EL TOPO (1970)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Though I admired Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1989 SANTA SANGRE and found the 1962 FANDO AND LIS diverting, until now I never got around to watching the Chilean-French director’s most celebrated film, EL TOPO (Spanish for “the mole.”) My shortest possible review boils down to, “liked it, didn’t love it,” with a side helping of recognition for the movie’s role in launching “midnight movies” in the U.S.

 Pauline Kael dubbed TOPO an “acid western,” and it may well be that some of the film’s appeal was for viewers who wanted to take drugs while watching a movie that didn’t make big demands on attention. Jodorowsky’s weird western (wherein he also plays the title character) is a conglomeration of colorful, frenetic episodes loaded with quasi-religious symbolism, punctuated by mass quantities of sex and violence. Extreme versions of these story-elements had by that time taken on the association of young filmmakers defying the staid limitations of Old Hollywood, though in America violence remained more popular with the mass audience than sex. If anything, though, Jodorowsky seems more preoccupied with filling his landscape with a smorgasbord of sexual anomalies, ranging from rape and homosexuality to sadomasochism and even a touch of gerontophilia.  

 

The character of Topo, mounted on a horse with his young son Hijo (played by one of the director’s real sons), opens the film. Like most heroes of spaghetti westerns, Topo has no history, but he’s not obsessed like them with making a few dollars more. In fact, money is barely if at all mentioned in the flick. Topo and Hijo stumble across a town whose inhabitants have been massacred by bandits, and for reasons unknown, the outlaw (as Jodorowsky’s commentary calls him) decides to go after the bandits. He kills them all but decides to take one of their women with him. For whatever reason Topo leaves his son behind with a Franciscan monastery, never to be seen again in the movie. Topo also decides to challenge four great masters of fighting-arts who happen to live in the area. The director may have been inspired by the Hong Kong kung-fu films that were just beginning to show up on international screens, but if so, Jodorowsky undermined the appeal of such challenges by having Topo win with guile rather than strength or skill. (In the commentary Jodorowsky claims that his gunfighter-hero absorbs the skills of those he defeats, but this conceit does not translate as well as the director supposes.)

 

During these exploits Topo and his female companion are joined by The Woman in Black. The two women have a lesbian sadomasochistic encounter and the Woman in Black executes Topo with several gunshots to the body, particularly the hands and feet (one of the most obvious Christ-references in the film). Topo’s body is found and dragged to a subterranean mine by a family of “monsters.” All of them are the result of the inbreeding they’ve suffered due to confinement in the mine by the neighboring townspeople. (Possibly a reference to Christ succoring “the blind, the halt and the lame?”) Despite his being fatally shot Topo resurrects and leads the freaks to freedom—but the result are anticlimactic, as the townsfolk kill the monsters and Topo kills them—after which he takes his own life and his grave is covered by honeybees. The end.

 There are some genuinely clever visionary tropes throughout EL TOPO. In an early scene evoking the narrative of Moses, Topo makes water flow from a stone—but it’s after making violent love to his unnamed female companion, and the stone looks like a big rocky phallus. Many other scenes, however, had no particular social or religious context; they seem to be nothing more than jazzy surrealistic scenes that Jodorowsky wanted to commit to film, and his latter-day interpretations of their meaning don’t entirely convince. Strangely, throughout the movie I kept thinking that I was watching a film by a much less experienced filmmaker, say, one in his twenties—though in truth, by the time TOPO was released in U.S. theaters Jodorowsky would have been about 41.

 

One controversial scene captures the guerilla-consciousness of the filmmaker, for in publicity he claimed that he, while acting the part of El Topo, really did rape the actress playing the gunman’s unnamed female companion. Later Jodorowsky recanted that statement, claiming that he faked the story in order to provoke audiences. Today this sort of “anything goes for art’s sake” seems as far from modern sensibilities as the cavemen’s first artistic doodles.

 

The mole didn’t burrow his way into my heart, but at least his underworld journey was moderately interesting. The ABKCO DVD release also includes a sprightly-surrealistic 1957 short, “The Cravat,” about a salon where the attendants seamlessly remove people’s heads for them.