The Agitator

Writer-director Shinya Tsukamoto is lauded for the vision and originality of his movies, but he is also a compelling screen presence in his own right, often in villainous roles. Paul Martin takes a look at some of the cinematic psychopaths he has breathed life into over the years.

As filmic first appearances go, it is a memorable one. Closeted in an industrial warren, surrounded on all sides by machinery, he takes a blade to his right thigh, slicing deeply through the flesh, blood gushing forth. But what comes next is even more shocking than this outré act of self-mutilation. A piece of metal piping is produced, lasciviously passed across the individual’s mouth, before being forcefully inserted into the freshly-opened wound. Maggots swarm around the exposed tissue - an irritating and unwelcome intrusion on this marriage between flesh and metal. He is forced from his sanctuary, out onto the city street, where he is knocked down by an oncoming automobile.

These uncanny events constitute the opening minutes of Tetsuo: the Iron Man, Tsukamoto's feature debut. And in addition to his duties behind the camera (which also encompassed responsibility for lighting, costuming and special effects), Tsukamoto plays the individual described above; the metal fetishist who dreams of a sublime unity between his own body and the artificial materials which comprise the late twentieth century Japanese metropolis. And this part has proved to be no means a unique one in the film-maker’s career in front of the camera, as his particular thespian qualities have been regularly employed to invest life into some decidedly dark and deranged cinematic antagonists.

Tsukamoto the actor has repeatedly fulfilled the function of dramatic agitator. His characters have often been oddball homunculi, existing outside the visible boundaries of everyday society, their dramatic raison d’être to unlock the inner fury which is locked away under the rigid routines, assimilated behaviours, and psychological hang-ups of the movies’ central protagonists. In the monochromatically stylised world of Tetsuo: the Iron Man, the activities of Tsukamoto’s unnamed fetishist trigger a fantastic metamorphosis in a young salaryman (Tomorowo Taguchi), an amendment of body and mind which serves to open up new modes of wild sexual expression to the latter. In one of the more bizarre love scenes ever committed to celluloid, the salaryman is penetrated by a Priapic vacuum cleaner tube proboscis which sprouts from his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara), before he in turn manifests a penile drill which bores right through her body in bloody fashion - to the maniacally cackling delight of the watching Tsukamoto.

The same function is expressed in rather less Freudian terms in the sequel/remake Tetsuo II: Bodyhammer (surely the sole Japanese body-horror flick to inspire lyrical reference in a song by Welsh retro-psychedelicists, courtesy of its name checking in Super Furry Animals’ (Drawing) Rings around the World). This time round Tsukamoto’s fetishist, now abetted by a coterie of shaven-headed acolytes, arranges the kidnap and murder the young son of the salaryman Taniguchi Tomoo (once again portrayed by Taguchi). This act of violence serves to sweep away layers of repressed primal instincts in the bereaved office worker and prompts his transformation into a kind of cyberpunk Incredible Hulk, with an arsenal of guns and cannons sprouting forth from fissures in his flesh whenever he becomes enraged.

Something of a role reversal is effected in the later Tokyo Fist, a boxing picture which presents an ostensibly non-fantasy scenario in the most lurid, alien terms - as if Raging Bull had been directed by David Cronenberg, with special effects from Dick Smith. Here Tsukamoto is the one trapped in the part of the hapless rat race drone; a salesman named Tsuda, who comes up against old school friend turned brutal pugilist Kojima (played by the director’s brother Kôji). Kojima administers a face-bursting battering on his old pal and steals his sadomasochism-inclined girlfriend (Kahori Fujii). Once again though, the close encounter with primordial, instinctual violence stirs something in the buttoned-down salaryman and Tsuda begins to immerse himself in the bone-shattering, blood-splattering world inhabited by his nemesis.

But this switch was a temporary one and Tsukamoto was again soon cast in the role of agitating force which had proved such an adept fit for him previously. This time however, his duties were limited to acting alone, as the movie in question was Takaishi Miike’s Ichi the Killer, a film which delivers such atomic explosions of outrageous violence as to make Tetsuo and Tokyo Fist look like Yo Gabba Gabba! in comparison. Tsukamoto is Jijii, a Machiavellian manipulator scuttling through the back alleys and side streets of a Red Harvest-style Shinjuku, where everyone but everyone is in some way implicated in criminal double-dealing. He is also the controller of Ichi himself (Nao Omari) - a sobbing, pathetic, but ultimately invincible killing machine who Jijii winds up and unleashes against his own foes, having identified them to his infantilised charge as associates of the bullies who tormented him as a child.

In addition to rousing the inner beast in his opponents, Tsukamoto’s before the camera parts are generally linked by a fantastic mutable physicality and strongly defined aesthetic. Tetsuo: The Iron Man has him as a wild-haired androgyny, existing in his own metal construct and observing the outside world through the flickering frame of a television filter. When he emerges to clash directly with the transformed salaryman, he is like a bionic glam rocker, all glinting skin and streaks of dark eye-liner. Echoes of the Toho monster movies of Japanese cinema past are evoked as the superpowered fetishist and his foe are unleashed upon the streets of Tokyo. Propelled on heel-rockets, the duo zoom through a frenetic time-lapse travelogue, akin to a Nippon-set version of Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera viewed on fast-forward. The Tokyo in which they exist is depicted as an environment starved of natural life, instead being an intimidating labyrinth of narrow subways, cramped apartment blocks, and gloomy underpasses. But Tsukamoto presents this artificial world as having its own wild pulsating energy, with household objects expanding, contracting and gaining mobility in the Svankmeyer-esque stop motion sequences which indicate just how blurred the line separating the organic salaryman from his manmade environment has become.

In Tetsuo II, Tsukamoto’s fetishist exists in an urban setting which, in terms of colour and design, is painted with a stylistic precision akin to such Cinema du look productions as Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva and Leos Carax’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. Tsukamoto’s hair-lipped cult leader spends most of his time submerged in a pool of molten metal, the coffin for his cybernetic vampire. Having let his devoted henchmen do most of his dirty work for him, he finally springs forth in the third act - ‘X’ painted on his chest, hair tugged back in a mohican and gun growing from his arm like James Woods in Videodrome - only to be swiftly decapitated by Taniguchi, who has by this point assimilated such a mass of metal and concrete as to be a kind of living emblem of the city itself. This violent parting of cranium from supporting body is no bar to Tsukamoto’s fetishist however, and his severed cerebellum eventually melds with both the mutant salaryman and his remaining followers. This amalgam manifests itself as a giant tank, a metallic rolling thunder ready to crush all of Tokyo before it (“Destruction is all I need!” snarls Tsukamoto at one point). Yet, even when the director is dealing with a narrative shorn of such explicit transformative possibilities, he still manages to find physical expression for the conflicts boiling in his characters’ ids. In Tokyo Fist, the competing figures of Tsuda and Kojima find their bodies undulating and shuddering with pronounced tremors as they parlay their incessant, metronomic training to enact fiercely feral, unsparingly vicious combat.

Jijii of Ichi the Killer initially forms stark contrast to the utter assurance of the twin fetishists in the Tetsuo movies. He is a shambling tramp figure, a skulking blot of a human being to be contemptuously ignored by the sharp-suited Yakuza. But as the depths of his malice are revealed, so too he seems to take on a more sinister aspect, like an elusive wraith spreading death and bloody mayhem throughout Shinjuku. One of the movie’s culminating scenes sees him finally completely step outside his dishevelled persona, literally shedding it as he removes his shabby threads to reveal a bulging, muscular Charles Atlas of a body underneath – a weapon promptly employed to dispense with the chief lieutenant of the flamboyant enforcer Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano). Throughout Ichi, director Miike exhibits a fascination for the limitations, capabilities and potential mutilations of the human body which is comparable to that displayed by Tsukamoto in his own movies. From the sadomasochistic Kakihara’s gleeful removal of a section of his own tongue in penance for a professional blunder; to the amazing disfigurements inflicted by the razorblade heels of the high-kicking Ichi (such as vertically slicing a foe in two and liberating a fully intact face from its body); to the most visually arresting sequence in the entire film, when gangster Suzuki (Susumu Terajima) is suspended naked from the ceiling by means of multiple meat hooks piercing his flesh, while Kakihara by turns tips boiling fat over him and inserts spikes through his tongue; Miike has a playfully inventive approach to both discerning the intrinsic possibilities of his characters’ bodies and testing his audience’s squeamishness.

And the idea of discovering new depths in the psyche via physical change is one which seems particularly prevalent in the discussed movies. The roles taken on by Shinya Tsukamoto regularly provide the key to unshackling other characters from the repression which stems from the expectations of polite society and the psychological baggage of the past. The dual workers played by Taguchi in the Tetsuo pictures seethe with an urban tension, appearing stifled and choked by life under the city smog. Howling catharsis is delivered with the mutations which claim their everyday guises and transmute them into new, far more excitingly expressive and powerful beings. Similarly, timorous salesman Tsuda is Tokyo Fist is put in touch with closeted passions and reserves of strength once he is introduced to that Darwinian crucible in which the underground boxing world operates. In Ichi the Killer, the title character is never able to shed the childhood traumas which have left him such a weeping, pitiable mess of a young man, but Tsukamoto’s Jijii is crucially able to momentarily harness the unstoppable fury resulting from these emotional wounds. For while Tsukamoto the actor is often the figure of evil, it is a necessary evil - an oppositional force of the requisite violence to shake the individual from their asphyxiating routine and awaken them to the full range of possibilities and emotions which lie buried within them.