El Topo (1970)

About – Spoilers:
El Topo translates to The Mole, and like the animal, the protagonist here journeys through the underbellies, often finding himself ill-equipped to handle the superficial surfaces after battling his way through.

This is a long meditation on one man. As he abandons family, lusts after mastery and fame, cheats to feed his ego with success, performs a few miracles but also fails, loses his aura among those who once worshipped him like a Messiah, finds himself reborn in a world of rejects where he gives himself a new mission to become their Messiah, yet still finds himself once again ill-equipped to save that which cannot be saved.

If you don’t care for the bizarre/surreal, some movies can have stretches that leave you bored. Not here, because there’s a steady stream of ridiculous or effedup sights that include:
A desert town strewn with the carcasses of women, children and animals, while the streams and puddles flow with blood and the men and boys are strung up in a chapel.
Lots of dead animals – rabbits on fire, a rabbit that seems to have had its eyes pecked out by a crow, a couple of crows shot, a crucified goat.
Eating a massive bug.
Deformed people, including a pair who operate as one while being partially limbless.
Brief moments of the aftermath of scourged monks and a woman.
A gang of fetishists, some hilarious.
Fat old women molesting a black slave.
A kid euthanizing a dying man.

But El Topo is possibly most notorious in modern times for its extended opening that features a naked 8-year-old boy. The boy was Jodorowsky’s irl son, a casting choice possibly made to ensure comfort for the kid, but also perhaps to deflect allegations of on-set abuse. The choice of having the kid nude appears to have been intended to shock the audience into thinking metaphorically as compared to what you’d do, if El Topo wandered the desert with his fully-clothed son. But if it’s meant to signify abandoning innocence and purity, you wonder why the kid wears a hat unless that’s an umbilical cord to his father. In any case, Jodorowsky probably got away with it because there’s nothing sexual or lurid in the depiction. But it’s definitely a little weird because in the latter half, El Topo’s next traveling companion is a dwarf woman.

There’s also great music. A recommended watch for pretty much everyone here.

Random Trivia:
Jodorowsky once claimed that he actually raped Mara Lorenzio in the desert for the scene that’s depicted in flashes here, but during Metoo, he backtracked on this.