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.
