El Topo, threatened with death, bargains to free them from their cave and digs a tunnel into the mountain. Many of these have been exiled to a cave inside a mountain. The film is also populated, as Jodorowsky's films are, by physically challenged characters amputees, people with Down syndrome, dwarfs, those whose bodies end at their trunks, men who talk with women's voices, women who talk with men's, a man without legs riding on the shoulders of a man without arms, and one of the most persistent images in the director's work, a symbiosis between a person without arms and another who stands close behind and allows his arms to act as the other's. Jodorowsky encourages such speculation by titling sections of the film after books of the Bible ('Psalms'), and making El Topo perhaps a Christ figure. The film went on to play all over the world and engender countless interpretations. John Lennon and Yoko Ono saw it, loved it, and convinced Beatles manager Allen Klein to buy and release it. Not the story, not the performances, not the stars (Jodorowsky himself plays El Topo and the child is his own son).

The ceaseless shocking images on the screen, are what made 'El 'Topo' an underground hit in one New York theater for months in 1970. What is El Topo seeking in the desert? Why, he is seeking symbols, images, bizarre people and events, with which to fill the film. But now having seen more of Jodorowsky's work, I think Jodorowsky's method is not without a purpose. I still agree with that and do not think the symbols add up to a 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.' Instead, they're employed in a shifting, prismatic way, casting their light on each other instead of on the film's conclusion. He makes not the slightest attempt to use them so they sort out into a single logical significance. In my review when the movie opened, I wrote: 'Jodorowsky lifts his symbols and mythologies from everywhere: Christianity, Zen, discount-store black magic, you name it. 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. 'El Topo' is filled with symbols, and they're not obvious.

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. This is not quite true, but truth is not allowed to interfere with its use as a convenient symbol. 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.

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