‘El Topo’ or — Sartana Trips Balls?
The Western has always been fertile ground for surrealism. The most obvious examples are the films of Sergio Leone with their references to everything from Di Chirico, Dali and Ernst. Jodorowsky takes this surrealist foundation (think Tuco from Leone’s ‘TG,TBATU’ sitting on his mule in the desert under an umbrella as a jumping off point) and runs with it big time, focusing it through the lens of psychedelia and mysticism and ending up… well, god knows where. ‘El Topo’ (1970) might start with heavy nods to Leone — the circular duelling ground, a gunslinger figure approached by three gunmen — but it’s not long before we’ve left the cinematic realm of Leone behind and plunge into a dream-world more akin to Fellini and then some.
‘El Topo’, played by Jodorowsky himself, means The Mole, although the director/star has less interest in digging through actual soil and more in furiously burrowing his way through the holes in the lattice of reality. But for what purpose? Liberation? If so is it spiritual, political or social liberation? Who knows? El Topo, like all of Jodorowsky’s central characters, is searching for the light, the light that will not only blind you but blow the top of your head off with its transcendent intensity. Yet this presents a certain problem, namely that in his quest for self-actualisation (if that’s what this quest actually is) then all collateral damage is acceptable. Anything goes on the path to enlightenment. So women are raped for their own spiritual development, animals destroyed left, right and centre and all that is fine as long as Alexandro gets his mystic rocks off. It can be pretty uncomfortable viewing. Sometimes I felt Jodorowsky was spending less time looking through his camera view-finder and more time squatting over a mirror in the desert attempting to gaze up his own anus.
But like all good colonoscopies up a heavily tumoured asshole, we are treated to sights of bloody and horrific magnificence normally hidden from us because, boy, does ‘El Topo’ hit you with the messed-up visual goodies. This is a seriously imaginative movie with Jodorowsky blasting us with his obsessions — father figures, Tarot and Tibetan disciplines, esoteric practices, cosmic geometries and women with massive asses. All fine and well even if all arcane systems, no matter how seemingly complicated, are based on relatively banal principles when you, mole-like, dig down. But maybe that’s the point.
Not that it’s all impenetrable weirdness and has, at its heart, a fairly straight forward story; it starts with the hunt for a murderous Colonel, then becomes a series of boss-fights before settling down into what might (again, I use the word ‘might’) be a political statement. But this was at the time of Vietnam and any film with self-immolation can’t help but have a political dimension, especially one with Tibetan overtones, both figuratively and musically (check out the Buddhist soundtrack for those).
‘El Topo’ might not open your mind but it will certainly open your eyes and it is cinema exactly how I love it, i.e. — freaky, fucked-up and utterly unique.
