Alexandro Jodorowsky's "El Topo" ("The Mole") speaks to a generation passionate about the possibility of transcendent experience, and it doesn't spare the "bloody truths."
A few months ago I watched Alexandro Jodorowsky’s “Fando and Lis” and the interesting documentary about the filmmaker that was included on the DVD. Jodorowsky was the director of the visionary film “El Topo,” which was released in 1970 and caused quite a stir for a couple of years and then disappeared. “Fando and Lis” was made before “El Topo” and the documentary was made later, when the filmmaker was 64 years old. He is 77 now. In part he was interviewed in his library, a large room containing thousands of books. In addition to all the books, he has also acquired, slowly over a number of years, the largest collection of comic books in Mexico. Once upon a time he made his living as a comic book artist. He was also an expert on Tarot cards. The rest of the documentary was devoted to his life as a psychological facilitator. Apparently, he has held weekly sessions with a large group of people for some time; he would ask for volunteers, and then work with them on their problems, memories, and emotional knots. From what I saw he was a more than adequate psychologist, as he scattered Zen-like insights all night long. No wonder he attracted large crowds every week.
He raised $300,000 to make the black and white film “Fando and Lis,” which for the most part was shot on the weekends. The father of one of his students financed it. Unfortunately, it was released during the Olympics in Mexico City in 1968, so the film got lost in the shuffle, overshadowed by events there. In the meanwhile he was making a living with a weekly comic strip for a major newspaper; it was called Fabulas Panicas. He also wrote three books and was very busy as a stage director. The first play he directed was Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame.” In the documentary he claims that at the time he directed at least a hundred plays, many of them experimental and controversial. He was and still is the kind of artist who works on the frontier - the further out the better. He feels comfortable out on the edge. “Fando and Lis” debuted at a time of considerable political turmoil in Mexico and during the Olympics. In the tense atmosphere the film became a cause celebre and even provoked a riot. Banned in Mexico, the film was shown in New York City to largely negative reviews. Critics were very aware, as I was, of Jodorowsky’s heavy debt to Fellini, including a similar cannibalistic ending, like in “Satyricon.” But despite all the troubles surrounding “Fando and Lis” he was able to raise another $400,000 to make “El Topo,” which compared to today’s costs, is a drop in the bucket.
Since “El Topo” hasn’t been shown anywhere for over 30 years, although pirated editions have been around, the younger generation have no idea what all the fuss was about. The “shock of the new” hit me the hardest with three films that were released between 1968 and 1971 - “2001: Space Odyssey,” “Easy Rider,” and “El Topo.” Take John Wayne, the ultimate cowboy in American movies, turn him inside out and rinse off all the Western clichés, then mix in some metaphoric and hieroglyphic thinking, and you might come close to Jodorowsky’s performance as this full-bearded surreal cowboy who travels through an imaginal world strewn with symbols and uncanny events that are never explained to the audience. This cowboy was more transcendent than the Duke. With a fine-tuned intuition Jodorowsky’s invented and embodied an image suitable for a countercultural hero. His mystic gunslinger made me think of Ed Dorn’s poetic figure, The Gunslinger, another image contrary to the conventional cowboy that we all grew up with on TV and in the movies. One critic labeled Jodorowsky’s cowboy a “demonic icon” expressive of the era. The Village Theater in New York, which is described in the book Midnight Movies as a “a sort of bargain basement countercultural Carnegie Hall which later became Fillmore East,” premiered “El Topo” on the night of 12/18/1970; it ran continuously, seven nights a week, through the end of June 1971. It did runaway business with virtually no advertising, capturing the imagination of the countercultural crowd like no other film since “2001” and “Easy Rider.”
John Lenon was so overwhelmed by “El Topo” that he instructed his manager, Allen Klein, to purchase the rights to the movie, which he did; they then changed its venue, moving it to a Broadway theater where they figured they turn their Chilean auteur into an international star and director. But things did not turn out as they supposed. The mainstream critics savaged the film, with Pauline Kael, movie critic at The New Yorker magazine, and Vincent Canaby of the New York Times, leading the charge. Kael wrote her famous review, “El Topo - Head Comics,” linking the film to Robert Crumb’s comics and the drug culture. The mainstreamers couldn’t cut the visionary expressionism of the film, the grotesque violence, baroque sexual transgressions and the freakish deformity; the obvious symbolic and surrealistic context was ignored or devalued. It was a movie about the chase for enlightenment, not another “Stagecoach” or “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Robert Crumb’s reputation has only grown over the years. Robert Hughes, for example, has called him “the Peter Brueghel of the 20th century.” But to Kael and Canaby to evoke his work was a put-down in the early seventies; at least it was to their middlebrow audience. Kael saw the violence in “El Topo’ as pandering to the young and insulting to the older generation. She saw Jodorowsky’s aesthetic as a “fundamental amorality.” (She also labeled Sam Peckinpah as a “fascist director.”) The authors of Midnight Movies, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, described “El Topo” as a “graceless amalgam” of greater talents - Bunel, Fellini, Leone, Peckinpah and Goddard.
None of the above does justice to Jodorowsky’s intentions. He attempted to speak directly, without all the usual filters and reservations, to a generation that was passionate about the possibility of transcendent experience, that did not try to avoid what Nietzsche called “bloody truths,” and for whom the issue of spiritual initiation was front and center. He used the image of ‘el topo,’ which means “the mole,’’ because he saw the spiritual seeker as someone who tunnels his or her way to the truth, or what the alchemist used to call “The Light of Nature,” a Light in the Darkness at the end of the tunnel. Only narrow-minded critics would demean those intentions as ‘Head Comics.’
The reason “El Topo” has not been available for 30 plus years is Jodorowsky had signed a contract with Allen Klein and Klein wanted him to make a film he did not want to make, “The Story of O,” a quasi-pornographic film about a female sex slave, which Jodorowsky found distasteful, so Klein withdrew “El Topo” from circulation, which he had threatened to do if Jodorowsky refused to abide by their contract. Thirty years later, the two men finally put their dispute behind them and kissed and made up, agreeing to reissue the film. Working with Klein’s daughter, Robin, Jodorowsky remastered the film, paying special attention to the color. It is now available for rent or purchase, and if we are really lucky, one of these days it’ll come through Bookmans.
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