A gunman dressed in black advances through a desert that belongs to no map, a landscape of the soul dried out by the sun of metaphysics. With him is his naked son, a symbol of primordial innocence destined to be abandoned. This solemn and earthy opening is not the beginning of a western, but of a ritual. Alejandro Jodorowsky, with El Topo, does not direct a film; he officiates a ceremony, an alchemical psychodrama that aims to transmute celluloid into spiritual gold and the viewer into an initiate. If the classic American western was the founding mythology of a nation, and Leone's spaghetti western its cynical and operatic deconstruction, El Topo is its apocryphal Gospel, a sacred text written in the feverish language of dreams and hallucinations.

The first half of the film is a violent climb towards enlightenment, a sort of gun-wielding Pilgrim's Progress. El Topo, “The Mole,” who digs to find the light, is an archetype, not a character. He is the ultimate gunslinger, so skilled that he transcends his own function, transforming violence into an instrument of gnosis. His journey leads him to challenge the four Masters of the Desert, figures who embody different philosophies and levels of consciousness. They are not mere adversaries to be defeated in a High Noon-style duel; they are living koans. Each confrontation is a spiritual lesson disguised as a shootout. Jodorowsky draws heavily on a dizzying cultural syncretism: the challenge with the first master, who deflects bullets with pure mental force, evokes the legends of Zen masters; the second, obsessed with maternal love, is a grotesque Freudian Oedipal complex; the third, with his ranch full of rabbits, seems to have come out of a Sufi parable about the vanity of possession. The last, an old man who catches butterflies with a net, represents the final lesson: true mastery lies not in possessing the weapon, but in not needing it. El Topo wins, but every victory is a moral defeat, a step forward on the path of violence that distances him from true wisdom. It is a ruthless critique of the male ego, of the search for power as a substitute for understanding. If Sam Peckinpah had filmed his The Wild Bunch under the influence of peyote and after reading the Bardo Thödol, the result would not have been very different.

Visually, Jodorowsky operates like a surrealist painter who has inherited Goya's palette and the composition of a Mexican retablo painter. Blood is never just blood: it gushes unnaturally, primary red against the ochre of the desert, turning into roses or nourishing the earth. The violence is hyperbolic, theatrical, to the point of becoming abstract, a concept rather than an act. It is the aesthetics of Antonin Artaud's “Theater of Cruelty” applied to cinema: shaking the viewer out of their bourgeois certainties, forcing them to confront the irrational, the sacred, and the profane that bubble beneath the surface of reality. Every shot is an allegory, every deformed character a metaphor for our own inner imperfection.

Then, halfway through the film, the fracture occurs. The great narrative break that has perplexed critics and viewers alike, but which is the beating heart of the work. Betrayed by the woman he thought he loved—a Lilith of the desert who pushes him toward violence and then abandons him—El Topo is riddled with bullets and left to die in a sequence that mimics crucifixion. His is a katabasi, a descent into hell. He is saved by a community of deformed and rejected beings who live in an underground cave, a chthonic womb that will welcome him for years. When he reemerges, he is no longer the gunman dressed in black. He is a bald holy man dressed in white, a sacred madman reminiscent of Prince Myshkin from Dostoevsky's The Idiot, or perhaps a Bodhisattva who has chosen to delay his own nirvana in order to help others.

The second part of the film abandons the western structure to become a bitter social parable. El Topo's mission is no longer selfish self-improvement, but collective liberation. He must dig a tunnel to lead his companions out of the cave and towards “civilization,” a nearby town that turns out to be a hell of depravity, religious bigotry, and unbridled capitalism. The town is a microcosm of modern society as seen through the hallucinatory eyes of the 1970s counterculture: a priest who plays Russian roulette with his parishioners, a phallic cult, legalized slavery. Jodorowsky does not use the scalpel of satire, but the club of grotesque farce. When the outcasts finally emerge into the sunlight, the ‘normal’ people of the city, terrified by their otherness, mercilessly massacre them. It is a scene of almost unbearable brutality, a pogrom that condemns not only intolerance, but the very idea of a society built on the exclusion of ‘those who are different’.

The ending is one of the most powerful images of sacrifice in the history of cinema. Faced with the massacre of his protégés, El Topo, powerless and broken, transforms himself into a vengeful fury, killing those responsible. But this return to violence is only a prelude to the final act. Reaching the center of the city, he douses himself with oil and sets himself on fire, immolating himself in a bonfire that is both an act of atonement and a supreme protest, an image that echoes the historic self-immolation of the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức. His death is not an end. Honey grows from his grave, bees swarm, symbols of sweetness and rebirth. His son, now a man, and his new partner leave, taking with them their father's spiritual legacy. The cycle continues.

El Topo would not have become a legend without the context in which it was born. It was first screened at midnight at the Elgin Theater in New York, becoming the progenitor of the “Midnight Movies” phenomenon. It was not a film to be seen and forgotten; it was an event, a rite of passage for the counterculture. Audiences returned to see it week after week, as if to a psychedelic mass, to decipher its symbols, to lose themselves in its stream of consciousness. It was John Lennon, struck by the vision, who convinced his manager Allen Klein to buy the distribution rights and finance the next, even more esoteric film, The Holy Mountain. This anecdote is not just a piece of trivia, but testimony to how Jodorowsky's work perfectly captured the zeitgeist of an era that sought answers outside traditional religions and political ideologies, in a territory where art, mysticism, and personal revolution converged.

Watching El Topo today means undergoing a total and at times exhausting cinematic experience. It is an imperfect work, sometimes didactic in its symbolism, and undoubtedly a product of its time. Yet its visionary power remains intact. Jodorowsky does not ask the viewer to “understand” his film in a logical sense, but to experience it, to allow themselves to be wounded and healed by its images. It is an initiatory journey that uses the language of the western to talk about alchemy, the body to talk about the soul, brutality to talk about transcendence. More than a film, it is a talisman, a magical object that continues to radiate an arcane and wild energy. A scar on the viewer's retina that, like the mole in the title, reminds us that sometimes, in order to find the light, we must first have the courage to dig in the dark.