By Laurie Baron
After establishing a reputation as an actor and director in avant-garde theatre, the Chilean-born Alejandro Jodorowsky burst onto the cinematic scene in 1970 with his surrealistic western El Topo. Since it prefigures the preoccupations of his subsequent films including The Dance of Reality, let me summarize its plot. A gunfighter abandons his son and embarks on a quest to kill and learn the secrets of four master gunslingers, each of whom symbolizes a particular religion or philosophy of life. When gravely wounded, he is nursed back to health by a tribe of maimed and dwarf characters who worship him as a God. A priest denounces them for blasphemy and vows to kill them and El Topo whom he discovers is the father who deserted him. Though El Topo fails to save his followers from a neighboring religious cult, he avenges them and commits suicide by setting himself on fire. His dwarf girlfriend bears a son who dressed in his father’s clothes rides off with her into the sunset.
While it is over fifty years since El Topo premiered and 23 years since the release of his last film, the 85 year-old Jodorowsky continues to exorcise these demons and preaches a transcendental spiritualism derived from Christianity, Shamanism, Tarot cards, and Zen Buddhism. The Dance of Reality differs from his previous movies because it is based on his childhood perceptions of his Ukrainian Jewish parents. His father Jaime played by Jodorowsky’s son Brontis was an abusive disciplinarian who terrorized his wife and son. Moreover, he was a doctrinaire Stalinist who wanted to assassinate the Chilean dictator Carlos Ibáñez del Campo. His mother Sara played by Pamela Flores sacrificed her dreams of becoming an Opera singer to care for her son and work in the family’s clothing store. She refused to cut her son’s hair because his girlish curls reminded her of her deceased father’s mane.
This autobiographical framework inspires a succession of phantasmagoric scenes. In the first half of the movie they visually convey what it felt like for the young Alejandro played by Jeremias Herskovits to be the object of his father’s bullying, his mother’s emotional neediness, and the surrounding community’s anti-Semitism. The second half focuses on Jaime’s imagined mission to assassinate Ibáñez and the torture that would have awaited him if he were arrested.
Jodorowsky the actor appears as the adult Alejandro commenting on the lessons he has learned from his experiences; whereas Jodorowsky the director artistically reshapes the traumatic events in his and his parents’ lives to attain some closure on them. He describes this technique as “psychomagic,” a therapy he developed to enable families to heal the psychological wounds they have inflicted on themselves and each other by reenacting them as art and theatre. Before shooting The Dance of Reality he informed its crew, “This is not a film. This is the healing of my soul.” Thus, Sara sings all of her dialogue as arias and soothes her son by letting him indulge his Oedipal fantasies. Jaime eventually realizes that ideological fanaticism is the root of demagoguery both on the left and the right. Alejandro becomes spiritually enlightened, recognizing that all religions ultimately teach their adherents to find the divine in themselves and thereby become one with the universe.
None of these messages is original or profound, but the images used to represent them often are mesmerizing. When young Alejandro throws a rock in the sea, it conjures up a giant wave teaming with sardines to wash upon the shore. A flock of gulls descends to eat them only to be scared away by starving peasants who feast on the fish. A procession of people infected with plague and thirsting for water march together under umbrellas and are quarantined by the police. Jaime brings barrels of water on his cart to quench their thirst, but they are so hungry that they tear apart his donkeys to eat their flesh. Jaime laments that without his donkeys, he can no longer bring them water.
The movie portrays the marginalization of Jews in Chilean society which presumably is what motivates Jaime to seek the classless, godless, and stateless society promised by communism. One memorable scene shows young Alejandro masturbating with a group of his Chilean peers. The boys stroke wooden phalluses with their hands, but quickly notice that Alejandro’s phallus is different. In their eyes, their penises look like bananas and his like a mushroom. They hate Alejandro for being different. In a recent interview, Jodorowsky remarked, “I have no nationality. When my father was five years old, he hid. He didn’t like the name Jodorowsky. He didn’t like any tradition. So I have no nationality. The Chileans didn’t like me, because I was white, my nose was different. I never had a place for me. But now, everywhere, I feel good. I have no prejudice. Everywhere I go, I am an extraterrestrial.”
Many critics have applauded The Dance of Reality for its inventive and striking imagery. When I began watching the film, I had a similar appreciation of it, but by the end, I found its political and religious messages trite and its cinematographic fantasies tiresome. It probably will not win many new fans for Jodorowsky, but it will confirm his standing as a creative and provocative auteur among those who already admire him.
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Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted via lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com