The Great Movies III

Jodorowsky has occupied the edges of the arts. He was a clown and puppeteer, studied under the mime Marcel Marceau, filmed a mime version of Thomas Mann's play The Transposed Heads, was a friend of the surrealist Arrabal, and is, in his own words, a "very famous comic-strip artist," the author of graphic novels that have become legendary.

He is also the author of the legendary cult film El Topo (1970), which was both saved and doomed by John Lennon. Saved, because Lennon admired it so much, he asked his manager, Allen Klein, to buy and distribute it. Doomed, because after the film became a worldwide sensation (Jodorowsky told me in 1989), "Klein made it disappear. He says, `I am waiting until you die, and then I am going to have a fortune.' He thinks he's immortal. If he dies first, I get the film back." So far, both men are still alive and only recently has El Topo been made available on video.

Jodorowsky's visionary world owes much to the surrealists, but even more to the quirky films that Luis Bunuel made during his Mexican exile, films showing men quietly obsessed with the details of their fetishes. Fenix, his hero, is literally a man whose world is defined by his obsessions. The witness to his mother's mutilation and his father's suicide, he is in an insane asylum when the film opens, perched atop a tree trunk. When he returns to the world, it is to play the role of his mother's arms and hands. He walks behind her, slips his arms through the sleeves of her garments and feeds her, plays the piano, gestures, and even caresses her body as if it is his own. Axel Jodorowsky and Blanca Guerra do this with such perfect timing that the hands seem to sense the next thought of the mother. But Fenix has no identity except as her instrument, which is why The Invisible Man appeals so strongly.

The first half of the film is filled with Felliniesque exuberance, celebrating the circus with its tawdry charms and sad clowns. The second half is somber and creepy, as in a scene where Fenix and four young men with Down syndrome are taken on a movie outing that ends (not unhappily) with cocaine and a visit to the red-light district.

Fenix eventually moves with his mother into a house where timbers lean everywhere at crazy angles for no apparent reason, except to evoke expressionism. And here he begins his revolt. As his mother jealously uses his hands to kill one woman after another, he recruits a muscular giantess who will be able, he thinks, to fight off any attack.

This giantess is pretty clearly a man in drag, but the movie makes no notice of that fact, and indeed many oddities pass unremarked, including the omnipresent doves and the ability of the tattooed lady, the dwarf, and the deaf-mute girl to materialize in Fenix's life when and how he needs them. All is finally made clear at the end, revealing how fearlessly Jodorowsky has married magic realism to Freud, in a film that is like a shriek against Momism.

Of course the movie is rated NC-i7. I believe more horror films should be made for adults, so that they are free to deal with true malevolence in the world, instead of retailing the pornography of violence without consequences. A generation is growing up that equates violence with action, instead of with harm. Not long ago The Exorcist was re-released and some young moviegoers laughed all the way through it. A society that laughs at evil eventually laughs at good, and then it loses its way.

The quality that Jodorowsky has above all is passionate sincerity. Apart from his wildly creative style, apart from his images, apart from his story inventions, he has strong moral feelings. He has an instinctive sympathy for Fenix, who was born into a world of fanaticism and cruelty, and has tried, with the help of a deaf girl and a dwarf, to get back the soul that was warped by his father and trapped by his mother. Maybe one difference between great horror films and all the others is that the great ones do not celebrate evil, but challenge it.

LL is a relentless excursion into style," Josef von Sternberg said of his The Scarlet Empress (1934). That's putting it mildly. Here is a film so crammed with style, so surrounded by it and weighted down with it, that the actors peer out from the display like children in a toy store. The film tells the story of Catherine the Great as a bizarre visual extravaganza, combining twisted sexuality and bold bawdy humor as if Mel Brooks had collaborated with the Marquis de Sade.