El Topo

(1970)

Directed by

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Review by Zach Saltz

Midgets.  Tattoos.  Pools of blood.  Elephant burials.  Severed limbs.

Such are the hallmarks of the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, the great surrealist cult director.  Jodorowsky is as much a cineaste as he is a spiritual guru, as his films often combine multi-layered elements of many discrete schools of faith, ranging from the widely-known to the obscure.  His 1970 midnight classic El Topo (The Mole) looks like it was made for about fourteen dollars, and is a strange sublimation of Christian symbolism, dime-store black magic, and Eastern philosophy that is, in many ways, perfectly unexplainable unless your viewing is enhanced with the aide of certain psychedelic substances (obviously more readily available at the time of its initial release).

The film is unusual as a western in many ways.  It looks as though the characters speak Spanish while their voices are awkwardly dubbed in English, with Korean subtitles to top it all off (though the latter was probably attributed to the specific copy of the film I had happened to rent).  The music is sparse, there are very few close-up shots.  The hero of the film is known only by the eponymous name El Topo, “The Mole”, and is decked in chic leather garments with a Grizzly Adams-like face full of ruffled hair and untrimmed beard.  His young son rides naked next to him on their horse, until he is abandoned in favor of a sensuous mulatto.  El Topo’s mission is decidedly clear -- he must systematically take out the four “masters” of the land, from each of whom he learns a valuable lesson in the form of black magic (in that sense, they resemble the villains of Aleister Crawley).  After the masters have been killed, El Topo is captured, taken into a mountain where is kept by a group of midgets, and eventually digs a hole to escape into the town below and kills everyone.  Then he dies and turns into a batch of honey for bees to feast on.

But is that what El Topo is really about?  Just another gun-slinging cowboy who happens to look more like Leatherface than Roy Rogers?  I think not.  First of all, Jodorowsky uses the western genre to articulate death and decay -- the corpses of men shot with guns and the decay of the plants trying in all futility to grow.  The images here resemble those of “Paradise Lost”, and I don’t think that’s a mistake; this vision of the west is clearly dystopian, and El Topo embodies the traditional Man With No Name archetype trying to seed out the tyranny plaguing the vast land.  The problem is (in my estimation; everything here is my interpretation, take it or leave it) that El Topo is a mole, and, as the opening credits tell us, he is blinded at the sight of the sun, a classicalist Eastern symbol of enlightenment. El Topo says that he is God, not unlike the Sufi poet Al Halaj, while the town below the mountain may be Canaan, complete with the worship of false idols (do you get the sense of paralyzing discrepancy here?)  And, like all great westerns, the essential element of loneliness is omnipresent; Jodorowsky is a master at framing his shots in a way to express the solitude of the central figure.  This is what was most confounding for me to consider after watching the film, but I think the trick is the presentment of bizarre, wildly visceral images (such as a man digesting a woman’s shoe or an armless midget scrambling around) that contrast any sense of homeliness the protagonist feels over the course of the story.

So, yes, the film is wholly ambiguous, but quite trippy and psychedelic.  The vibrant colors of the sky look so perfect that they almost resemble a Venetian matte, while the contrasting browns and reds of the monolithic mountain and the pools of blood remind us of the desolate destruction of life, as a result of the palpable as wells as the surreal.  It’s clear that the film is a product of the 1960s, a time when ambiguous spiritual identity was advocated, and our interpretations of what we see in Jodorowsky’s films may echo Milton’s Satan’s own words, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Rating: