Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1992)

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1992)

Hell is industrial. It is red and stinks of molten iron and sweat, it reeks of outrage and desire. Life in Tokyo, on the other hand, is blue and sterile. It's not really life at all. It's where men spend their years repressing their feelings under the cultivation of model domestic conformity and dreaming at night of grassy fields they no longer remember the colors of.

Shinya Tsukamoto's second Tetsuo film is not a sequel but a companion piece, another take on the same premise and themes of the first. Tomoro Taguchi again plays a salaryman, this time named Tomoo and married to a wife named Kana. Tomoo and Kana have a young son, Minori. One day two thugs (reminded me of the punks from Jean-Jacque Beneix's Diva) assault the family while out shopping at a mall. After injecting Tomoo with a foreign substance, the thugs initiate a campaign of terror involcing the kidnapping of the boy. Their purpose is to trigger a transformation in Tomoo. They succeed, and the results are monstrous – for Minori most of all.

The thugs are part of a cult led by Yatsu (Shinya Tssukamoto), a mysterious figure with the bizarre ability to turn his body into mechanized weaponry. Yatsu and his gang live in a factory and spend their hours bodybuilding – metaphorically hammering flesh and bone into hardbodies that gleam like polished metal. They serve a shady experiment in mad science with Tomoo as their chosen target for reasons that Yatsu will reveal over the course of the film.

This is Tsukamoto's second feature film in color, but the first in which he applies it to his personal aesthetic (Hiruko the Goblin having been work for hire). He's stated that the Tetsuo movies were born of his hatred for the city and the impossibility of retaining any relationship with nature there. His Tokyo is a place of hard, featureless surfaces as far as the eye can see: glass, concrete, tile, chrome. The lights are cold there. Tsukamoto shoots almost the entire movie stressing blue or red with lighting or filters. Tomoo's world is blue, but when he begins to push himself at a gym both his skin and the chromed weight machine reflect the subtlest hints of red – a warning.

Tetsuo II is not well regarded by most fans of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. That's unfortunate because it's a more accomplished piece and still a kick in the head, but it's an understandable response. In the earlier film, Tsukamoto was refining techniques he had explored on home video without a budget and the result was an anarchic howl that apparently spat on comforting filmic conventions. It was a breathless fusion of cocaine, adrenaline, and lust. No wonder it gained a cult following, and no wonder that a followup would inevitably fail to be as fresh or as jolting. Still, anyone who had seen the director's short film A Monster of Regular Size should have predicted this trend because it's the same story in even less coherent form – The Iron Man was the second version, and the process of refinement and added coherence had already begun.

With this third version Tsukamoto adds nothing new to his bag of tricks (shocking fast cuts, stop-motion, Raimi-esque camera moves and wirework among others) but he hardly needs to. By now he kows the tricks well enough to employ them with confidence and authority. Instead, Tsukamoto shifts his focus to advancing his skill as a storyteller. What he comes up with is much more straight-forward in narrative yet more ambivalent in treatment, and more nuanced.

Start with Tsukamoto's favored structure of two men at war with each other and the woman caught in the middle. One man, the antagonist, usually sees something in the other that reflects himself and sets out to transform the protagonist. How this affects the woman is never the same from one film to the next, and the women of his early films went unexplored. In Tetsuo II Kana seems to exist to underscore the idea that male sexuality is by nature all about an innate desire to destroy. She stands out as both the only female in the movie and the only one in the film whose response to loss and grief is not wholesale rage. This is spelled out in stark terms in a sex scene late in the film. Personally I think it's a simplistic, mistaken view of both genders and is actually a step backwards from a more complex understanding expressed in the first film, one he would return to in Tokyo Fist. Really? Women have no capacity for violence or destruction? Wendy O. Williams would have disagreed. Even so this film introduces a vital ingredient that went missing before: empathy, expressed by Kana and even Yatsu himself. It's the beginning of humanism in Tukamoto's body of work, the one element without which he'd not be one of my favorite filmmakers. Tetsuo II is still an apocalyptic vision that suggests the only way to be at peace is to be the last man standing.

In another nuance, this Tetsuo offers no alternative to the sterility of the city. Instead of embracing the howl of anarchy in the face of conformity, the solution proffered by Yatsu's tribe is fascism – that's no path to freedom!

The movie still has enough horror to qualify for the genre, but feels more like a comic book – a true manga (it's not for the kiddies!) or something out of The Incredible Hulk. When Tomoo Hulks out he has a grin that would scare even the Joker.