The Dance of Reality

In his first film in 23 years 86-year-old Alejandro Jodorowsky produces a spectacular surrealist meditation on the nature of humanity. His examination of character operates on two levels. As his father transforms from macho autocrat to sensitivity and vulnerability, Jodorowsky’s subject is how to be a proper human. But as that story is played against the background of Chilean politics the same lesson applies to the body politic: how can a government be properly humane. 

Here Jodorowsky’s father looks like the dictator Ortiz — tall, thin, strutting, strong cheekbones, affecting the same moustache — against whom he plots, first a revolt then assassination. At the crucial moment he can’t shoot him because his hands are suddenly crippled, a metaphor for the fact he unawares admires and emulates the autocracy his politics opposes. His hands lock because he can’t kill the outer embodiment of his self; he has to kill it within. His wife frees him by making him fire at the images of Stalin, Ortiz and himself, that is, purging himself of his autocratic insensitive past self.

The father’s crippling connects him to the community of mine-damaged cripples whom he earlier disparaged, refused to let his son help and even attacked. His — first psychological, then physical — crippling is imaged in their missing limbs. All are reduced by their ruinous, uncaring society. The society that pragmatically rejects the broken, the disadvantaged, reflects in the father’s rejection of his son’s sensitivity — that dread homosexuality — and his cruel tests to toughen him. In contrast to the father’s skeletal sternness, the mother has an operatic extravagance both in emotion — she sings all her lines as arias — and in her mothering bosom. She strips down exuberantly to cure her son’s fear of the darkness with a frolic. 

His mother heals his father by urinating on him, a brazen parody of baptism and washing away his sins. Earlier the father blew out the radio by pissing on it during Ortiz's public address. The wife’s beneficent piss corrects the destructive macho posturing of his.
     There are other parodies of Christianity in the film. The mother thinks her son is the reincarnation of her father and rejects him when he loses his long blond hair. The father passes through a series of tests and tortures on the road to redemption, resisting the temptation to betray his ideals. At the end the hawking dwarf outside the family’s clothing store turns water into wine — reducing Christ’s miracle to a parlour trick. When most in need the father is rejected by the film’s one priest, a callous unchristian sort. The ranting theosophist may seem a salutary alternative to the various churches of greed and power — until he shows his own cruelty in forcing the young hero to fight his dead friend’s twin brother in a bar. No religion is valid if it countenances human cruelty. That’s why Jodorowsky’s “reality” is not fixed, hard and cold, but a “dance,” inviting openness, spontaneity, partnering and joy.

Jodorowsky pere is Jewish — and constantly insulted as such — but shows no sign of faith or observance. His conversion from cruel tyrant to sensitivity and forgiveness evokes the change from the Old Testament God to the New. That applies equally to the concept of what kind of person and what kind of government one should be. 

     Obviously this is a very personal film. Jodorowsky himself plays his adult self and his son Brontis plays Alejandro’s father. Its true signature is the brilliant invention in imagery, music and event.