georges Bataille, “Eye,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 17.
Compare Marxist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin’s (1888–1938) critique of the “destroy the machines”-style of Luddite protest in his essay “Anarchy and Scientific Communism” (1918): “Of course, there was a time in the labour movement when the workers were not yet clear on the difference between the machine as a means of production and the machine as capital, that is, as a means of oppression. Nonetheless, at that time the workers tended not to do away with private ownership of the machines, but to destroy the machines themselves, so as to return to primitive manual means of labour.” See Nikolai Bukharin, “Anarchy and Scientific Communism,” in The Poverty of Statism, trans. Paul Sharkey (Sanday, UK: Cienfuegos Press, 1981), 4 (emphasis added).
See Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, ed. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 198–215.
Antonin Artaud quoted in Stephen Barber, Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 36.
Luis Buñuel, My Last Breath (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), 103–4.
Jean Goudal, “Surrealism and Cinema,” in The Shadow & Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, ed. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000), 93. Goudal’s essay, which was originally published in La Revue hebdomadair in February 1925, was read by Buñuel before he made Un chien andalou and is said to have influenced his conception of surrealist cinema.
Short, “Un Chien Andalou,” 72. Short also points out how these fragmented body parts, superimposed onto the face, anticipate René Magritte’s painting Le Viol (The rape, 1934). See Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 485.
Richard Scheib, “Review of Tetsuo: The Iron Man,” http://www.moria.co.nz/sf/tetsuo.htm (accessed April 17, 2008).
On the postindustrial landscapes in Tetsuo, see Ian Conrich, “Metal-Morphosis: Post-Industrial Crisis and the Tormented Body in the Tetsuo Films,” in Japanese Horror Cinema, ed. Jay McRoy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 100–102.
For an interesting alternative reading of the politics of skin color in Tetsuo, see Takayuki Tatsumi, Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 151–70. Tatsumi reads the figure of the metal fetishist as a reinscription of the postwar literary history of the Japanese Apache in relation to three novels:
Kaikō Ken’s Nihon san-mon opera (Japanese three penny opera, 1959),
Komatsu Sakyō’s Nihon apatchi zoku (Japanese Apache tribe, 1964), and
Yang Sok Il’s Yoru o kakete (Through the night, 1994). Tatsumi argues that, by reiterating the figure of the Japanese Apache, Tetsuo “radically reproduce[s] the most uncanny fear of and fascination with the techno-Mongoloid” (169). The problem with this reading is that it ignores the iconographic function of African American athletes in the film with whom the metal fetishist clearly identifies and seeks to emulate. Whether blackness in Tetsuo reiterates racial stereotypes (e.g., of athletic prowess or predatory sexuality) or resists such stereotypes is open to question. Either way, the metaphorics of skin color in the film is neither innocent nor straightforward.
In his airbrush work, Giger sprays directly onto paper without preliminary sketches or stencils in a working style that is analogous to the “automatic writing” (écriture automatique) made famous by the Surrealists, which aimed to bypass the censorship of consciousness (or the superego) so that images could arise from the unconscious and enter directly into art. Giger describes the process as follows: “The drawings arose spontaneously, without any prior sketch or idea. I tried to switch off my thoughts as far as possible, so as to bring the debris in my mind uncensored into the daylight. The result was a highly personal form of psychogram…. With time, working this instrument [the airbrush] becomes as automatic as driving a car. One becomes a mere automaton, a machine, functioning, even when one has overstepped the frontiers of lucid thought, as for example in a state of intoxication.” See Giger quoted in H. R Giger, H. R. Giger’s Retrospective, 1964–1984 (Beverly Hills, CA: Morpheus International, 1997), 48. Also see
Fritz Billeter, “The Beauty and Surrealism of HR Giger,” in HR Giger: The Oeuvre Before Alien, 1961–1976, ed. Beat Stutzer (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2007), 75–76; Carlos Arenas, “Liberation Through Horror: Giger and the Fantastic in Art,” in HR Giger, ed. Beat Stutzer, 29. On André Breton’s famous definition of surrealism as “psychic automatism,” see
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 3–47.
H. R. Giger, H. R. Giger’s Biomechanics (Beverly Hills, CA: Morpheus International, 1990), 88.
Some of the chrome-plated gynoids of Japanese illustrator Sorayama Hajime also mix flesh and metal but do so in a way that is far less disturbing (and less thought provoking) than Giger’s work (or Tsukamoto’s remediations of Giger). Sorayama’s “sexy robots” are, basically, robot pinups and have more in common with soft porn than they do with cyberpunk per se. See Hajime, Sexy Robot. On Sorayama, see Thomas Foster, The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 98–107.
The emphasis on womblike chambers and claustrophobic shafts and tunnels is something Tetsuo shares with Alien. As Barbara Creed writes, in Alien, “virtually all aspects of the mise en scène are designed to signify the female: womb-like interiors, fallopian-tube corridors, small claustrophobic spaces.” See Creed, “Gynesis, Postmodernism and the Science Fiction Horror Film,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1990), 215.
Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 266–67.
Burton Watson, trans., Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 49.
On the telepods’ resemblance to eggs, see Adam Knee, “The Metamorphosis of the Fly,” Wide Angle 14, no. 1 (1992): 20–34. Taking it a step further, Helen Rob-bins sees in the telepod’s “uterine shapes and vulvi-form glass doors … clear womb simulacra” and the masculine reappropriation of the maternal function (in other words, a trope for androgenesis). See
Helen Robbins, “‘More Human than I am Alone’: Womb Envy in David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Dead Ringers,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Mae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993), 137.
William Beard, The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg, rev. and expanded ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 227.
For example, see Edward Guerrero, “AIDS as Monster in Science Fiction,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 18, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 87–93; Knee, “The Metamorphosis of the Fly,” 20–34;
Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 250–52. Both in his commentary track for The Fly and in interviews, Cronenberg has explicitly denied this interpretation: “If you think of The Fly as an AIDS movie, then you have to think that Geena Davis gave it to him, because he’s a guy who’s never been fucked before. Then, is she going to die? That’s why I don’t want it to be AIDS, truly.” See
Chris Rodley, ed., Cronenberg on Cronenberg (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 127–28.
Jill McGreal, “Interview with David Cronenberg,” in David Cronenberg, BFI Dossier, no. 21, ed. Wayne Drew (London: British Film Institute, 1984), 9.
Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 138.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rūdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 139 (sec. 7[60]).
However, Bianca contradicts Convex’s assertion of the necessity of violent media by telling Max that “the Videodrome signal, the one that does the damage, it can be delivered under a test pattern, anything.” Since the viewer is placed in the position of not knowing any more than Max, it is hard to say who is telling the truth. Cronenberg’s conception of the Videodrome subsignal owes much to William S. Burroughs’s notion of the “image-virus,” as discussed in The Soft Machine. See William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine (New York: Grove, 1961), 78. Also See Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 74–80; Beard, The Artist as Monster, 129–33.
J. G. Ballard, Kurasshu, trans. Yanashita Kiichiro (Tokyo: Peyotorukobo, 1992).
See Danielle Talerico, “Interpreting Sexual Imagery in Japanese Prints,” Impressions: The Journal of the Ukiyo-e Society of America 23 (2001): 24–41.
On the role of “tentacle sex” in anime, see Susan J. Napier, Anime from “Akira” to “Howl’s Moving Castle”: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 21, 79, 93.
See Tony Rayns, “Tokyo Stories,” Sight and Sound 1, no. 8 (December 1991): 12–15.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), 181.
Felicity J. Colman, “Rhizome,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 231–32. See
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7–13.
See Janet Staiger, “Future Noir: Contemporary Representations of Visionary Cities,” East-West Film Journal 3, no. 1 (December 1988): 20–42;
Lebbeus Woods, “The Question of Space,” in Technoscience and Cyberculture, ed. Stanley Aronowitz and others (New York: Routledge, 1996), 279–90.
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177–82.
Syd Mead quoted in Don Shay, Blade Runner: The Inside Story (London: Titan Books, 2000), 8 (emphasis added). Also see
Dietrich Neumann, ed., Film Architecture: Set Designs from “Metropolis” to “Blade Runner” (Munich: Prestel, 1999), 148–59. On the city as “a dense accumulation, a sedimentation of tubes, pipes, installations and cavities” in Tetsuo, see Alberto Momo, “The City in Two (or Three) Strokes by Tsukamoto (Compression and Explosion),” in Shinya Tsukamoto. The machine-city receives perhaps its most literal expression in The Matrix Revolutions (2003) when Neo negotiates a truce with the machines governing the system of the Matrix against the backdrop of a machinic city space utterly devoid of all vestiges of the organic.
Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (Rockville, MD: James A. Rock & Co., 2001), 12 (emphasis added).
Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 124.
Quoted in Thomas Elsaesser, Metropolis (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 64. As Elsaesser points out, Friedell’s comments anticipate both Metropolis and
Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin—Symphony of a Big City (Berlin: Die Symphonie der Großstadt, 1927).
Sharalyn Orbaugh, “Frankenstein and the Cyborg Metropolis: The Evolution of Body and Cityin Science Fiction Narratives,” in Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation, ed. Steven T Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 86.
F. T Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without Strings— Words-in-Freedom,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 97.
F. T Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Gūnter Berghaus (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 13. Compare the popularity of speeding cars in Futurist art, such as Gino Severini’s Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin (1912) and Luigi Russolo’s Automobile at Speed (1913).
Quoted in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arrendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 241. Compare Dani Cavallaro on “the Futurist fantasy of a hard, sealed and machine-like male physique, capable of opposing the sense of boundlessness conventionally associated with the female body.” See
Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science fiction and the Work of William Gibson (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 108. Also see Conrich, “Metal-Morphosis,” 103;
Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 3–4.
Luigi Russolo, “The Art of Noises,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 85.
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper-Perennial, 1993), 114.
James E. Robertson and Nobue Suzuki, “Introduction,” in Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa, ed. James E. Robertson and Nobue Suzuki (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 7. On the salary-man as social symbol, see
Takeuchi Hiroshi, “Sarariiman to iu shakaiteki hyōchō,” in Nihon bunka no shakaigaku, ed. Inoue Shun and others (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996), 125–42;
Anne Allison, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 37.
Mike Donaldson, “What is Hegemonic Masculinity?” Theory and Society 22 (1993): 643.
On the performativity of gender, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).
Laura Miller, “Male Beauty Work in Japan,” in Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan, ed. James E. Robertson and Nobue Suzuki, 38. Reprinted in Laura Miller, Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 125–58.
Robertson and Suzuki, “Introduction,” 8. Also see Wim Lunsing, Beyond Common Sense: Negotiating Constructions of Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Japan (London: Kegan Paul, 2001).
I am using “homosociality” in the sense given to the term by David William Foster: “Homosociality is understood to refer to the way in which patriarchal society forges bonds between men for the orderly transference and maintenance of mas-culinist power: these bonds not only allow for men to transmit power from one to another (along any number of social axes of class, caste, race, religion, profession, and the like), but also they allow for the process of inclusion of some men in power and exclusion of others from it, and they allow for the vigilant scrutiny of men to determine if they are abiding by the conditions of the patriarchy—that is, if they are worthy exponents of it…. In homosociality, women are tokens of the exchange of power between men: appropriate and adequate heterosexual relations with women are taken as a guarantee of one’s conformance with the patriarchy, and it is frequently through women that patriarchal power is transmitted.” See David William Foster, Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), xv.
Quoted in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 241. Also see Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 60.
Copyright information
© 2010 Steven T. Brown
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brown, S.T. (2010). Desiring Machines. In: Tokyo Cyberpunk. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230110069_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230110069_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-10360-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11006-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)