Holy Mountain

Holy Mountain

Bizarre, absurdist, surreal avant garde cinema is a form of filmmaking that is truly and only for the most artistically brave, perhaps because it runs the greatest risk when standing up to audience scrutiny (and dismissal) than the more run of the mill mainstream movies out there. Arguably first pioneered by Luis Bunuel and still carried on to this day by David Lynch, the never ending debate about who is the best and most adept at this genre will always in the end perhaps center on Alejandro Jodorowsky, a guy who started out as a mime and puppeteer before picking up a camera and carving out his place as maybe the most INSANE filmmaker ever, first drawing stares and acclaim with his 1971 masterpiece El Topo which successfully melded a strange, original yet compelling Western story with mindblowing visuals that celebrated both the freakishly beautiful as well as the abominations of one man’s twisted mind. The film gained an instant fan in one John Lennon, who had his management team take Jodorowsky on and promised to finance his next feature. That next feature turned out to be this 1973 followup, and as amazing and eye popping as the visuals were here as well, in many ways it appeared that Jodorowsky just threw all semblance of a coherent story out the window in order to make a highly satiric message about society (which still holds up today), religion, materialism, and even his own posturing of himself as some kind of a cinematic guru whose preachings would somehow change the world as we know it. The film begins with a dual closeup of what appears to be two female Marilyn Monroe wannabes both made up to look like the famous actress before Jodorowsky himself enters and wipes off their makeup, strips them naked, and then shaves all the hair on their heads off clean in order to help them find some kind of a path to enlightenment. Indeed, the Jodorowsky character here (known as “The Alchemist”) is some kind of all knowing holy man looking for disciples to take on a mystical journey to the film’s aptly titled mountain, with the overriding criteria for all takers is that they be both morally and spiritually corrupt to begin with. The first contestant who is introduced in the opening 30 minutes is a fellow known only as “The Thief” (Horacio Salinas in a role originally cast with Lennon’s fellow Beatle George Harrison) whom we watch wandering through his village, an obviously shiftless, lazy individual who even carries around with him a man with no arms and no legs (although it is not made clear how this relationship ever benefits either one or the other). He also has a passing resemblance to Jesus Christ, leading to one bit where he is used as a body mold model to create a surplus line of Jesus statues to sell at market. Anyway, it can be bluntly said that any viewer who can make it through this opening portion of the film and the unspeakably grotesque atrocities on display (although beautifully filmed and exquisitely designed in the shot composition) is probably stalwart enough to make it all the way through to the end of the movie itself. The Thief finally comes upon the “home” of Jodorowsky’s Alchemist (really a giant orange tower in the middle of the city square) and after Jodorowsky subdues him during a knife attack and shows off his gold making alchemy skills by having his subject defecate into a jar before turning it into something far more valuable, it is explained that along with he and an unnamed, heavily tattooed black woman, it is now time to meet our other seven contestants for this mythical journey, described as being “among the most powerful people in the world who are also thieves just like you, only on a different level”. This leads to a series of seven vignettes for these other travelers to be, each of them being a nice little introductory piece detailing just how evil and morally barren they really are. First up is a so called “bed and comfort manufacturer” (Juan Ferrera) who runs a large factory and has seemingly screwed (and impregnated) every single female employee who works in it and also produces “permanent masks” for people “who want to be loved for who they wish to be.” Next up is a “weapons manufacturer” (Adriana Page) who (in a contrast to the previous entrant) has a sprawling array of submissive male employees worshipping her every step as she even manufactures weapons “for the radical protester crowd” including psychedelic guitar machine guns and rainbow colored hand grenade necklaces. After that we meet an “art dealer” (Burt Kleiner) whose primary interest seems to be in promoting art that is all about nothing more than sex and sexual proclivities including having a so called “orgasm machine”. Certainly the scariest entrant is next, a “toymaker” (Valerie Jodorowsky) who promotes herself to children by performing clown routines in the streets but then goes back to her factory to manufacture kid’s toys and comic books that condition them to hate and want to kill whoever the next projected enemies of the state are in the next 10 to 15 years (in other words indoctrinating them). After that we get Berg (Nicky Nichols), a slimy “financial advisor to The President” (who appears to be screwing his mother) that advises said President on just how many citizens need to be killed in order to balance the budget. Then we meet Axon (Oliver Stone collaborator Richard Rutowski), said to be the “chief of police” who requires his young recruits to “sacrifice a part of their body” to him through castration before leading them into the streets to kill and maim yet another band of undesirables. Finally, there is Lut (Luis Lomeli), a “housing manufacturer” who, in order to save money, has decided not to build decent homes or apartments anymore for lower income people, but rather coffin shaped “compartments” or pods solely for them to sleep in as they will be expected to do everything else (including eating) in the workplace. Once Jodorowsky’s Alchemist has them all gathered together, he explains that while they may all have money and power, they still have no way of escaping death and that this journey that they’re embarking on to the fabled Holy Mountain will guarantee them all immortality and ever lasting life, but first they are all made to burn their money as well as craven images of themselves (wax figures) before they head on out. Indeed, it would seem that for the rest of the movie the primary methods of The Alchemist involve both breaking down and destroying the egos and self worth of these disciples (including having everyone shave their heads) which would seem to indicate that the only real way to be immortal is to kill everything human and flawed about what they once were (in short, willingly accept death anyway) in order to empty their heads and their hearts so that they may be filled with the great thing yet to come, whatever that is. Even when they arrive at the island where the mountain is located, they are greeted by a jovial fat man (possibly the Devil?) who actually runs a resort on the island populated by all of the past travelers who had tried and failed to climb that mountain. But this group is a determined lot, rejecting the overtures and trudging on until we get to the actual ending of this movie, one of the most brilliant and audacious endings ever filmed, keeping in mind that it is NOT the ending that we were expecting, but rather one in which Jodorowsky seems to be saying that either he is just as much of a charlatan as anybody else or that maybe the kind of true final spiritual attainment as promised is just simply not something that can be captured on film and presented to an audience for mass consumption especially after the mindblowing, stomach churning visual feast that has been on display for us over the last two hours. Jodorowsky was essentially a one of a kind type who was capable of achieving the most amazing visuals through nothing more than just pure low budget artistically shot compositions and not through the use of computers, animation, or special effects, thus making him an artist whom we can forgive for not giving us a 2001 type light show onto the next plane of existence since he himself was really just a brilliantly simple man who knew nothing of what that actual experience would literally seem like, thus making the joke just slightly be on us even after presenting one of the most sumptuous works of cinematic art ever created in the 20th century…

8/10

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