El Topo
Studio: Anchor Bay
WorkNameSort: El Topo
So I’ve finally seen El Topo. This Holy Grail of underground cinema is, after a decades-long legal stalemate, available for home viewing, individually and as part of the Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky box set.
The well-documented backstory of El Topo (The Mole) is almost unbelievable: brought to America by John Lennon, inventing the midnight-movie phenomenon and playing for a solid year in that time slot, only to be withdrawn from circulation for 30 years, along with Jodorowsky’s follow-up, The Holy Mountain, by producer Allen Klein due to Jodorowsky’s reneging on Klein’s porno project, The Story of O.
This extended period of silver-screen limbo led, naturally, to a hefty amount of unwarranted mythologizing about this ‘lost masterpiece,â?� heretofore circulated only in crummy bootlegs. Fans will be delighted at this gorgeous Anchor Bay transfer, but no matter how vibrant that red paint looks as it gushes from any and all of its characters’ orifices, it can’t help elevate this overhyped jumble of Biblical allusions and hippie ethos from what it really is: a curious and pretentious bit of nostalgia that strains for relevance or even basic entertainment. Jodorowsky, as the movie’s nomadic hero, El Topo, appears to be crazy, high or both, and in the Vietnam era, who can really blame him? But unless the viewer is one or both of these things also, this two-hour gaze into his mystical and twisted brain may approach torture.
Still, he shows mastery here and there, like in an opening tableau in which El Topo rides a horse through a post-apocalyptic fever dream. A horse trotting through puddles of blood, a man impaled on a giant stake, a battle-scarred landscape strewn with corpses, bodies hung like slabs of meat in a butcher shop. Jodorowsky’s repulsive visuals have an indelible pull at times like these, and they’re impossible to forget. Another classic scene occurs moments later, when El Topo distracts some bad guys by throwing down a red balloon. So transfixed are the villains by the balloon as it slowly loses its helium, they don’t notice the quick-drawing El Topo shooting them down, filmed as an experimental montage.
There’s barely a plot, certainly not one that matters, even for champions of the movie. El Topo, the black-clad antihero, frees a woman from a dictator, and to win her over he has to defeat four master gunslingers. He appears to do so episodically, engaging in philosophical and metaphysical (and, subtextually theological) discourse each time. Then he supposedly dies, until he turns up later, in the film’s turgid second half, as a monk.
Like his contemporaries Sam Peckinpah and Dusan Makavejev, Jodorowsky was at the height of hip formal innovation at the time of this breakthrough film, and by stripping the Western of its moral hero mythology, he laid the scorched template for many revisionist Westerns to come. I get that. But he also gave us a movie so of its time ‘ filled with bare breasts and penises, scandalous scenes of guys kissing guys and gals kissing gals, rape, old-time religion, flagellation and self-immolation as a mirror to Vietnam ‘ that the ostentatious importance he attaches to his spelled-out surrealism comes off today as a dated counterculture goulash long hyped as art by a blank generation desperate for something different.
This article appears in May 30 – Jun 5, 2007.