Had Pulp Fiction’s Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) carried through on his thought to quit being a drug dealer’s enforcer and ‘walk the earth’ like Cain in the 1970s television series Kung Fu, he might well have entered the land of El Topo.
This pop-expressionist Western is easily as fascinating as it is odd to watch, following gunfighter-metaphysician El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, who also directed the film) as he encounters earthly beings and evildoers, cross-dressers and misfits, a pair of women who could be the light and dark sides of his soul, and four master gunfighters—a fakir, a guru, a flute-playing bodhisattva, and a Zen adept—among many others in the desolate desert wastes and under the high, unending blue skies of northwest Mexico.
The movie is in essence El Topo’s quest, first to overcome a series of masters, then to overcome himself. To seek out the masters, he tells a companion: “The desert is circular. In order to find them we have to travel in a spiral.” That may sound like high-flown malarkey; the cool thing is, this view seems to inform the way director Jodorowsky imagined and filmed the story.
What makes this movie really sing is that it unfolds in expressive, beautifully composed shots, especially the medium shots, which stay with a viewer long after the credits roll.
There is a rich diet of sex and violence mixed in with dollops of the kind of pop philosophy that since has beaten its well-worn way into countless self-help books; the blood looks more like bright red paint and, more often than not, the sex is something inflicted on the weak by the powerful. But the sex and violence are so offbeat that they tend to fascinate rather than to arouse or repel.
Bad guy vaqueros, banditos, and bullies turn out to be shoe fetishists, cross-dressers, obsessives and zanies more out of the crackpot imagination of Terry Gilliam and his Monty Python colleagues than the cruel and usual pistoleros of Tombstone and Dodge City, though this movie’s backbone is the traditional Hollywood horse opera.
The settings and landscapes derive from the vernacular of the Great American Western drama, from the massacred Mexican pueblos that would not be out of place in spaghetti westerns to the white Victorian clapboard frontier town under the thumb of its ‘League of Dignified Women’ (La Liga de Mujeres Dignas), hexed by the league’s twisted moralism—and its ubiquitous black on white eye-in-the-pyramid banner.
The film also is filled with a grand curiosity headshop of mumbo jumbo from eastern and western religious traditions: its titled main parts appear to allude loosely to Scripture—Genesis; Prophets; Psalms; and Apocalypse—though not in any readily apparent way, and set in a Roman Catholic country, the movie’s imagery and symbolism draw heavily yet not exclusively on Roman Catholicism.
In the beginning, El Topo (The Mole), a gunslinger in black leather travelling with his naked seven-year-old son (Brontis Jodorowsky) behind him in the saddle, has his son ‘put away childish things’ by burying his teddy bear and a photograph of his mother in the sand. El Topo avenges two massacred villages, then abandons his son to make his own way in the world.
‘Genesis’—Leaving his son behind, El Topo rides off into the desert with a young woman, Mara (Mara Lorenzio), to find and challenge the four master gunfighters. He encounters the First Master (Héctor Martínez—‘El Borrado’), a loin-clothed ascetic with a pair of helpers—one with no arms who carries the other with no legs who carries a pistol and a lantern; and then the Second Master (Juan José Gurrola), an Indian Cossack large as a bear, in a full gray fur coat and black astrakhan hat, devoted to a tarot-reading gypsy. Another woman (Paula Romo), a dark, gunslinging stranger in black leather, joins El Topo and Mara.
‘Prophets’—El Topo finds and challenges the Third Master (Victor Fosada) a musician and herder of rabbits who shot for the heart when he should have shot for the head; and the Fourth Master (Agustín Isunza) and old man in the dunes who traded his revolver for a butterfly net. At the successful end of this quest, El Topo renounces his supremacy; the women (who bonded while fighting each other on the dunes with bull whips) turn on him and cause him to suffer a ‘passion’—i.e., he is ‘stigmatized’ by pistol shots to his hands, feet and side.
‘Psalms’—El Topo is reborn into a new life as a demigod of the halt, lame, and deformed who rescued and nurtured him, whom the nearby town has imprisoned in the bowels of a mountain. Back among men as a man of peace in a monkish frock, El Topo resolves to free these people by digging a tunnel through the mountain. In the course of his work, he impregnates Mujercita (Jacqueline Luis), the ‘small woman’ who serves him, clowns and begs with him. The town’s religion—a false charismatic faith built on Russian roulette played with a blank charge, practiced in a former Catholic church—is debunked after a young monk (Robert John) replaces the blank with a bullet and a small boy shoots himself.
‘Apocalypse’—The young monk is El Topo’s now adult son. El Topo meets his son once more; the son swears to kill him, and dons his father’s black leather gun-slinging togs. Working with his son, El Topo finishes the tunnel and frees the cave people to return to the town, but the townspeople massacre them when they arrive. As this happens, El Topo’s second son is born on the mountain. In his anger, El Topo massacres the townspeople, then sets himself alight in the center of the town like Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who immolated himself in the streets of Saigon in 1963—an iconic image of the Vietnam War. El Topo’s adult son rides off with Mujercita and his infant half brother, completing the circle and ending the film.
This synopsis barely scratches the surface, but one may find it helpful to start with a strip map because the story this film tells is all about The Journey and experiencing the bizarre, grotesque, entertaining, and intriguing sights and scenes along the way.
Link to the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceHH3QGXvNw
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