re tetsuo
ok it’s been a few years since my rewatch so i may have forgotten some stuff but!!
first off, my introduction to tetsuo was the professor for my cyborg philosophy class offhandedly mentioning it at the end of the semester as something we may or may not be ready for. i rented it, and turns out i was NOT ready for it. it hit some nerve around my relationship to my body that i was still invested in actively avoiding at the time. very kristeva.
gradual bodily transformation is generally the most distressing body horror trope for me, tldr puberty stuff. the reminder that you don’t control your body; that it can and will change around you without your consent; that it is at every moment Continually Engaged in a process of transformation, the final result of which you cannot know.
ok but the movie right
why does it play sexy jazz for the car crash scene?? bc this is a meet-cute, these are lovers crossing paths for the first time, becoming parts of each other’s lives and remaking each other in the process
what of the metal fetishist?? subverts ‘clean and proper body’ - penetrates own flesh with metal - feminized - maggots suggest organic matter - the fetishist tries to transcend the human body but is thus far unable to do so - the car crash actualizes this transcendence: the organic body subsumed by metal
tetsuo - introduced as str8 normie businessman - he too is shaped and molded by technology but in ways that are culturally sanctioned and therefore rendered invisible - he facilitates the fetishist’s transcendence and is thus himself awakened - as such he experiences the bodily transformation the fetishist longed for
the other scary thing about the Gradual Bodily Transformation is the idea that it’s not actually a transformation at all, so much as it’s a Consummation or an Uncovering, the emergence and reveal of the true self, that which was inside you all along, what you really were but were too afraid to acknowledge
“it was not this but the waiting for this that was perverse” (gary j shipley, terminal park)
tetsuo the businessman and the fetishist are different arrangements of the same parts. the fetishist represents what is made possible in the rejection of the Symbolic Order. the body without organs. he is both the subject and the object of tetsuo’s buried (homo)sexual desire.
the other other scary thing about the Gradual Bodily Transformation is the idea that You Secretly Want It To Happen. it’s the thing you actually want but are too afraid to admit to yourself. it’s the inevitable physical emergence of your suppressed desire.
tetsuo’s drill dick - probably the most upsetting part of the movie lol - again pointing to the inability to control the body - eruption of repressed sexuality - impossibility of hiding forever - fear of yr body being dangerous to those around you on some fundamental level - fear of desire as inherently destructive
tetsuo and the fetishist merging into one body / “our love can destroy this entire fucking world”
(not to be overly precious but this is me returning to this movie like a decade later and having a great time, bc i made peace with the parts of myself it made me look at)
tetsuo stops running from the truth of his body and accepts it, he becomes one with the fetishist, and together they head out to have lots of gay sex and overthrow capitalism. the end.
“the end of the world is no more than the end of the world’s conformity to our cognizance of it” (gary j shipley, terminal park)