Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2009)

Spoilers follow.

What many fans of 1989's Tetsuo: The iron Man may not know is that it was a refinement of an earlier version of the same story. Allow me to place emphasis on 'refinement', because that's precisely what it was – an expansion and further explication of a rather incoherent and meaningless experiment in no-budget filmcraft. The reason I stress this is because there have since been two more Tetsuo films from Shinya Tsukamoto, and both of them have had a lukewarm reception at best from fans who feel that elaborating on the first feature has robbed it of it's essence...moved it from raw anarchic howl toward more conventional cinema. And they're right, it has, but it's only fair to the director to realize that he was already well along on that trajectory back in 1989. Just sayin'.

The son of businessman Anthony (Eric Bossick) is deliberately murdered right before Anthony's eyes. His wife Yuriko (Akiko Monô ) aches for revenge, but to her disgust Anthony cannot bring any kind of emotional reaction to the surface. That is, not until his body begins to morph into a metal instrument of pure rage. The killer comes after them both, leading Anthony to revelations about himself, his parents, and his father's research into recreating the human body through robotics.

In many ways this fourth Tetsuo (third feature film) is a throwback to a part of Tsukamoto's career that he was already finished with and left behind. Specifically it is a remake of sorts of Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, and it had no more creative impetus than the notion of making a Tetsuo film in America. and having the antihero fly. When it came down to it, neither of those made it into the film, except that the salaryman role played before by Tomoro Taguchi was replaced by Bossick, an American Taguchi lookalike. For many it was too little too late. However, I would like to suggest that this Tetsuo could not have been made at any other time in Tsukamoto's career. Where he takes it to is a complete refutation of the earlier films, honoring the spiritual journey his body of work had led him on.

Tsukamoto and co-writer Hisakatsu Kuroki (who co-scripted the Nightmare Detective movies) have pared the story down to the most simplistic possible characterizations and plot resulting in a brisk comic-book (or manga) film (fittingly, Anthony transforms through a number of stages, first looking every bit like a character from Marvel then like a metallic John Merrick – a face that might have inspired the look of The Scarecrow from Nolan's Batman Begin.). At only seventy minutes, it almost feels more of a sketch. Even the performances are lasered in on the moment like comic-book peoples, unnaturally flat or eschewing nuances they are dictated not by normal human responses but by the style of the film. Aesthetically, Bullet Man recreates the chaotic, micro-budget look of the first Tetsuo feature but with a very calculated, high-budget approach: not black and white but digitally desaturated: not grainy, grimy 16mm but crystalline HD. Again, YMMV – I found it exhilarating to see a Tetsuo flick that looks this good, not to mention hearing Chu Ishikawa's original themes again.

What's not readily apparent is the heart of the film. The earlier films – in fact, nearly all of the directors works until recently – had struggled with the conflict between the natural body and an aggressively artificial environment However, Tsukamoto had already succeeded in resolving that conflict, exorcised the demon, and moved on. There was no need to revisit it, and it is not revisited in Bullet Man. The story built around that theme remains, but the theme itself is no longer present as a driving force. 

On the other hand, Bullet Man has a few links to his more recent works. Echoing Vital, a flashback to Anthony's dying mother sees her requesting that her husband dissect her body, study every bit of her and recreate her physically, a request born of a concern for the peace of her continuing spiritual presence. This part of the story is the weakest, and I believe it of less importance thematically than simply owing to the conventional need to flesh out a quick plot. More substance can probably be found in a visual motif Tsukamoto has lately begin using in all his films, that of colorful microscopic footage and renderings of the human body's internal workings. As meticulous as Tsukamoto is with his metaphorical imagery, I'm sure it's not coincidental that the most colorful sequence in the movie has the killer/instigator stand before a gray wall on which a projector is shuffling slides of the human body in medical renderings, brightly colored and superimposed over himself. What it might mean, though, I have to confess goes right over my head. There is also a direct if obvious re-iteration from Nightmare Detective 2 that anger, hate, a refusal to forgive mutates the soul and effectively kills the self.

I'm not convinced that Tetsuo: the Bullet Man is actually exploring anything. That, I think, is what keeps the movie a slight work, neither Tsukamoto nor his characters are striving for meaning and so neither are we the audience asked to do any heavy lifting. Rather than working out a question, Bullet Man stands as a statement of principles from the director, gleaned over a lifetime of exploring his most personal concerns. It plays like a coda to his work thus far, the capping of an era. Iron Man and Body Hammer at the beginning of his professional career embraced an apocalyptic vision. Bullet Man walks us right up to that very same door of annihilation...and then says 'no' and resolutely closes the door. That's not a place Tsukamoto had reached before Nightmare Detective 2. 

Over the body of his work Shinya Tsukamoto has crafted tales of personal metamorphosis. Through his filmic explorations, it is Tsukamoto himself who has transformed.

Nightmare Detective 2 (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2008)

Kagenuma, the reluctant psychic of Nightmare Detective, has not found peace. His dreams are filled with the heartbreaking memories of his mother, a woman with an extreme social anxiety disorder. When Kagenuma innocently revealed his ability to read minds by asking her about her crippling fear of the world, it gave her a new one: that she was exposed to everyone, humiliated. She tried to murder her child, then she hanged herself.

It isn't just bad memories and dreams that come to him. As a child, was was terrorized by ghosts that visited him in the night or marched outside in the street. His father saw them too.

Now he spends his days shut up in his hotel room, surrounded by the children of families living there. They are fond of him, and are probably the only people he can stand to b around: bright, full of happiness, not filling his mind with adult disillusion and anger. Still, he'd rather be alone. The last thing he wants is to be called upon for his services as a psychic. 

That's when teenaged Yukie shows up. She and her schoolgirl clique pranked Yuko Kikugawa, an unloved student who has now shut herself off from the world but is appearing in their dreams. Yukie senses a threat, and she's right – soon they begin dying.

“Apologize to her”, that's Kagenuma's advice when he turns Yukie away.

Naturally he doesn't stay uninvolved for long, or we'd have no movie. When he does agree to enter Yukie's dreams, it isn't sympathy that motivates him. He sees in Yuko the same crippling terror that drove his mother mad, and he badly wants to understand. What did his mother see? Was he, her child, a monster in her eyes? What kind of fear makes someone you love unreachable?

This second film in a still unfinished trilogy about Kagenuma feels like a nexus for the character and for writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto as well. For more than half his career he has sought a reconciliation of the body with its environment. with a measure of empathy and compassion, and with a measure of optimism. Having finally achieved that his quest has moved inward to the troubled soul, and I'm finding his stories (Vital, Haze, Nightmare detective) far more tempered in their optimism. The first film featuring Kagenuma ended with nothing more spirited than a temporary respite from hopelessness for the title character.

That film was saddled with a routine police procedural plot that hindered the movie from feeling like a personal work. This time the film takes the visuals and plot logic of a Japanese ghost story, though the specter is that of a girl still living. Rather than being forced into a formula, that frees Tsukamoto to spend quality time with his characters, and to let them discover common ties (spoilers ahead)

Yukie has not been the nicest person toward her classmates, and she's fully aware of it, but then she hasn't had the happiest home life either with a mother who makes no effort to connect with her. At school she has surrounded herself with friends who are similarly uncaring of others. Yukie's insistence on reaching out to Yuko, the girl they hurt together, is alien to their nature and we gather new to Yukie herself.

Examining Yuko's bedroom, Kagenuma finds artwork she has done: dark, crowded, anxious but also among the works are pages radiating color and wonder, brightness. Happiness. If Yuko has joy in her, perhaps Kagenuma's mother did as well? In the very next scene we see Kagenuma as we've never seen him before: happily playing at games with the children of his apartment. Something in himself has been freed by the discovery. Note that Kagenuma can hear the inner thoughts of the girl's father wishing this stranger would leave his house, but importantly not until after he finds the happier artwork.

The film's coda is a sequence in which Kagenuma of hos own accord helps a child by ascending into the child's anxiety dream only to discover that the child is himself. His child self sleeps fitfully, sharing a futon with his older brother while his parents seem to find enjoyment in his suffering. It's an uncomfortable moment: on the one had, his mother is happy and laughing, and his father shares a moment of binding with her uncommon to Kagenuma's understanding of them; on the other, it's beyond him what they find delightful about their child's anxieties. It is, after all, only a dream, but one that plays on the cognizance gap between children and adults. Meanwhile, we've just learned a new detail about Kagenuma, that he has an older brother. It means nothing to the story proper, but it means something to viewers who know that Tsukamoto himself had an older brother and a troubled relationship with his own parents.

The key to setting them all free is empathy – Yukie, Yuko, Kagenuma, the troubled memory of his mother (or perhaps literally her spirit, after the ambiguous Vital, as the ghosts indicate), and maybe even setting free the director himself. Empathy comes with a price, openness to the unwanted pain of other people that warps their inner essences.  Yuko is caught in the middle. We see her and some of the figures in her art as having one eye shut and the other open too widely.  Yukie alone of her clique learns empathy, and it will forever alter her perceptions. The alternate course is to; hurt people in order to shut down one's ability to feel, which is tantamount to killing one's self (as Kagenuma's mother and Yukie's friends). Through empathy, Nightmare Detective 2 finds something more valuable than solace. The movie finds forgiveness, and through forgiveness catharsis.

Nightmare Detective (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2006)

Police investigate two cases, a young woman who has stabbed herself to death and a married man who has done the same. To Detective Sekiya the verdict is clear: suicide. Detective Kirishima isn't so sure. Shortly before their deaths both had called someone named '0'. The dead man's wife says that he was screaming for help in his sleep even as his arm, puppetlike, plunged a boxcutter at himself. The police chief decides that a psychic should be brought in to help locate '0'.

That psychic is Kagenuma, with the ability to enter other people's dreams. Kagenuma has never had a happy life. His mother feared and rejected him for his psychic gift. When he uses it, he sees nothing but other people's pain, their miseries, the darkest forgotten secrets that misshape their psyches. They come to him begging for his help, then resent him for what comes of it after he has endured their nightmares. Kagenuma would like for himself nothing better than oblivion and an escape from the company of others. 

Writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto has explored a number of disparate ideas over the course of his career, and now with his ninth feature release he draws most of them together in one film. Alienation and the deadening of the spirit have been a constant theme throughout his oeuvre, and suicide particular to Bullet Ballet and Vital (Vital especially explored the idea of suicide pacts). In recent films Tsukamoto's gaze had turned from the body itself to the inner essence (Vital, Haze). Suppression of memory to blot out pain was key to Vital and Haze both. ESP and the idea of shared psychic space between people (that is, people visiting each other's subconscious minds) appeared in Tetsuo: the Iron Man and resurfaced in Vital.

Tsukamoto himself plays '0', a more or less direct continuation of the morphing antagonist of Tetsuo and Tetsuo II, the man who has gone from seeking the destruction of his self to a perverse joy in the destruction of everyone and everything around him. '0' also is the more malevolent reflection of the instigator he played in A Snake of June.

Tsukamoto's films have a history of showcasing strong female characters. Those sensibilities are again put forward in Keiko Kirishima, the detective who presses Kagenuma to get involved in the case. She is new to the force, having been stationed a desk job with the police before now. Seeing her first dead bodies she has a hard time with the bloody aftermath. In a Tsukamoto film, squeamishness is a device like glasses were for Hitchcock: in the master's movies the wearing of glasses signified faulty moral vision. For tsukamoto, an inability to deal with blood, decay, etc. means a character who is not fully in touch with nature and often blind to something important in the story. Kirishima says that she asked for a transfer because she wants to do work that is more substantial, but we will learn later that it is more likely that an inner drive is seeking closer proximity with violence and death. Privately, Kirishima has been having her own series of nightmares in which she meets a wilder version of herself. 

All of this echoes the female protagonists of Tokyo Fist (Hizuru discovers her inner fury), A Snake of June (Rinko hides her true essence from herself), and Bullet Ballet (Chisato lives on the edge in search of self-destruction). And that brings us to the major problem with Nightmare Detective: Kirishima, not Kagenuma, is the central character here but she does not live up to Tsukamoto's heroines of his past efforts. Those characters were more fully developed and played by vibrant actresses. We've seen the likes before. The female cop who has to work harder than everyone else to prove herself equal to the men. Sad to say it's true to life, so the problem isn;t one of credibility. Unfortunately it's overly familiar – a cliché. Coming from a director renowned for his wild imagination establishes the movie on a disconcerting note. Compounding the problem, Ysukamoto has cast pop singer Hitomi in the lead, a decent actress of limited experience and without the range of his previous lead actresses. Kirishima doesn't resonate like Rinko, Hizumi, or Chisato.

I blame the premise of the movie. In tying together so much of his past work in one movie, this should be the Tsukamoto film to end them all, his crowning achievement. It is a good film, yet in sum it ends up one of his slighter works even as he brings his disparate strands together in one uniform piece. Weakening the piece substantially, these themes don't make themselves plain until late in the movie. In order to bring the audience to that point, Tsukamoto must take pains to build and support his premise. That takes the form of a standard police procedural, nothing like the fresh original storytelling the director is known for. We've seen criminal investigation movies of this flavor before, and coming from Tsukamoto it feels impersonal and uninspired. Nightmare Detective takes patience and probably multiple viewings before you see the real Tsukamoto in it. I didn't until I watched and reviewed his films in chronological order.

You can catch some sense of the director in the camera movements, like the nervous handheld shots. Here too, though, Tsukamoto departs from his usual tendencies. While he's still experimenting, true to his nature, this time his use of colors employs not gels and filters but digital manipulation with color timing and desaturation. Tokyo no longer seems a cold, sterile place to live, just another urban center with an alluring night presence. Chu Ishikawa tones it down as well, where an emotional montage is informed not by the director’s favored composer but by Erik Satie's Gymnopaedia.

I've always been fascinated by dreams and the dream experience, and the difficulty in recreating that experience on screen. Most directors fail – hell, most don't even try. I suspect they have never spent a moment recalling their own dreams, falling back on popular misconceptions (fill the screen with extravagant visuals, et voila). Have you ever noticed how in dreams you often know intuitively what a thing, person, or creature looks like even though you never actually see them? How would you convey that in a movie without heavy expositive dialog? In Nightmare Detective Tsukamoto has come close by creating elaborate nightmare creatures and then not letting us have more than shaky glimpses of what they might be. 

Repeating another motif of late is imagery of life in water, both fish and microscopic. In Nightmare Detective, water indicates the organic boundaries between the physical and spiritual, and between one consciousness and another. Kagenuma descends in and out of dreamastates and others' selves by sinking onto the keel of a sunken ship. We also see imagery of fish and microscopic life.

Preparing to enter someone else's dream state, Kagenuma dresses in a rain slicker, and beneath that pants and shoes he can easily slip out of. It's a psychological trick, helping him find the right mental state by shedding encumbrances. The rain slicker looks a bit like a cape – echoing the visual cue from M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable but much more amusing as a jab at superhero costumes.

Tsukamoto can also be found in a visual motif that recurs from Vital, an act of mutual asphyxiation between two characters seeking oblivion together. This is not erotic asphyxiation, but shared hopelessness. Both films trade in depression without solving it. In Nightmare Detective, one character finds his depression linked to a buried childhood trauma while another who suffers looks into her own past and finds abundant joy. How did they both end up in the same place? It's the mystery that preoccupies Tsukamoto's movie.

Nightmare Detective is the first in a trilogy proposed by Shinya Tsukamoto. To date he has yet to begin production on the third film.