We Really Need to talk about the Holy Mountain

Let me just say, although I was not all that impressed by El Topo
 
(I tended to enjoy Fando y Lis

a little more), I'm glad John Lennon and Yoko Ono went to see it at a midnight showing.  They convinced the Beatles' manager, Alen Klein, to bankroll Jodorowsky's next film, what some would call his most self-indulgent (and consequently most brilliant) the Holy Mountain.



Does the film live up to the budget?  Let's put it this way, Jodorowsky never made a better film since, even though his concept for Dune would have been brilliant.  The Dance of Reality was a pretentious jab at communist discipline and any non-religious approach



However, the Holy Mountain has always stuck with me as one of the most brilliant films of all of cinema history.  I can't help, even as an atheist, feeling shame a being mocked by Jodorowsky's psycho-magic in the documentary about him, Consellation.

He, the director who forced his actors to take psilocybin mushrooms during the "hump the mountain" scene.  He who, at the end of the film assures that all we have just seen was a film and not actual reality.  He who can read your fortune in the tarot deck.



I understand why some might be taken in by cults and cult films are called that for a reason.  They offer the perfect escape from just the wrong situation.  The Holy Mountain is one of those films.  And it was geuinely, Babylonianally hedonistic and subversive.  You can enter a world where it doesn't matter if you mutilate animals or make bombs into toys.  The journey is the same.  You might be Jesus of Muhammad, but you're still just in Olympic competition with Zeus and Aphrodite at the Pantheon Bar and it's Kareoke night.  A drunk guy can go across the mountain, but he can't ascend because he can only travel horizontally.



I love you and I'd like you to know, this film has not always or even often done right by me.  As a matter of fact, strict, fundamental adherence to this film could result in some dangerous fundamentalism.  Of course Jodorowsky free's you from all that at the end when he declares the whole previous hour and a half simulacrum of reality a film.  Just watch it already.