Film Review: El Topo (1970)

An acid drenched version of Sodom and Gomorrah that sucks you right into a surreal vortex towards a strange journey towards enlightenment.

Wandering through the desert with the sun beating down on you, soon enough the heat will start to twist and turn your mind in odd directions and the world will not look the same anymore. You come across a town full of slaughtered corpses, is it a mirage or reality? What are you doing here in the first place? You won’t find any enlightenment in the desert no matter how much mescalin you’ve taken. You didn’t even think to bring any water with you. Go back from whence you came and be better prepared next time.

Come on man, you’re getting wildly off track here. What my rambling is trying to get at is that the desert is a sprawling wasteland of freak lawlessness, absolutely anything can take the opportunity to fuck you up and there’ll be no witnesses.

Far away from the places we’ve tainted with our busy and noisy lives, the desert is one of those open, untainted lands where the effects of the universe’s naked strangeness are the most pronounced. In the stillness there oscillates the vibrational dance of life and death, because that’s what it all boils down to. Perfect place to seek enlightenment, or whatever your version of it may be. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s sophomore film, El Topo (1970) has our black-clothed protagonist wander the desert in a similar manner looking for the answer. Shooting his way to transcendence until bullets don’t work anymore. This entire film is a twisted version of Jim Morrison’s desert trip, swinging back and forth from seriously gruesome slaughter to carnivalesque insanity. I encountered some truly strange characters and bizarre occurrences along the way, the stuff of a wild wheeling acid trip where all grip is being lost. I’ll get into the nature of that in just a moment. I can tell that Jodorowsky is having a blast playing around with the filmic language, exploring the vast expanses of surrealism with blissful blindness, he’s coming to grips with his style.

How the camera moves through this desolation, expanding out into the scorching wastes and careening inwards once the body gives up through the heat. Aimlessly wandering, the camera mimics our titular character, the Mole’s, journey through the desert, shaky and tentative as he’s shooting a path for himself, but firm and resolute the closer he comes to enlightenment. If you came here looking for a resplendent colour-palette, turn away now because it’s barren, but this sterile view makes each random event even more flagrant as it stands out in firm relief from the infecund landscape. Some truly horrid symbols and signs litter this preternatural hellscape, dead animals piling up in mounds, a carnage of freaks and strange duels are only the tip of this surreal iceberg.

Things seemingly happen out of nowhere, the tone of the film crashing from grave drama to these odd silly instances where characters are acting in exaggerated, clownish ways. It caught me completely off guard and it was one of the few things that saved the runtime from skewering the film with boredom. Every character we come across seems hollow, as if an apparition or a figment of our imagination. The Mole himself, feels like he’s driven by one singular thing only, much like a regular mole who is blinded by the first sight of the sun after digging around in unending darkness for so long. Maybe his enlightenment will be just as blinding. The other characters have odd behaviours and beliefs that echo the sort of epiphanies that are waiting to detonate onto the surface with volatile realisation. Some of them are just plain stupid and the only purpose they serve is to take a bullet, which I don’t protest to at all because the death scenes are wonderful, some poor souls take their sweet time departing and make as much of a scene as they can manage.

A constant juxtaposition between Christianity and eastern spiritualism is striking, large amounts of symbolism related to these beliefs are unignorable. From plenty of Jesus imagery to the plot – if that’s what we want to even call it – unfolding in a depraved version of Sodom and Gomorrah, these images and symbols serve as caricatured commentary on Christian values and the church. Wild droves of people blindly following a figurehead, constantly looking for that next miraculous hit. Entire civilisations and generations have been done in by freakish monsters who claim a special relationship with god, this place is one of them. Meanwhile, along the way, doses of spiritualism free him from his mortal body until he self-immolates in proper monk fashion.

My ears were on the verge of exploding with how dense the soundscape is, almost like being pulled along in an aural avalanche. The screeching chatter of animals will, much like the abrupt visuals, change their tone to soothing flute harmonies. Sound is used to expert effect throughout to build tension, atmosphere and noise.

The runtime was starting to test the limits of this film as I felt that one thing rapidly led to another and then the pace dropped. A handful of the events could’ve been taken out, but without them the already delicate and thin construction of the plot would fall to bits. But I can see exactly why this film was so dear within the midnight movie circuit, this beautifully bizarre experience is an alternative to a religious high.