Jodorowsky’s Dune: Mutate your mind!

Feeling when you are not allowed to fulfil your vision leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. That feeling can not be seen in a cheerful Alejandro Jodorowsky, but after watching documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, bitter taste of injustice lingers in mouth of us, viewers. Because we are, all these years, deprived of one truly master piece. And how can we know that, if the movie is never made? By knowing the work of Jodorowsky, his epic El Topo and The Holy mountain, by the list of participants in this never-made movie and it is mind-blowing creative crew. Illustrators Moebius, H.R.Giger and Chris Foss, then Dan O’ Bannon on special effects, then Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine and Mick Jagger as actors, Pink Floyd and Magma as musicians on a Jodorowsky’s script for one of the greatest achievements in SF Frank Herbert’s Dune series? That would make me shiver of anticipation if I was living at that time. But it was obstructed and not only because of producers (notably Dino de Laurentis) who wanted to made that film for themselves. De Laurentis made Dune with David Lynch and it was commercial failure, even if that movie, due to Lynch’s aesthetic have some cult following during the years. Lynch lacked control with that movie and it was agreed that he will make Dune as de Laurentis wish if he grant him full freedom for his next movie, gloriously dark Blue Velvet. So I don’t blame David Lynch, who respect and was influenced deeply by Jodorowsky. Alejandro, on the other hand, felt relief, that very human emotion, when he saw that Lynch’s movie is not as good as his would have been.
So what is reason for obstructing Jodorowsky’s vision? He is an Latin American artist and they worked and lived, and still do, in condition where censorship is very real (not to mention harsher conditions) so they in order to express themselves use language of magical realism as Gabriel García Márquez or language filled with mystical symbolism as Jodorowsky. That was the only way they can fulfil their vision. So it is not artsy, as sometimes with their European colleagues, it is the necessity. When the same freedom is given to European movie makers they will not exploit that freedom fully because they were never bounded in shackles as Latin Americans. In seventies El Topo was promoted by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and only that can raise some authoritative eyebrows, and the cult status that this movie gathered had arouse more then one authoritative eyebrow, I am sure, even if El Topo could be seen only in midnight theaters. In those revolutionary times, during the tension of Cold War, those free-your-mind ideas are considered dangerous as undermining the system. Jodorowsky said in documentary that he wanted to “mutate the mind of youth” and set them free, and governments of those times surely didn’t want citizens that are too free. Critics described both El Topo and The Holy Mountain as petty drug culture movies. Jodorowsky himself was being critical to LSD culture as fake and illusionary in The Holy Mountain. He said in documentary that he wanted to make movie that will recreate effect of LSD without actualy taking the drug. His relationship with the drug is complex, but that doesn’t undermine spiritualism and enlightenment. In his movies he did not made an revolutionary manual of how to made molotov cocktail or where are the targets of class struggle. That was not his intentions. He wanted to free us all, through his art, of any religious doctrination, dogmatism, media propaganda, social conformism and let us be creative.
When we go through history to look for the roots of injustices that fall on Latin America we’ll see that before unscrupulous American meddling in Latin American internal affairs, horrors of juntas, disastrous capitalistic economic experiments, there is Spanish Inquisition as a model for all totalitarian police states supported by cold-blood bureaucratism. So there, in Spain, witch I am about to visit in a few days, is Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. There in deeply divided country with descendants of moriscos, conversos, heretics and the history of Inquisition as an states instrument of control. There could be found mythical teachers we must vanquish and rebirth through that struggle, because that is where it all began.
It is a great pity for cinematography that Dune is never made, but we can be lead by Jodorowsky’s example. He just change the media and fulfil his vision there. He was collaborating with genial Moebius in comic book The Incal, with Juan Giménez in Metabarons, and instal all that is lost from Dune there, then he is writing books, traveling around the world and spreading his ideas, even he is 85.
If you are persistent nothing can stop you.