I knew El Topo would be crazy, but I wasn’t truly prepared for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s bizarre acid Western. Jodorowsky himself stars in the film, which really consists of two parts (a series of title cards referencing the Bible further split up the film). In the first, the titular El Topo is a dangerous gunslinger who saves a town and embarks on a spiritual journey which requires him to defeat four gun masters (but not before he abandons his young son, rapes his travel partner, and cuts off a bad guy’s dick). In the second, El Topo is a peaceful mystic helping a colony of deformed outcasts tunnel out of their cave prison so that they may rejoin society. You can probably imagine how well that goes for everyone.
Jodorowsky’s vision is surreal, lurid, and uncompromising. An early vignette, in which El Topo and his naked son (don’t ask) wander through a slaughtered town that is drenched in pools of overflowing blood, is as unsettling and primal as any of the film’s endless stylistic excesses. In another scene, religious congregants play a game of euphoric Russian Roulette. El Topo is influenced by the mythicism and framing of Sergio Leone, but Jodorowsky takes that blueprint and spills a glass of LSD-spiked piss on it. El Topo turns aggressive, outlandish stupidity into an art form, treating the ridiculous as sublime.
What does it all mean? Answers range from “nothing” to “probably nothing,” but it’s certainly a hell of a spectacle. El Topo’s intoxicating mixture of pseudo metaphysics and aesthetic insanity turned it into a midnight cult classic.
But, to enjoy Jodorowsky’s El Topo is to either ignore or overlook that the man is very likely a tremendous asshole and that the film’s production was possibly criminal. There are a litany of elements here that are, in the current parlance, problematic (and I’m not even talking about the gratuitous depictions of violence and sexual degradation). El Topo fetishizes physical deformities, likely features animal cruelty, and Jodorowsky claims that he actually raped his co-star in the ugly aforementioned scene. The latter seems to be a cross between a language barrier issue (Jodorowsky has a somewhat tenuous grasp on the English language) and/or a disgusting attempt at shock value promotional tactics, but, nonetheless, El Topo is undoubtedly a no-go for many viewers on moral grounds alone (you know, besides the fact that it’s a nonsensical two hour long hallucinatory mindfuck).
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