Spectacle and The Human Body in Too Hot To Handle and Tetsuo: The Iron Man

One of the pillars of Laura Mulvey’s thesis in her lauded 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is the concept that pleasure gained from watching films is derived from gazing at human figures on-screen. There’s little doubt to this claim, considering the near-supermodels in action films whose hair and makeup magically withstands any shootout or explosion, or female characters in otherwise male-dominated plots who serve little purpose other than to simply be looked at. This notion of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ has been utilized and exploited for so long in visual media that many pieces of film and media have arisen which are built entirely around the idea of presenting bodies to look at, with diegetic content and narrative cohesion relegated to a position of lower importance. Many reality television programs serve as prime examples of this notion, creating an additional layer of tangibility to spectators as onscreen individuals and situations are presented as ‘real’; that is, unscripted and relatable to common folk. The Netflix sensation Too Hot To Handle shows us exactly how visual pleasure can be utilized to create spectacle which keeps its viewers not only engaged, but nearly mesmerized. 

Anyone who’s watched Too Hot To Handle can attest to just how addictive it is, but what makes it work so well? The concept is simple, but presents an intriguing experiment: a dozen young, attractive, and sexually vital individuals are sent to an island resort with the prospect of mingling and engaging in all forms of sexual debauchery with one another. The twist is that when they arrive, the contestants are informed that they are not allowed to fornicate or engage in intimate physical contact of any kind, and any ‘rule break’ results in a deduction of money from the $200,000 prize pool which goes to whoever is nominated as the ‘winner’ at the end of the series. The show creates interest by presenting a barricade within a natural progression: a suggestion of [attractive, scantily-clad individuals → flirtation → sex] is stunted and thereby frustrated for the onscreen figures and spectators alike. Instead, we watch curiously as individuals are urged to seek ‘deeper emotional connections’ with one another, ones which are not based upon the expectation of sex. This proves difficult for most of the contestants, as they are chosen based on their predisposition to pursue purely sexual relationships, but it makes for a fascinating watch seeing couples form and court one another, but fail to reach the precipice of the sexual act. Space is instead left for a sort of risky titillation to take hold, one perhaps even equal to the affectation of the actual fulfillment of the sexual act, when we see couples inevitably ‘break the rules’ and engage in indecent behavior at the expense of the groups’ general approval and size of the potential reward for disengaging. What makes an admittedly juvenile-sounding concept work so well is its manipulation of and experimentation with visual pleasure: tension is built and held as viewers await the next ‘rule break’, all the while seeing the onscreen individuals gaze at and be gazed at by one another. One almost feels as though they are a voyeuristic participant in this game of gazes, the prospect of intimacy made even more taboo and exciting than normal by its forbidding. The figures’ actions themselves are made all the more interesting and attractive to spectators by the conditions set to dictate their behavior..

A piece of media like Too Hot To Handle exploits the human body and its visual connotations to create a fascinating viewing experience, but on the other end of the spectrum, what happens when human figures are distorted beyond recognition, so as to become completely foreign? Philosophers like Freud and Lacan would invoke the term unheimlich, or uncanny. The more familiar an object is, the greater its capacity to disturb when presented with some foreign aspect– with this concept in mind, it would make sense that our own bodies would take on the greatest capacity to invoke uncanniness or discomfort. Consider the success of the horror subgenre known as ‘body horror’: from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1978) to David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) and Videodrome (1983). Many of the most lauded horror films in history involve the presentation of a warped or mutilated form of the human figure. Few, however, have taken the idea to such an extreme as Japanese filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto with his 1989 picture Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The film follows a metal fetishist obsessed with augmenting his and others’ bodies with metal implants as he tracks down and torments a salaryman. The salaryman accidentally runs over the metal fetishist with his car at the beginning of the film, demonstrating from the film’s onset the powerful destructive force machinery can wreak on the human body. The metal fetishist’s subsequent revenge takes form as metal disfigurations overtake the salaryman’s body, eventually fully transforming him into the ‘Iron Man’ before the two face off in an apocalyptic showdown. This story is presented uncompromisingly and nightmarishly, with the sound design consisting of various metallic sounds and screeches, the transformation sequences presented with a sort of hyper-stopmotion style of editing. Tetsuo presents a radical take on transhumanism, or the philosophy of augmenting and improving human capabilities through use of emerging technologies such as A.I. and genetic engineering. Watching Tsukamoto’s characters invokes both discomfort and awe as both the creative and destructive capabilities of superhuman entities are explored. The film’s spectacle lies somewhere between its terror, disgust, and its prospects of a future oozing with cyberpunk aesthetics (ones which are usually invoked in sci-fi media in a positive manner). This is precisely the uncanniness which makes Tetsuo so effective.

Perhaps what can be learned from how Too Hot To Handle and Tetsuo use the spectacle of the human figure is that upsetting presupposed conditions of the presentation of the human body can often work to garner more interest and attention than the mere figures alone.