El Topo (1970)

There are films that arrive ahead of their time and films that arrive from a different dimension entirely, and El Topo belongs to the second category. Alejandro Jodorowsky's acid Western of 1970 sends a black-clad gunfighter and his naked son across a desert of slaughtered towns and mystical gun masters, and it does so with an earnestness that modern audiences will find either sacred or insufferable. The film is soaked in Judeo-Christian iconography and Eastern philosophy, but it delivers its sermon through imagery instead of instruction, which spares it from the heavy-handed moralizing that a later era might have imposed. A modern studio would have found a way to make the desert explain itself.

On the matter of representation, the film is an odd case. The cast is Mexican throughout, and the production leans heavily on dwarf and maimed performers, though the camera treats their bodies as freak-show spectacle instead of a statement of dignity. A black-clad woman with a man's voice wanders through the middle section, adding a note of gender ambiguity that reads as surrealist ornament. The film's treatment of women, however, is beyond defense. Marah exists to be brutalized, and the film insists that violation awakens her faith. No amount of mysticism launders that.

The cave-dwelling outcasts and the depraved town cultists carry a faint whiff of anti-establishment complaint, but the film has no economic thesis and no interest in one. Its cruelty toward its own cast of the disabled is spectacle, and its final massacre and self-immolation play as ritual, not critique. We are left with a genuine oddity, a midnight movie of real conviction and no measurable social program. Somewhere between the beehive graves and the stone phallus, the culture moved on. El Topo stayed exactly where it was, humming to itself in the dark.