Even the counterculture itself produced critics of El Topo’s political pretensions

Evidence

El Topo may have been the quintessential counterculture film, but the counterculture was not entirely behind it. “I don’t know why people are going around saying El Topo is the greatest movie ever made,” EVO’s new film critic “Honest” Bob Singer wondered. Singer read the film as political pandering: “When the ‘Colonel’ comes out of a doorway followed by a herd of swine, all the radicals snicker,” he wrote, adding that “Jodorowsky’s mixture of revolutionary propaganda with Christian/Zen evangelism comes down to an apocalyptic High Noon wherein he personally frees the people and dispatches the neocolonialist blasphemers.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1685

Categorization

• XREF: Once established the counterculture reading of El Topo, the internal dissent here is a nuance — a case of even counterculture audiences debating the message of their own emblematic art.