Escape Velocity (40 page)

At the same time, as Claudia Springer points out, cinematic icons in the Sarah Connor mold convey multiple, often conflicting messages. Noting that Connor's transformation "into a taut, muscular killing machine" is in part a response to the psychological and sexual abuse she suffers at the hands of mcile doctors and jailers in the psycho ward. Springer argues that while "Sarah Connor fits into a long tradition of phallic women in films . . . she also provides an attractive figure in the realm of fantasy for angry women":

As viewers of martial arts films know, it is enormously satisfying to experience vicariously the triumph of an underdog seeking revenge against the perpetrators of injustice. Women under patriarchy can experience the exhilarating fantasy of immense

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physical strength and freedom from all constraints when watching figures like Sarah Connor. Revenge fantasies are powerful, even when they are packaged for consumption by the Hollywood film industry.'^'

On a similar note, the cultural critic Tricia Rose observes,

The question is: Who is doing the constructing? The problem with the Terminator series ... is that male imagination is driving the narrative, which is what makes a pistol-packin' mama like Sarah Connor so problematic. But the larger question is, once again, not, "How was Sarah Connor constructed by the filmmaker?" but "How do the feminist graduate students I know (many of whom idolize these characters) use these women in ways that rewrite the narrative and maybe rewrite their life roles?" . . . These images are opening up possibilities, revising what men and women think women ought to be, even if they wind up endorsing patriarchal norms in other ways. Hollywood has to reaffirm the status quo, of course, but trust me when I tell you that just by opening those gates, they're creating a rupture they may not be able to suture. '^^

Tetsuo: Fear and Loathing in the Robot Kingdom

In Shinya Tsukamoto's cult movie, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), the cyborg is reimagined yet again, this time in an electroconvulsive Tokyo jolted by animated sequences that hurtle the view^er through the city at stomach-lurching speed. Wires writhe like w^orms; technology sprouts in living flesh. Obsessive, compulsive, often psychotically funny, Tetsuo takes place in a technological landscape that has been annexed by the pathological male ego-an ego that occupies "the space betw^een phallic aggression and the fear of sodomy," as the film critic Tony Rayns puts it.'^^ This is the society of media spectacle, fetishized consumption, and infantile sexuality limned by Ballard:

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncer-

I

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tain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles ... it seems to me, have been reversed.'^"*

This transposition is a hallmark of what Scott Bukatman calls "techno-surrealism," in which the libido, like the voracious Blob of B-movie fame, moves "beyond the bounds of the individual psyche" to swallow up reality.'^^ Noting the "fear of aggressive female sexuality," "willfully hyperbolic violence," and other dark valleys of the id that have been mapped onto Tetsuo's overlit terrain, Bukatman argues that the movie is "a discourse both of and about the armored body in technoculture."'^^ He maintains that cyborging, in Tetsuo, is part of a strategy "to reseat the human (male) in a position of virile power and control."'^^

But while Tetsuo undeniably situates the viewer inside an alienated male psyche whose traditional, "Iron Man" masculinity is rusting through, the movie's deepest anxieties have less to do with the plight of the male than the perilous state of the human in a world overrun-and, increasingly, run-by technology.

Furthermore, Bukatman's analysis attempts to neatly schematize a work that defies rationalization. Stock phrases like "over the top" shrivel to understatements when applied to Tetsuo, a movie so mondo it is a genre unto itself. Often compared to David Lynch's Eraserhead and Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, it is steeped in the style and subject matter of manga-the ultraviolent, often scatological comic novels devoured by millions of Japanese. And the comic strip gotterdammerung at the end of the film recalls the clobberthons that inevitably ring down the curtain in kitsch classics such as Godzilla vs. Megaton. The film critic J. Hoberman called Tetsuo "an assemblage of textures-less a splatter than a solder flick.'" ^^ Tsukamoto's own explanation, in a fractured but poetic translation, is illuminating: "My primary concern was to create one sensual imagery on the screen.'"^^ With only a few lines of dialogue and the barest skeleton of a plot, the hour-long, black-and-white movie is a descent into a maelstrom of body loathing, cyborg fantasies, mechano-eroticism, information anxiety, agoraphobia, castration complexes, and fear of phallic mothers. Biological metaphors for machinery fuse with mechanical metaphors for biology in animated sequences of swarming wires and pulsating metal excrescences.

The movie begins in what looks Uke an abandoned factory, where a young "metal fetishist" (played by Tsukamoto) acts out his cyborg fantasies in a decidedly low-tech manner, slicing open his thigh to insert a piece of electrical conduit. Despite Tetsuo's nearly nonexistent budget, the movie's special effects-created by Tsukamoto, who not only directed but also wrote, cophotographed, and edited the film-are gut-wrenching: Blood spurts out of the gash with a hyperreal squelch, and we see the cable being shoved into the gory laceration in a not-for-the-squeamish close-up. Binding his leg, the metal fetishist shrieks at the sight of maggots crawling on the wound. Sick with terror, he runs blindly into the street, where he is bowled over in a hit-and-run accident involving a salaryman (the ulcerated, workaholic company man who is a fixture of Japanese society).

The following morning, while shaving, the salaryman (played by rock musician Tomoroh Taguchi) notices a wire growing out of his cheek. Unable to remove it, he tries to banish his anxiety with daydreams about making love to his girlfriend. In a trope that crosses the cartoon thought balloon with the Terminator's "Termovision," his thoughts appear on a TV screen, grainy with snow. En route to work, on a subway platform, he sits next to a prim, bespectacled young woman in sensible shoes. Both notice a steaming glob of technological excrement-wires, scrap metal, bubbling goo-on the ground nearby. Her curiosity aroused, the woman pokes it gingerly and is transformed, without warning, into a spastic, wild-eyed cyborg. She chases the salaryman into what appears to be the men's room, goaded on by the fiendish will of her hand, which has mutated into a tumorous mass of amorphous industrial rubbish. Hilariously, she pauses to preen before attacking him. Her amok seduction ends when the salaryman snaps her neck with a visceral crunch.

Later, the salaryman relives the attack in a mechano-erotic dream starring his girlfriend as the Monstrous Feminine incarnate: a swarthy succubus armed with a strap-on robo-dildo consisting of a long, floating cable terminating in a drill bit. She vamps her way across the room and, in a masterstroke of perverse hilarity, sodomizes the salaryman with her serpentine sex machine. Steam rises from his flanks and we're off", flying dizzily through the streets of Tokyo to slam headlong into a no parking sign whose symbolism is obvious in a movie fraught with the fear of sodomy.

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At this point, Tetsuo spins out of control, into a giddy wipeout. The salary man's wire whisker blossoms into full-blown metalmorphosis: Smoldering circuitry erupts out of his cheek; pipes jut from his back; and his penis mutates into an enormous drill with which he literally screws his girlfriend to death in a scene out of Andrea Dworkin's nightmares. The last third of the movie is given over to a telekinetic struggle between the cyborged salaryman and the revenant metal fetishist, who is undergoing a similar transformation. The battle is equal parts Poltergeist and Godzilla: Objects are squashed flat by an invisible force and heavy metal ectoplasm oozes everywhere. The salary man's girlfriend rises from the dead only to dissolve into bubbling gunk, out of which bursts the fetishist, bearing flowers, his lipsticked lips pursed to kiss the salaryman.

Armageddon ensues, in the course of which the fetishist is repeatedly penetrated by the salaryman's squealing drill. "His hatred having shaded into a kind of love, the fetishist explains that he needs to merge with the salaryman to overcome the rust that is attacking his frame," the director's notes reveal.'"^^ Says the fetishist, "Now that we are fully mutated, why don't we unite to mutate the world?" When the dust settles, the two combatants have indeed melded into a siege engine made of tangled pipes, twisted wires, and machine parts. As the towering structure rumbles into the distance, its contours finally resolve themselves into a recognizable shape: a monolithic Priapus.

Tetsuo offers poetic evidence that technological modernity provides no bulwark, as Ballard has argued, against "[v]oyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings" and other "diseases of the psyche."^"*' In Tetsuo, the repressed returns with a vengeance: The Shinto belief that everything has an indwelling spirit, or kami, brings the inherent uncanniness in machines to life; libidinous urges wriggle free of the propriety that straitjackets Japanese society; and the Japanese woman-the squeaky, shuffling helpmate who smilingly attends to her husband's every need-mutates into a sexual carnivore with a bionic hand or a fiendish Theda Bara with a motorized strap-on. "In general audience TV cartoons as well as in the comics," notes the Japanologist William Bohnaker,

the Japanese female is ever more openly portrayed as a gas-underpressure, liable to explode terrifyingly under the incessant pin-

pricks of her duties and dearths. A recurrent image ... is of a demure, doting, tweeting mama suddenly transmogrifying into a screaming virago.''*^

Drawing inspiration from Godzilla as well as the recombinant Transformer and Gobot toy robots that took U.S. toy stores by storm in the eighties, Tsukamoto refracts the body/mind, human/machine dichotomies of cyberculture through Japan, whose repressive social psyche is frequently at odds with the individual ego-a conflict dramatized by the phenomenon of ijime, or "bullying," in which schoolchildren harass and sometimes murder classmates who do not conform to the social norm, literalizing the Japanese adage "bang down the nail that sticks out."

Tetsuo is racked by tensions between technophilia and techno-phobia, between Japan's self-image as the high-tech, user-friendly robotto okoku, or "robot kingdom," and an emerging public awareness of de-skilling, technostress, and robot-related workplace fatalities in Japan. "What I thought when I was making Tetsuo," says Tsukamoto, "was that you can experience euphoria even if you're being raped by the machine. At the same time, there is always this urge to destroy technology, the industrial world. That conflict was going on inside me when I was making Tetsuo-the feeling that I enjoy being raped by the machine but at the same time I want to destroy the things that are invading me, the human being."

Biomechanical Tattoos: Totem and Taboo in Technoculture

What will the archeologists of 3001 make of our preserved tattooed hides, decorated with biomechanical alien art? Will they think that we were part machine? Or maybe that we worshipped machines?

-Unbylined editorial, Tattoo Flash magazine^"^^

"We are the primitives of a new sensibility," wrote an Italian futurist, in the early part of this century.''*'* Now, a burgeoning underground of urban aboriginals has revived the archaic notion of the body as a blank slate. In tribal cultures, writes essayist David Levi Strauss, "body manipulations are often sacred and magical, and always social "; the body is transformed from

its inarticulate, natural state into a communicating, social body through "the marks of civilization"-tattooing, piercing, branding, and scarification.'"*^ In Moby-Dick, the harpooner Queequeg-"a creature in the transition state" between "savage" cannibal and civilized man-reverses the biblical trope in w^hich the word becomes flesh: he is the flesh made word.'"*^ His tattoos are

the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume.'"*^

Inspired by Charles Gatewood's photos and videos of the body bizarre, the Modern Primitives issue of ReAearch magazine, the Gauntlet (a chain of body piercing parlors), and the illustrated, perforated bodies of MTV staples such as Guns 'n' Roses, a groundswell of interest in do-it-yourself body modification has swept taboo practices out of National Geographic and into youth culture. Informed by S and M and biker chic, these practices have surfaced in the solid black "tribal" tattoos-chain-linked Celtic runes, flamelike Polynesian designs-and pierced noses, nipples, navels, and pudenda of "modern primitives."

Modern primitive is a catchall category that includes fans of hardcore techno and industrial dance music; bondage fetishists; performance artists; technopagans; and practitioners of suspension by flesh hooks and other forms of ritual mortification, or "body play," intended to produce altered states of consciousness. A polyvalent phenomenon, it is first and foremost an example of what sociologists have called "resistance through rituals." In their introduction to Modern Primitives, the editors V. Vale and Andrea Juno assert,

Amidst an almost universal feeling of powerlessness to "change the world," individuals are changing what they do have power over: their own bodies.^"^^

The San Francisco-based tattoo artist Greg Kulz echoes their sentiments, noting, "People want to have control over their [bodies]. Even if

you can't control the external environment, you can start by controlling your internal environment. You can get a permanent mark or marks that no one else has a say in at alL''^"^^