Movie review • The Holy Mountain : Hallucinogenic daydream by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Anti-system film, the epitome of experimental and subversive cinema, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cinema is literally extraordinary.

The Chilean director makes films not to earn money but, in his own words, to lose money. What he seeks, through his artistic experiments, has always been to transmit a certain vision of humanity and therefore of society. Fiercely opposed to the functioning of the film industry, but also of the capitalist model in general, consumer society and other pangs of Western modernity, his films are veritable philosophical and political pamphlets.

You only have to see the striking documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune to immediately identify the character and take the measure of his disgust of the reign of money, of the quest for power (political and financial), and his perpetual will to free himself from a formatted and marked system that dictates to him how to create his works of art. Dune might have been Jodorowsky’s masterpiece, his ultimate film – or not. In his absence, The holy Mountain undoubtedly stole this title. A formal and thematic summit of its experimental, symbolist, psychoanalytic and of course highly mystical cinema, the film could almost serve as a «manifesto» of the thought of its creator. Jodorowsky uses a narrative that resembles an initiatory journey (to the eminently biblical consonances) to overthrow idols, become iconoclastic and denounce the society of his time – and ours.

To sum up, The Holy Mountain is built in two parts. In the first, we follow a man who resembles Jesus Christ as he walks in a city, visibly under the yoke of a totalitarian regime. At the top of a tower, he meets an alchemist Master who offers to teach him the secret of immortality. For this, our hippie Jesus must gather seven apostles, presented as the great «thieves» of this world – that is, the elites of modern society, those who embody the various pillars of the system, of this established order that Jodorowsky intends to pulverize by the grotesque, surrealism or even psychedelic.

Among these «apostles», we will find a magnate of a cosmetics company, an arms manufacturer, an art collector, an ideologue in charge of youth indoctrination, a political and financial advisor, a police chief and a businessman architect. The presentation of each of them is the occasion of a fierce criticism of each sector of society, giving rise to crazy scenes always very imprinted of sexuality with psychoanalytic reach, as everywhere in the cinema of Jodorowsky.

These portraits-robots put end to end, the overview is without appeal. Jodorowsky accuses a world where everything has become ideological (to the point of being clearly assimilated to Nazism), where everything becomes competition, source of conflict and hatred of the other. Life is mechanized, manufactured, exported, multiplied to the point of emptying itself of all meaning, and finally consumed massively. Sexuality, physical identity, art, education, war, religion, and even death are the costs of global industrialization. Everything becomes commerce, and the only God still alive is called «money».

Jodorowsky supports this idea that the objects that we idolize, that we covet, associated with the monetization of our desires, have no deep value. They look like gold, but their essence is fecal. We create pleasure machines, interchangeable faces to envy, we make art a luxury reserved for the elites, we teach young people to lower the other to grow up themselves, we militarily repress his people at the slightest demand, small statues of Christ are sold hoping to sell faith at the same time, etc. Moreover, on this last point, Jodorowsky has always been particularly bleak; in all his films, religion takes a hit, not as such, but as an institution that has itself sunk into the market economy. In The Holy Mountain, the faithful who come out of the church are prostitutes. The message is clear.

The second part of the film recounts the rise of the famous « sacred mountain », at the summit of which the eight characters, guided by the Alchemist Master, are supposed to find the secret of immortality. Half a lie, actually. For the goal of ascension is less to discover the secret of immortality than to reconnect, on the contrary, with their mortal condition and to embrace it. “You have power and money, but you are mortal”, or “Possession is the ultimate penalty”. To do this, they must burn, «kill» their money and a mannequin with the effigy of each. In this way, they discard their individualism, their thirst for possession and power, and destroy their «social self», fixed and rigid by social formation such as the wax mannequin. By freeing themselves from their illusions, by abandoning their idols, by stripping themselves physically and spiritually, they try to find their “deep self”, symbolically drowned. «When the self thinks: this is me, this is mine; he imprisons himself and forgets the deep self». Once the latter is found, it is possible to reconnect with the most primordial reality (land, sea, and nature in general). “The earth is your true flesh”.

Jodorowsky insists on the conflictual but necessary relationship between the soul and the body. In all his films, and in the very functioning of his «psychomagic», the body is at the same time the tomb and the altar, imprisonment and freedom. In The Holy Mountain, this relationship translates into an obsession with food, the symbolic and literal digestion of external bodies of all kinds. At Jodorowsky, man is what he eats – and it is from this bulimia that he will have to move away to find what he is in his heart, “fasting”. By the hair that is cut frantically, by the limbs that are missing or that are torn off, the body is tested and decomposed. The soul, which possesses it, must one day give it back so that it can be reborn in another way: a rebirth not in another individual human body, but in a group, in a great All that is Creation itself. A quest for self, for the other, for Nature, through scenes of pure mysticism and philosophical meditations.

A quest that could only take the form of an ascension, because it is a vertical journey, unlike a commodity society where everything is based on horizontal, lateral exchanges, without any transcendence. On this subject, the characters meet a colossus who claims to be the strongest man in the world, able to cross matter. But it moves only horizontally, it cannot go up and down. It is unable, by any chance, to climb the Holy mountain. He incarnates this modern man who destroys everything in his path, always looks before him but never again neither looks up (towards Heaven, towards God), nor down (towards Earth, towards death). “It is not the fear of falling that holds you back, but the fear of climbing,” one of the “apostles” said. And Nietzsche is not far away.

The Holy Mountain is a trip, a punch film, a confusing sensory and mystical experience that should not be taken for what it is not. Symbolism is sometimes heavy, metaphors lack subtlety, iconoclasm is repetitive. It is a film that is fully lived, in all its excesses and coarseness, or that rejects itself – sometimes for the same reasons. Like its final twist, The Holy Mountain breaks the codes from beginning to end, questioning reality and the relationship to images. We become like this couple of tourists who, at first, take pictures of themselves, posing in the middle of a sexual assault, then murder. We seek to immortalize ourselves by capturing these moments, sometimes gory, glaucous, unsustainable, and sometimes insignificant.

But Jodorowsky answers that it is better to learn to die, to become «more human than ever». We were in a fairy tale, but we woke up. The Sacred Mountain is the immortalization of an awakening to mortality.