Alejandro Jodorowsky
El Topo

After watching this film, I redefined "intelligent" and "stupid", almost in a Piagetian manner "intelligence is a form of adaptation to the environment".

The smart kids go out in a rainbow pack and free noise to trap fresh-faced beauties, while the big fools have cobwebs of fireworks destined to burn out in the sky without being able to immobilize any flesh. As if they were tracing lines with asylum crayons. I've come to the conclusion of illness and no-sense as the only Flaubertian vital experience, also because "pleasure writes in white" pretending to remain calcified but lying. I also think I no longer exist and have only dreamed of my footprints, in reality imprinted on snow with invisible ink; there is no past, no present, and no future either.

Nothing of us will remain at all, as death is the last residence, and oblivion will guard our every action under the scent of marble. None of us will have ever existed a hundred years from now. Our image will unravel like a fake Persian rug from every foreign and familiar mind until it grants us an extraterrestrial levitation, an eternal non-belonging to the human race. Jodorowsky understood, through his dense Apollinaire-like network, that the dream is more real and subcutaneous than any sober analysis from a university pamphlet; "El Topo" thrives on inner paradoxes that gush like butterfly-cockroaches during dream activity, to bruise and at the same time adorn the flesh. Life is lies, fear, a puppet show, compromise; the dream is a free jazz Janus, a "bare bones us" incapable of the diction school lies we were domesticated into upon waking. The trials the gunslinger (Jodorowsky himself) must face are existential implosions in which he will fill himself with compressed desert just to receive a mystical sign and a metamorphic orgasm. Alejandro subtly mocks any desire for decoding, since life itself turns out to be symbolic, unsolvable, and devoid of any meaning. And even wanting to find a psychological sense in any action, the supreme sense, that of life, will always remain obscured. The character of the gunslinger is the antithesis of those who rely on blind religion, love, the state, politics, all castrating superstructures, all chimeras that find their explanation in the Apollonian fear of nothingness. Finding sub-activities with a complete meaning, adorning them with significance, and making them one's life distracts from the unbearable weight of decay, pain, and death.

This is a work of art for those who still believe in unemployment, in not being present, and in the mellifluousness of their own flesh.

^_^