Fernando Arrabal was notorious in the 1960's for founding the Panic Movement, a confrontational form of street theater in which the performers attempted to shock and disgust onlookers by smearing themselves with gore, urinating on religious icons, castrating rabbits, hurling ordure in all directions, performing unspeakable acts of sadomasochistic lust, and the like. Arrabal also created many highly experimental plays, novels, and films, nearly all of them scandalous. (A rare example of a non-scandalous Arrabal creation is ODYSSEY OF THE PACIFIC, a sweet and atmospheric children's movie, filmed on location in Canada, that stars Mickey Rooney as a train conductor.)  Arrabal is now generally recognized as a leader of the surrealist movement in Spain during the second half of the twentieth century. Rayo Casablanca describes Arrabal as "an enigma, an artist in every medium, a genius (and magnificent chess player), a lover and a fiend."

I'm more inclined to describe Arrabal as a persistent contrarian. Whatever you believe, he believes the opposite. He loves to discombobulate conventional wisdom, to defy logic, to celebrate only that which is contradictory or paradoxical. This contrarian compulsion is evident in the title of his first film, LONG LIVE DEATH. The beautiful aspects of nature terrify Arrabal, or so he claims in a recent interview, but at the same time he loves spiders and insects, especially cockroaches. The cockroach mating ritual is, in Arrabal's opinion, the most exquisite of love stories. The filthier and more debased something is, the more likely Arrabal is to see God, love, and beauty in it. He believes the anus is the most sacred part of the human body and wishes he could wear his own anus on the top of his head like a halo. Perhaps this is why the dwarf hermit saint in I WILL WALK LIKE A CRAZY HORSE sticks a flower in his bride's ass, pulls it out again, then nearly swoons with spiritual bliss as he licks her poop off the stem. Arrabal tells us that he and his parents were persecuted by society, but that he loves society anyway and wishes it were possible for him to kiss society on the mouth and have pornographic sex with her.  Although everyone else thinks his movies are virulent Juvenalian satires of the Church and the State, Arrabal assures us they have nothing whatsoever to do with social institutions. Instead, they're private poems about love, God, levitation, and his own personal sexuality.

Out of respect for Arrabal, rather than attempting to review I WILL WALK LIKE A CRAZY HORSE in the customary fashion, I will be a contrarian myself and approach it from an unconventional angle. For many years Arrabal worked together with the legendary Alexandro Jodorowsky. The second film in Jodorowsky's Mexican trilogy, the masterpiece EL TOPO, came out about five years before Arrabal made CRAZY HORSE. It is instructive, I believe, to look at certain similarities and differences between these two underground cult classics.

Both movies were quickly denounced and banned. Both are infused with magic, miracles, mystical visions, and a continuous flow of disturbing surrealistic imagery. Both feature lurid shots of decomposed carcasses, swarming insects, bleeding wounds, sexual mutilations, defiled crucifixes, brutal executions by military firing squads, naked children being subjected to abuse, circus animals in strange settings, and people with ghastly anatomical deformities. Don't misunderstand me. I would never insinuate that Arrabal stole Jodorowsky's imagery. Who knows? Perhaps the two artists had agreed to share each other's personal symbology long before either movie was made. In any case, there is a key difference in technique. Jodorowsky's surrealistic images have an organic rightness and are integral elements in the scenes in which they appear, whereas Arrabal's surrealistic images frequently feel contrived, inserted, and extraneous.

Jodorowsky presents his plot in chronological order while Arrabal jumps back and forth between the past and the present, but in both movies the basic story line is simple, linear, and easy to follow. The crucial difference is that EL TOPO is full of sudden surprises and unexpected new developments. Unfortunately, there are stretches in CRAZY HORSE when everything becomes predictable and tedious.

EL TOPO has a handsome hero who undertakes a quest for enlightenment in the desert, and guess what, CRAZY HORSE also has a handsome hero who undertakes a quest for enlightenment in the desert. Please do not infer that I suspect Arrabal of stealing from Jodorowsky. I come to bury Arrabal, not to accuse him of plagiarism. What's important here is not the obvious similarity but a critical difference. The hero of EL TOPO (played with panache and passion by Jodo himself) is spiritually transformed from a deadly gunfighter who never smiles into a gentle, self-effacing mime who loves making little children laugh and devotes himself to freeing a group of cripples and amputees. The hero of CRAZY HORSE (played stiffly and nervously by American actor George Shannon) is an unlikable rich-boy misogynist who doesn't change much in a spiritual sense but does get transformed physically when he begs the above-mentioned dwarf hermit saint (played with gusto by Hachemi Marzouk) to butcher him and eat his body. The saint is happy to oblige. You should see the feast! Or maybe you shouldn't . . .

Jodorowsky is a fierce moralist. He judges people in terms of good and evil, sees those who seek power over others as inevitably evil, and is convinced that all social institutions are therefore instruments of class warfare and oppression. In EL TOPO, the socially outcast cripples and amputees, meek ascetics who live in a cave and have no power or wealth whatsoever, are the only adults capable of love and generosity and playfulness.  They will cheerfully humiliate or even endanger themselves in order to help someone else. Those in power are vain, greedy, materialistic, arrogant, obscene, pampered, and cruel. They separate themselves from nature, worship social conventions and religious rituals, and take sadistic pleasure in ridiculing, torturing, and exterminating the peasants whose slave labor they depend on.

It is obvious that Arrabal agrees with bits and pieces of Jodorowsky's moral philosophy, but no clear and consistent theme, moral or otherwise, can be discerned in CRAZY HORSE. Arrabal's eye is too sharply focused on that sacred anus of his. He is entirely too preoccupied with own quirks and perversions. (I should warn you that not only is Arrabal fascinated with the eating of excrement and entrails, he also appears to have some really nasty unresolved issues concerning his mommy.) When Jodorowsky shocks us, he does so to provoke thought about social injustice, but Arrabal shocks us solely to show off, solely to prove how disgusting he can be, and indeed, he is far more disgusting  than Jodorowsky without being half as interesting.