El Topo
“The mole digs tunnels under the earth, looking for the sun. Sometimes, he gets to the surface. When he sees the sun, he is blinded.” So intones Alejandro Jodorowsky over the opening credits of his wild acid western, El Topo (1970: the beginning of something new). “El Topo” translates to “The Mole”, a central, unifying image, that takes on a double meaning here. El Topo, played by Jodorowsky himself, is a creature that thrives in the darkness. It is a modern myth; the heroic fantasy fed through the counterculture kaleidoscope. The title itself is a metaphor for the underground cinema that was emerging in the sixties and seventies. Like the mole, digging holes to emerge from the depths, El Topo found its way from the low-budget subterranean world of underground art films, into the mainstream, largely thanks to the old Elgin Theatre in New York that played it for months in 1971. Its images entranced John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who convinced Beatles manager Allen Klein to buy and release it. To this day it remains part of the cult canon: it was the original Midnight Movie. Not only is it a film about the myth of El Topo, but a film about the film El Topo. It extends its tendrils, wrapping them around itself, and in turn, around culture itself.
Sometimes to go forwards you have to go back. Though the term acid western was coined to define Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man, it has since been retroactively applied to a number of films previous to it, and El Topo has henceforth been considered one of the essential films in the genre, if not the essential film. It is a film that seeks to tap into the inherent religious aspect that always resided within the Western genre. The film opens with El Topo, dressed in all black — even his umbrella — riding into shot across the hot desert sands. He is the quintessential Man in Black of For a Few Dollars More, and more recently, HBO’s Westworld. He is the gunslinger, venturing out deep into the wilderness, facing up against the might of God and nature. Like most Westerns, it is a mythic odyssey — with its sublime depiction of vast, arid landscapes of deserts and mountains — as much as it is a road movie, focusing on the journey as much as the place.
But the acid counterculture was about zeitgeist, and Jodorowsky hopes to immediately subvert our connotations that we find in these opening images, choosing to place his own seven-year-old son — naked — on the horse with him. It is a film loaded with evocative symbols, symbols that Jodorowsky lifts from all corners of culture and mythology. Here we have the mythic symbol of the gunslinger, but the film also presents us with icons and images of Christianity, Zen, and shamanic magic.
“It is these absurd incongruities that make up most of the film’s kaleidoscopic mosaic of symbols and metaphors. El Topo owes as much to Leone as it does to the great surrealists, Buñuel and Dali.”
El Topo is also Jodorowsky’s strange love letter to the Spaghetti Western. There is one scene that is reminiscent of the legendary three-way stand-off at the climax of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — released a few years before, 1966 — where El Topo faces up against three bandits responsible for a dreadful massacre. Like Leone, Jodorowsky uses a collage of increasingly more extreme close-ups of the gunslingers’ faces to ramp up the tension, but unlike Leone, who has Ennio Morricone’s classic score pulsating underneath the action, Jodorowsky utilises the slow, high-pitched squeal of a deflating balloon to echo the unspoken countdown that builds up to the quickdraw. It is a remarkably surreal scene — one that does not match up to Leone’s stylistic craft and innovation — but one that is able to rely on its own dramatic absurdity to succeed.
It is these absurd incongruities that make up most of the film’s kaleidoscopic mosaic of symbols and metaphors. El Topo owes as much to Leone as it does to the great surrealists, Buñuel and Dali. A head picture designed for those film fanatics who were spirituality awoken in the 60s. There is always something unexpected in the surrealist set-pieces, such as each of the duels with the four masters of the universe. Resonant images — such as a symbiosis between a person without arms and another without legs who is strapped behind, acting as the other’s arms — are done with vibrant imagination. In the vision of Jodorowsky, the desert — the archetypal setting of the Western — becomes a dreamscape, more in the manner of Dali’s most famous paintings than the iconic images of John Ford’s American fantasies. Jodorowsky continues the Western tradition of a central conflict between man and nature, both literally and figuratively, and it is this journey of self-discovery that is played out upon the sandswept surrealist stage. At one point, El Topo (or Jodorowsky?) proclaims: “I am God!” Later on, he retracts this statement: “I am not a god. I am a man.” The themes of the Western are presented as an echoic hallucinogenic trip where the boundary between man and nature begin to blur. It becomes unclear where El Topo’s internal struggle begins, and the desert ends.
There are a lot of ideas packed into this offbeat hotchpotch. To divulge the film’s entire meaning is a hopeless and equally thankless task. Perhaps this was Jodorowsky’s intention all along. It plays like a two-hour long collage painting that moves at 24 frames per second. To extract every particle of meaning in a single viewing is near impossible. Like some of those great postmodern collages, it is visually striking, yet often unwieldy in its presentation. Cohesion was clearly never Jodorowsky’s goal, and it is this imperfection that arguably makes it such a fascinating work of art. But the film often falls into the trap of tedious longueurs, and it seems that El Topo has been forced by a higher entity to spiral around the desert revisiting the same encounters again and again. It can at times be wild and thought-provoking, and at others portentous and taciturn, speaking loudly but not saying much.
Perhaps the film’s greatest achievement then is its ability to exist beyond the frames of film. It is a film that reaches back to a collective culture, borrowing elements from all walks of life, but also a film that pushes forward, bringing the entire medium along with it. El Topo not only sits comfortably on a list of essential cult films, but also comfortably in the cinematic canon. Its liberating effect broke down long-standing barriers that stood not only in the realm of art and cinema, but in society. In a film that runs as red as any seminal religious text — we witness castrations, beheadings, lynchings, and massacres — a modern myth is written that hopes to encompass history in its entirety, be that by evoking the stories through which it is told, or the images through which it is presented. Traditional narrative is not so important as visual spectacle. This is cinema in pure, unadulterated form: one of cinema’s greatest genres transposed onto the acid tab of the 1960s counterculture. Jodorowsky reaches out and places it on our tongue.
