This could be a response to Renegade Cut’s video on Upstream Color. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YxevRuwiJg). A continuation of those ideas on film. A resistance to explanation, to hard logic and quantification. It’s also a response to whatever else I read and watched and heard over the past little bit of living. Take of it what you will.
RC asks that we stop looking at films as puzzles to be solved, or of chains of arcane symbols to be decoded. Now a look at El Topo, a film that is very literally an assemblage of symbols, although not to the degree of Jodorowskys next film, the Holy Mountain.
Stop watching logically, which is not to say turn off your brain. Turn it on, but to other registers. Watch a movie in the way you’d listen to Beethoven, the way you take in the spectacle of a days end sunset. Free from logic, watch emotionally, intuitively. Ask not what is happening and why is happening, but how does it make you feel and why it does that.
Get to love the texture of the film, the viscosity of moments as they’re strung out in front of and behind you. Not to stop thinking, but to think along new and different paths. [captain planet: heart]. What is the meaning of El Topo or anything else for that matter. Immolate that desire of yours, for like El Topo it will get you nothing. El Topo, the mole: the rules of the duel are always changing, they are in differential.
Is the Colonel God? No of course not, he is the Colonel or is he Immortan Joe (Fury Road)*? They are the same, Emissaries of Patriarchy, male authority, clad in symbols of authority and power to hide underlying weakness of the corrupt and rotten flesh, grown hard with age. (El Topo cannot age, Max cannot age, Stalker stands at the edge of age along with writer who already afraid he is aging away). And yes these are traits shared with the God we ask that the colonel is representative of, but God here is just another emissary of the kind that the Colonel and Immortan Joe are. Even in Jodorowsky, we cannot reduce what we see, we cannot say the exact shape that Gregor Samsa has taken – much less state what Kafka ‘meant’ by it.
So, El Topo kills the patriarch. Jodorowsky has a dim view of people, El Topo (again, the mole) is no Zarathrusta, Jodorowsky has no space in the film for an Ubermensch.
And what of the use of “freaks”, really the differently bodied. They make striking symbols in themselves. We’re all differently bodied, but there is no time for subtlety here. There is no need, a curse on those who would conflate the subtle with the good. Again, let me stress: metaphors are not allegory and both suffer if given true “meanings”. [Roger Ebert – If a symbol does not have readily apparent meaning, it doesn’t. (by golly what a sentence that one is)] Not what does it represent, but how does it feel.
The 4 masters
Blindness gives way to sight, Strength gives into the delicate, a farmer knows as much of death as he does of life, a butterfly net is stronger than a bullet. Here, let me kill myself to teach you this lesson. Twenty years later a son rides off in the clothes of his immolated father with his newborn brother on his back. Perhaps the son is merely another brother. Our mole spirals farther out, perhaps this all repeats in some fashion. (“The man in black fled across the desert, the gunslinger followed.” Only El Topo is the gunslinger in black, both fleeing and following.) Call it eternal return if you like. We
I’m here to prime the pump (a paintbrush is a kind of pump[designing metaphors]) so to speak. Don’t take me with you, leave me be. Go breath out your own words on the issue, tell me what you feel.
*Or Trump for that matter, but there is no need to drag that into this.
Meifumado 