One of the most successful films now playing in New York hasn't even opened here yet. That is, officially. It's a Mexican film called El Topo (The Mole), and it's a two-hour-plus, surreal fantasy, which, since New Year's, has been playing midnight shows (1 A.M. on Fridays and Saturdays) at the Elgin Theater, on Eighth Avenue near l9th Street. With a handful of reviews in the underground press and none to speak of in the straight press, the film has been attracting capacity audiences, many of whose members are apparently repeaters who come back to turn on and to be turned on.
The film's local sponsor, Douglas Films, and the management of the Elgin have done practically no fommal advertising. When they are extravagant, they add to the regular Elgin ads the tagline: "El Topo at midnight." Even so, there has become attached to El Topo the sort of multi-leveled chic that makes it a required experience for the experience-collecting young, and that has, on a couple of occasions, I'm told, practically emptied Elaine's at that point in the evening when the more aged merrymakers face the alternatives of either going home or getting into fights at the bar.
Clearly, all of this is the result of extraordinary word-of mouth, that mysterious phenomenon that once turned Abie's Irish Rose into one of the greatest hits the American theater has ever known and that, more recently, transfommed Airport into the biggest money-making movie of 1970. El Topo is by way of being this year's underground Airport, the sort of film that appears to render film criticism superfluousăwhich always sounds like a swell idea until I see the film that is supposed to score this cultural breakthrough. El Topo is no exception, and when I saw it early one recent Saturday morning, I was about equally tom between my wonder at the uncritical reverence with which the Elgin audience received the film and my impulse to say something loud and rude.
I must admit at this point that I approached the movie with mixed emotions. After all, I had just read the review by Steven Fuller in Changes, in which he said, among other things, that: "El Topo is a masterpiece as much as it is a testament to one man's genius in this decaying world. Director [Alexandro] Jodorowsky has implanted deliberately almost every conceivable symbol system known to intellectual man.... Each man reads what he wants to into the film. A. J. Weberman reads Dylan and revolutionary politics into it, as he does into everything. The reviewer from Rolling Stone reads his own ineptitude into the film by his inability to use his eyes...."
I certainly didn't want to read my own ineptitude in the movie, nor was I exactly keen on seeing some kind of reflection of my mind's weaknesses, Glenn O'Brien, in The Village Voice, had said: "[Jodorowsky's] art is too violent for the most violent nation in history. The hero is too proud, too self-conscious, and asks too many questions. But it is this very repulsion that El Topo elicits, this confusion that it reveals in weak minds, which makes it a work of cinematic cruelty, a weapon of spiritual revolution...."
Has El Topo really rendered film criticism superfluous, or is it spawning a kind of fascistic film criticism that hopes to strong-arm the opposition with suggestions of reflected ineptitude and confused minds7 I'd hazard the guess that a certain amount of the pro-criticism and of the pro-audience reaction generally is itself the result of calculated intellectual intimidation within the film itself, which has four acts subtitled "Genesis," "Prophets," "Psalms" and "Apocalypse." Now no movie that has the surface sheen of one of Sergio Leone's superior, made-in-Almeira Westems (and at least three times as much simulated blood and cruelty) can easily be described as meaningless when its first act is Genesis. That, at least, seems to be the name of this game. It is not enough, however, to say that because every man can read into a movie what he wants, the movie is an artistic meta-experience. One might just as well isolate Nathan's, on the comer of Broadway and 43rd Street, and invite the rest of us to take a trip on our various, totally subjective responses to the sights of spilt clam chowder and coagulating mustard and the smells of hot dogs coming down to room temperature.
At this point, I suppose, I should backtrack to describe El Topo, which was written, directed and co-produced by Jodorowsky, who also plays its title role. El Topo is a mythic gunman who looks very much like Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name but whose barrenly beautiful desert landscape seems to have been borrowed from Fellini and stocked with imagesăsuch as the one of a bandit sucking on the toe of a lady's slipperăused earlier and better by Bunuel. Jodorowsky is, I'm told, a Chilean, in his early forties, who has had considerable success as a stage director in Mexico City and whose first film, Fando and Lis, an adaptation of the Arrabal play, was released here last year. I somehow missed Fando and Lis, but the last paragraph of Roger Greenspun's review of that film could also apply to Jodorowsky's latest effort: "For all of its invocations of theater of cruelty, Fando and Lis hardly ever scares up anything stronger than unpleasant whimsy."
It isn't that El Topo is not about anything, but rather that it's about too much. Inventorying it is like sorting out the contents of a turkey buzzard's stomach: There is very little that's not there, but nothing much has been digested. To start with we are toldăby a title cardăthat the mole spends its life burrowing tunnels upward toward the sun, and that, when he sees the sun, he is often blinded. As moles are blinded, so once were Icarus's wings melted ăand we are off into the sort of movie that is so full of symbology that we appreciate occasional, fleeting views of plain old landscapes with nothing in them. There is, after a while, only so much that nothing can mean.
In "Genesis," El Topo rides a black stallion across the desert with his small naked son hanging on behind him. They come upon a village whose citizens have been massacred by bandits, and El Topo sets out to take revenge on the gang, which is led by a colonel who is probably God. God is eventually castrated by El Topo, His Son. In "Prophets," El Topo, who has abandoned his son to the monks, and is now accompanied by a woman more evil than Eve, undergoes a series of epic trials in his quest for knowledge, physical perfection and spiritual salvation. He succeeds in each through deception and murder, then he dies (is it in "Psalms"?), only to be resurrected in "Apocalypse," for another series of adventures that lead back to the beginning of the film.
God, original sin, Catholicism, Zen, Lao-tse, Christ, the conventions of movie Westerns, Ulysses and his Odyssey, aphorisms ("My butterfly net is stronger than your gun." "Perfection is to get lost")ăthey're all there, in a movie that is all guts (quite literally) but that has no body to give the guts particular shape or function. The movie has no life of its own. Jodorowsky is not interesting or inventive enough as a filmmaker to restructure reality, as, say, Bunuel does in his surreal classic, L'Age d'Or. He simply enumerates, catalogues, and I can believe Fuller's rather awed statement in his review in Changes that Jodorowsky's library "contains thousands of volumes covering every imaginable subject and literary period." He could be the William Randolph Hearst of the movie intellect and El Topo his rather grotesque, ego-salving San Simeon. Much has been made of Jodorowsky's excessive cruelties, as if the depiction of a world soaked in crimson paint, and in which faces disintegrate before our eyes in all sorts of fancy photographic effects, had some sort of cleansing effect ("a spiritual revolution," O'Brien calls it). The fundamental effect, however, is one of elaborate, expensive movie mechanics. How does he do it!
A number of underground critics have compared El Topo to Satyricon, which is natural enough, I guess, since Jodorowsky outdoes Fellini in his fondness for freaksăpinheads, amputees, humpbacks, and the likeăbut because the movie is without fundamental order it never succeeds in becoming anything more than a high-class sideshow. Instead of the theater of cruelty, we have an amateur theatrical of the absurd. It is also, for all of its violence, rather prim and passionless, which is partially obscured by the director's fancy camerawork. However, it's his use of things like zooms and stately pans, and his fondness for Busby Berkeley-like overhead shots, that deny Jodorowsky's real interest in "almost every conceivable symbol system known to intellectual man." It's as if he didn't trust the austerity of his vision (as Bunuel does) and felt compelled to hoke it up. The movie isn't all bad. There are a few genuinely funny and terrifying moments, such as one sequence in which four bandits set out to rape four not exactly pure monks. Then, also, the Mexican Government apparently would like to disown the film on the grounds that it's anti-Catholic. It was invited to compete at the Cannes Festival, now in progress, but the Mexican authorities reportedly refused to sanction its official showing, as a result of which it is being exhibited at the festival unofficially.
I have the feeling that the Mexican authorities are a little like the members of the Elgin audience with whom I saw the film. I was amazed when, at the end of the screening, there was so little audience response. I would have assumed that a film with this much underground reputation would have prompted cheers. There was some desultory applause, but most of the people around me seemed to want to be told whether it was good or bad, if not what it really meant. It's difficult, especially at three o'clock in the morning, to admit that you've been conned. Instead, like all those people who were taken in by the Duke and the Dauphin and their Royal Nonesuch, the audiences march out of the Elgin and urge their friends to go. It would be a terrible mistake, I suspect, to show the movie at an earlier hour.