Having watched as much of "Jodorowsky's Dune" as I could stomach, I've removed his remaining films from my Quickflix list. The guy isn't worth my time. He's an obnoxiously egotistical idiot. His films are over the top, like Gilliam, but they lack the wit/spark: they're just shock for the sake of shock; sensationalism for the sake of sensationalism. It is disrespectful to the psychedelic experience, to associate his awful Cirque du Soleil train wrecks with LSD. I'm, honestly, a little sick of this absurd insistence that laser shows and other forms of eye-candy go hand in hand with hallucinogens. The class of drugs - hallucinogens - implies, to the uninitiated, a visual/auditory experience. But, that is just the surface.
Make-up and silly costumes are not representative of psych-culture. I ate mushrooms every day for an entire year, and I object to your classification. If your idea of a good trip is sitting down and watching 8 hours of pretentious visually-overloaded cinema, then you don't know very much about psychedelics. You're at the entry level. So is Jodorowsky. I understand where he's coming from. He's trying to do with film, what Picasso did with fine art. But, he's not innovating. He's just rebelling against convention, for the sake of rebelling against convention. His fellow film-makers, meanwhile, as far as he's concerned, they might as well be asleep: because they're not painting their actors green; inexplicably casting naked pre-pubescent boys in leading roles; designing space-ships that look as if they've been painted with post-Halloween vomit; according to his limited perspective, they're not making "art". Part of film-making - or, indeed, any art form - involves being able to work within the confines of the medium. The scale of Dune was absolutely ridiculous. Clearly the guy was fucked off his head during most of his career. A fourteen hour science fiction film? That doesn't make him an artist of great ambition, it makes him an idiot. He should never have been given millions of dollars. Jodorowsky's "Dune" isn't the greatest movie never made. It is an absolute failure, in every department.
The costume and set design - for a serious science-fiction film - was utterly inappropriate. It looks like an episode of Beetlejuice (the cartoon), mixed with some of the weirder animated sequences from The Wall, on acid. How the fuck does that suit the source material? Why are all of his films so heavily reliant on sensational imagery? I mean, what does it add to a film? He says in the documentary that he hadn't even read it when he decided to adapt it into a multi-million epic. Yet, he insists that it would have changed the world. And, I'm sure he believes the bullshit dribbling out of his mouth. He is one of the most unashamedly arrogant artists I've ever encountered. Perhaps the most arrogant. I feel sorry for him, being of his advanced age and having never grown up. He's one of those unfortunate people who resist ego death so much, that they end up - instead - inflating their ego. There is no humility in his words, nor does anything he have to say hint at a deep understanding of anything. The documentary might as well be ninety minutes of Jodorowsky performing auto-fellatio. I lost count of how many times he said he was going to open people's consciousness and expand their minds. Funny thing is, eye-candy doesn't expand your mind. Hallucinations are the temptations of the psychedelic experience. They are surface distractions. And, because they are so extraordinary, they are very effective distractions. The weak will sit, mindlessly, and marvel at all the pretty colours - like a awe-struck infant - while the strong will resist the urge to regress, and meditate. Below the shiny surface of the psychedelic experience, is the real trip: and this - the spiritual/revelatory underbelly - can be expressed, cinematically, or otherwise, without a plethora of bright colours and optical illusions. People who define the psychedelic experience as a sensory experience, might as well define people by the colour of their skin.
It's fortunate - for Jodorowsky - that the film was never produced, because it would have had a colder critical reception than David Lynch's version. (Funny that he got so much pleasure, witnessing David Lynch's version flop.) His project - from the very beginning - was misguidedly ambitious. Yet, in retrospect, his implication is that it wasn't; that it was smothered by a conservative industry. Now, decades later, he can insist that it would have been the greatest film ever made. The thing is, it wasn't. It didn't get anywhere near post-production. There's all these fringe artists that are interviewed throughout the documentary, insisting that there was some sort of conspiratorial regime that disallowed the film from being made. In truth, he wasted nearly ten million dollars - which, adjusted for inflation, is approximately sixty-five million dollars - and the film wasn't even a tenth complete. He spent two million dollars (thirteen million in 2014) on pre-production alone. He gets really angry, during the film, insisting that it was unfair that he wasn't given an inexhaustible budget. Why? Because - in his mind - he unquestionably deserved it; because he is a self-proclaimed genius. How dare investors get nervous as the budget inflates exponentially? They should throw tens of millions of dollars at him! Fuck it, a hundred million! Why not? He is Jodorowsky; or, as he says in El Topo, "I am God!"
I'm tired of people blaming the "evil" studios for not wanting to stuff unprecedented amounts of money into questionable investments. Even if the film turned out to be a masterpiece, despite all evidence to the contrary, who's going to sit through a fourteen hour science-fiction movie? Pulling the plug on the film was the right move. It would have gone down in history as the biggest flop / cinematic-disaster of all time. At least they cut their losses.
Jodorowsky destroyed his own career, through incompetence. "If you fail, it's not important," he says in the documentary. "We need to try." So, clearly, he has no respect for other people's money and - therefore - has no place in big-budget film-making. The industry is what it is: if you want to make low-budget art films, you can experiment until your heart's content; if you want to make big-budget Hollywood films, on the other hand, you have to play by the rules.
There's this thing that disgruntled artists always say about studios. Films must be comparable to other films in order to justify big budgets. When you're pitching, in other words, you have to say it's like this film or that film. The implication being: Hollywood isn't willing to take risks. But, why should they? Artists, typically, don't invest in their own projects. Yet they whinge and fucking moan that nobody else will. Like the studios owe them. What a load of shit. Artists get carried away. If you look at the behind-the-scenes reality of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, he was really struggling to accept the limitations of the budget. In the end, the film had to be re-written by numerous people and a huge number of scenes had to be taken out all-together. Gilliam blamed the studios, publically. He still does. Yet, without them, look what happened to The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Like Dune, it was a fucking disaster.
If you think this is psych culture, you should watch "The Congress" with Robin Wright and Harvey Keitel. Dose acid like you're eating popcorn. You'll probably love it.