“El Topo’s” violence is extreme and unremitting, and more calloused even than Ken Russell’s in “The Devils.” And yet, somehow, “The Devils” came over as a violent exploitation film, and “El Topo” doesn’t. These quests supply most of the film’s generous supply of killings, tortures, disembowelments, hangings, boilings, genocides, and so on. When El Topo moves out of this world, he goes first to do battle with the Four Masters of the Desert (who have black-magic connotations probably inspired by the work of Aleister Crawley), and later to help free a colony of deformed and incestuously mutated cripples. In the version according to Jodorowsky, the West is peopled largely with corpses of men and animals and the survivors are gross, obscene caricatures who follow phony gospel-mongers and practice slavery.
The movie has echoes here of Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou,” in which the characters make their way out of a gangster movie and into a musical, and wind up against their will in a Western. What he digs his way into and out of, mostly, is the Italian Western genre.
The movie begins with an observation about the mole (he spends his life digging tunnels to the sky, and when he finally sees the sun, he goes blind), and then sets its hero to actual and symbolic tunnel-digging. Jodorowsky’s hero, El Topo (the mole) devotes his life to a spaced-out quest that’s first cousin to the journeys in the Ring trilogy, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” maybe “Easy Rider,” certainly “2001,” and most obviously to the goalless, introspective missions of Eastwood’s Man with No Name. The effect resembles Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and especially Eliot’s notion of shoring up fragments of mythology against the ruins of the post-Christian era. Instead, they’re employed in a shifting, prismatic way, casting their light on each other instead of on the film’s conclusion. He makes not the slightest attempt to use them so they sort out into a single logical significance. Jodorowsky lifts his symbols and mythologies from everywhere: Christianity, Zen, discount-store black magic, you name it. I don’t think you can take the movie apart that way “El Topo” is all of a piece, and you’ve got to take the concrete with the fantasy, the spirit with the flesh. Its director, author and star, Alejandro Jodorowsky, was attacked in some quarters for using the symbols to make the violence digestible, and in other quarters for using the blood to sell the symbols. It surfaced to a normal run last November amid loud controversy. Shot on a fairly large budget in Mexico, It began its American existence as an underground cult object, playing midnight shows in New York for six months. Sinopse: El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky), um pistoleiro que veste preto, inicia uma.
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