Wednesday Western: 'El Topo' (1970)

Trying to write about "El Topo" took me by surprise. The short version is: The movies I admired in my 20s look and feel different to me now that I’m married and have kids.

I guess I didn’t expect parenthood to change my worldview entirely, including my standards and expectations for art.

So this week’s Wednesday Western is not about examining a film we all love. This is instead the story of a grown man looking back at the corduroy bell-bottoms he was famous for in college, back when the world was fundamentally different.

Weirder than weird

About a decade ago, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was a hero of mine. His 1973 film “The Holy Mountain” blew my mind. I watched it once a week, then branched into Jodorowsky’s other films, hoping to find another as beautifully strange.

I was not disappointed. Soon I stumbled upon “El Topo” (Spanish for “The Mole”), which the BBC deemed “the weirdest Western ever made.” It quickly replaced "The Holy Mountain" as my favorite Jodorowsky film. Not only did the Chilean-born director write the script, he scored the soundtrack and played the starring role.

Watching it today, however, I find plenty to be disappointed about.

Be warned: This is the weirdest movie we’ve examined so far on Wednesday Western. It will not sit right with many of you.

By the end of this article, you’ll be equipped with everything you need in order to make a decision: Should I even watch “El Topo,” which Jodorowsky himself described as “LSD without LSD”?

Acid Western

In a review of the film, the New Yorker coined the term "acid Western" to describe “El Topo.” The New York Times used the term “psychomagical realism.”

Few directors have captured the possibilities of surrealism better than Alejandro Jodorowsky.

"El Topo" has served as a license to be weird for many directors, writers, and actors, earning praise from an array of artists, including Frank Ocean, Marilyn Manson, David Lynch, Peter Gabriel, Peter Fonda, John Lennon, The Mighty Boosh, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Patton Oswalt, the chubby little guy from the show "King of Queens."

During an interview, Jodorowsky said, “I wanted to do an image that a person will never forget in his life, to create mental change. To reach a state of enlightenment.”

The shadowy hero of this hallucination is the eponymous El Topo, whom we find wandering the desert on horseback with his naked son, Hijo, which is Spanish for “son.” They encounter a village that has just been ruthlessly gutted, the bodies of its citizens and animals lining the mud — Jodorowsky used actual dead horses.

Where you can find it

The easiest way to watch is probably via the Internet Archive or Vimeo.

Amazon Prime: $4.09 to rent; AppleTV: $19.99 to buy (I do not recommend this).

If none of those work, shoot me an email at kryan@blazemedia.com and I’ll get you sorted.

Anti-Westerns

The “El Topo” ratio is interesting: Most Western aficionados who aren’t as interested in other genres don’t like “El Topo,” if they’ve even heard of it. Meanwhile, “El Topo” is huge among movie snobs and eccentric cinephiles who don’t typically like Westerns. In this, it resembles "Brokeback Mountain," which I will not be covering.

Compare this to, say, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” which is lauded by both groups, or “Heaven’s Gate,” which is largely reviled by both (more on this in an upcoming entry).

Which brings us to another reason that "El Topo" may prove divisive for Wednesday Western readers: its status as an “anti-Western."

This was a term coined by Robert Altman to describe his iconic "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," which Screen Rant's Ben Sherlock writes “subverts and upends just about every trope of the genre in the bleakest, most cynical way possible.”

By now, you can guess where I stand on any movie or director whose goal is to “subvert and upend” a genre that, instead, should be enjoyed and preserved.

The terminology strikes me as a bit silly and pretentious. The presupposition is that Westerns didn’t become rebellious — or authentic — until the postmodern geniuses waved their wands and created morally ambiguous movies.

Budd Boetticher’s Ranown Cycle alone belies this claim.

To make things worse ...

As you may have gathered by now, Jodorowsky is a weirdo. In “El Topo,” he slaughtered a few dozen rabbits to use as set dressing. He also killed horses and sheep and at least one frog. He has since claimed that he killed all of the animals himself.

If that weren’t enough to polarize us, there’s the rape scene.

In his book “El Topo: A Book of the Film” (1972), Jodorowsky wrote: “I really raped her. And she screamed."

In 2019, the story emerged, and New York's El Museo del Barrio canceled an exhibit devoted to Jordorowsky’s work.

Jodorowsky waved away the controversy:

These words: ‘I’ve raped my actress,’ was said fifty years ago by El Topo, a bandit dressed in black leather that nobody knew. They were words, not facts, Surrealist publicity in order to enter the world of cinema from a position of obscurity. I do not condone the act of rape, but exploited the shock value of the statement at the time, following years in the Panic Movement and other iterations of harnessing shock to motivate energetic release.

In an interview with the New York Times, Jodorowsky’s wife, Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, insisted that her husband is a “respectful, generous, and deeply good man,” that he has “never raped anyone,” and that he’s the victim of “attacks, scandals, intimidations, threats, slanders.”

To complicate the matter, Jodorowsky claims that his own mother is the child of a rape.

"There are terrible fathers and mothers. I show that already in 'Santa Sangre.' I myself come from a crazy family of raped immigrants in misery. My mother's mother was raped by a Cossack. My mother was born from rape. And I was born in 1929, the year of crisis."

Artist as jester of the universe

During a 1973 interview, Jodorowsky loosened from talk of the movie he was promoting and, in his elegant yet broken English, defined the artist as the jester of the universe.

When traversing Jordorowsky’s surreal and symbol-inundated imagery, this idea is helpful. The weirdness of his work is by nature playful. It is of course philosophical, spiritual, political, religious — all of those. But it functions clearest when appreciated as play.

“El Topo” has done a lot not just for Westerns but for film overall.

Criterion Collection detailed the four-decade career of Ben Barenholtz, beginning with the French "Les Enfants Terribles," followed by “Night of the Living Dead,” the original, in 1968. That year, he opened Elgin Cinema in New York City, where he began screening experimental movies at midnight.

“El Topo” is responsible for making the midnight movie a staple of American cinema.

Still, Jodorowsky’s prestige has waned in my little cinematic universe. Knowing the full story of "El Topo" — the animal cruelty, the accusation of rape — I couldn’t re-watch the movie that I once found so compelling.

A father now, I have to wonder what kind of man would unearth pure evil and total death with the giddiness of a deranged scientist.