The Great Movies III

Another of the film's many strong supporting performances is by Trinidad Silva, as the motel manager and labor broker, who defines situations by imposing his will upon them. He might have had a rich career, but was killed in a traffic accident a few years after the film was made.

The closing scenes use the power of melodrama to involve our emotions, and they succeed; the simplicity and depth of Gutierrez's acting is heartbreaking. I've read reviews criticizing the film for its melodrama, but it occurred to me that the lives of many poor people are melodrama from birth to death. It takes a lot of money to insulate yourself in a less eventful, more controllable, life.

Seen after twenty years, El Norte retains its direct power to move and anger. The story needs no updating; it repeats every day. The movie really makes no statement about immigration itself, because policy questions are irrelevant to its characters. They want what we all want, better lives for themselves and their children. Their story is the same story enacted by the German, Irish, and Italian immigrants to America-by all of us, even the Native Americans, who came from Mongolia.

In the years since the film was released, the underlying reality of illegal immigration has remained essentially the same: America forbids it, yet requires it as a source of cheap labor. Someone like Cesar Chavez, who fought for the rights of Chicano farm laborers, was attacked because he revealed the nation's underlying hypocrisy on the subject.

The stories of Enrique and Rosa end sadly, but Nava returned to the subject of immigrant families in Mi Familia, where they endure and prevail. A Mexican American couple played by Jose Sanchez and Jennifer Lopez walk to Los Angeles, move in with an uncle they have never met before, and by the end of their lives, count among their children a nun, a lawyer, a writer, and a gang member shot dead by the police. They agree they have had wonderful lives, and that it would be wrong to ask for too much.

man in black rides the desert vastness of Mexico with a naked child in front of him on the saddle. Three hee-hawing gunmen appear from out of hiding, laughing that they have been sent to kill him. The man carefully places the child behind him on the saddle.

So opens Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970), one of the legendary "lost films," out of circulation for years before it was finally released on a DVD in 2007. A lone rider confronted by gunmen is nothing new in the Western. A naked child is, and adds a queasy undertone of danger and transgression. Jodorowsky finds a way to evoke that uneasiness throughout the film, and all of his work. There is always something incongruous, something unexpected that does not belong.

The lone rider is El Topo. The name translates as "the mole." The movie informs us that a mole spends his life digging tunnels to the sky, only to go blind when it sees the sun. This is not quite true, but truth is not allowed to interfere with its use as a convenient symbol. Will El Topo dig free and go blind? And if he does, what will that mean? Pauline Kael observed that Fellini's La Dolce Vita is filled with symbols, and they're all obvious. El Topo is filled with symbols, and they're not obvious. I am reminded of one of Ebert's Laws: "If you have to ask what something symbolizes, it doesn't." Or it stands for itself.

In my review when the movie opened, I wrote: "Jodorowsky lifts his symbols and mythologies from everywhere: Christianity, Zen, discountstore black magic, you name it. He makes not the slightest attempt to use them so they sort out into a single logical significance. Instead, they're employed in a shifting, prismatic way, casting their light on each other instead of on the film's conclusion. The effect resembles Eliot's The Waste Land, and especially Eliot's notion of shoring up fragments of mythology against the ruins of the post-Christian era.

I still agree with that and do not think the symbols add up to a conclusion. But now having seen more of Jodorowsky's work, I think Jodorowsky's method is not without a purpose. What is El Topo seeking in the desert? Why, he is seeking symbols, images, bizarre people and events, with which to fill the film.

The ceaseless shocking images on the screen are what made El Topo an underground hit in one New York theater for months in 1970. Not the story, not the performances, not the stars (Jodorowsky himself plays El Topo and the child is his own son). The images. John Lennon and Yoko Ono saw it, loved it, and convinced Beatles manager Allen Klein to buy and release it. The film went on to play all over the world and engender countless interpretations. Jodorowsky encourages such speculation by titling sections of the film after books of the Bible ("Psalms"), and making El Topo perhaps a Christ figure.