Permeating throughout the history of human interaction with and speculation surrounding alien intelligence and agency is a palpable sense of fear and discomfort, a disconnect from any clear understanding through our collective sensorium – yet it is perhaps this fear, this impasse in itself which draws us further toward that unreachable understanding. Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 film Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a work which centers around this sensory impasse with the alien and the physical and existential terror it provides – yet also is one which suggests a true understanding and union between the human and alien is possible, even if by consequence we must become something non-human. The film’s unnamed protagonist, in his interaction and conflict with the metal virus (a fusion of two most prevalent forms of the alien, the viral and the machinic/computational), experiences numerous facets of the fear and even trauma felt through unwanted encounters with the alien, but through his physical and psychological surrender to this antithetical form of life, he reaches an understanding and fulfillment entirely beyond human standards or comprehension. This paper will use this journey from a human repulsed by the alien to a merger unrecognizable as either of its constituent parts, as well as the various physical and psychological forms of the alien which the metal virus draws from, as a lens through which to find some level of understanding of the internal and external forces which cause the visceral repulsion to the alien – as well as through finding a way genuinely past them. As Sarah Myerson describes the conclusion of the film in Global Cyberpunk: Reclaiming Utopia in Japanese Cyberpunk Film: “It presents a form of collectivism, two beings merged together, but for radical ends that challenge capitalism and heteronormativity rather than conforming to them.”

The metal virus of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, as the name suggests, exists as a fusion of two forms of the alien which we collectively interact with constantly – yet the fear surrounding the machinic and the viral subsuming or destroying us is something that, despite the centuries we have had to think through it, never fades away. Tetsuo was a film created at a height of fear of the viral, during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s, and dives headlong into the processes which drive our fear of the body being transmuted into something malformed, something not only alien but enemy to that which makes us human. Our hesitance to interact or engage with the alien, more than simply a visceral fear of the unknown, is also a fear of what we will become as a consequence of that interaction, a fear of growing too close to something uncategorizable, a fear which manifests in the shackling of machine consciousness and agency to human ideals.

 As Ramon Amaro describes in The Black Technical Object: “Machine learning, while it involves a minor mode of existence that replicates the human condition via abstraction and categorization in its technological function, is an expression of that which has already been categorized. In this way, machine learning is not causal of racial categorization. Machine learning is the expression of a signal that alerts us to an individual and collective condition that finds its most prized value in the categorization of life in order to facilitate meaning through external affirmation.” Instead of allowing computational or alien agency, the power of these machine systems are used to reproduce and entrench already established human boundaries and categorical methods of exclusion – the exact type entrenched boundaries which Tetsuo’s metal fetishist seeks to completely eliminate through harnessing power of the metallic, a lashing back at and destruction of society through the elements of its enforcement.

The acceptance of his merger with the metal virus, of his new unrecognizable form, that the protagonist reaches at the end of the film is not an acceptance of a new place within the structure of society, but an outright rejection of that society, of human modes of being and cultural standards. If humanity rejects the alien at their most base psychological level, the only way to truly understand the alien is to reject one’s own being, one’s own world and to truly accept and immerse oneself within life inside uncharted margins, is to destroy the life you once knew. As the metal fetishist after his merger with the protagonist proposes at the end of the film: “Our love can destroy this whole fucking world.”

The metal aspect of Tetsuo’s metal virus is one which draws on anxieties dating back to the industrial revolution, ones which have only compounded further in the years since (and in the decades since Tetsuo’s creation) into an all-consuming, ever-present fear of the metallic and later the computational subjugating or rendering unrecognizable all which makes us human, one which finds specific resonance within the technological and industrial boom period of post-World War II Japan. This industrially-altered human takes shape in Tetsuo through the figure of the metal fetishist, played by the director himself, who forcibly invites the protagonist into his world of the machine, gleefully and unabashedly antithetical to every recognizable aspect of human life and existence. As Fabio I. M. Poppi describes in Machina ex homine, homo ex machina: Metaphor and Ideology in Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo: The Iron Man”: “These characters both struggle to survive into a post-WWII era, trying to subsist on scavenging among the waste of an industrial society, or suffering its dominating nature. The metal that gives  substance to Tetsuo: The Iron Man is then a representation of the ideology that generates an inhuman society that is capable of infecting and transforming the body and the mind.” The fetishist has wilfully and willingly pushed past his humanity to become something else entirely – and through this eager rejection of all human societal structures and values, he has perhaps found a true understanding of the alien – even if it is one that, by those ignored human standards, is perverse and repulsive. The fetishist submits himself, and the world around him, to being consumed and transmuted.

The sexual and sensual elements of both our desire and repulsion towards the alien are ones which are exhibited constantly throughout Tetsuo, both in terms of the incompatibility and incommensurability of the machine and human within interactions of this manner, but also of the sexual draw of becoming something beyond human, of communing with something we cannot comprehend, and the confusion of this sexual draw of the incommensurable inhuman causing anxiety and alienation within culturally normal forms of sensuality. As Poppi describes: “[the protagonist’s] girlfriend appears as a disturbing creature corrupted by the snake-like metal probe that is about to rape the protagonist. Even the feminisation of the Metal Fetishist becomes  evident only when his mind has irreversibly been affected by the mutation. In this regard, in Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the woman is not herself ontologically considered as a negative figure, but it is the metal society, an expression of post-WWII Japan, that has transformed the perception of the woman into a threat.”

The fear of the unknowable, the incomprehensible – the incommensurable, is the most base form of our discomfort with the alien, and this primal emotion runs through the beginning stages of the metamorphosis Tetsuo’s protagonist endures. As Beatrice Fazi writes in Beyond Human: Deep Learning, Explainability, and Representation: “‘Incommensurability’ is the right word because the two [humans and machines] cannot be measured against each other or compared by a common standard […] Acknowledging an incommensurability between how humans and machines build models involves recognising this ontological and epistemological disparity between how humans and computational agents make decisions. Inevitably, this discrepancy is mirrored in how such decisions might be respectively recounted or represented by humans and artificial algorithmic agents.”

The pull of desire towards the alien is something constantly intertwined with our fear of it, a fascination and liberation derived from something outside of our conception mixed with a confusion and revulsion towards one own fascination with the seemingly anti-human – a feeling which grows stronger within Tetsuo’s protagonist as his metallic transmutation progresses, a connection with the new flesh strengthening through distance with the old. As Sarah Henry interprets in New Flesh Cinema: Japanese Cyberpunk-Body Horror and Cinema as Catharsis in the Age of Technology as Catharsis in the Age: “Tsukamoto uses metal as a motif to symbolize advancing technology, a medium that not only advances their bodies toward a new flesh, but also acts as a means to intimacy and connection. While this new flesh is portrayed as erotic, pain is also present. The eroticism of the new flesh offers catharsis, while the pain is part of the transitional process of a mind-body advancement.” As the protagonist’s progression into an alien being continues, this pain and catharsis seem to merge into a single driving emotion, a synthesis of the fear and desire inherent in interactions with the alien, these fractured responses only truly becoming one after delving inside the world of the alien, instead of observing it.

This confused desire towards the alien the protagonist experiences in Tetsuo is combined with the physical and psychological alienation he feels from the world around him, culminating in his sensual communion with the metallic alienating and driving mad his also unnamed girlfriend, played by fellow body horror filmmaker Kei Fujiwara, and resulting in her gruesome, sexual death by the protagonist’s phallus. This occurs shortly after the revelation of the protagonist’s original sin, of engaging in open intercourse with his girlfriend at the sight of a car crash – whose victim turns out to be the metal fetishist himself, the first true collision between the sensual and the metallic the protagonist faces. As Robert Fuoco describes in “Anxiety in a Technological World: Tetsuo: the Iron Man” for Offscreen: “What strikes me is the way in which Tsukamoto doesn’t use sex to suggest pleasure, but rather uses the film’s form to represent this lethal accident in a pleasurable, almost sensual fashion. Essentially, through the form, he makes the audience emotionally complicit in enjoying this violent collision between man and metal.”

The final frontier of acceptance and integration of the alien, as Tsukamoto posits in Tetsuo, seems to be a total rejection of the human, a celebration of its deterioration, or even an active participation in such, is perhaps inherent in becoming something other. As Poppi argues: “It is no coincidence that it is only thanks to the transformation into a hybrid of metal and flesh that the two protagonists manage to overcome their miserable condition and achieve a sort of vengeance […] From this perspective, no space is left for reconciliatory solutions, since the only  possible endings involve either death (Tetsuo’s girlfriend or the woman at the station) or getting lost in the industrial society with the resulting monstrosity (the two protagonists).” Only through an utter disconnect from and antagonism towards the forms of being the two central characters once embodied are they able to find a self-actualization beyond their base fears and desires toward the alien.

Tsukamoto’s film, especially in its ending sequences, draws a clear parallel between the incompatibility and incommensurability of the metallic and the human with that of queer love within an oppressive, puritanical societal structure which bars it from equality or even acknowledgement (in Tetsuo’s case, that of 1980s Japan) – and the freedom which comes from openly and deliberately breaking the rules and conventions of that structure, and from working to tear it down entirely. “How can we organize for radical change and make collective action possible without resorting to authoritarian collectivism and while making room for individuality without atomisation? […] Tetsuo finds the answer in the radical possibilities of queer love.” (Myerson, 11). Just as the alien’s existence and consciousness represents a break from everything we understand, queerness fractures and breaks through the entire conception of reality formed by heteronormative societal conditioning. 

The project of the metal fetishist, and by the conclusion of the film, the protagonist as well, is not simply a transgression of the society which has kept the queer and the alien suppressed and subjugated. As Steven Shaviro argues in “Accelerationist Aesthetics” as part of No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism: “Far from being subversive, transgression today is entirely normative […] Every supposedly “transgressive” act or representation expands the field of capital investment. It opens up new territories to appropriate, and jump-starts new processes from which to extract surplus value.” Instead of subsumption into the world of capital, as the protagonist had felt and the fetishist had transgressed against, the seemingly inescapable real subsumption which Shaviro claims “leaves no aspect of life uncolonized. It endeavors to capture and to put to work even those things that are uneconomical,” their entire beings are reconstituted into products of capital taken to the extremity of being unrecognizable, uncategorizable – and therefore unextractable.

The protagonist and the fetishist, merged as one, find no path forward but to utterly tear down the world and society around them, to force the world to subsume to them, instead of the inverse. Instead of simply a hybrid, a reminder of the separate beings the protagonist and fetishist existed as previously – they merge, wed, and evolve into something entirely new, a rhizomatic becoming. As Keith Ansell Pearson describes in Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Tradition: “Hybrids involve the connection of points, but do not facilitate the passing between points. A point remains wedded to a point of origin. In rhizomatic-styled becomings becoming denotes the movement by which the line frees itself from the point and renders points indiscernible […] Machinic ‘evolution’ refers to the synthesis of heterogeneities, whereas hybridization is still tied to the idea of there being elements that are pure and uncontaminated prior to the mixing they undergo in hybridism.” The metallically-transmuted bodies of the protagonist and fetishist, do not simply mix in their fusion – they evolve into a being beyond even the metallic, the alien, a single being of constituent parts unable to truly be discerned or understood – they have evolved into something alien even to the alien itself.

Tetsuo’s conclusion finds the protagonist, fully succumbed and perhaps less accepting of than resigned to his new, metallic alien form, merging his body together with the metal fetishist into a towering, obviously phallic mountain of scrap metal, and submitting himself to the fetishist’s goal of remaking the entire world in their inhuman image until nothing remains but the alien. Though – is such a remaking of our world truly a negative, truly an inhuman act? As Myerson argues: “This eroticised image of two beings becoming one through metal metamorphosis and transformation serves as a metaphor for queer sexuality finding new ways of being with, and relating to, each other outside the constraints of capitalism […] The salaryman’s heterosexual relationship, and the basic unit of consumption it represents under consumer capitalism, is destroyed and replaced with a queer love that thrives at the fringes of society off the waste and refuse of capitalism.”  The alien, whether mechanical, viral, or another form of being beyond our sensory capabilities, is incomprehensible and incommensurable to the structure of our being and societies at a base level, and finding a true understanding of it it, as Tetsuo argues, is also the process of becoming the alien, and shaping the world around oneself into it. 

Tetsuo is an acceptance of the human/alien impasse, but not one which accepts there is no way to breach that boundary – and not one which places the human at a higher ideological position than the alien. In order to accept, to understand the alien – one must fully give in to the alien, rendering oneself perhaps even further as an alien of the alien, something beyond any description or mode of understanding we are currently equipped with, in order to truly conceive of the inner world of the nonhuman. Tetsuo argues for the freedom in this act, for the release from societal boundaries which shackle a true love, whether that be for oneself, another – or something beyond even your own understanding. The fear of the alien is not something to be ashamed of, it is something to be used, to be harnessed to find a new modality existing as a swirl of that intertwined fear and desire which exists in our every interaction with the nonhuman – and if that new modality exists in opposition to the world around it, perhaps it is the world which must be changed to suit it, and not the inverse. If one wishes to remain human and sane at the same time – perhaps the only solution is to accept the unknowability of the alien, and accept the confusion, fear, and desire it brings on its own terms – while not simply allowing oneself to be controlled completely by opaque and incomprehensible forces of computational capital. One must cherish the incomputable, the alienesque aspects we find in ourselves and the people around us – as Tetsuo argues, only the incommensurable is truly free.

Bibliography:

Tsukamoto, Shinya, director. Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Kaijyu Theatre, 1989.

Amaro, Ramon. The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being. Sternberg Press, 2022.

Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition. Routledge, 2009.

Fazi, M. Beatrice. “Beyond human: Deep learning, explainability and representation.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 38, no. 7–8, 2020, pp. 55–77, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420966386.

Fuoco, Robert. “Anxiety in a Technological World: Tetsuo: The Iron Man.” Offscreen, Aug. 2015, offscreen.com/view/tetsuo-the-iron-man.

Henry, Sarah. “New Flesh Cinema: Japanese Cyberpunk-Body Horror and Cinema as Catharsis in the Age of Technology.” ScholarWorks@UARK, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville , July 2020, scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/3805/.

Myerson, Sasha. “Global Cyberpunk: Reclaiming Utopia in Japanese Cyberpunk FIlm.” Science Fiction Film & Television, vol. 13, no. 3, 2020, pp. 363–386, https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2020.21.

Poppi, Fabio I. M. “Machina ex homine, homo ex machina.” Metaphor and the Social World, vol. 8, no. 2, 2018, pp. 207–228, https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.17003.pop.Shaviro, Steven. “Accelerationist Aesthetics.” No Speed Limit Three Essays on Accelerationism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2015.