El Topo and Jeanne — Revisited in 2025

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Friday November 28, 2025 · 3:52 PM PST

2025/11/28 · 15:52

Updated and expanded from the 2014 TPJ post (https://trenzpruca.wordpress.com/2014/08/11/el-topo-and-jeanne/)

In my never-ending quest for something—anything—to do in suburban El Dorado Hills, I recently decided to revisit Alejandro Jodorowsky’s early film El Topo. When I first watched it many years ago, it was already rumored to have influenced David Lynch, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Manson, George Harrison, John Lennon, Peter Gabriel, and approximately forty million stoners who insisted it changed their lives, usually while staring into a lava lamp.

Watching it again in 2025, I can say that it is still one of the strangest, most symbol-drenched films ever made. Jodorowsky remains one of the few directors who can make you feel as though you’ve stepped into an acid-soaked allegory even while stone-cold sober.

Jodorowsky and the Symbolist Tradition

Like many artists from Mexico and South America, Jodorowsky is addicted to symbolism—lush, violent, ecstatic symbolism—in a way that can seem loopy to Americans and Northern Europeans raised on realism or minimalism.

Spanish artists also lean heavily on symbolism, grounded in dramatic color and religious intensity. Central and South American artists, however, give symbolism a more visceral presence—blood, death, rebirth, sex, mysticism, all swirling together like a fever dream.

By contrast, Italian artists (especially those from the shadow-heavy Renaissance tradition) treat darkness itself as a color—an elemental part of the palette—while Northern and Eastern Europeans often turn inward toward hellscapes of shadow, silence, and implied threat.

Symbolism is a universal impulse, but its geography matters.

This was something I learned not only from art history but from experience. When I ran my district of the New York Mental Health Information Service, I noticed that Spanish, South American, and recent Italian immigrants often hallucinated visions of the suffering Christ during breakdowns—bleeding hearts, thorns, martyrdom. Northern and Eastern Europeans, by contrast, hallucinated Hell—not the theological kind, but an existential one: darkness, geometry, emptiness, threat.

If you want to understand El Topo, understanding those cultural differences helps. Jodorowsky pulls from the deep symbolic vocabulary of Latin America—the mystical and the grotesque as companions, not opposites.

The Plot of El Topo

(If “plot” is even the right word)

Describing the plot of El Topo is like trying to summarize a peyote vision in bullet points, but here goes:

A black-clad gunfighter (Jodorowsky himself), known only as El Topo—“the mole”—travels through a surreal desert landscape with his young son on a spiritual-violent quest. He battles four master gunfighters, each representing a different philosophical or mystical ideal. After completing this task through increasingly morally troubling methods, he undergoes death, rebirth, and transformation, eventually becoming a shaven-headed holy man devoted to freeing a community of malformed outcasts who live underground.

Violence erupts again in the film’s final act, culminating in a self-sacrificial ending that is half tragedy, half cosmic joke.

It is a Western, a myth, a religious allegory, an exploitation film, and a dream—often simultaneously. Whether any of it “means” anything is up to the viewer. Jodorowsky insists the symbols are there to trigger transformation, not to be decoded like a puzzle.

A Bit About Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky—Chilean-Ukrainian, mime, poet, tarot scholar, theater anarchist, filmmaker, and professional mystic—is one of the last surviving icons of the 1960s–70s avant-garde.

Before El Topo, he worked with Marcel Marceau, staged radical “panic theater” performances, and wrote comic books that later influenced the aesthetics of cyberpunk and psychedelic science fiction.

El Topo became the world’s first true “midnight movie,” thanks in part to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, whose financial support ensured its distribution. Jodorowsky later attempted to film an epic adaptation of Dune—with Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, and Mick Jagger—but the project collapsed under the weight of its own ambition, becoming legend and inspiring generations of directors.

Even now, at age 95, he remains a cult figure—part guru, part carnival magician—whose films inspire either devotion or bafflement. Sometimes both.

**1970: El Topo, Jeanne, and San Francisco**

I first saw El Topo in 1970, shortly after arriving in San Francisco. I went with a woman I had just met on a bus. The theater was near the Civic Center. Like many things from those years, it no longer exists except in memory.

The woman’s name was Jeanne. We stayed together for three years. I was in love with her. She wanted to go to medical school and had to take extra science courses since she had graduated earlier with a liberal arts degree. She worked hard, and eventually she succeeded.

During the summer before medical school began, we broke up. I tried to get back together, but by then she was also seeing another man, much younger than I.

I asked her to marry me. She said she needed time to decide.

That weekend she went hiking in the Trinity Alps. She fell off a cliff and died. The young man and I accompanied her body back to Iowa where her family lived.

Two weeks after the funeral, the young man went swimming in a lake somewhere in the East Bay and drowned.

Whenever I watch El Topo, Jeanne drifts back into view like one of Jodorowsky’s symbols—blood, death, rebirth, and the arbitrary cruelty of the universe wrapped together. I don’t pretend to know the meaning. I’m too far from my roots and too close to the exit to decode the symbolism of my own life.

**2025: Watching El Topo Again**

Now, in 2025, watching El Topo again feels like opening a time capsule buried in surrealism and sorrow. The film’s violence no longer shocks; the symbolism no longer puzzles. What lingers instead is a sense of distance—how far I have traveled from the man who sat in that vanished theater with a young woman and a life ahead of him.

As we age, the past and future grow shadowy; only the present stays colorful. That’s a good thing, I think. The present may be smaller, but it is clearer.

And maybe that is the real message of El Topo: the mole burrows underground for years, blind to everything except the moment it finds itself in. When it emerges into the light, it sees the world anew—just long enough to act, to make its mark, before returning to darkness.

Somewhere in that cycle, Jeanne still walks with me. And somewhere, El Topo still rides through the desert looking for enlightenment in all the wrong (or perhaps the only possible) places.

Not a Movie Review: “Radioactive Dreams.”

Trenz Pruca

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday November 25, 2025 · 1:39 PM PST

2025/11/25 · 13:39

Among my favorite movies — a list that includes The Princess Bride, The Iron Crown, Diva, Fabulous Fabiola, Blazing Saddles, and of course The Godfather — sits a little, radiant, mutant of a film called Radioactive Dreams. It is not an A-movie. It is hardly a B-movie. It may not even qualify as alphabetical in the traditional sense. But it is one of my favorite cinematic experiences of all time, precisely because it is so gloriously, unapologetically, neon-lit bizarre.

It is also almost impossible to find, which makes its discovery feel like stumbling upon a lost scripture of the Church of Saturday-Night VHS.

Now, if you have not seen Radioactive Dreams — and you probably haven’t, unless you once lived within ten minutes of a 1980s strip-mall video store — you’re in for a treat, or at least an experience. Not every treat is delicious, but sometimes the weird flavors linger longest.

This is a film that commits to its own insanity with such cheerful sincerity that you can’t help but love it. Or at least admire it the way we admire people who decide to roller-skate across Nevada for charity: it might not be wise, but it sure is memorable.

So allow me to take you on a journey into its glowing wastelands.

THE SETUP: TWO BOYS, A VAULT, AND TOO MUCH RAYMOND CHANDLER

The movie begins with the world blowing itself to radioactive hell — as one did, cinematically speaking, in the 1980s.

Two fathers shove their young sons — Phillip Chandler and Marlowe Hammer (yes, really) — into a fallout shelter moments before the bombs drop. While the world vaporizes itself outside, the boys spend 15 formative years underground, reading 1950s detective fiction and listening almost exclusively to swing music.

Imagine growing up with nothing but Chandler, Spillane, and Tommy Dorsey. Imagine thinking the outside world was filled with iron-jawed femme fatales, suspicious bartenders who know too much, and saxophones playing the blues at three in the morning. Imagine stepping outside expecting Humphrey Bogart and getting… well… 1980s post-apocalyptic punk cannibals.

And so these two naive, suit-wearing, dance-loving “dancing dicks” (their term) dig themselves out of their bunker at age 19, step into the nuclear dust, and immediately find themselves outnumbered by mutants, greasers, biker-girls, cannibals, and something that looks suspiciously like a giant radioactive rat.

I knew then I was watching something special.

THE WIZARD OF OZ BUT WITH MORE CANNIBALS

The film’s first visual gag is a stunner. Everything inside the vault is shot in black and white, tightly framed in a 4:3 box — the past, sealed and preserved. Then the boys wrench open the vault door and:

Color bleeds in.
The frame widens.
The world becomes terrifying and brown.

It’s the Wizard of Oz moment, if Dorothy had stepped out into a wasteland patrolled by biker-gang sociopaths and women with more eyeshadow than fuel.

It is this mix of sincerity and absurdity that hooked me. The boys are earnest; the world is not. They are noir. The world is punk. They are swing. The world is New Wave. They are private detectives. The world wants to eat them.

This is not just a culture clash — it’s a cross-century fistfight.

THE SOUNDTRACK: SWING MEETS NEW WAVE MEETS “EAT YOU ALIVE”

One of the strangest joys of the film is the soundtrack.

Phillip and Marlowe grew up on 1940s swing. But the wasteland is dominated by early 80s New Wave, including the gloriously deranged sequence in which cannibals gleefully hack their way through a chase scene set to Lisa Lee’s “Eat You Alive.”

If the metaphor isn’t subtle, neither is the film.

Then, just as you’re settling in, the movie delivers what may be — and I am not exaggerating — one of the greatest non-sequitur music-video interludes in cinema history.

About halfway through the film, everything stops.

A woman (Sue Saad) suddenly leaps in front of the camera and belts out “Guilty Pleasures” as if she’s stumbled in from an MTV soundstage filming down the hall.

No warning. No transition. No narrative justification.

It is magnificent.

If modern films sometimes suffer from too much narrative cohesion, Radioactive Dreams is the opposite. It is a patchwork quilt of scenes stitched together by enthusiasm, ignorance of genre boundaries, and whatever music rights Albert Pyun could negotiate after 11 PM on a Tuesday.

THE VILLAINS: GREASERS, CANNIBALS, BIKER GIRLS, AND A RODENT THAT COULD EAT A BUICK

A great post-apocalyptic film needs great enemies, and Radioactive Dreams supplies them as if randomly drawn from a hat labeled UNSTABLE CULTURAL ARCHETYPES.

There are:

Rockabilly greasers with hair gel strong enough to deflect bullets
Femme-fatale biker girls
Cannibal tribes with surprisingly coherent choreography
A villain named Miles Archer (Lisa Blount), lifted from Chandler’s The Maltese Falcon
Rusty Mars (Michele Little), who might be a villain, might be a hero, might be your cousin who joined a biker gang and found religion
And yes, a giant radioactive rat who arrives briefly, memorably, and with the presence of a creature that knows it will only get one chance to make an impression

Every time Phillip and Marlowe meet someone new, one of three things happens:

They try to kill the boys.
They try to eat the boys.
They try to steal from the boys.

Sometimes all three.

THE PRIVATE-EYE MYTHOS GETS HIT BY A MAD MAX TRUCK

Phillip, being the bookish one, narrates his experience in hard-boiled voice-over:

“My name’s Philip, and this is going to be a yarn about me and my pal, Marlowe…”

It’s perfect imitation-Chandler, if Raymond Chandler had been raised in a bunker and taught by malfunctioning educational robots.

Phillip and Marlowe try to solve a mystery about missing nuclear keys, their disappeared fathers, and the fate of the last unused missile.

But the world they inhabit doesn’t understand detective structure. The film’s plotting resembles two boys chasing clues in the midst of a rave-fueled biker riot.

Reviewers have put it kindly:

“The logic is borderline cartoon.” — VideoReligion.net
https://www.videoreligion.net/2018/11/radioactive-dreams-1985.html

Borderline?
This film pole-vaults over the border and dances in its underwear on the other side.

THE ENDING: “NOW WE DANCE.”

And now we reach the movie’s crown jewel.

After a tumult of gunfights, double-crosses, giant rats, and nuclear keys, Phillip turns to Marlowe and asks the eternal, time-honored question:

“Well Marlowe, what do we do now?”

Marlowe pauses, thinks, and replies:

“Now we dance.”

And then, for approximately ten minutes (in the full version), they perform what can best be described as a post-nuclear tap-dance revival meeting, surrounded by cheering wasteland survivors.

It is joyous.
It is absurd.
It is unearned.
It is unforgettable.

Unfortunately, the version circulating online often truncates this masterpiece to a mere two minutes — cinematic vandalism of the highest order.

But we will return to this mystery.

THE SCARCITY PROBLEM: WHY YOU CAN’T FIND THIS MOVIE (AND WHY THAT MAKES IT BETTER)

Now we come to one of the strangest ironies of Radioactive Dreams:

The film is about two boys emerging from a bunker to rediscover a ruined world — and to watch the film today, you have to do the same.

As of today:

No U.S. Blu-ray
No U.S. DVD
No streaming release
Only VHS, LaserDisc, and a single German Region-2 DVD that looks like it was transferred through a sock

This means that Radioactive Dreams is one of the last true cult scavenger hunts in cinema.

And just when you think it can’t get stranger…

THE ALTERNATE CUTS & THE GREAT COLLECTOR’S QUEST

Yes — there is more than one version of this film.

The IMDb “Alternate Versions” page confirms that a Japanese LaserDisc edition exists that runs about 10 minutes longer than the U.S. theatrical cut.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091818/alternateversions/

Wikipedia confirms the same — and adds a twist:
The two versions are not simply longer/shorter.
They contain different scenes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_Dreams

Let me translate:

The Japanese cut includes scenes the U.S. version does not.
The U.S. version includes scenes the Japanese cut does not.
Neither version is “complete.”
Both versions are half-buried in cinematic rubble.
Only mad collectors possess both.

This means there is no definitive version of Radioactive Dreams.

The movie about the apocalypse exists in fragmented, post-apocalyptic form.

You cannot make this up.

THE LASERDISC GRAIL

The U.S. Vestron LaserDisc runs about 94 minutes and is extremely rare.
https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/02920/ID7542VE/Radioactive-Dreams

The Japanese LaserDisc — the longer cut — exists mostly as whispered legend, late-night eBay sightings, and collector forum confessions:

“Different intro, about ten minutes longer — shared on Peter NC-17’s account.”
Reddit, /r/boutiquebluray
https://www.reddit.com/r/boutiquebluray/comments/1gsz9uc/someone_release_radioactive_dreams_already/

Blu-Ray.com has a 10-page thread of people begging for a remaster.
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=357029&page=5

Somewhere, in some dusty basement, lies the uncut version — not on film, not on tape, but in LaserDisc form, waiting for a brave soul with a working player, a steady hand, and a tolerance for static.

THE GERMAN DVD: A SORT OF HOLY RELIC (IF YOU SQUINT)

Germany produced a limited-run Region-2 DVD edition — 1,000 copies — sourced from what appears to be a worn VHS master.

It is the cinematic equivalent of discovering an ancient scroll written on a napkin.

Two songs were cut due to rights issues.
The image quality resembles a photocopy of a photocopy.
But it exists.
Collectors covet it.
Some worship it.

If Phillip and Marlowe ever stumbled on it in the wasteland, I imagine they would say:

“Well Phillip, what do we do now?”
“Now we preserve it.”

WHY THIS FILM STILL MATTERS (AND WHY IT WILL ALWAYS MATTER TO ME)

What makes Radioactive Dreams special is not that it’s good — although parts of it absolutely are — but that it is fearlessly itself.

It is a film that refuses to hide its strangeness.
It is earnest where it should be cynical.
It is hopeful where it should be bleak.
It dances when it should run and sings when it should hide.
It makes terrible decisions joyfully.
It is naive, messy, contradictory, and delightful.

In other words:
It is human.
It is the kind of film people make before they’re told “movies shouldn’t do that.”

Every time I rewatch it — often in some terrible, degraded transfer — I feel that same jolt of joy: the sense that someone, somewhere, poured their whole heart into something wonderfully impractical and gloriously out of step with the world.

Phillip and Marlowe emerge from their bunker believing the world is a noir novel.
They are wrong — gloriously wrong.
But they keep dancing anyway.

That is the spirit of Radioactive Dreams.

And it is why the film should — must — be revived.

This film deserves the Criterion treatment.
It deserves an HD restoration.
It deserves an earnest essay in TPJ (and perhaps a quizzical one on Daily Kos).
And most importantly:
it deserves viewers who appreciate its mutant optimism.

WHERE TO WATCH (AND WHAT TO WATCH OUT FOR)

For the brave:

A cut/truncated version circulates online (link previously provided), though the final dance sequence is butchered.
VHS copies appear occasionally on eBay, sometimes at reasonable prices, sometimes requiring you to mortgage a kidney.
LaserDiscs appear rarely and vanish immediately.

If you find the Japanese LD version, contact the Department of Energy and tell them you have found a missing nuclear codebook.

EPILOGUE: “NOW WE DANCE.”

I sometimes imagine Phillip and Marlowe digging their way out of a bunker in 2025, stepping into our world full of streaming services, consolidated media catalogs, algorithm-driven taste silos, and CEOs who think culture is a spreadsheet error.

I imagine them looking around and saying:

“Gee, Phil… the world sure did get boring.”

And then I imagine Marlowe turning, smiling, and saying:

“Well Phillip… now we bring back the weird.”

That’s what Radioactive Dreams is: a reminder that cinema once danced — badly, joyously, unexpectedly — even when the world had blown itself to pieces.

And that somewhere, in a forgotten LaserDisc vault, it is still dancing.

Note: The original post: papajoesfables.wordpress.com/…

The updated version: trenzpruca.wordpress.com/...

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