El Topo
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
Mexico, 1970
A man in black riding a horse across the dunes. We are in familiar territory - the classic opening to a Western. But there is something different going on here. He is carrying an open umbrella (for shade?) and sitting behind him on the horse is his seven-year old son, naked. So begins El Topo (The Mole).
“The mole digs tunnels under the earth, looking for the sun. Sometimes, he gets to the surface. When he sees the sun, he is blinded.”
Hailed by many as a classic of the Acid Western genre, a club of which we think it is the only member, El Topo was reputedly a lost film that disappeared from circulation shortly after release in 1970. It had run for six months, apparently seven days a week, in the midnight slot at the Elgin Cinema in New York where devotees sat enthralled in a haze of marijuana. Celebrated by fans as diverse as John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and erm… Kanye West (it was re-released on DVD in 2007), the film is the product of the bizarre - or addled - imagination of its writer, director and star: Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Jodorowsky is something of a cult figure amongst denizens of of the cult movie circuit. The self-described ‘Cecil B de Mille of the underground’, he is rather fond of the melodramatic quote:
“The explosion of galaxies is violent ... The birth of a child is very violent … Life is violent, the circulation of blood, the heart beating, all is violent. But there are two types of violence – creative and destructive. I am creating art.”
Well, let us be the judge of that. At first we thought that El Topo might be a subversive and satirical take on the Western. It certainly looks like a Sergio Leone production with Don Quixote playing Clint Eastwood or vice versa. We were wrong … very wrong.
Ostensibly the tale of a gunfighters’s path to spiritual enlightenment, father and son come across a village that has been subjected to a grisly massacre with the victims on graphic display. Everything about this film is on graphic display. El Topo and his boy track down the man responsible, a despotic colonel played by Baron Bomburst from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. After castrating the Colonel and forcing him to shoot himself El Topo finishes off his henchmen, a trio of shoe fetishists with a penchant for abusing Franciscan monks … yes, really. He rescues the Colonel’s captive, Mara, and abandons his son so that he can ride off with her into the desert. His next challenge is to defeat four successive master gunslingers, which he manages with no little treachery. Unfortunately for El Topo, Mara and her new girlfriend shoot stigmata into his hands and feet and leave him for dead. The End? No … several years later, and it really does feel like years, he wakens in a cave wearing a yellow fright-wig surrounded by a host of people with a range of physical disabilities. We won’t go on because by this time what there was of a story had unravelled into chaos.
Nine plots stitched together … with some dead animals thrown in - C
Jodorowsky and his disciples call this surrealism. We call it bombastic bilge. Having said that, there are aspects of El Topo that we liked. The Chilean director clearly has an artist’s vision: there are plenty of astonishing visual flourishes to be found in the film and the sound design impresses. The film is not without moments of true wit: one of the gunfighters that our hero comes up against is an emaciated, semi-naked, old man armed with a butterfly net. As he has no gun, he challenges El Topo to fisticuffs. Despite his advanced years, the old man is too agile and in frustration El Topo shoots at him. The old man reacts with lightening speed and uses his net to deflect the bullet:
“You see, my net is mightier than your bullets.” El Topo is exasperated and the old man chides him, “even though you cheated, you couldn’t have taken anything.” El Topo responds, “I could have taken your life.” The old man says, smiling, “Life, I don’t care about that. I’ll show you”. He takes El Toto’s gun from him and shoots himself, quipping, “You lost!”.
Some of the skittish jokes and cringeworthy antics seem derivative of early Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the actually satirical Western, Blazing Saddles. It came as a jolt to find that El Topo preceded them.
But whatever highlights you can find are drowned out by the buckets of fake blood, the relentless animal cruelty, and the exploitation of children and people with physical disabilities. And of course there is the juvenile attitude toward sex and the unreconstructed misogyny: pretty much every scene with a woman includes her clothing being removed, usually by force. There is one gratuitously offensive scene showing Mara being raped by El Topo. At the time Jodorowsky claimed the assault was real, but 20 years later he backtracked, stating that, “They were words, not facts, surrealist publicity in order to enter the world of cinema from a position of obscurity.” This announcement came after a New York retrospective of his work was cancelled.
Loading a film with religious and occult symbolism does not make it surrealist art. In the final quarter the screen is congested with depictions of the Eye of Providence - an eye set within a triangle - the icon often associated with Freemasonry. Is Jodoroswky really trying to make an artistic or political point? Does he identify with the mole, seeking the light? We were not convinced. The film ends with a crass reconstruction of the self-immolation of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc.
We would agree with John Lennon & Co. El Topo is a film best watched at midnight and in a state of inebriation. With any luck when you wake up it may all be over.
Reids’ Results (out of 100)
C - 52
T - 43
N - 50
S - 40
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