I know I’m never supposed to admit stuff like this, but it was a foregone conclusion that I’d love Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo. I really liked Jodorowsky’s 1990 film Santa Sangre, to my knowledge the only film of his that was widely available on home video until recently, and El Topo has an even better reputation. I’ve seen the title mentioned in virtually all and any lists of significant midnight movies or cult films. It certainly sounds like my sort of thing. Surreal, ultra-violent, epic, bizarre, pretentious -- these are certainly appealing adjectives. Heaven knows that my cinema is the cinema of broad gestures and obtuse philosophizing. And yet, I had put off seeing it until this official DVD release. Beatles manager Allen Klein bought the distribution rights and made the film a worldwide hit only to subsequently pull it from exhibition after Jodorowsky fled the country to get out of directing The Story of O for him. The film has since been widely available through the black market, and I wish I could claim that I was waiting for a legitimate release, but the truth of the matter is that I was just too lazy and cheap to pull out my credit card and order it. (And yet, he had no qualms about getting The Star Wars Holiday Special for review, I hear you saying.)

I may have waited for all the wrong reasons, but I’m glad I did for all the right ones. The 1.33:1 full-frame transfer looks fantastic. Skies are a blueberry blue, clouds are a puffy white, and most importantly the blood is bright red. Yeah, the blood is fake! It looks like red paint. The wounds don’t really look very realistic either. When somebody gets shot or something, Jodorowsky just puts red paint on them. It’s curious how strongly some critics (i.e. Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert circa 1972 at least) responded to the violence, suggesting that this was the most violent film ever made up to its time. But no, man, this isn’t real violence, it’s play violence. If you hate the film, you could say that the special effects are amateurish. But if you love it like I do, you could say that they’re “consciously artificial.” Point being that, if seen from an illegitimate source in less-than-pristine condition, El Topo would inaccurately seem more outlawish than merely cartoonish.

What surprised me about the film was how, I don’t exactly want to say “cerebral” but maybe “academic,” it is. Unlike Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey (a popularly cited “head” movie preceding El Topo) and David Lynch’s Eraserhead (a popularly cited “head” movie, one traditionally shown at the witching hour besides, following El Topo), the film is not truly spiritual or mythological, but rather is about spirituality and mythology. 2001 and Eraserhead are very direct and are not particularly self-conscious. With El Topo, Jodorowsky puts everything in quotes.

Normally, I would be inclined to call shenanigans on this nonsense. By appealing to the intellect, Jodorowsky is avoiding ever exposing himself as vulnerably unhip. But it’s not just that. If we were to celebrate El Topo over 2001 (or perhaps even a good and genuine spaghetti western like The Good, The Bad & The Ugly) it would mean that the shadow of religion has come to replace religion itself. Indeed, let me be clear that while I have a great deal of admiration for El Topo I can’t consider myself a cultist like I am for 2001. But as an intellectual exercise I find El Topo to have a kind of brilliance. Shockingly cynical, the film ruthlessly if perhaps unconsciously exposes the philosophical bankruptcy of the sixties counterculture by providing us with a superhero incapable of finding an ideal to embody. Jodorowsky’s truly nihilistic message is that one must have power to affect change, but once you have power you will inevitably become drunk on it and no longer desire to challenge the status quo. Genuine heroism and, it would follow, genuine moral behavior is then impossible to achieve. In this sense, the film is a spiritual ancestor to Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

The titular El Topo (played by Jodorowsky) is a mythical gunslinger dressed all in black. In the first scene of the film, he commands his eight-year-old son Brontis (a perpetually naked Brontis Jodorowsky, the filmmaker’s real-life son) to bury a picture of his mother and his first toy as he is now a man. The two then stumble upon a town that has just been raided by bandits. There are no survivors aside from a dying man who begs El Topo to shoot him. El Topo hands his gun to Brontis so his son may do the deed.

The bandits are a sexually perverse group. One man draws a woman in the sand with beans and attempts to make love to her. Another satiates his fetish by kissing and sucking on a woman’s high-heeled shoe. Yet others take over a monastery. They dance with and kiss the monks, strip them of their robes and ride them like horses, flogging their bare buttocks with cactus leaves until they bleed. The leader of these bandits is “The Colonel,” a smallish bitter old man. His woman is called simply “The Woman.” She is forced to dress and pamper The Colonel while he abuses her and sexually humiliates her in front of his men. El Topo tracks down The Colonel and castrates him, much to the delight of both the bandits and the monks. No longer having any reason to live, the Colonel kills himself. Aroused by and grateful to her liberator, The Woman takes Brontis’s spot on El Topo’s horse. The two take off, leaving Brontis in the care of the monks.

Surely, El Topo couldn’t have known that he would get a woman out of this deal. So what exactly motivated him to track down and humiliate/destroy the man responsible for the town’s massacre? I don’t see anything in the film that suggests El Topo (at this stage at least) has a very strong interest in justice. Rather, it seems that he does it because he is a truly great man and the Colonel and his bandits are truly mediocre men. He finds their mediocrity offensive and this is why they must be punished. El Topo’s value system is a kind of blend of classical Mexican machismo and hippy-dippy Eastern philosophy, the meeting point between the two being a stoical detachment to the material world. This is why Brontis “becomes a man” by burying a picture of his mother and his first toy. When the bandits kill, they do so out of pleasure--for game and for sport. El Topo rejects this (or at least believe he does) and kills simply as a means to affirm his own greatness. When the Colonel asks El Topo who he is to judge, El Topo blithely replies, “I am God.” And so El Topo is not a great man because he upholds justice, but rather he upholds justice because he is a great man. Being a great man comes first. 

The Woman and El Topo ride through the desert. They stop by a pool of water and The Woman drinks from it. She complains that it is bitter. El Topo stirs a stick in the water and makes it sweet. He tells her that when Moses was taking his people through the desert they found a pool of water but could not drink it because it was bitter. They called this Mara. The Woman’s name will hereby be Mara because she is like bitter water (in other words, worthless). She complains of hunger and thirst and so El Topo produces turtle eggs and water for her. Mara tries to produce these miracles herself, but fails. She paces back and force chanting, “Nothing, nothing, nothing” until El Topo becomes so frustrated that he rapes her.

Mara tells El Topo that if he really loves her, he will prove himself the best by slaying the Four Masters of the desert. The first master is an androgynous hippy with long black hair and a mustache. He has been shot many times, but has not died as he has no fear of the bullets and allows them to simply pass through him. His goal is not to win, but to gain total control. El Topo tricks him by digging a deep hole the night before the duel and getting the Master to fall into it, giving El Topo a clear shot to his head. The First Master’s servants, a legless man and an armless man, try to avenge their master’s death but are killed easily by Mara. She is very proud that El Topo has won the duel, but he is disgusted at himself.

The pair goes on to face the next three masters. A Woman in Black, dressed just like El Topo, offers to guide them to their next location. Through the rest of their journey she proceeds to seduce Mara, first by giving her a lotus mirror in which Mara can admire her own reflection, and then later by seductively eating a cactus fruit in a scene that is going on my short list of “greatest instances of symbolic oral sex” along with Vanilla Ice feeding Kristin Minter an ice cube in Cool as Ice and John Cameron Mitchell describing the taste of gummy bears in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Mara loves her mirror and spends all day staring into it, prompting an annoyed El Topo to destroy it.

The second master dresses in furs and lives with his mother. He has retired from gunfighting and now creates toothpick sculptures that fall apart when held by those with less precision and strength than himself. When El Topo tries to pick it up, he only destroys it. El Topo defeats the Second Master through trickery also. He places shards of glass from Mara’s mirror beneath the mother’s foot. When she steps on it and screams, the Second Master becomes distracted, allowing El Topo to kill him. The Third Master has retired also and become a rabbit farmer. When El Topo comes onto his farm his bad vibes end up killing all the rabbits. The Third Master says he only needs one bullet because he never misses. El Topo again uses trickery to defeat him. He hides Mara’s mirror in front of his heart, blocking the Third Master’s shot and making him easy pickings for El Topo.

The Fourth Master is a senile old man who has a pole for a house. He says that he will not fight El Topo with another revolver, but with his butterfly net. El Topo shoots him, but the Fourth Master catches the bullets and throws them back. The next time El Topo shoots, the Fourth Master will deflect the bullets into his heart. El Topo admits defeat. The Fourth Master says that even if he won, El Topo would have nothing to take from him. El Topo suggests he could take his life. The Fourth Master says that his life means nothing to him and shoots himself to prove it. His dying words to El Topo are “You lost.”

El Topo is driven to madness. He goes back to the graves of the other three masters. The Third Master’s grave is covered in rabbits and bursts into flames. The Second Master is buried with his master under a pyramid of toothpicks. The hole where the First Master died is now covered with honey. Distraught, El Topo rubs some broken honeycomb all over his face. He destroys the First Master’s tower and crushes his revolver with a rock. Mara embraces him, celebrating his “victory” over the Four Masters. El Topo isn’t having it. The Woman in Black follows him to a bridge and challenges him to a duel. She defeats El Topo, shooting him in his feet and outstretched hands as El Topo assumes the Christ pose. She gives the revolver to Mara saying, “It’s either him or me.” Mara shoots El Topo in the side, making the “fifth wound of Christ.” The two lovers then ride away, leaving El Topo for dead.

This is the most misogynistic segment of El Topo. Certainly you could say it’s also the most homophobic, but the homophobia is clearly a function of the misogyny. The Four Masters are truly “greater” than El Topo. After all, he likely would have lost if he didn‘t outsmart them with cheap tricks. But the Four Masters are also considerably more effeminate and considerably less masculine than El Topo, which just goes to show that masculinity does not correlate with greatness. The First Master seems the most overtly homosexual. His servants, the Armless Man and the Legless Man, intimately braid his hair and massage his feet. When he dies, they grow enraged like jilted lovers. The Second Master is more covertly homosexual; he has a deep non-erotic love for his mother, reminding of Freud’s characterization of the homosexual orientation as being the result of an unresolved Oedipal complex. The Third Master raises rabbits. This isn’t particularly gay, but it has some distinctly feminine undertones with the rabbit being a symbol of fecundity (particularly in that Jodorowsky uses so many of them) and this rabbit farm being the only real image of domesticity in the film. The Fourth Master isn’t exactly feminine, but frail, old, senile and lacking in the kind of virility that characterizes the masculine El Topo.

Importantly, all Four Masters are basically uninterested in fighting and do so only to humor El Topo. The suggestion here is that when a man becomes truly great he removes himself from the world and de-evolves into “woman-dom,” the very thing that El Topo defines himself in rejecting. The trickery that El Topo uses to defeat the Four Masters is a product of femininity. The glass and the frame of the mirror used to defeat the Second and Third Masters was taken from Mara (as a gift from the Woman in Black) and the hole used to trap the First Master is a vaginal symbol. When El Topo is finally defeated it is by a “female El Topo.” The message is that when man has become as complete as he can be, he will inevitably be conquered by the forces of woman. This is why El Topo crushes his revolver (phallus) near the end. He realizes that his penis has become obsolete.

The world of woman is one of passivity, sensuality, materialism and self-love, values characterized through Mara‘s mirror. Woman is not a revolutionary, she is an ultimately worthless but dangerous shiny toy. But this is the logical outcome of El Topo’s belief of greatness, which is defined as existing before one’s actions and not before. How much longer will the truly great man prove his greatness by conquering the less great (even if this is through the role of “avenging angel” or revolutionary) before he decides he no longer has to prove himself and retires to effeminate self-love? This is the paradox. One must have ego in order to fight, conquer and destroy the corrupt values of the feminized world, but ego itself is an inherently feminizing drug.

El Topo enters a coma and for the next twenty years or so is preserved by an underground society of freaks. His beard has grown out further and he now has a full-blown blonde Jewfro (Jodorowsky is a Russian Jew who grew up in Chile, making El Topo, I guess, of Semitic heritage). The freaks have been painting his face. He is wearing lipstick, rouge and mascara. A female dwarf, hereby referred to as The Small Woman, tells him that they are forced to live underground because years of incest have rendered them repulsive to the townspeople living above ground. They can leave their prison, but it takes a few days to climb up to the opening. 

Moved that these people took him in when he would have died otherwise, El Topo declares that he will go above ground and earn some money so that they can dig a tunnel out and rejoin the rest of society. He shaves his beard and head and dons a monk’s robes. The town above ground is a depraved place where the principal entertainments are rodeos where blacks and Indians are hogtied and branded for the amusement of rich old women. Outside of the rodeo, blacks and Indians are sold as slaves. Criminals are executed in public. One such criminal is a black slave who is falsely accused of rape by his owners. This town’s symbol is a triangle with an eye in the center like you would find on the back of a one-dollar bill. This symbol has replaced even the cross in the churches, where mass consists of games of Russian roulette. The assistant priest of the town’s church is Brontis, who has now grown into a man.

El Topo and the Small Woman earn money through odd jobs and performing a mime routine where they play lovers that are unable to embrace. At one raucous party, the two are forced to have sex. They fall in love and the Small Woman becomes pregnant, prompting El Topo to enter the church so they may be married. Recognizing his father, Brontis vows to kill him but agrees to wait until the tunnel is finished. El Topo and the Small Woman finally earn enough money to buy some dynamite and finish the tunnel. The freaks cheerfully march into town but are massacred by the townspeople. Enraged, El Topo becomes insane again and kills everybody in the town. He is shot but refuses to feel the pain. When he is finished he performs self-immolation much like the Buddhist priests protesting the Vietnam War. The Small Woman gives birth, and Brontis rides off into the desert with her and the newborn baby. Thousands of bees cover El Topo’s grave, presumably indicating that he is now enjoying the sainthood that met the death of the First Master.

Having died, El Topo has now been reborn a holy man. In his coma he had dropped out of the world and became feminized (as indicated by the make-up painted on him) much like the Masters he has slain. Upon waking up he shaves off his hair and beard, the last remaining remnants of his masculinity, and embraces the asceticism of the monk lifestyle. He will now define himself by fighting non-violently for the plight of the down-trodden. El Topo is now a true avatar for hippy values, socially conscientious and with no ego. (“I am not a God. I am a man,” he tells the Small Woman.) However, without an ass-kicking egotistical El Topo Version 1.0 to take care of things, the asshole banditos have taken over!

The society represented in the last third of El Topo is commonly perceived as a parody of America. There are executions, a slave trade, and worshipping the “almighty dollar” (signified by that pyramid symbol, yuk yuk)! But it’s also a society of what Jodorowsky considers distinctly feminine evils--particularly the materialism and vanity that characterized Mara in the second third of the film. Note how the pampered old women are the most overt icons of corruption in this segment. This seems to be a break away from traditional counterculture ethos where social evils are a product of the patriarchy. In the world of El Topo, it is the feminine/homosexual element that sexualizes violence and makes it sadistic. In the hands of a truly masculine figure like El Topo Version 1.0, it has a sort of spiritual purity as a vehicle for justice and self-affirmation.

Becoming a monk is El Topo’s way of assaulting the feminine world without becoming a part of it. (The love of public executions in this society reminds us of how the bandits and monks celebrated when El Topo castrated their Colonel. Even as a revolutionary, he is essentially entertaining the degenerate feminized culture.) The joke, though, is as a monk he is completely ineffectual in assaulting the feminized world. When these assholes strike you and you turn the other cheek, they’re only going to strike you in that one also and then laugh at your expense. Digging a tunnel to above ground and freeing the freaks only succeeded in getting them all killed.

El Topo’s self-immolation and the implied parody of the Buddhist monks protesting the Vietnam war is chilling. The totality of the gesture is met and lapped by its emptiness. Their death ultimately has had little effect on the outcome of the Vietnam War. They died for an ideal and ideals ultimately have little practical value. If you want to cause change, you have to kick ass and take names. But all ass-kickers essentially kick ass for glory, and even if they think they don‘t, they‘re going to be lionized as heroes anyway and their egos will be fellated whether they want it or not. (El Topo didn’t seem to want his tomb to be covered in bees nor does this seem to be a reward of any kind. It’s treated more like a natural consequence. El Topo is a great man, regardless of what he does, and this is what always happens to great men.) If you truly want to lose all ego, you must not kick ass. The non-violent monk is the epitome of anonymity and humility. But if you never kick ass, nothing is ever going to change. This is quite the catch-22!

Jodorowsky doesn’t have any solutions, but this doesn’t as much bother me as I don’t have any solutions either. The film’s nihilism isn’t as much mere attitude as it is an inevitable philosophical conclusion. I can see how El Topo may have played, once upon a time, as iconoclastic for the sake of iconoclasm and a cynical pandering to the counterculture. But today it seems like a tonic to the ideological muddiness of the 1960s. There isn’t any poetry to the film; it makes it seem as though the very concept of poetry has become obsolete. Follow El Topo to its logical conclusion and you may just walk away thinking that the cinema is finally dead.