Alejandro Jodorowski Revisited

Jodorowski Revisited.

“I AM NOT GOING SO FAST TO CATCH THE DEATH NOR TOO SLOW FOR THE DEATH TO CATCH ME, A FILM EVERY SEVEN ANNUAL CYCLES IS ENOUGH.”

“EVERY DAY THE NEWSPAPER INSULT ME, EVERY DAY I HAVE A NEW PROBLEM WITH SOCIETY”

ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKI.


Essay by Oswaldo Pérez Cabrera originally appeared in Cannibal Culture, Cine Muerte magazine in Vancouver.


Jesus walks naked through the streets of Mexico City followed by a horde of whores while the military police bastards dance with their gas masks after having their blood feast. An elephant spits blood from his hose-trunk only to have his mortuary service as food to hundred of homeless mud people. A nine-year-old child ends the misery of an agonizing man with his pistol surrounded by a pool of blood in a desert old western town. Old women bet the right to kiss a fat stud in his underwear in the middle of a deserted mountain. Parades of freaks marching almost imperially - war toys designed to be used by conditioned children - orgies, massacre, death, spiritual life, and twisted religions. Welcome to the bizarre world of Alejandro Jodorowski, the Chilean multi-artist who can be considered one of the few citizens of the world and other dimensions, a term that every one of us should hang on our chest.
A lot has been said about his movies, and a lot more has been said about his other artistic expressions: mime artist, performer, happenings artist, theatre, comic, founder of the panique movement (with Moebius and Fernando Arrabal) and the horror circus, tarot card master, Psycho Magic, collaborator of the magazine Heavy Metal, etc. Yet, it is hard to classify his movies. We know they are considered cult films, but are they gore? Horror? Surrealistic? Mystic? Religious? Grotesque? We can draw one conclusion: His movies are all of that and more. People bleed, religions are questioned and satirised, the human mind is deeply explored, art is carried to the limits of the fantastic, music is used to disturb us as well, surreal images and symbols are a constant. We are required to see his films several times and everytime a new element or symbol will pop in our mind. Animals are used to play with our psyche and emotions. Sex and nudity are exploited as a natural part of our twisted society. Basically, if you are dumb, or have an unnatural moral, a square mind, and are easily disturbed, then don’t waste your time, and continue with your boring, routine life. In fact, if that is the case then you should stop reading this article as well. This will leave us with approximately 20% of the world population - the ones who are really thinking beyond their routines. Maybe I am being generous with the human race.

Art, sex and human values are taken to the extremes, so now you know, you have been warned. At one time Jodorowski said about his warped movies: “I think that if you want to change the world, you must first change the actors in the picture. And before doing that you must change yourself right? This must be done… I must kill myself and I must be born again… The audiences must be assassinated, killed, destroyed, and they must leave the theatre as new people. This is a good picture.” 1971.
He did what was stated above with his actors in “The Holy Mountain in 1972, as well as to himself in “El Topo” in 1969, and he was planning to do it in the movie that never was made, but promised to be a masterpiece of all arts combined: “Dunes”. Jodorowski was supposed to direct the project that was full of geniuses, such as Jean Girard (“Moebius”), a cartoon artist and designer with whom Jodorowski had collaborated before in the artistic comic world; H.R. Giger, who at the time was an unknown young artist, was supposed to design the … well that requires no further explanation and also Dan O’ Bannon, who later wrote the screenplay for Alien. The music was going to be composed by Pink Floyd and in the character of the Mad Professor (charging a fortune) the master of dimensions, the crazy genius, Salvador Dali. The project was abandoned after two years of work. In my personal opinion, I think that David Lynch (despite his artistic success with his films, Eraserhead and the Elephant Man) was not the right person to direct the film (which was adapted from the novel of Frank Herbert). This movie would have been a precursor to the Star Wars phenomenon but Hollywood didn’t believe in sci-fi movies and least of all a long expensive sci-fi movie. In the end, Jodorowski’s surrealistic vision will never be imitated.
I will give you a brief synopsis of four of his masterpieces, so you can go by yourself in this trip of mindscapes, gore, and dreamscapes.
“Fando y Lis” was considered to be lost for almost 30 years, a psychedelic trip that remains us of landscapes from Dante’s Inferno and weirder characters than those that Alice found in Wonderland. The movie had its premier, as strange as this sounds, in the Acapulco Film Festival in 1969; the outcome of the festival was as strange as it sounds as well, the cinema was destroyed and the director barely escaped. Mexico wasn’t prepared for this kind of surrealisms. Fando y Lis is a young couples that is looking for the mythic lost city of Tar where all their wishes should be granted. Lis can’t walk what makes Fando the head and the abusive part of the couple. In their trip they are descending into a mad world that makes Mad Max looks like a kids’ fair. The film is made in Mexico with Mexican actors. The film is based on a play by the multimediatic artist Fernando Arrabal and the two actors Sergio Kleiner and Silvia Mariscal are obliged to twist in a mime kind of way through the whole movie.
The trailer of that time which included a drawing of Fando standing on top of Lis who is pictured with six arachnid legs contains the next phrases which I believe will suit the description of the movie better. “An erotic odyssey…through the perverse…the phallic…the mystic…and the sadistic” “A trip into a Dantean inferno where no act is pagan or profane” or logical they might add, the movie is full with surrealistic allegories where everything it just could’ve been one of your nightmares. The film is a real mindbender trip of hallucinating nature.
El Topo, the film that catapulted the Chilean filmmaker to cult status, filmed in 1969 reminds us of a spaghetti western and opens when Jodorowski himself “El Topo” and his son are walking in a town where everybody has been murdered. We can see men women and children surrounded by pools of blood. The kid who is 9 years old has to finish off a dying man with his pistol. After that, father and son begin a quest to discover who has made this bloody parade. The next scenes include a showdown with three bandidos who are taken down by the guru-like Jodorowski. Women-like Catholic priests are humiliated and raped by brainless men under the orders of a sadist and meticulous colonel who also has a submissive woman. Everybody is saved from this hellish slavery by El Topo. The animals presented in these scenes are pigs. Why? It is the beginning of the journey (the first part of the movie called the Genesis) to achieve the Nirvana - the maximum knowledge. The castration of the church and the elimination of the military forces and dictatorships mark the Genesis. El Topo begins his quest joined by the submissive woman meanwhile leaving his son with the effeminate priests. He now has to find the true masters and kill them, sucking their knowledge. The first one is a fakir type who is served by two freaks that together make a grotesque symbiosis. He predicates meditation and at the end El Topo deceives the master and kills him along with the two- part human creature. The second master is deep in the desert. He and his companion look like Hungarian gypsies and predicate perfection, but one must kill vanity to trick perfection and at the end with the symbol of a lion El Topo cheats and kills them.
The second part is called “The prophets” and began with the quest to find the third master who is an Indian harvesting a horde of rabbits. All the rabbits died when El Topo arrives and because too much perfection is a mistake, he wins by lying again. The fourth master who lives in the centre of the desert is a maharishi, a guru type who taught the ultimate lesson and humbly kill himself before the eyes of El Topo who is now the deceive one.
El Topo finds another woman, a devilish lady who started introducing masochism and lesbianism into the trio. The women later planned to kill El Topo who is left in a comatose state and is rescued by a freak community that lives underground. The third part or the “psalms: began here when he adopts a Hare Krishna look after a revelation and became the Shaman and Messiah of the freaks, whose purpose was to emerge to the surface. It was written that El Topo was the chosen one to help the community to leave the depths, but in the surface a strange society rules, a combination of a western town full of Masons, Lutherans, Slaves, Aristocrats, and a political religious party. Then the last part of the movie or the Apocalypse began when the midgets and freaks came to the upper world after all the sacrifices of El Topo and his midget lover. There are more surprises and symbols (the symbols are used in the way we use them now; they stick into our minds in form of subliminal messages. He explores some of the weapons of manipulation) to come, but is not the intention here to give away the movie, but only to give glimpses of it. El Topo ignores all traditional approaches to narrative and characterisation to become an innovative film.
The next movie and more psychedelic is The Holy Mountain, filmed in Mexico City in 1972. It is about a Master who recruits 9 thieves and teaches them to kill themselves in order to seek the great masters in the Holy Mountain; of course the movie is again full of symbolisms. Animals are a constant, like in a scene where the conquest of Mexico is represented by iguanas and frogs in a model of Tenochtitlan; the scene becomes bloody when the Spaniards take the city. We can see the freaks as an important part of his filmography, the rediscovery of aesthetics, the occidental beauty is questioned, and our heroes are mostly ugly to our conception. One of the thieves is a representation of Christ who has a horde of whores following him. He is beaten up and used as a marketing device and finds himself surrounded with hundreds of images of himself. So after this new birth and beginning, he enters the world of the Hermetic, Alchemy and chromatic psychedelic contained in a concrete tower. The thieves, who will go on a quest for the ultimate truth, are represented by the planets and put in a fantastic, apocalyptic, doomed and even crueller world than the one we live in. The first thief is Venus, who represents beauty, sex, polygamy, appearance, masks, sex slavery, and other perversions. The industry is bizarre love. Then we have the thief represented by Mars, which as a god of war shows weapons, bombs, but also polygamy, sex slaves, religion and dogs. Klen is the next one and represents Jupiter and we see fish, hedonism, art, and sexual art like the giant electric vagina (which has orgasms). Sel comes from Saturn, and is the one in charge of conditioning the children to create war with other human races (in this specific time the Peruvians) to exterminate them and keep the economy rolling, the industry is the war toys and is linked directly to the government and politics. Uranus explores the Oedipus complex, communications, and is the bizarre advisor to the president. Neptune is the chief of police and is perverse, evil, foments a cult of killing and of course, bloody massacres can be seen. Pluto is the games, art nouveau, housing, the industry is the coffins. The last one of course is our Christ. So they are trained to join their powers as one and began their hallucinatory trip by burning their money and killing themselves to reborn as one being in their true essence. They take powerful drugs and go to places like the huge graveyard bar, where you can find all the people that were in search of the masters but preferred to stay in this crazy purgatory. Again, the end and the rest of the adventures are totally pshycotropic so I cannot go any further with the rest of the descriptions. This film is a strong critic of the modern societies and in particular de developed countries.
In the last movie of this article Santa Sangre filmed in Mexico City in 1989, Jodorowski teams with the Italian master of horror Dario Argento as a producer and cast his son (Adan Jodorowski) as the main character. The story is based on a serial killer that terrified Mexico City in the 50’s: Goyo Cardenas who murdered tens of women. Again Jodorowski plays with the animal symbols and the surrealistic that comes inherent with the most populated city in the world. The story is developed in the circus, and starts as a love story between the young killer and a young mime after the mother’s church is tear down by the government and the catholic religion. The story focuses also on the cults. The killer’s mother is defending her religion based on a woman who lost her arms when a couple of thieves rapped her. According to the faith, the blood left a pool where they built the temple. Later the mother will suffer the same fate as her idol. The picture depicts a bizarre and macabre life in the circus, however full of art, theatrical and mime expressions as well as music and dance. The movie is beautifully gory.
Then we see the killer escape from a mental institution and reunites with his armless mother and the killing begins along with the unique vision of Mexico’s low life scenarios and semi-cultural life. The love interest is played by Sabina Dennison and is a deaf mute girl with a white face. The acting of Blanca Guerra as the mother and the performances of Jodorowksi’s son are extraordinary. Some powerful shots are when Blanca Guerra losses her arms, when the female ghosts came back to haunt Felix in a graveyard in the back of his house in ruins or when a dead elephant is thrown to the homeless mud people. We can see that his influences include Buñuel, Fellini, Freud, Breton, Philip k. Dick, etc.
The rest is up to the viewer, but let me warn you that this dark movie is depressing, but beautifully obscure. These were some glimpses to a visionary and warp world of one of the most complicated minds of our time. Currently he is working with Fernando Arau in the second part of El Topo called “The Sons of El Topo” but you never know with the extravagant souls. My final recommendations, see the movies with extreme caution and expect anything, expect to be annoyed and disturbed, at the end that is the purpose: To kill the audience.

After reviewing the classical cult movies of this Chilean multi-artist, let’s proceed to give some information that you would not find on any web site. In my writing career I have found that when you are dealing with surrealist poetry or short stories, people tend to imagine and understand the contents according to the way each one of them has been living. Sometimes a reader that comments on a short story sees a symbolism or a metaphor that I didn’t intend to put there, nonetheless it works perfectly. I think when we are dealing with a complex mind like Jodorowski’s we can apply the same principle. It is very difficult to fully understand all that he is trying to show but you will have a lot of fun trying to understand his movies, especially because you will have to use your brain.

What it is clear to me is that he likes to mock the religions and the human race in general. But he takes this mockery and satire to the extreme, making it harsh for the viewer with a weak stomach due to some very graphic scenes. But the maximum mockery comes with the ending of Holy Mountain. If you saw it, you know what I am talking about. We humans generally go through a lot to try to achieve our goals. We even step on people and succumb to evilness to get what we want and at the end what is the point? At the end it is all just like a big game and the result that we were hoping to achieve is not as good as we thought it would be. Then we become greedy, obsessed, unsatisfied, like Oligarchs because we don’t know how to enjoy what we have - the parody of Jesus walking in the streets of Mexico City, the most surrealistic city in the world, searching for his salvation turning down his life with prostitutes and the potential marketing of his image. At the end, after he went through the teachings of the master he ends up with… nothing. In the same way the audience, that Jodorowski likes to involve so much, ends up wondering what it was all for. At the end the result doesn’t matter, we have to enjoy every moment of the process while it lasts and then be reborn to another process or into another movie.

In Santa Sangre he explores the Oedipus complex to the excessive levels of a hallucinatory trip caused by a very traumatic experience. In Jodorowski’s world everything is taken to the extreme. Another astonishing image is when in the corrupted environment of the circus, an elephant dies spitting blood from its trunk. Some say that an elephant represents wisdom. Then wisdom spits blood and dies and then it is thrown to a horde of hungry mud-people. The meaning of this symbolism here is that wisdom can only be used for a certain time, like food, eventually it will be devoured by the people and became useless like everything in the world, like every cycle of life. There is the eagle tattooed on the chest of the owner of the circus. The mighty eagle that represents the commercialism of the Yankees is a sort of dictatorship arranging the problems and disputes of the members of the circus. The owner does so with a raunchy oligarch and authoritarian attitude and is unable to solve his own problems, problems that end up killing him in a painful way. This metaphor is very interesting because the owner represents the authority (he is actually from the US). The authority (the Yankees) that wants to be the police of the world but at the same time they create wars so they can sell their weapons which is one of their major businesses. This topic is also explored by Jodorowski in Holy Mountain where kids are conditioned to kill and create more wars so that the economy keeps on flowing. He is a strong and merciless analyst of our twisted society.

The exploration of settings is a bonus in Jodorowski’s movies; from the gothic settings of Santa Sangre, especially when the victims rise to haunt the murderer, to the western and desolated setting in El Topo. I think his intention is to always create a parallel world full of nightmarish landscapes where anything can happen and only he is capable of taking us back from his personal dimension. The characters are also a little metaphysical, grotesque and above all, very interesting - all full of a bizarre psychology.
The love interest of the antihero in Santa Sangre is a deaf mute, abused child who resembles a harlequin and symbolizes purity in some sense because she escaped from evilness and is tries to do the same with the antihero, like the mythical bird the Phoenix which rises from the ashes.

She is a freak as well. The freaks are one of the most important characters in his movies. Freaks of all kinds: evil freaks, short freaks, disabled freaks, ugly freaks, beautiful freaks, etc. ‘The freak’ by definition is someone that is abnormal or subnormal, that because of his/her special condition is considered a curiosity or an oddity. But if we think deeper aren’t we all are freaks of some sort? Who is to say where to draw the line that separates normality from abnormality? We all are freaks in one sense or another. Isn’t society a freak entity that no longer lives in balance with nature? The president that executes somebody because of his-her political ideas - that president is a freak! The soldier that follows that order and kills - he is a freak too! The ones that fight in a war, those are freaks too. The priest that fucks expensive women and the next day ask for money to the church members, he is a freak, as well as all the parishioners that do exactly what he says; pedophiles, rapists, women beaters, etc. All freaks of nature. That is the point that I believe Jodorowski is trying to make. “Freakness” can be applied to everybody. You don’t have to be a midget or have three arms or have a tumor the size or a watermelon to be a freak. In the end we are a race of freaks. “We have to kill the audience” “We have to be born again”. The question is: Is the world that we live in as different as the chaotic world of Jodorowski? We have the same fanatics ruling countries, the same religious leaders, the same surrealistic environments, the same cruel killings or massacres. Genocides. Kids are inhaling cement on dirty streets and we become freaks because we just keep walking throwing them a coin or a piece of bread. We become insensitive which I believe is a quality of “Feakness” and then we cry with a stinking Julia Roberts film - pretty pathetic!

The prostitutes walking the dirty alleys looking to escape from reality at the beginning of Holy Mountain. The prostitutes are following a doubtful Jesus who represents a crumbling faith, but they follow him where? Nothing good results from following religion scams in his movies and in real life. It’s the same thing with the politicians. Jodorowski explores all religions sometimes combining them, sometimes being obvious, but always mocking them in one way or the other. He destroys all religions in El Topo and creates his own version of a martyr saving the new race (which is made of freaks) that seems more normal than the inhabitants of the surface.

So what Jodorowski is exposing is the destruction of ourselves as we know ourselves to be but not such a drastic destruction. It is more of a sardonic and ironic destruction of our inner selfish beings. In other words, we mock ourselves because of the way we are, the stupid things that we do, like kill another human being, and destroy all that by laughing and satirizing until we are disgusted by our ways then we can be reborn. We killed ourselves and we can start all over again, then the term freak will be erased from the dictionary because we will not consider anybody strange anymore.

That is the secret message of Jodorowski, but to get to it, you have to go through all the horrors that we have created.


OSWALDO PÉREZ CABRERA.