John Wayne has left the horse

El Topo is really not your typical Western

Mark Holcomb

It's impossible to consider this bizarro anti-Western outside the context of its time. By 1970, the year of El Topo's initial U.S. release, the counter-culture—all but completely compromised by its political enemies as well as its own goofy adherents, and happily co-opted by corporate carpetbaggers—had congealed into hedonistic self-indulgence, blinkered utopianism and moral exhaustion. Chilean auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky responded with the definitive document of the final throes of the hippie heyday as well as the unwitting opening volley of the coming Me Generation: A visually sumptuous, philosophically obtuse (head) trip up the ass of its messianic maker, El Topo was and remains a sui generis work of masturbatory art that elicits fits of passion and derision in pretty much equal measure.

It's also a movie that deserves to be seen projected onto a screen, so ABKCO Films' current U.S. theatrical re-release—the first in more than 30 years—is a true cinephile's blessing. (Alas, ABKCO isn't screening the new digitally restored version struck for the film's upcoming DVD release.) El Topo's elliptical plot is a feat of relentless, overblown symbolism and aesthetic self-aggrandizement—imagine equal parts The Wild Bunch, Aguirre: The Wrath of God and TV's Kung Fu—so it benefits from an oversized presentation in a way few films do.

Jodorowsky himself (who else?) plays the titular gunfighter who, with his young son (the director's real-life child, Brontis) in tow, stumbles across a village massacre while wandering through a desert. El Topo slaughters the responsible bandits and rescues a woman (Mara Lorenzio) they've enslaved, who leads him on a search for four gunslinging masters as well as on a few naked frolics. Leaving the boy behind with an order of monks he's liberated, our hero hooks up with a mysterious woman in black (Paula Romo), defeats the four masters, achieves enlightenment and goes it alone when the two women fall for each other and literally dump him. Things really get weird at this point, as El Topo hibernates underground for many years before becoming the spiritual leader to a group of deformed cave dwellers and leading them above ground to yet another massacre—and to his now-grown son.

Clearly, they don't make 'em like this anymore. El Topo's primary draw is in the way it looks, moves and sounds; even the cheesy score by Jodorowsky and Nacho Mendez is somehow ideal. The director makes marvelous use of the film's rugged Mexican locations, and his stringently formal tableaux—a stylistic signature—are at once organic and starkly iconic. Cinematographer Rafael Corkidi's fluid, gently stalking tracking shots are equally impressive, and the bellowing animal sounds that routinely overwhelm the soundtrack give the proceedings a bold, nightmarish quality.

Then there's the story. Admirable in scope if not in depth or coherence, El Topo's narrative adds up to little more than misogynistic, numbingly violent stoner porn that occasionally tilts toward the sexual variety (albeit with a refreshingly anti-establishment/anti-clerical bent). Moreover, such elements as animal death, exploitative use of deformed and likely impoverished extras and full-frontal child nudity are suspect by any era's standards. Therapeutic intentions notwithstanding, ladling industrial-grade mysticism and spaghetti-Western genre conventions over one's private obsessions does not a masterpiece make.

Yet for all its weird imbalance, El Topo—like the films of David Lynch and precious few others—is more inclined to interrogate reality than slavishly duplicate it, and that's something sorely lacking in cinema. If for no other reason than that and El Topo's singular visual beauty, Jodorowsky has earned his shaggy spot in the canon, and his mind-blowing oeuvre deserves its longevity.

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