Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Tokyo Fist
1995 · Shinya Tsukamoto · Tokyo Fist on Sightlines
Start with the color. Tokyo in this film is steel blue, gray and a sick fluorescent green: towers, glass, corridors, a tidy apartment where nothing seems to be warm. Tsuda moves through it in the posture of a man who sells insurance for a living, which he does. Then a body gets hit, and red arrives. It doesn't look like a sports injury. It looks like the first heat anyone in the frame has felt in years.
That contrast is Shinya Tsukamoto's whole argument, and he makes it with paint before he makes it with plot. The story could hardly be more familiar. Tsuda runs into Kojima, a childhood friend, on the subway. Kojima is a semiprofessional boxer now. Tsuda comes to suspect that Kojima is after his fiancée, Hizuru. There's a humiliation, then training, then the road toward a bout. Boxing pictures have run on this track for decades. What Tsukamoto does is keep the track and change what runs on it.
Deleuze has a name for what runs on it, and it helps. In his account of classical cinema, most films live in the action-image: a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the cut carries us from cause to effect. Here that is the triangle's promise. You've been wronged, so you train, and then you settle it. Deleuze also describes a stranger, rougher zone that sits between pure feeling and real action. He calls it the impulse-image. Here people aren't driven by plans. They're driven by appetite and compulsion, by drives that well up under the polite social surface, and the line they follow tends to slope downward, toward wreckage. The impulse-image belongs to naturalism, to Stroheim and Buñuel, and its emblem is a civilized setting that keeps cracking open onto something older and more savage.
That is Tokyo Fist exactly. Deleuze would call the city a derived milieu: a real, specific place (office, apartment, subway car) that turns out to be the thin crust over what he calls an originary world, where only hunger and blows count. The gym and the ring are where the crust gives way. Tsukamoto stages them as counter-spaces, the only rooms in Tokyo where flesh is allowed to matter. So when Tsuda starts training, the story's outline says revenge, but the images say something else. He isn't getting fit to win back a woman. He's swelling, bruising and splitting his skin because his body has become the only proof that he's alive. Feeling doesn't turn into action here. It turns into injury.
That's why the lens is worth using. Read the film as a plain revenge melodrama and the excess seems like style laid on top of the story: the geysering blood, the gristly punch-sounds, the faces so swollen they barely look like faces. Read it as an impulse-image and the excess is the story. The melodrama's emotional logic has been translated, beat for beat, into the body.
The film's real invention is that it doesn't leave this to the men. Hizuru, whom the triangle casts as the prize, starts her own program: piercing, tattooing, hardening herself. Kahori Fujii plays it as something chosen, not something suffered. Her transformation runs alongside the men's as a counter-plot, and the staging sets her body against theirs, so the film turns into a three-way argument about what a body is for. This is where Tokyo Fist goes beyond naturalism's usual fatalism. The drive points downhill, but it is also a way of writing yourself. Hizuru won't be the object two rivals fight over. She takes up the same tools, needle and wound, and makes herself the author of her own skin.
The editing turns all of this into rhythm. In the fights and training sequences Tsukamoto, who cut the film himself, uses flurries of very short shots, stroboscopic bursts, and motion that ramps and stutters. You can't follow these fights as sport. You take them as hits. Between them come quiet, curdled domestic passages, and the swing between numbness and eruption is the film's pulse. Chū Ishikawa's score, all clanging percussion and machine rhythm, binds the bodies to the city. The punches sound like industry.
Here the debts show. The percussive montage of metal against flesh, cut in lockstep with Ishikawa's clangor, comes straight from Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and Tokyo Fist moves it from mutation into the ring. Tetsuo II: Body Hammer gave Tsukamoto the 16mm handheld city-chase and the blue-toned palette, along with the idea of bodily change as male rage turned outward, which he now routes into muscle and bruise instead of metal. From Raging Bull he took the subjective in-ring camera, the thickened, animal punch-sound, and boxing as ritual self-annihilation. Videodrome supplied the grammar in which flesh becomes a wound and an opening, and desire turns into physical mutation. Eraserhead taught him to treat a city's machine-drone as continuous score. Behind them sits Death Powder, the grungy proto-cyberpunk that first fused rotting flesh with machine texture on a cheap 16mm surface. Tokyo Fist pulls these chapters into a new one. Cyberpunk's metal comes off, and what's left is the same pressure working on ordinary skin, in an ordinary love story, in an ordinary city. That turn toward the human is why the film is often treated as the bridge to the urban-alienation films Tsukamoto made next.
It's also a film made by hand. Tsukamoto produced, wrote, directed, shot, edited and art-directed it through his own Kaijyu Theater, and he plays Tsuda. His real younger brother, Kōji, plays Kojima. The effects are prosthetics, makeup and cutting tricks, with no compositing, so the violence has a handmade ugliness you can almost touch. For a film that argues identity is written in flesh, that matters. Here the body is the special effect.
So watch the color. Each time red breaks into the blue, ask what kind of image you're seeing. Is it someone acting on the world? Or is it a drive with nowhere else to go, coming up through the only surface left? Then watch Hizuru, and ask whose story this really is.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Feelings are inflicted rather than spoken; Tsuda's jealousy comes out as compulsive training, swelling, bruising and split skin instead of a plan of action.
- derived-milieu — Tokyo's sterile grid of towers, offices and the couple's apartment is staged as a numbing surface that pens the characters and provokes their turn to the body.
- originary-world — The gym and boxing ring work as counter-spaces where flesh is allowed to matter, the savage world under the city's surface.
- affective colour — A cold palette of steel blue, gray and green for the city and apartment, against which blood shows up as an almost sacramental red, the only heat available.
- attitudes & postures — Acting is keyed to physical transformation: Tsuda's slide from soft salaryman to hardened fighter, and Hizuru's piercing and tattooing, so identity is written in flesh.
- montage-pathetic — Fight and training sequences cut as flurries of very short shots, stroboscopic bursts and stuttered motion, which turn boxing into a subjective assault, set against quiet domestic passages.