For A Few Icons More

El Topo is a film with such an atmosphere of religious fervor around it that I am hesitant to criticize it for fear of being either damnably sacriligious or damnably wrong about it. The center of the cult is New York, where before the movie officially premiered three weeks ago, it had been showing downtown unofficially for six months, once daily at midnight. It sold out easily every weekend. Its popularity has continued undiminished by the move to a Times Square theatre which shows the film five times a day. The audiences--almost entirely under 25 and freaky--leave the theatre silently, seemingly entranced with a new-found religious faith, as many reviewers would have us believe, or simply stunned and horrified by what they have seen.

It would be safe to say that El Topo is the bloodiest movie ever made. There is no five-minute period of it without either a mangled body, a disemboweled animal, or a death, exaggeratedly bloody to the same degree that Hollywood traditionally exaggerates death's neatness. Blood spurts geyser-like out of bullet wounds, stabbed men vomit blood, pools of blood cover the ground. The deaths are shown lustily--the camera voyeuristically gravitates toward the worst of the blood. The deaths are surreal, lacking in lesson or meaning, worse than life.

The film was made in Mexico by Alexandro Jodorowsky, a Charles-Mansonish-looking, sincere, 40-year-old Chilean of Polish-Russian parentage who was once a member and composer for Marcel Marceau's mime-troupe. Between TV, talk shows he now runs a Mexico City theatre and writes a comic strip "Fabulas Panicas" ("Panic Fables") for a newspaper in Mexico City. Jodorowsky wrote, directed, and is the hero of the film.

"El Topo", which means "the mole", begins with a moral of sorts: "The mole burrows tunnels beneath the earth. Sometimes he reaches the surface. When he sees the sun, he goes blind." The film is fraught with this kind of heavy-handed crypticism. Perhaps Jodorowsky is telling us, with characteristic humility, that his film is the sun and we are all moles.

Jodorowsky is similarly humble in the titles he gives to the four sections of the film: "Genesis," "Prophets," "Psalms," and "Apocalypse." "Genesis" begins with a man in black leather (Jodorowsky) riding on a black horse across the desert. A black umbrella shades his head from the sun. Behind him in the saddle sits his naked son, white against his father's blackness. They stop and father says to son in a deep, forboding voice that lets you know he's saying something heavy. "Now you are a man. You are seven years old. Bury your first toy and your mother's picture." The boy obeys silently.

On horseback again, they enter a small village which has been the scene of an enormous massacre. Horses bellies are slit open, guts hanging out. Humans lie full of bullet holes. The riders dismount and wade through the puddles of blood to explore the carnage. Due to the gaudiness of the color (which continues throughout the film) the blood looks quite a bit like Ocean Spray cranberry juice. (It may in fact be Ocean Spray cranberry juice.) But one thing is definitely real--the slaughtered animals. This is Mexico, not the Land of the Free. There is no strong ASPCA leaning over Jodorowsky's shoulder.

"Who did it?" the rider-in-black asks the only man with any life left in him. The man, covered with blood, moans, "Kill me." "Who did it?" the rider insists. "Kill me." The rider hands his gun to his naked son who fires two bullets into the man's stomach.

The rider from nowhere becomes the avenger. This is the super spaghetti Western--the most surreal version of an already surreal type. Even the music sounds as if Sergio Leone had picked it.

The avenger hunts down the culprits, who are holed up in a Franciscan monastery. They have forced the monks to dress up as women, and have bloodied their asses. The avenger kills the culprits, castrates their leader, and wins the leader's captive women. Before he is killed the leader asks the man-in-black. "Who are you to judge me?" "I am god," is, of course, the reply.

The second part of the film begins as the rider abandons his son for the woman, who demands, as a condition of her love, that he show himself to be the greatest man by killing the Four Great Masters of the Desert. He calls her Mara, which, he says, is what the Israelites called the bitter water they found in the desert. (Mara is also the name of the tempter of the Buddha.) She, along with every other woman in the movie, is portrayed as evil; all are vain, selfish, deceitful. There is only one exception, a midget, who is childish and faithful like a dog.

The men, however, are all either evil and powerful, or noble, upright and brilliant, except for the hero who becomes noble after the first half of the movie. The Four Masters are exemplary of the great-and-noble man: the first is a Hindu who concentrates so that bullets pass through him: the second is far faster and more accurate with his gun than the rider; the next is a faster sharp-shooter who has hundreds of pet rabbits (all of which we get to see die, of course); the last is an old man who uses a butterfly net instead of a gun to shoot back any bullets fired at him. The rider beats the first three Masters by treachery. The last Master tells the rider, "I have nothing. You can't take anything from me." "I can take your life," the rider responds. "But my life is worth nothing," the Master rejoins and taking the rider's gun, fires a bullet into his own heart.

The Masters spout the kind of gems of wisdom Jodorowsky loves so well: "You shoot to find yourself. I do it in order to disappear." Or, "The heart, the head--exchange them. It's time." It all gets a little wearing after an hour.

When the last Master shoots himself, Jodorowsky freaks out, and runs around pulling at his hair and yelling at God for having forsaken him. Meanwhile, Mara has taken up with a stereotypical lesbian, who dresses in black, wears black mascara and a black Sassoon haircut. The lesbian shoots him six times, but he keeps walking, arms outstretched and with stigmata bleeding at the hands and feet, until Mara shoots him and he crumbles to the ground and is hauled away by a group of dwarfs and cripples.

He appears to be a hopeless case, but in the third section of the film, we find him resurrected, perhaps 20 years later, and being worshipped by a group of deformed and grotesque people inside a cave. They have been imprisoned there by the people of a nearby town, so that the townspeople will not have to see the results of generations of incest.

The rider becomes the penitent, shaves his head and commits himself to the task of digging a tunnel out of the cave. Because he is bigger and stronger than all the prisoners, he can climb out of the cave. With the dwarf women who took care of him on his back, he goes into the town to collect money by begging for supplies to dig the tunnel. The town is an exaggerated stereotype of a Hollywood Western town; boorish, fat old women in 1890's dresses, who ooh and aah as they watch two men kill each other; black slaves branded (before your very eyes, naturally), lynched, and accused of rape by lecherous women.

When the penitent and his dwarf woman ask to be married in the town church they discover that the priest is none other than the abandoned son. The son wants to kill his father for abandoning him, but agrees to wait until he has finished digging the tunnel.

The tunnel is finished in the fourth section, and the crippled come running out of their cave toward the town and are met by a barrage of rifle fire. When the penitent arrives they are all dead. The townspeople shoot him also but he refuses to die and picks up a gun and again, as the avenger, kills all the townspeople. The only survivors are his dwarf wife, their newborn son, and his priest son. The penitent pours kerosene over himself and self-immolates, leaving the other three to ride off into the desert, and keep civilization going (or perhaps star in a sequel).

Jodorowsky borrows heavily from many other directors--notably Bunuel, Fellini, Peckinpah, and Leone. In trying to outdo his forebears with greater bloodshed, deformity and perversion, he fails to realize anything more subtle, anything transcending what he shocks you with. El Topo is intensity for the sake of intensity. Jodorowsky's attempts at anything but horror are sad failures: a scene of Mara discovering the world outside of her monastic confinement looks like a bad Tampax ad.

The film leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. So many animals are slaughtered, so many deformities are shown, that I must conclude that Jodorowsky is exploitative. He hopes to turn shocks into dollars.

The extent to which El Topo is just another exploiter of the youth-freak market is indicated by the fact that the film is being released by the producer of three of the Beatles and that a record is now out of "Music from 'El Topo'.' Maybe they'll start selling packaged guts.