‘The human spirit is prey to the most astounding impulses. Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him.’
– George Bataille, Eroticism (1957)
In his short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (1940), Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges writes, ‘Mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men.’ The quote is attributed to an invented leader of a heretical sect, but could well have emerged from Borges’ own mouth. His entire oeuvre reveals a persistent obsession with mirrors and a conspicuous absence of sex. His stories are populated predominantly by men – more archetypes than idiosyncratic individuals – while women rarely make an appearance. When they do, they tend to cause trouble. And when there is sex, which I believe occurs only once, in the story ‘Ulrikke,’ the man and woman copulate beneath a mirror. Critics often attribute the notable sexlessness of Borges’ work to a traumatic experience in late adolescence, when his father took him to a prostitute out of concern for his son’s sexual inexperience. While I’ve never been particularly interested in this vein of biographical guesswork, it has often struck me as remarkable that a writer whose work elides such a vital aspect of human experience could mean so much to me.
Eros is so ubiquitous in the work of Borges’ fellow Latin American Alejandro Jodorowsky that you’d think the word ‘prude’ did not exist in his vocabulary. While Jodorowsky shares Borges’ obsession with ancient archetypes – valuable tools for Latin American artists asserting their place in global culture while crafting stories born of their own geopolitical region – the former’s work would be inconceivable without the erotic and corporeal. Our stories, he insists, both individual and collective, are written on the body, so must be expressed through the body. Speech becomes symbolic in his films – even bordering on didactic or cliché – their allegorical landscape a visual mashup resembling T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ wrote Roger Ebert when El Topo was first released, ‘especially Eliot’s notion of shoring up fragments of mythology against the ruins of the post-Christian era.’ Cue Jodorowsky: waist deep amidst those ruins, self-anointed prophet of that ‘post-Christian era,’ cinematic spectacle his ritual offering.
The story of Jodorowsky’s assent to spiritual leader is the stuff of legend. His first film Fando y Lis incited riots at the premiere in Acapulco in 1968, and was eventually banned. More outrage ensued around El Topo, his second film. A Mexican censorship report cites ‘the blood, the violence, scatology, blasphemy and abnormality shown in the film,’ as well as scenes featuring ‘lesbianism, sadism and other unconventional sexual practices,’ as cause for its censorship.1 El Topo ultimately premiered in New York in December 1970, where the acid western quickly became a hit in counter-cultural circles and gave rise to the phenomenon of the midnight movie: ‘It’s midnight mass at the Elgin,’ wrote Glenn O’Brien in The Village Voice. ‘Jodorowsky is here to confess; the young audience is here for communion.’2 Religious metaphors proliferate in O’Brien’s piece – he calls El Topo a ‘comedy that becomes a cult of salvation,’ one where ‘humor attacks reality,’ provoking laughter ‘in order to overcome horror.’ Film scholars Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik attribute El Topo’s success to the way in which ‘its metaphors brought the upheaval of the late 60s from the streets into the theaters at a time when actual political action retreated into sectarianism,’3 as the euphoria of the late 60s was starting to die down and the New Age was on the rise. Yoko Ono and John Lennon were so taken with the film they encouraged Beatles manager Allen Klein to finance Jodorowsky’s next project. And so, with a budget of $1,000,000, The Holy Mountain (1973), perhaps his most iconic film, was made.
It’s 2023: the New Age is back, and still thinks it’s new. The image of these worshippers flocking to midnight screenings of Jodorowsky’s films finds its double in the expat pageant now swarming Mexico City, spiritually famished and eager to guzzle at the teat of ‘ancient wisdom.’ They come in search of spiritual transcendence, served to them on a platter by shamans of varying degrees of authenticity, at retreats of varying degrees of bourgeois comfort, throughout Latin America. Where the Global North is concerned, the Global South has always been good for resource extraction and the fulfilment of exotic fantasy. Art historian Abigail Susik insists that while his films produced some of pop culture’s most iconic images of shamanic ritual to date, Jodorowsky ‘later criticised “trendy neo-shamanism” and the fetishised idealisation of indigenous culture as an exotic other.’ What’s more, she argues, he consciously used that fetish to draw the viewer towards what is actually a critique of international counterculture and state-sponsored violence in Latin America.4 Even so, the line between fetishisation and satire seems thin – I doubt many viewers really pick up on this nuanced critique of neocolonial drug tourism. (Case in point: I recently saw an Instagram post picturing the officiants of a wedding of the Burning Man bourgeoisie wearing the Alchemist’s iconic tall black hat from the opening shot of The Holy Mountain.)
Psychedelic-induced transcendence isn’t all that’s on offer in Jodorowsky’s cinematic visions of the occult; his is an imaginative world driven by violent eroticism and a violence that often looks erotic. Watching these films today, I wonder what still tantalises, or if this orgiastic syncretism is just a kitsch-like relic of the past at best, and a disturbing spectacle at worst, especially in a post-#MeToo era. What are we looking at, and what keeps us looking?
JODOROWSKY’S GROTESQUE SPECTACLES OF THE EROTIC
A beautiful young woman lies on her side, facing the camera, in a bed strewn with dolls, munching audibly on a rose. The expression on her face is flat. This is Lis. When we next see her she’s being pushed through a deserted, rocky landscape on a cart by her lover, Fando. Lis is paraplegic and dependent on Fando for her mobility. The couple are searching for Tar – a mystical city that survived Earth’s destruction and promises eternal ecstasy to those who reach it. As the couple progress on their journey, they must contend with a phantasmagoria of characters and flashbacks.
We find ourselves in a theatre. A puppeteer, played by none other than Jodorowsky himself, emerges onstage. A little girl dressed in white sits in the first row, watching him slowly cut the strings of a marionette. When she reaches for the lifeless doll, the puppeteer pulls her onstage and ominously promises to show her his world. He pushes the puppet over a black wall, sending the little girl after it. On the other side, she’s greeted by men and women in black suits who threaten to run strings through her hands and feet. They offer her money, which she throws back at them before running to play. The scene cuts to the adult paraplegic Lis on her cart, surrounded by men in suits. Cut again – the little girl screams to be let go. She runs into another group of suited men in coats, philosophising. At the sight of the little girl, they stop their musing and turn their attention to her, making predatory grunts and murmurs, eventually cornering and crowding her until she falls to the floor. They lie down next to her and, opening their umbrellas so she is no longer visible to the viewer, commit some act of violation we can only assume to be rape. We hear the little girl’s screams as an image appears of men’s hands crushing eggs in their fists, her screams intermingling with the sounds of eggshells exploding. The scene cuts from the little girl fighting off groping, grabbing hands to an adult Lis, also all in white, being mocked by men in suits.
The child’s gang rape will be replayed, as a flashback when Fando and Lis begin to embrace, and as re-enactment when Fando ties his lover to the cart and strips her naked, inviting three men in suits to ogle as he directs them in how and where they should touch her. Ever possessive, Fando swings from passion to violence with his lover, often one leading to the other. When he tires of carrying her across his back like a doll, or a cross, he hurls her to the ground. She fails to imagine the barren ravine strewn with flowers; he becomes enraged, dragging her limp body down the rocky incline and abandoning her in tears. But even Fando has limits when it comes to violent perversion – stomping off alone, he encounters a man who tears into a stuffed doll’s crotch and digs a hole between her legs. The man forces Fando to drop little snakes into the doll’s crevice. Disgusted, or afraid, Fando runs away, pleading for Lis, whom he caresses, only to kill her. He immediately repents the act, weeping as he carries her now lifeless body over his back to bury her before burying himself. The film’s final scene features the spirits of Fando and Lis, both naked – pale and unblemished – frolicking off into Edenic bliss together as a voiceover says: ‘When the reflection faded away in the mirror, it gave way to the word “FREEDOM.”’
Fando y Lis puts on full display the axis on which all Jodorowsky’s work – cinematic, therapeutic and literary – spins: the twinned nature of passion and violence. The prophet holds the mirror to this spectacle of human folly to tell us we must destroy our egos – release our parental attachments, traumas, precious narratives of self – so we might achieve spiritual transcendence. The erotic functions as the scene of our follies and vehicle for spiritual exorcism, often exposing humanity at its most merciless and animalistic. Herein lies another obsession of Jodorowsky’s: the exploitation of the weak by the powerful. Early in El Topo, we see a colonel order his lover to entertain the grovelling advances of a group of canine-like men, forcing her to kiss and expose her breasts to the group. Women, too, are prone to exploitative lasciviousness: a group of voluptuous older women ambushes a young black servant, groping him while screaming accusations of rape, calling him a ‘filthy slave.’ A voiceover of growling beasts plays as the women proceed with their clawing at the man, whom they eventually throw into the street, where an angry mob strings him up and shoots him dead. Scenes of voyeurism proliferate, whether the masses lust over violence or sex. When El Topo and his dwarf lover descend into a speakeasy, they are stripped naked and encouraged to consummate their love in the centre of the room, but the crowd’s leering presence makes it impossible for them to go through with the act. This is a world where intimacy is perverted and the erotic makes primitive beasts of us all.
Far from the threatening crowd, we are no safer alone in Jodorowsky’s world; one on one we are just as vulnerable, if not more so.
Early in El Topo – which translates to ‘the mole,’ a creature which thrives in darkness – the black-clad cowboy rescues the colonel’s lover from her indentured servitude. When they cannot find water in the desert, he flies into a rage and turns on her, rabidly stripping her naked and raping her. In the following scene, we see her striking a rock to release water. Are we to make of this that the rape was somehow productive? The film self-consciously calls out violence as the opposite, the enemy, of love: ‘You don’t love,’ one man says to El Topo, accusingly: ‘You destroy, you kill, and no one loves you.’ But what kind of love are we talking about if erotic desire so often leads to violence?
Chaste love?
It would be unfair to leave it at that; there is more to Jodorowsky’s erotics than sheer violence. There are moments, no matter how fleeting, when whimsy and comedy prevail: a band of cowboys waltzes with a group of Franciscan monks, whom they kiss; a procession of revelrous, bedazzled transvestites dress Fando in women’s clothing; Fando and Lis write their names on each other’s bodies in tar-black paint before ecstatically dumping whole buckets of it on one another, chasing each other and giggling all the while. These are brief reveries when the filmmaker’s characters flicker with what James Baldwin once called ‘a freedom that [is] close to love.’
By the time The Holy Mountain premieres in 1973, LSD has become ubiquitous, the US will end its nearly twenty-year-long involvement in the Vietnam War, and the first of a series of recessions after a post-WWII economic expansion will commence. But the recession has not yet hit, the war has not yet ended, and Jodorowsky is here to warn us of the dangers of industrialisation. We leave the allegorically charged, almost quaint landscapes of ravines and deserts for the technicolour precision of a modern world, where everything from weapon production to sex is efficiently mechanised. Eight spiritual seekers, together with the Alchemist – played, you guessed it, by Jodorowsky – seek to relinquish the material and egoic to find the secret to immortality. In an iconic sequence we meet Klen, who runs an art factory that has just produced a love machine. By stroking its mechanical vagina with an electronic rod, the spectator can bring the machine to climax. Klen’s lover happens to be very good at producing the electronic orgasm, and so she does, until a liquid that looks like a mixture of faeces and semen spews from the rod, and a mechanical ‘baby’ appears.
The Holy Mountain showcases Jodorowsky’s taste for maximalism and the grotesque to unprecedented heights. In a 1974 piece for The New York Times, writer and film critic T.E.D. Klein made a stunning verbal catalogue better than I could: ‘I’ve just returned from The Holy Mountain. It was quite a trip. I saw an old man pluck out his glass eye and hand it to a girl. I watched three men impale themselves over and over on bayonets. I passed a man whose face was covered in flies, and another whose body was covered with giant spiders. I met an armless psychopath, a quadruple amputee, a religious chimpanzee and a man whose excrement was turned into gold. I witnessed mother–son incest, transvestism in the church, several dozen executions, and one public castration.’ Even so, what bothered him more than any of the above was the excessive abuse of animals, or rather of their corpses. The body count is indeed immense: dead sheep, slaughtered chickens, a dead pig used as a vat for carrying plaster, bodies of goats, and the legendary slaughter of frogs and toads in a re-enactment of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, all amount to what Klein will flippantly call ‘Death for Art’s Sake’ in a film that tries ‘so hard to be shocking that, in the end, [it] becomes merely monotonous.’
I read this and sense my own fatigue towards Jodorowsky’s work – while watching these films, I go from being largely unmoved to actively repulsed. My resistance has something to do with the unshakable connotation of ‘cult’ in ‘cult classic’ – fanboys tend to be men, and the occult so often manifests in charismatic men sexually exploiting trusting, coerced women. Is it surprising that the cult filmmaker has now turned shamanic healer? At the time of writing, Jodorowsky has 2,100,000 followers on Twitter, and people travel from all over the world for his Tarot readings and psychomagic interventions. In my assessment of his work, particularly its relation to the erotic, I also struggle to account for the challenge of viewing these films in a post-#MeToo era. In early 2019, New York City’s El Museo del Barrio cancelled a retrospective of Jodorowsky’s work after an old interview resurfaced in which he boasts he committed actual rape in the infamous scene from El Topo. While he has since emphasised that this was a publicity stunt at the time of the film’s initial promotion, the recurrence of sexual violence in his films is a fact with which a viewer must contend.
Russian writer Nikolai Gogol famously quotes the proverb ‘No use blaming the mirror if your face is crooked.’ Is Jodorowsky to blame if his films show me a repellent vision of humanity I’d rather not see? Perhaps the problem is my own. While I struggle with the dearth of actual pleasure, both in my viewing experience and in most of the ‘erotic’ acts depicted, I wonder if I’m missing something. I turn to friends for whom this work matters, and ask what they see.
G., a gay man from the US, trained as a classical ballet dancer and joined the marines after an injury kept him from continuing to dance. In the marines, he experienced first hand how patriarchal systems use violence and sexual intimidation to impose order and exert control. Something about Jodorowsky daring to ‘spill all his guts out’ has always been moving for G. He points to a passage from Jodorowsky’s book Psychomagic (2009), in which the filmmaker describes his therapeutic practice by distinguishing between unconscious acts and poetic acts: both release repressed energies, but the former is ‘an open door to vandalism, to violence,’ while the latter can be ‘a conscious process that aims at voluntarily introducing a fissure into the dead order that permeates society.’5 Violence has spiritual ramifications, Jodorowsky is unquestionably aware of that. And it matters, says G., that the work is adamantly anti-cathartic; it’s more honest that way, honouring our continual yearning for something we may never have – or else have for only a moment – be it love, or eternal ecstasy in Tar.
D. is a trans woman from Mexico, for whom the indigenista fantasy is more than exotic spectacle. She insists on the importance of Jodorowsky’s work in its capacity for shaking the Western viewer from a blissful ignorance to the level of violence experienced by much of the world throughout history, especially in Latin America. She finds a massive sorrow in these films that refuses self-pity. That, she says, is worthy of admiration.
L. is Afro-Colombian and holds a PhD in performance studies. His research focuses on carnival as liberatory practice. I tell him I find Jodorowsky’s work almost anti-erotic, and he doesn’t disagree, but suggests it offers a new way of seeing trauma and perversion that he finds valuable and rare. He celebrates the invitation, albeit taboo, to consider the pleasure of trauma. He sends me a clip from Santa Sangre (1989), one of Jodorowsky’s later films: A knife-thrower having an affair with a tattooed woman in the circus performs an act in which the woman leans back against a target, limbs splayed, as he throws knives at her. Each time a blade grazes her skin, she moans and contorts her face in deep pleasure.
L. and I discuss the confluence of aesthetic and socio-political influences on Jodorowsky’s work, as a Jewish Chilean who self-exiles to Paris in the early 60s, before making theatre and films in Mexico, which he premieres in the US due to authoritarian censorship, before finally making his home in Paris, where he lives today. In this diasporic rebel we see the culmination of French and Mexican experiments in Surrealism. Key to understanding his work, suggests L., is Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of ‘the grotesque body,’ a body that performs all material functions to an exaggerated or excessive degree – eating, drinking, defecating, copulation, dismemberment, pregnancy – and represents a celebration of the life cycle, ‘a body in the act of becoming, … on the threshold of the grave and the crib.’6 The carnival, a popular social ritual through which ordinary people take licence to indulge in excesses of all kinds, epitomises ‘the grotesque’ for Bakhtin, and was a historically pivotal tool for undermining official power structures and social norms. Jodorowsky loves a grotesque parade – they feature in nearly all of his films as embodiments of his aesthetic brand of perversity, dark humour and non-conformity.
There is a jolting vitality in the grotesque and its transgressive blurring of boundaries – between self and other, the socially ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable,’ life and death – that inoffensive beauty cannot attain. This jolt is uncomfortable. I remember reading Voltaire’s Candide in graduate school, a novel banned upon publication in 1759 for its blasphemy and sexual explicitness. The professor drew our attention to a scene following the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755. A drunken sailor has paid a prostitute for sex, which they have atop a pile of corpses amidst sounds of moans emanating from still-living bodies buried in the ruins. The students in the class, largely female, were shocked when the professor suggested there was a significance about this ‘will to life’ amid such destruction. Their indignation made me embrace the perversion, something in its unapologetic insistence on life that I applauded.
In his 1920 essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ Freud posits the ancient Greek Eros, god of love, and Thanatos, god of death, as representatives of two opposing aims of all human instinct – the will towards life and the will towards death. French philosopher Georges Bataille turns this opposition on its head in a Bakhtinian manner, insisting that Eros and Thanatos are not opposed, but rather intermingled, bleeding into one another: ‘Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death,’7 he writes in Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (1957). Moreover, he insists that the erotic act is implicitly violent in breaking individuals out of their socially habituated, isolated selves while allowing them a moment of ephemeral continuity with another: ‘erotic activity,’ he writes, ‘by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea.’8 One thing is certain, we will die and we will die alone, but our lives might be measured in these vanishing moments of mutual aliveness.
This pursuit of mortality through the erotic is fleshed out to its extreme in the writings of the Marquis de Sade, a figure looming large over Bataille’s study. ‘De Sade’s system is the ruinous form of eroticism.’9 It is a system in which the individual’s pursuit of his most depraved desires comes at the expense of consideration for the suffering of others. Sade’s sovereign heroes exist as if in a moral vacuum. Perhaps it is this spectre of Sade in Jodorowsky’s work that leaves me uneasy; the sense of the impersonal, the erasure of the individual and the anarchy of destruction promised by touching our most taboo desires.
And yet, perversion exists only in equal and opposite reaction to the degree of a society’s repression, or its decadent decline. In her 1967 essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination,’ Susan Sontag makes a case for the urgent necessity of artists like Sade and Jodorowsky, creators willing to explore the outer reaches of the imagination that many fear or refuse to even approach: ‘Everyone, at least in dreams, has inhabited the world of the pornographic imagination for some hours or days or even longer periods of his life; but only the full-time residents make the fetishes, the trophies, the art,’ she writes. ‘[T]he poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don’t know.’10 What he knows is the deep hunger humans can have to lose themselves, to be irrational, to be irreverent, to destroy, to unleash the unfamiliar, or, as Sontag says, ‘to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness.’ And to play.
Perhaps my own attachment to notions of self and erotic intimacy stop me short of wholly embracing Jodorowsky’s grotesque spectacles. But so long as there are forces in the world intent on reigning in this irreverent carnival, I suppose I am grateful that this work exists, if only as testament to a vitality that cannot be stifled and as a mirror to society’s wilful hypocrisy. We desperately need poetics of transgression that disturb our comfort, and return us to our feeling selves, selves that cannot be tamed, selves we might even fear.
- Nimbe Montserrat Algarabel Rutter, ‘Cine y Poder. Reconstrucción de los discursos de la censura y el escándalo en México (1968–2002)’, PhD thesis, 2012, p. 209, cited in Antonio Lazáro-Reboll, ‘Alejandro Jodorowsky and El Topo,’ in Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton (eds), The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema, Oxford: Routledge, 2019, p. 423.
- Glenn O’Brien, ‘El Topo,’ The Village Voice, 25 March 1971.
- Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendic, 100 Cult Films, London: BFI, 2011.
- Abigail Susik, ‘The Alchemy of Surrealist Presence in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain,’ in Kristoffer Noheden and Abigail Susik (eds), Surrealism and Film after 1945, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021, p. 188.
- Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2010, p. 24.
- Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (trans. Hélène Iswolsky), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968, p. 317 (originally published in Russian in 1965).
- Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (trans. Mary Dalwood), San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 1986, p. 11 (originally published in French in 1957).
- Ibid., p. 22.
- Ibid., p. 171.
- Susan Sontag, ‘The Pornographic Imagination,’ Partisan Review, vol. 34, spring 1967, p. 232.