The director who went too far: the shocking truth about the exploitation 'classic' El Topo 

It’s a hallucinatory mix, which is why El Topo screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before becoming a fixture as one of the first ‘midnight movies’, the cult, late-night screenings at arthouse cinemas that also launched Night of the Living Dead to prominence. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were early enthusiasts and George Harrison was so impressed that he almost appeared in El Topo’s follow-up, Holy Mountain (he refused to agree to flash his bottom and was not cast).

Now, at 90, Jodorowsky remains a favourite of many filmmakers and cineastes; his 2016 drama Endless Poetry won rave reviews and was shown in Cannes. Yet he is still so prone to gnomic utterances and myth-making that it’s hard to know how much of his own account of the film’s tortured production to believe. It's also disturbing how often rape crops up often in his conversation, even today.

El Topo was Jodorowsky’s third film but his first professional effort, in his own account, following a lost debut film (a story based on Thomas Mann’s play The Severed Heads that was, he said, taken away by his collaborator Ruth Michelly) and the experimental Mexican film Fando Y Lis. Made in a flurry, El Topo took nine months from conception to release, thanks to the support of producer Roberto Viskin, who gathered the money, miraculously provided for all Jodorowsky’s strange requests and gave the director the total artistic freedom he demanded.

With the help of a sympathetic crew, condoms filled with blood for the numerous gunshot wounds and a largely non-professional cast that included beggars and 25 prostitutes from towns around the set (the film was shot in a town built in the desert for an old Glenn Ford Western), he made the film of his dreams.

El Topo (which means “The Mole”) is almost impossible to describe, but it begins with a black-clad gunslinger (Jodorowsky) riding through the desert with a naked little boy, his son (the director’s son Brontis Jodorowsky), sitting on the horse behind him. He battles bandits and a corrupt military officer, abandoning his son with some monks he rescues from torture while picking up a captive woman (Mara Lorenzio) who he takes across the desert with him.

He rapes her, causing a sort of mythic flood, but she tells him later that he must earn her love by defeating four fabled gun masters. He manages the feat, though he’s overcome with guilt – so the woman leaves and he is adopted by an underground society of outcasts (played by the aforementioned beggars, along with amputees and little people). He has a new quest, to free his new protectors from their cavern prison. But when the freed troglodytes are shot down by the townspeople nearby, El Topo takes revenge before immolating himself.

It’s a trippy and frequently dream-like affair, driven by haunting imagery and with Jodorowsky mixing Biblical, mythological and Zen references according to his own, idiosyncratic whims. His aim was to ape the Western genre but import Eastern philosophy, and a certain fairytale logic, into a gory, disturbing dream.

But almost immediately, troubling elements appear. The first town that El Topo visits is the scene of a massacre, and Jodorowsky crowed of it that, “If you look at the first scene, you will see that there are one hundred women. I counted everything in my picture. I dressed them in white, like brides: bloody brides. When I saw the scene being filmed, I felt I was seeing one hundred raped brides…I didn't have the money to dress them all in bridal gowns. Otherwise I would have had them all wear elegant white wedding gowns. One day I'll make a movie with ten thousand women dressed as raped brides.”

The film’s later rape scene is a brief but violent depiction of assault followed by a series of more symbolic imagery: a fountain in the desert, eggs in the sand. But Jodorowsky’s account of its filming, in the 1972 book El Topo: A Book Of The Film, is far more disturbing than what he puts on-screen:

We had never talked to each other. I knew nothing about her. We went to the desert with two other people: the photographer and a technician. No one else. I said, 'I'm not going to rehearse. There will be only one take because it will be impossible to repeat. Roll the cameras only when I signal you to.'

Then I told her, 'Pain does not hurt. Hit me.' And she hit me. I said, 'Harder.' And she started to hit me very hard, hard enough to break a rib... I ached for a week. After she had hit me long enough and hard enough to tire her, I said, 'Now it's my turn. Roll the cameras.' And I really... I really... I really raped her. And she screamed.

He goes on:

Then [Lorenzio] told me that she had been raped before. You see, for me the character is frigid until El Topo rapes her. And she has an orgasm. That’s why I show a stone phallus in that scene… which spouts water. She has an orgasm. She accepts male sex. And that’s what happened to Mara in reality. She really had that problem. Fantastic scene. A very, very strong scene.

The rape claim was, at the time, largely ignored. Unless the interview was edited for expressions of shock or horror, it appears that the immediate follow-up question in response to this admission, from filmmaker and critic Ira Cohen, was “Do you know that the mole has a cock like a knife? You know, with a serrated edge, like a surgical instrument.”

The story never seemed to harm Jodorowsky’s reputation. He continued to enjoy a cult following, though he spent long decades making comics when unable to get films off the ground with the artistic control he demanded (especially after the enormously expensive attempt to make Dune in the 1970s, which involved hiring Salvador Dali and promising to make him the highest-paid actor in Hollywood).

A typewritten CV Jodorowsky gave to Roger Ebert in Cannes in 1989 read: “Russian parents, lived in Chile, worked in Paris, was the partner of Marcel Marceau, founded the 'Panic' movement with Fernando Arrabal, directed 100 plays in Mexico, drew a comic strip, made 'El Topo,' and now lives in the United States..."

Jodorowsky influenced directors such as David Lynch (who would late take the job of adapting Frank Herbert’s  Dune after Jodorowsky failed), Nicolas Winding Refn and Samuel Fuller. Later films, like Santa Sangre, also became cult hits, and even in recent years he has talked up the possibility of a sequel to El Topo, Son Of El Topo, and seen that prospect greeted with unalloyed acclaim and excitement by most film writers (Emily Asher Perrin is an honourable exception). The rape claims are rarely raised in interviews, but when they have been, Jodorowsky has changed his story.

In 2007 Jodorowsky told Empire magazine that, “I didn’t rape Mara, but I penetrated her with her consent.” In a Facebook post in 2017 he ridiculed his original account. “How could I, in front of such a crowd, rape an actress with impunity?... I said things to shock interviewers.” He explicitly contradicted his claim that only two others were present, listing the many other people on a film crew, but on that occasion made no mention of “penetration with consent” either.

Neither has Jodorowsky’s explanation for the lesser claim of having slaughtered hundreds of rabbits on set been consistent. In the 1972 book, Jodorowsky claimed that, “I killed all the rabbits because no one else wanted to do it. It upset them. I did it with karate blows on the neck. To kill a rabbit, you take it by the ears and strike it on the nape of the neck with the edge of your hand. And the rabbit dies easily. That's all I look for in life: to die easily. By killing three hundred rabbits, I learned how to die peacefully. A rabbit surrenders its life much more easily than a woman surrenders to an orgasm. Easier. The vengeance of today's woman is to make the man work to give her an orgasm. ‘I'll reach an orgasm by the sweat of your brow.’”

But in a 2008 interview, he explained away that earlier statement too. “When the film first came out, I was accused of killing animals to make it. So I said: 'Yes! I kill animals! Yes! I hate women! I hate animals! I love violence!' I said that because, for me, these questions were idiotic. How you can judge a work with that kind of concept? In reality, actually, all the animals in the film had already been killed. They were sick. There was a myxomatosis outbreak, that had killed a lot of rabbits, and I bought these dead rabbits. So, in reality, I didn’t kill animals, but I said that I did…”

He swung back again, in 2014, when he said that he regretted asking his (real-life as well as on-screen) son, Brontis, to kill the creatures. “When I made El Topo, I was just asking [Brontis] to kill some rabbits. ‘Just!’ Because at the time, I said to myself, ‘We should give everything to art.’ So when I finished the picture, I became more human, and asked forgiveness from my child. I'd never kill an animal; I became conscious.” 

And Jodorowsky keeps talking about rape. In the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which pieced together his attempts to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune for the screen in the second half of the 1970s (David Lynch would finally make the film in 1984), Jodorowsky claims that, “When you make a picture, you must not respect the novel. It’s like you get married, no? You go with the wife, white, the woman is white. You take the woman, if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to… to rape the bride. And then you will have your picture. I was raping Frank Herbert, raping, like this! But with love, with love.” The apparent belief that respect and sex are incompatible, and that rape and sex are interchangeable, is strikingly wrong.

On Twitter, a fan asked him, “When I was a little girl I was sexually abused. Now, even though I love him, it’s hard for me to sexually desire my husband”. His response, in July 2016, was, “Make him disguise as your rapist, and you will be sexually aroused…” The same year he tweeted that, “Everyone should rape their children. This would awaken in them an unwavering trauma with their parents.” (He subsequently deleted the tweet.)

Set against this history of – at least – violent imagery is the fact that Jodorowsky should not, necessarily, be taken at face value, since he revels in the same sort of metaphor and dream logic as his films. In the same interview as the rape claim he said that “a flea I met in 1945” was an important influence on El Topo and that “I don't think Alexander the Great conquered anything. The ambitious one was his horse”.

But his stories are still horrifying. Perhaps the rabbits were sick, but many of them are hopping around quite merrily early in the scene, and his 2014 quotes suggest that some, at least, were killed outright. And even if Lorenzio did consent, given the power imbalance between a debutante actress and the charismatic director/star on a film’s set, the degree of that consent must be up for question (and the need for any penetration, given the way the film is shot).

Lorenzio disappeared from public life – “After we filmed the movie, she left” said the director – and has never spoken on the record about her experiences, so Jodorowsky’s is the dominant account of the film’s creation.

Perhaps he is just seeking to shock us. But in light of the (at best) murky history of El Topo, the film may be more exploitation than arthouse after all.