Shinya Tsukamoto
A Snake Of June

There has been much discussion about the work of various Cronenberg and Tsukamoto, on the logos that characterizes their filmic research, an attempt to vivisect the flesh in relation to the machine and technology, to a utopian Ballardian fusion between man and machine at a biological level. The experience will increasingly tend to remove the immediacy of the carnal dimension and instead valorize the set of practices and operations that seem to realize the transcendence of the technological man compared to natural processes.

If you remember, with Tetsuo "the Iron Man," Tsukamoto played openly, responding to the no longer so utopian provocation of that Cronenbergian videodrome and pushed completely towards that fusion between man and machine. Many years later, in 2002, signing his other masterpiece "A Snake of June," Tsukamoto, rather than focusing on carnal immediacy, brings semantic reflection to hyper-metaphorical levels, diving back into the flesh only after a long journey of formation, secularized, distorted as much as you want, but always hyper-mediated by the awareness of the real. There is nothing immediate in this film: the same instinctual and a-rational drives are metaphorized in postmodern images.
The sexual act as a series of photographic shots, the female breast, fertility, rebirth, and eternal youth, framed in the endless nightmare that gradually creeps into a disjointed yakuza movie, breaking down every narrative scheme; the Tetsuo man-machine; the passage from image to image, from text to text, all this is the result of a strong reflection on oneself, turned on slightly offset themes compared to the classical Western ones, moreover in narrative forms partly foreign to the Western recipient, but above all, extreme as here we do not have the courage to do.

It is not then "purity," that we find in the Japanese cinema of a Tsukamoto, but the prototype of a kind of Hegelian process of instinctual contents that, after passing through the two inferior relations, the "pure" and naive and the negative rejection of the other from oneself (which is also part of oneself), now it engulfs it all in itself, becoming self-conscious and metabolizing it deeply within entirely rational cognitive processes.
Thus: relativism to excess, rather than immediacy. The "substance and blood" are nothing but the extreme consequences of the two worlds, the rational and the instinctual, finally reconciled in a film with total aesthetic shamelessness, in black and white with constant bluish tendencies throughout the film, where sex and disease, mutilations and changes are all-in-one with an eroticism that plays with the inexorable decay of the human body, given that the man of mere flesh in Tsukamoto’s world is by now decadent, let's speak of post-eroticism then, lived by the cyborg-viewer who masturbates (the husband in the film), interfaced by the video (the wife), immortalized by the third off-field element, namely the camera.

This great film has been described as the worthy Japanese response to 'Eyes Wide Shut', and I disagree since not in terms of content (perhaps we are in the same playing field in this respect) but in terms of direction we are very distant, obsessive and feverish that of Tsukamoto, aestheticizing in the tracking shots and hypnotic in the constant unfolding over two and a half hours that of the last great Kubrick.