El Topo is not a western. It goes beyond any western.It is not a religious film. It contains all religions.
It is a mystic film.El Topo is bloody. It is tender. It is sexual.
El Topo is marvelous and terrible.
It’s funny. It’s violent.
El Topo is monstrous and cruel.
El Topo is more than spectacle. It is an event for all your life.
-from the movie's trailer
Though it begins as many westerns do – with a grim and weathered gunslinger rinding in from the desert waste - Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 film El Topo is only superficially a western. We’ve seen this before in countless other westerns – with Wayne or Cooper or Eastwood. But El Topo is different, disturbingly so.
With this gunslinger rides a naked little boy. Why is he naked? This is only the first of many enigmas within El Topo.
There is minimal dialogue. Little is explained.
To explain would obviate the need for the movie. To explain would be to short cut the journey. And if it is anything, El Topo is about a journey, a journey toward spiritual enlightenment.
In the first half of the film El Topo (the Mole) battle four master gunmen in order to win the love of a woman who has convinced him to become the greatest gunman in the land. El Topo soon realizes that he cannot win against these Masters in a fair fight. Their skill outstrips his, and they have spiritual lessons to teach him if he would only submit to their teaching. Instead he resorts to trickery and lies in order to defeat them.
And this is his undoing. In winning he loses everything and is left to die alone in the wilderness.
The second half takes place many years later. He was rescued by a community of subterranean deformed outcasts. He vows to realize the lessons of the four masters and to rescue the underground dwellers. He performs tricks and stunts in the neighboring community to beg money for his project. El Topo (the Mole) needs money to buy dynamite in order to dig a tunnel to free his adopted community.
The residents of this neighboring town are as spiritually deformed as the underground outcasts are physically. They abuse and molest and murder and oppress the poor. They worship the all-seeing-eye-within a pyramid – and insist that God loves them and God wants them to be rich and that nothing bad will ever happen to them. They play Russian roulette and proclaim each empty chamber a miracle until a small boy shoots himself in the head.
The movie has its own spiraling circling logic. The desert is a spiral. To find the way through it El Topo has to travel in a circle - and it makes little sense to evaluate the movie except within its own context. Jodorowsky uses Christian and Eastern religious symbols – but does so in his own idiosyncratic fashion.
This isn’t an easy film. It is violent and it is cruel. But for those who would, like El Topo, dig through its complexities and its difficulty there might be the light of the sun – or there might be only madness and death.
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