This year marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of one of my favorite movies, Alejandro Jodorowsky's absurdly psychedelic The Holy Mountain. This film, along with Sly & The Family Stone's Fresh and Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures, is prime ammunition for my contention that 1973 was an especially fertile year for creative endeavors. Considered by myself and surely others to be the Chilean-Mexican auteur's masterpiece, The Holy Mountain is a baroque mess of Castanedan narrative and trippy Jungian symbolism, thrown together under the thin guise of a group of nine people searching for enlightenment. But more than anything, it's two-odd hours of contemplative flute playing and patchouli oil.
The film rightly evades definite classification, however I think that it may be interesting to view the film as a sort of crime thriller. Lead by the Alchemist (Jodorowsky himself, in a thinly-veiled reprisal of his role in 1970's El Topo), the enlightenment-seekers join together to seek a common goal, one which is illicit, hidden, and full of reward, much like any good crime cadre. They are to storm the Holy Mountain of Lotus Island, where the Secret Masters of the World are said to reside and enjoy eternal life. By confronting them, they hope to grasp their power. Like all characters who pantomime the Indian-style ascetic narrative, they give up their possessions, theatrically represented by burning their money in a furnace at the center of their table-of-camaraderie. They endure rigorous tests of mental and spiritual strength (incidentally, the cast mirrored the trials of their characters, living communally and taking spiritual instruction as filming took place). They meet with wise men who give them advice and powers to aid them on their quest. Above all, they seek to gain the understanding necessary to fully grasp what they are to encounter upon the mountain's summit. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like these guys are gearing up to knock over the bank of reality: death.
Why not see The Holy Mountain as a bank-robbing thriller? The mere fact that the job/quest is positioned opposite the gain of material wealth is enough to push it into this territory. There are notions of wealth being thrown around here, but not the same ones that we're used to. Like all good potential heisters, the ascetics view the successful completion of their task as essentially the be-all of their lives, or at least their lives as film representations. Prior to the commencement of the mission, we are given views into their lives-as-consumers (weapons manufacturers, cosmetics moguls, finance ministers) via the famous "planetary vignettes." All of these people, on some level, are caught up in the play of modernity; numbers, statistics and appearances. The Man from Venus runs a company that manufactures, among other things, bespoke prosthetic faces for the less-than-satisfied. The Woman from Mars uses market research to advertise and sell firearms to every demographic. The Man from Pluto designs coffin-shaped-and-sized housing in the name of commercial efficiency. The Thief (aka "the guy who looks like Jesus") renounces after experiencing the horror of reproduction; his image is copied while he is unconscious and proliferated into a warehouse's worth of wax doubles (or was that marzipan? Would probably make more sense in a Latin-Mexican cultural context, i.e., the eating of marzipan-Judas, marzipan-skeletons, during El Dia de los Muertos).
The one thing they all have in common is a desire to escape this. All problems, all cares, will dissolve upon the robbery and the escape with the booty. Like the classic heister, they seek to "make a clean getaway" from the "poverty" of their existence. And of course, all it takes is "one last job" to do it. In the Dharmic sense, one last job indeed. Of course, the distinction is that the ultimate prize has nothing to do with the wealth in the "classic" sense. In fact, it REALLY has nothing to do with that, as evidenced by the money-burning scene referenced above.
The reason why we usually are seduced by the heist film's ne'er-do-wells is their james-bond allure. Take Ocean's Eleven; George Clooney/Daniel Ocean might be breaking the law, but he does it with a level of delicious finesse and efficiency (not to mention relative lack of harm to innocents) that trumps the efforts of his foes. As a charming bloke, he is more than Andy Garcia within the dramatic universe that the film has bracketed and created for us. He is given a "wealth" in another form. His resourcefulness and his cunning seduce us. That said, he and his compatriots use their own kinds of wealth; their cunning, their resources, their knowledge -- to gain more wealth. Manipulations of objects, of characteristics, to acquire more objects, in fact, the "big" object that makes all the other little objects worthwhile.
The Holy Mountain is similar in that it is about people banding together to "get" something, but it works in a reverse direction. Renunciation, especially in the Indic sense, is a reaction against multiplicity. It's very much the sacrifice of the many qualities in the name of the one quality. Each of the heisters has deliberately given up that which makes him him and her her; their clothing, their skills, their money, in order to achieve the goal, which is also defined by a lack of definition, a lack of objecthood. This can clearly be parsed in the scene in which the nine characters incinerate their effigies within the fire, and shave their heads and bodies as to appear, to become, identical. Instead of luring Wealth with wealth, they extinguish wealth by extinguishing their own 'wealth,' their own characteristics. And thus transcend it.
But, ultimately, for all its metaphysical pretensions, isn't The Holy Mountain just the heist film that I have attempted to distinguish it from? For all their aspirations to escape the cycle of birth and death, Joderowsky's reformed villains might just be playing at being enlightened, for a chance at the Ultimate Possession, the biggest prize of all. Jodorowsky delivers a final message on this absurdity of the heist in the final scene. But I won't ruin it for you. :-)
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