El Topo (Jodorowsky, 1970)
|
|
|
 |
Alejandro Jodorowsky, born in the year of Pluto's discovery,* stated, "even a flower opening is violent." He is a man that sees the world constantly creating, destroying, regurgitating, and metabolizing itself while others simply see stasis. And because of this, many think that he is legitimately insane.
|
|
|
Pauline Kael called this film "a masterpiece." John Lennon referred to it as "the most powerful film I've ever seen." At the time of its release, the Los Angeles Free Press called it "The greatest film ever made."(7) However, as the millennium turned and many film institutes and critics turned a reflective eye on the past 100 years, El Topo was nowhere to be found—a forgotten curiosity relegated to the psychedelic dustheap of the countercultural peak of the late 1960's. It is difficult to pinpoint a singular origin of the current critical dismissal and unawareness of El Topo, but is rather an interrelationship of the following factors: one, the pendulum dictating the movement of cultural and socio-political zeitgeists has swung so far away the singular countercultural ethos to render El Topo's message and unique film style as nonsensical, unevocative, and unintelligible; two, the film is so lopsided in a spontaneous Dionysian and erotic upheaval of the collective Id that critical appraisal had to act as necessary repressive and authoritarian counterbalance to the film; and, three, the simple inaccessibility to the film.
The film simply cannot be viewed in a traditional sense. Like a Zen monk whacking its student to achieve a state of satori, the repetition of violence, surrealistic symbolism, and the smorgasbord of religious and occult iconography is meant to subvert waking, conditioned consciousness and speak directly to a seed deeply buried in the collective unconscious that contains the message, "the evolution of spirit in and through the human phenomenon is a painful, eternal recurrence of death and rebirth ultimately leading to redemption." Thus, the film is a brutal, exasperating immolation of the human phenomenon, a Nietzschean-Zarathustrian effigy in which the ubermensch-as-protagonist continually overcomes himself to reach a state of salvation.
El Topo is the hallucinogenic trip of a narcissistic, one-sided anti-hero infused and inflated by the life-affirming energies of the collective unconscious. Through a series of confrontations in which the hubris of his own ego is painfully and ruthlessly exorcised and annihilated from consciousness, Jodorowsky's El Topo evolves from a misogynistic and arrogant and outsider to a saintly wise fool, a bodhisattva ensnared in a web of suffering, innocently learning to see himself in others and using his gifts and talents for all.
Besides being incredibly evocative of the "Plutonic imagery", with its carrion birds, carnal suffering, desolate desert beauty, unbridled fecundity, and deep eros, El Topo's allegorical message is essentially about the right use of Plutonic power. Astrologer Robert Couteau has identified the wrong application of Pluto's energies as "The attempt to transform another person against his or her will." (8) Jodorowsky's El Topo evolves from a desirous, lecherous gunslinger dominating others to prove the efficacy of his own will to a humble martyr who helps liberate a group of deformed and downtrodden outsiders. Hence, through a powerful sequence of painful death-rebirths at the beginning of the film, Jodorowsky learns to use reapply the power of his will from "power over" to "power with." The pain involved with viewing El Topo, then, may revolve less around the sacrilegious employment of imagery, the graphic violence, and misogyny, and more around the powerful tinge latent within all of us that Jodorowsky has tapped into the predetermined fate of the human race.
|
