In The Holy Mountain, which followed his 1970 cult ‘midnight feature’ hit El Topo, director Alexandro Jodorowsky baked the cinematic High Theater of Religion at street theater temperature and basted it with New Age esotericism.
The result makes for a tantalizing dish, whether one finds it to be a rich confection of symbols and images geared toward self-discovery, or a psychedelic circus of head games and eye candy.
In El Topo (The Mole), a Zen master gunslinger called The Mole (Jodorowsky) burrows deep into a mountain to free an ‘underclass’ of deformed people imprisoned inside whom in the end he cannot save.
In The Holy Mountain, The Alchemist (Jodorowsky) leads a Christ-like figure called The Thief (Horacio Salinas) and a group of seven Companions to scale a mountain to seize the secret of immortality from The Nine Immortal Men who live on top.
What The Devil to make of all this, though?
As in El Topo, start with the High Theater of Religion, particularly of the flavor Roman Catholic. Picture an august array of its principal figures and symbols motoring majestically through Mexico at a high rate of speed in an ornate vehicle we’ll call ‘Seeing Is Believing.’
Hurtling just as quickly toward this Holy Assemblage from the opposite direction is the Tarot’s Chariot, here a vehicle reminiscent of Ken Kesey’s Magic Bus. The bus has the Tarot’s 21 major arcana on board, with the no ‘count Fool its Neal Cassady behind the wheel and a big hamper of alchemy instruments strapped to the roof. We’ll call this bus ‘What You See Is What You Get.’
A squeal of wheels. A loud crash. The two decks of icons shuffled in a riot of bold color under the bright Mexican sun. And from the wreckage crawls a lone gone cat, as though from a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem: ‘Christ climbed down/from His bare Tree/this year…’*
The Holy Mountain is a potpourri of inventive pop renderings of images from and references to the world’s major religions and mystic practices, from alchemy and astrology to yoga and Zen Buddhism, inlaid with an Aquarian counterculture criticism of Western capitalism and materialism.
One conceivably could dig out of this rich vocabulary of images a variety of ingenious interpretations, though one of Jodorowsky’s points seems to be along the lines of George Harrison’s ‘Beware of Maia!’ in his 1970 album All Things Must Pass—that is, do not be deceived by the illusory nature of the material world.
Incidentally, Harrison reportedly balked at a role in the film at the prospect of having to appear naked. (John Lennon likewise declined a part because he did not want to spend three months away from Yoko Ono in Mexico.)
Nevertheless, illusory images are all we have to go on. Rather than roll one’s eyes at the pop New Age symbols or take offense at the use of religious images, sit back and enjoy the spectacle. Bear in mind that Jodorowsky is a showman and his film is an act of entertainment—much as Harrison was a musician speaking for himself.
The film’s strong points are Jodorowsky's fertile and energetically inventive mind, and that he knows how to frame a shot and to tell a story in pictures. He seems to do this with an awed reverence for the process and the story that draws a viewer in and inspires the suspension of disbelief, probably the keys to a master street performer’s skill and charm.
The Holy Mountain opens with The Alchemist, clad from head to toe in black with a high-crowned, wide brimmed black hat, ritually cleaning a matched pair of lovely naked young blonde women who appear only in this opening scene.
Next, The Thief, a young derelict with a full beard, dead drunk in a muddy village lane, is revived by The Crippled Man (Basilio González), a man with stumps for arms and legs, and transported to and placed upon a cross by a ‘Lord of the Flies’ band of naked boys.
This may sound like a gratuitous amount of nudity, but it is ‘equal opportunity’ nudity and it fits into the fabric of the narrative. The images are not prurient, simply the costumes in which certain characters appear in their given scenes.
Awakened when the boys start throwing rocks at him, The Thief climbs down from the cross and chases them away, setting into motion his journey, accompanied by The Crippled Man, to a Latin American town filled—among many, many other things—with bright, elaborate and abundant images from Roman Catholicism, repressive soldiers killing young people, rows of local women ironing bloody clothing, and clueless middle aged Yankee tourists in sombreros.
After witnessing a ‘reenactment’ of the Conquest of Mexico performed by a ‘circus’ of toads in tiny Spanish conquistador armor and brown monastic robes against horned toad ‘natives’ caped and cowled in feathery ceremonial Aztec finery, The Thief ascends a high tower where he encounters The Alchemist, now dressed in white.
The Alchemist’s attendant, The Written Woman (Ramona Saunders), a statuesque Negress with long steel fingernails, marked with Hebrew letters and mystical tattoos, removes a squid in blue blood from a boil in The Thief’s neck. The Alchemist turns The Thief’s excrement to gold. The two begin their quest to The Holy Mountain.
The Alchemist completes his team with seven materially successful ‘seekers’ with sci-fi names and the attributes of planets, who would appear to embody Western cultural weaknesses similar to the seven deadly vices. During the quest, each must purify himself by overcoming his personal vice.
Legend has it that Nine Immortal Men live on top of The Holy Mountain. The Companions travel by sea to Lotus Island where The Holy Mountain is located, intending to scale the mountain and rob its nine incumbents of the secret of their immortality.
And like a blow from a Zen master’s staff, the story ends with a twist.
Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHiA3w6Y3KA
Link to MP's El Topo review: http://moompitchers.blogspot.com/2011/04/kaleidoscopic-cult-western-all-about.html
*From Christ Climbed Down, a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in A Coney Island of the Mind, A New Directions Paperback No. 74; New York, 1958.
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