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The allegorical experience in Alejandro Jodorowskys El Topo

In an essay entitled Theory of the central conflict, 1 Ral Ruz develops an interesting analogy between a medieval demon and the entertainment industry. According to the Chilean filmmaker, in the 5th Century, Casiano and other founding fathers of Christianity debated about the tristitia (sadness), an emotion they considered the eighth capital sin. Caused by the noon demon, sadness was an illness particularly common among the most isolated and lonely monks. It would almost always start the same: around midnight, the monk is thrown off his meditation by the sound of footsteps coming from the yard and knocks on the door. Aware hes alone the monk tries to re-focus, but under the torment of the mysterious sounds he ends up experimenting the different phases of a painful boredom: first, a deep exhaustion invades him, then he is unable to sleep properly, and finally his possessed by the greatest anxiety. Diminished, the monk becomes an easy prey for that demon, which eventually takes the form of a spectre. Even though he knows this apparition is a mere artifice, the monk does not hesitate to accept an invitation to leave his cell. He is taken to the most diverse places, where hed very much like to stay, but back in his cell boredom reappears, even stronger than before. With every new journey the friar becomes more melancholic. Furthermore, the illusions seem to contaminate everything and soon the cell itself, the other monks, and even communication with God, will become an illusion. His world has been emptied by entertainment. Just like the monk/junky is afraid to lose his dose of entertainment, for it would mean to endure the painful consequences of boredom (abstinence), a similar hardship has pushed contemporary audiences to establish a symbiotic relationship with the media screens TV, mobile phone, laptops, etc. The paradox about the signs and images of the modern world of mass media is that, even though they comfort and grant sense to the world, their attempt to

2 supersede reality has brought with it the disappearance of sense and representation. The barrier modernity pretended to put up between reality and imagination has vanished and today were incapable to make judgment on the authenticity of the image. Entertainment is replaced by whats realer than the real, the hyperreal. With the developments in the technique, the summoning of the images great betrayal to reality is complete: by accomplishing an evergrowing intensity, images seem to suffer a chronic disability to imagine reality and instead opt to replace it. The postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard extensively analysed the ways in which reality is completely substituted by the image after the implementation of narrative strategies. For the author of Culture & Simulacra, our collective knowledge about historical realities and political conjunctures is being replaced by the creations of the media industries. The illusion, the dream, the drug and the artifice have stopped being the natural predators of reality. All of them have lost their energy, as if an incurable and malicious disease had struck them. According to Baudrillard, that which devours reality is none other than simulacrum, which secretes, like poisonous nectar, the real world as a product. There is no real communication in the world of simulacrum, since signs are immersed in a circuit of endogamic exchange that works actually in the absence of reality. 2 One may ask, then, what would be the specific role of cinema in such simultaneous fabrication/falsification of reality. For Baudrillard, the photographic image is the purest, for it doesnt stimulate time or movement, and limits itself to the most rigorous unreality. Every form of moving image (cinema, video, computer animation) is to him only an attenuated variation of the pure image and its rupture with reality. However, Baudrillard acknowledged that cinema, unlike other forms of entertainment, possesses a certain liberating potency. The different technical aspects and narrative strategies available for the filmmakers are just a starting point that defines the limits of what can be expressed or indicated in a certain period. Therefore, for Baudrillard the creative process in the simulation era always takes place within

3 a range of possibilities in which extremes are seduction and obscenity: in one side is the art capable of inventing a scene different from the real one, a different set of rules; on the other side is the realist art, which has fallen in some sort of obscenity by becoming descriptive, objective or a mere reflection of the worlds decay. 3 According to Buci-Glucksman, this preference for seductive, complex and ambivalent images (over coherent, generic and verisimilar ones) is a characteristic of both postmodernity and baroque reason; both perspectives share the fascination with artifice, especially montage and allegory. 4 Certainly, the baroque fascination for the ruin, the construction of reality, the incompleteness of the world, the artifice and the artificial has much in common with Baudrillards sense of the endlessly constructed and simulated character of the social in hyperreality. The primary images of the of the seventeenth-century baroque were the ruin and the labyrinth, figures principally based upon deception. In those times, the term baroque implied an art or music of extravagance, impetuousness, and virtuosity, all of which were concerned with agitating the affections and senses of the individual. Among the romantic writers and Enlightenment intellectuals, the baroque was believed to lack the reason and discipline that came to be associated with neoclassicism, being instead regarded as a chaotic and exuberant form expressing lower moods like melancholy, spleen and anxiety. These conceptual affinities provide in fact a way to avoid the vagueness that normally arises when the term postmodernity is introduced, using instead a renewed definition of baroque. Following Sarduy, more than an artistic style or a specific moment in the history of culture, the baroque can be regarded as both a general attitude and the formal quality of the objects expressing that attitude. 5 In that sense, a baroque element could be found in any epoch of civilization. The baroque becomes almost a spiritual category defined in opposition to the classical: if every cultural phenomenon has subjacent forms that obey to a structural pattern and coexist with other forms possessing a completely different nature and internal stability, the baroque can be defined as a certain morphology that is in conflict with another

4 morphology, which can be called classical. 6 Such situation was in fact foreseen by Benjamin, who stated in his analysis of the German Trauerspiel that some of the distinctive features of the baroque passion were bound to reappear in following years. The baroque of our time is a specific economy of representation, regulated not just by the sheer repetition (not even in the case of the variance) or formula, but by the detour, the accident, the anomaly, and the drift. The neo-baroque structures are open forms that complicate the closure of classical systems, refusing any other principle than the incompleteness of every knowledge and discourse (including its own discourse). Baroque reason, with its theatricalization of existence and its logic of ambivalence, is not just another reason within modernity. Above all, it is the Reason of the Other, of its overwhelming excess. 7 Acknowledging the simultaneous inevitability and insufficiency of language, the baroque reason avoids the common places and is openly eccentric with respect to what it wants to say. As its subject (the other) is always elusive and cannot be expressed completely or directly, baroque implements the use of allegory, 8 which is a form characterized by the fragmentation of language and representation that enables a perpetual displacement and metamorphosis of discourse and gives rise to a profane appreciation of the Now. By taking distance from the classical linguistic systems of codified symbols circulating in a univocal direction, allegory represents a cultural shift in the relation between visible and invisible, tangible and non-tangible. But more than a simple device, Benjamin regarded allegory as pre-eminently a form of experience, a sort of intuition that arises from the apprehension of the provisional nature of the world, which is no longer permanent or immutable. Consequently, the unitary and immanent value that the Romantics gave to symbol becomes openly questioned by allegory. The elusive truth of the world is never accessible, but allegory discloses it far more than the ephemeral glimpses of wholeness supposedly attained in the Romantic symbol. As a technique, allegory is also an attitude, a way of seeing that transforms the physical world into

5 signs. This is why Benjamin himself was so interested in all the literary qualities of philosophy. Throughout his oeuvre, he developed an allegorical writing style, combining esotericism, obscurity and an obsession for outer appearances in order to express the inaccessibility of truth and of being. Alejandro Jodorowsky, another Chilean filmmaker, has created a singular style that, in my opinion, has some affinities to Benjamins ideas. His films, populated by ambiguous and shocking images, redefine narrative space in conscious opposition to the practices of a Hollywood-type narrative cinema and seem to be crafted to arouse the most diverse reactions in the spectators. Like Benjamin, his invocation of mysticism is a means of searching for an objective art that is obsessed with the pursuit of truth. Such is the case of his second feature film El Topo (The Mole), a 1970 experimental western that undermines classical narrative structures through an allegoric deployment of the techniques of realist cinema. Although Jodorowskys style is essentially based upon the same sort of visceral shock and mystical qualities (like the extensive use of aphorisms and surreal juxtapositions) that Artaud proposed in his Theatre of Cruelty, some of the formal qualities of El Topo (for example, the use of stationary camera and realistic editing techniques) are in fact completely conventional. As the film was shot using few close-ups of actors, and avoiding editing techniques like dissolves, fades and other effects, a certain sense of realism is lend to the interacting imaginary elements. This paradoxical strategy to represent truth is actually the central motif of what Benjamin called the antinomies of the allegorical, 9 namely, the simultaneous devaluation and elevation of the object, the coexistence of convention and expressiveness, and the strict use of technique supporting the eruptive ingenuity of some of the most notable baroque dramatists. In short, even though Jodorowskys film seems to engage the audiences primarily in an unconscious level, it offers in fact different layers of meaning: a very intellectual level, an instinctive level, a sexual level, an emotional level, etc.

6 In her analysis of the baroque reason, Buci-Glucksmann identifies the nature of the feminine as the main symbol of the Other, representing an heterogeneous, alien and inassimilable element that resists Apollonian reason. 10 In this essay, I would argue that in the case of El Topo it is the spectator who fulfills such role. The artistic product of an allegoric effort (in this case the work of a filmmaker) is nothing but a body in rest, unstable, ephemeral, a volatile configuration of meaning, a mere artistic coefficient that needs the intervention of a receptor in order to signify and represent. The Other that is announced by the allegorical piece (allo agoronei, to speak the other according to its etymology) is precisely the spectator, who becomes reader and writer at once. Consequently, I will not pursue any kind of interpretative approach to El Topo, because trying to make coherent sense of the film by establishing a pattern amongst the different elements would imply an impoverishment of its polysemy. Any description supplying an inventory of the film's generous supply of massacres, tortures, gags, duels and numerous aberrations would be evocative but scarcely helpful. Instead, my attempt here is to explore how the film creates a form of allegorical experience in the spectator by using two allegoric strategies commonly associated with the baroque: the fragment and the labyrinth.

The fragment A bearded man (El Topo) in black rides the endless desert with his naked little son in front of him, on the saddle. The boy is told to bury his first toy and the picture of his mother before continuing the journey, as he is a grown up man now. Three hee-hawing gunmen reminiscent of the ludicrous outlaws in Sergio Leones films appear from out of hiding, laughing to the man that they have been ordered to kill him. The hero carefully places the child behind him on the saddle and gets rid of the mercenaries. As described, this could be the opening sequence of a classical western, and El Topo certainly uses some of the conventions of the western film, but in fact it is a purely abstract construction that creates its own time and

7 space. In order to create a hallucinatory effect, Jodorowsky extracts his symbols and mythologies from everywhere: Christianity, Zen Buddhism, tarot, and black magic, just to name a few. However, this film frustrates any attempt for a comprehensive interpretation and it becomes clear that Jodorowsky was not invested in assembling all the pieces into some kind of theory or closed rational system. Instead, the fragments are charged with tension and employed in a shifting, fractal way, casting their light on each other instead of on the film's denouement. The result reminds The Waste Land, where Elliot holds the fragments of ancient mythology against the ruins of the post-Christian era. Such is the technique of the baroque: to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal [] in the unremitting expectation of a miracle. 11 The fragment as a creative material thus responds to a need for both form and content: form, in that it expresses the chaos, rhythm, casualness, and intervals of narrative; content, in that it avoids the order produced by connections and keeps at bay the monster of totality. 12 Through this strategy Jodorowsky radically attacks the space of representation in contemporary entertainment culture; certainly, the self-enclosed and nebulous space in his film has some of the elastic properties that Cubitt finds in the Hollywood baroque (a space heavily bended, twisted, and fractured), 13 but the effect is more a metaphysical journey than the empty sense of completion that the blockbusters want to create. The edition has a fundamental role in creating a hallucinatory sensation, as it uses abrupt cuts to place side by side verisimilar and oneiric images in order to undermine the uniform contours, fixed spacing, and linear sense. The desert in the film is not just the zone separating one town from another as in a conventional western, but a blank canvas were the director can deploy a system of consecutive sets, a net of distant sceneries that does not stand for reality and does not resemble a recognizable geographical space. 14 The theatrical nature of the film is accentuated by its division into four biblical sections: Genesis, Prophets, Psalms and Apocalypse. When the hero falls in love with a

8 woman (Mara) he rescued from of a group of sadist men, she makes him prove his love by killing the Four Great Gun Masters and becoming the best gunslinger of the desert. One by one, each master waits for El Topo in a different location, and all these four artificially enclosed environments are composed by religious and mystic symbols and artefacts that recreate the solemnity and prescriptive nature of the ritual sphere. As the story develops, the indistinct use of religious imagery, visions of excess, romance and comedy obscures the genre: the dissolution of the narrative is such that its possible you laugh when you are meant to be crying, or cry when you are meant to laugh; you are horrified by whats banal and seduced by what is brutal. The spectator is left feeling undecided, disoriented, and that is part of the sensation, part of the thrill, part of the jouissance that characterizes the figural power of the neo-baroque. 15 As in a dream, the Euclidian solidity of the image is fragmented, rendered discontinuous, divisible and liable to re-combination in the most radical ways. El Topo cheats and manages to kill the first three Masters, who are all more wise and spiritually enlightened than him and have every time fewer worldly possessions. The fourth Master possesses only his own life and chooses to kill himself precisely to prove to him that life is meaningless. Defeated, the hero rushes through the desert retracing his steps and witnessing all the destruction he had left behind. Without any will left, he assumes a pose of self-sacrifice as he is challenged by a gunwoman (representing hes alter-ego) who has previously joined their journey and lusts after Mara. Mortally wounded, his body is hauled away by a bunch of deformed people. Amputees, dwarfs, a gunman without legs riding on the shoulders of a man without arms, the film is actually crowded by physically challenged characters. The recurrence of all sorts of incompatible figures (with their irregular boundary lines and their literal incompleteness) creates an improbable composition that strengthens the un-representational nature of the film. Calabrese gives the name of container objects to the works that are mainly composed by fragments from other works, and such label can be partially applied to this film: by placing the fragments together, El Topo is more an attempt to

9 create a higher level of consciousness than the mere layering of styles and motifs of the pastiche. The unification (if there is one) lays in the juxtaposition of the parts, and in the delirious pleasure derived from a description possessing no unitary quality. Here, the force of the fragment emerges from its autonomy: despite having formed part of a previous whole, it doesnt need to take the presence of that whole into account in order to be defined; on the contrary, the whole is in absentia. 16 The dialogues also have a fragmentary and aphoristic tenor. The constant references and quotations of the Bible and other religious texts are introduced in the secular and even anomic context of the spaghetti western. Reminding the metaphor of the old mole that Marx introduced as an image of the Revolution in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a narrator informs at the beginning of the film that the mole digs tunnels under the earth looking for the sun and sometimes this journey takes him to the surface, where he ends up blinded by the suns brightness. In this case, the figure of the mole is more about a spiritual journey than a revolutionary struggle. In a consecutive order, the Masters try to communicate his wisdom to the hero by using forceful existential propositions: You shoot to find yourself, I do it in order to vanish says the second Master. When El Topo has to face the failure of his quest, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, he cries in agony like Jesus did in the cross: I have been spilt like water, and my bones have been dislocated. My heart has turned to wax and melts within me [] I am laid low in the dust of death. My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Numerous aphorisms of this tenor are introduced throughout the film, and the incompletion, the paradoxical and abrupt nature of many of the statements remembers that the knowledge afforded by the allegory is just illusory. Allegory then becomes fragmentary when there is no proper language or set of images. Under this interlocking of residual and emergent modes of knowledge production, of faith and paganism, of the pre-modern and the modern, what lies is the recognition of the lack of fullness in the world.

10 El Topo is a more than a patchwork of textual and visual references, jelling into surreal spectacle and producing the loss of contextual value. New values are acquired from the isolation of fragments and from their re-situation in another context, a movement that erodes the systematic and contextual memory of classical texts. Jodorowskys piece explores the collapse of the imaginary/real distinction and the decline or fall of totality, going beyond mere intellectual quotation to comprise a complex layering of styles and meaning. In the end, all the mentioned narrative codes and referential codes compete in ways that tend to provoke the kind of creative reading on the part of the spectator that Duchamp celebrated in his speech to the American Federation of Arts in 1957: All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. 17

The Labyrinth Allegory, we have to remember, more than a technique or a content is a kind of experience. Its idea of truth does not consist of a knowledge to be possessed after processing the linguistic form of a philosophical quest; rather, Benjamin understands truth as a form, which means that representation is not to be viewed for its product but for its process. When Bataille wrote that men act in order to be, a proposition that, he clarifies, must not be understood in the negative sense of conservation (conserving in order not to be thrown out of existence by death), but in the positive sense of a tragic and incessant combat for a satisfaction that is almost beyond reach, 18 he actually introduced a complementary definition of allegory. Being in the world is completely uncertain for both Bataille and Benjamin, and the allegorical experience becomes a form of expression, a way of bringing out something internal that is by definition incomplete. The truth of being knows no pristine moment before representation; truth, understood now as a process, is always representing itself. Starting from

11 an extreme complexity, being imposes on reflection more than the precariousness of a fugitive appearance, but this complexity, displaced little by little, becomes in turn the labyrinth where what had suddenly come forward strangely loses its way. 19 The labyrinth becomes metaphor for an ambiguous complexity. On the one hand, it implies the loss of any original orientation, denying the existence of a global order or a general topography; on the other, however, it still implies the challenge of finding an order, without casting any doubt upon the existence of the order itself. 20 The labyrinth as a motif is appears in El Topo in two different ways: represented under the figure of the desert, and used as stylistic structure. The immensity of the desert offers no referent, is opened and mysterious, the perfect place to get lost. The perfect labyrinth would be infinite as the sand of the desert. El Topo, committed to fulfill his spiritual journey, assumes that the best way to cover the circularity of the desert is to travel in spiral. There are some ruins in the way, but they dont represent actual points of reference, as the nature of the ruin is to embody the passage of time, not to symbolize or contain information. Even though he has no clue, no map, no usable memory to find an orientation, El Topo proceeds step by step, always believing in the existence of his final goal, but in such process the resolution of every singular situation demands the temporal annulation of any sense of totality. As Calabrese mentions, the travelers capacity to perceive just what he has in front of his eyes (a form of myopia) is in fact what makes the labyrinth possible. The faith of the wanderer in a resolution of the mystery is what gives sense to the whole artifice. El Topo eventually finds his way across the desert and seems to master it, but in a more figurative way his quest remains opened until the end. Benjamins theory of allegory describes precisely the same mechanism: the continuous line of impoverishment in allegorical action is only in the service of a final replenishment, but this final moment, however, is continually deferred to a time beyond life, or beyond history, or beyond propositional verifiability. 21

12 In structural terms, the film can be regarded as a geography of blurred ideas, since the consecutive events in the narrative condense, in every case, a set of images and figures that transmits a diffused impression or a very general aspect of existence. But even though the narrative is delusive and fragmentary, there remains some unity within the system, and this is essential to create a fluid experience in the spectator. Ultimately, El Topo is a labyrinth simply because of the intricate way all those heterogeneous elements get connected. The structure of the film becomes a representation of the allegorical experience and its openness, continuous movement, and permanent loss of orientation. The spectator develops an aesthetic pleasure for the labyrinth as an a-systematic construction, based on the possibility of becoming nomad and wandering without further certainty. El Topo finds its aesthetic value not in offering the possible pleasure of unravelling the knot or unveiling the mystery, but in the promise of a higher pleasure: the joy of being lost and clueless. In a certain way, Jodorowsky follows the lead of Jean Baudrillard, who thought that it does not matter how hard we try to materialize things, to bring them out, or make them visible; well never solve the underlying mystery. This perpetual challenge is precisely one of the recurring elements of neo-baroque reason: by using figures like the knot or the labyrinth, it continually tries to reproduce the pleasure of drifting away any sense of reality. The essential discontinuity and incompleteness of the allegorical work is concomitant with a breaking of the fictional contract of consistency in the level of realism by the authors suddenly intruding a higher fictionality onto the scene.

Conclusions The Western gunslinger of the first half of the film goes through a ritual rebirth and becomes a completely different being, an enlightened sort of ascetic. The group of crippled pariahs that rescued him several years ago have been taking care of him since then. They live in a cave, isolated from civilization, deformed by continuous endogamy. Honouring his name,

13 El Topo promises to dig a tunnel that will connect the cave with the nearest town, which represents all the values of Western world. It is in fact a deeply bourgeois town, where cultish puritanical beliefs (symbolized by the Eye of Providence in the American dollar) mask an undercurrent of racism, colonial abuse, economic exploitation, debauchery and violence. What started as a western film evolves into a picture of the obscenity of Western societies, where fanatical Christianity coexists with bourgeois, colonialist and chauvinist social values. When this bastion of civilization is introduced as an oasis in the middle of the desert, the presence of the figural power of baroque becomes even higher. With its historical and geographical, not to mention aesthetic eccentricity, the film confronts the historicist canon (the new classicism) constructed in the hegemonic centres of the Western world, and it achieves it, paradoxically, by using the narrative techniques standardized by Western mass media. As Chiampi has mentioned about Latin American baroque, the crossroads of signs and temporalities, aesthetic logic of mourning and melancholy, of luxuriousness and pleasure, of erotic convulsion and allegorical pathos, reappears to bear witness to the crisis/end of modernity and the very condition of an Otherness that could not be assimilated by the project of the Enlightenment. 22 Instead of trying to simplify, absorb or nullify the Otherness, El Topos baroque reason implies a certainty conscience of the insufficiency of discourse, hence its use of allegorical strategies like the fragment and the labyrinth. As an open text that invites the spectator to engage into an active and creative reading, this film contains a kind of rebellious energy that has little to do with the sedative entertainment that absorbed the monk in the Middle age monastery of the story that opened this essay.

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Notes
Ral Ruiz, Teora del Conflicto Central, in Potica del cine (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Sudamericana Chilena, 2000), 20-21. 2 Jean Baudrillard, Impossible exchange (London: Verso, 2001). 3 Jean Baudrillard, El complot del arte (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2006), 23. 4 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994). 5 Severo Sarduy, Nueva Inestabilidad, in Ensayos Generales Sobre el Barroco (Mexico: FCE, 1987) 6 Omar Calabrese, La Era Neobarroca. (Madrid: Catedra, 1987), 31-32. 7 Buci-Glucksmann, 39 8 Allegory comes from the latin allo agoreini, that can be translated as to speak the other. 9 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Drama (London: Verso, 1998), 174-77. 10 Buci-Glucksmann, 140. 11 Benjamin, 178. 12 Calabrese, 87. 13 Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2004), 222-223. 14 Even though he film was shot in Mexico, due to the lack of geographical references and the ambiguity of the cultural it could have perfectly been shot in any other desert in the world. 15 Buci-Gluksmann, 133. 16 Calabrese, 73. 17 Marcel Duchamp, The Creatie Act, Art News, no. 4 (Summer 1957), 28. 18 George Bataille, The Labyrinth, in Visions of Excess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 171. 19 Bataille, 173. 20 Calabrese, 148 21 Benjamin, 216. 22 Irlemar Chiampi, Barroco y modernidad. (Mxico: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 2000), 5.
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Bibliography Bataille, George. Visions of Excess. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Baudrillard, Jean. El complot del arte, Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2006. Baudrillard, Jean. Impossible exchange. London: Verso, 2001. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Drama. London: Verso, 1998. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994. Calabrese, Omar. La Era Neobarroca. Madrid: Catedra, 1987. Chiampi, Irlemar. Barroco y modernidad. Mxico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 2000. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2004.Ruiz, Raul. Potica del cine. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Sudamericana Chilena, 2000). Duchamp, Marcel. The Creatie Act, Art News, no. 4 (Summer 1957). Sarduy, Severo. Ensayos Generales Sobre el Barroco. Mexico: FCE, 1987.

Filmography El Topo. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. 1970. Tartan Video, 2007, DVD.