The Holy Mounltain

Like most films containing ostentatious blasphemy, Alexander Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (1973) tends toward pedantic didacticism.  In this case, Jodorowsky suggests supplanting the rich, and bizarre, culture of Latin American Catholicism with...it's not clear, but, perhaps, some sort of apolitical liberation theology based, it seems, on Tarot cards.  Since Catholicism, particularly in its Mexican-Peruvian form, is far stranger than anything that Jodorowsky can invent as an alternative religion, The Holy Mountain falls a little flat -- it never quite achieves the hallucinatory and visionary splendor to which it aspires.  Along the way, the movie delivers plenty of genuinely shocking and beautiful images and so its worth watching for the pictures.  And the film is basically silent -- there is very little dialogue, a mercy since the speeches and words that we can hear are, more or less, idiotic in an annoying "new age" sort of way.

After an arcane introduction involving a magus who shaves the heads of two beautiful novice girls, The Holy Mountain shows us a thief, sprawled in the dust of a favela his face crawling with flies.  The thief rouses himself accompanied by an amputee dwarf with no hands and only short, ineffectual stumps for legs.  (Jodorowsky fetishizes amputees and his films crawl with them -- it's an effect that is oddly horrific, like something from Tod Browning's Freaks.)  The thief resides in a kind of wicked Babylon where cops in gas masks gun down innocent-looking hippies, harlots have sex with thugs in public, and armies of men march around carrying flayed goats crucified on posts.  The thief is captured, drowned in plaster so that he can serve as a model for a couple hundred plaster statues of his life-size body, used to represent the crucified Christ.  The thief with his dwarf side-kick goes berserk and wrecks the crucified figures, although one of them, apparently made out of some kind of cheese, serves him as a sort of mobile buffet -- he carries his Jesus-meal on a cross, it's like State Fair food:  Fried Jesus on a stick.  (The audience gets a momentary frisson out of the image of the thief gnawing away Jesus' face but, really, how different is this from actual Christianity -- don't we eat Jesus during every Communion?)  The thief scales an enormous tower with sheer walls, something like one of the fortified towers of  San Gemigiano and, in that structure, encounters the alchemist played by Jodorowsky himself.  (Jodorowsky has a huge balding forehead and piercing eyes and he looks a little like an alien from a 1950's scifi film.)  The alchemist first shows that he can transform the thief's shit into gold through various melting, boiling, and other processes in his alembics.  Then, he introduces the thief to his nine zodiacal disciples -- each of them affiliated with a certain evil aspect of the modern world.  There is Mars who embodies war-mongering, Uranus, a kind of lascivious fop, and other figures including an evil toy-manufacturer who makes guns for small children, a cruel banker, a dicatator, an architect, and so forth.  (The satirical sequences introducing each zodiacal figure are the funniest and best parts of the film.) The alchemist gathers the thief and the nine zodiacal warriors around a table, lectures them on the Tarot and, then, demands that they burn all their money.  After burning their cash, the alchemist orders them to burn themselves in the central fire-pit -- and, so, they cast life-size nude wax figures of themselves into the flames.  Then, the alchemist abandons the tower and leads his merry crew on a series of adventures intended to put them to the test and ultimately achieve wisdom -- the goal is a group of sages atop a Holy Mountain.  The adventures are either grotesque or disgusting, something like a South American version of the Fear Factor except completely over-the-top.  In James Bond movies of the era, a heroine might be menaced by a single rust-red tarantula slowly creeping toward her naked body; everything in Jodorowsky is absurdly excessive -- in The Holy Mountain a nude Zodiac disciple is shown howling with dismay as, at least fifty hand-sized tarantulas crawl over his chest, belly, and face.  The adventurers comes to a great dome of snow and ice, the holy mountain.  They see the nine Taoist sages gathered around a round table on a lofty meadow.  Of course, the motionless sages turn out to be the wax figures of the nine Zodiacal warriors who, now, discard their simulacra and seat themselves at the table -- the object of the search was their secret and true selves.  The alchemist proclaims that the thief needs him no longer and hands his disciple an enormous scimitar telling him to cut off his head.  When the thief cuts off the head of the alchemist, he is revealed to have decapitated a goat.  The alchemist summons all his followers together to reveal the truth to them.  Facing the camera, he tells the director of photography to zoom back and reveal that the wise man, the thief, and the nine zodiac disciples are all being filmed by a cameras and a sound crew.  The movie is full of spurting blood, grotesque rapes, nudity, and strange architectural and natural landscapes.  The Holy Mountain is impressively designed and fantastically inventive and, yet, it never really persuades me that there is anything truthful or authentic about the picture.  There is no real acting, everyone mugs for the camera, no dialogue, no suspense or narrative beyond the broad lineaments of the quest theme and, of course, the wisdom disclosed at the climax is specious and has the quality of a fortune cookie.  John Boorman's Excaliber which the film sometimes resembles is also about the Quest -- an Arthurian quest -- but it is far more moving and powerful because there are actual characters in the film and we care about them.  Jodorowsky gives us nothing but Jungian archetypes and its hard to worry to much about their fates.