“Rare genius”: The film director John Lennon gifted $1million
In 1966, Yoko Ono unveiled a work titled ‘Yes’. At the top of a ladder hung a magnifying glass. When you held the magnifying glass to the roof above, in a small, scratchy print, the word “Yes” was etched onto the ceiling. This was the piece that made John Lennon swoon. ”It was positive,” he reflected. ”I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘fuck you’ or something, it said ‘yes’.”
Lennon later claimed that he knew little to nothing about Yoko Ono before the exhibition, and she stated the same about Lennon, the world’s most famous man at that point. But, thankfully, they fortuitously met that day in the gallery, and their art began to marry in strange new ways. As Lennon said of ‘Yes’, “I thought it was fantastic – I got the humour in her work immediately. I didn’t have to have much knowledge about avant-garde or underground art, the humour got me straightaway.” Soon, he would be the frontrunner of the avant-garde world.
Lennon’s interest in hand-holding sentiments evaporated. He endeavoured to scour the peripheries of culture, searching for new and alluring magnifying glasses. He wanted to apply himself in new ways, too. In the November of ’66, The Beatles enjoyed a well-deserved break from the madness of stardom. They returned to their friends and family in Liverpool, but Lennon had other desires and struggled to settle back into relaxed civility, so he decided to shoot a film in Spain.
He loved this new creative avenue. “I was always waiting for a reason to get out of The Beatles from the day I made How I Won the War,” he would later reflect. Movies were beginning to move him. “I feel I want to be them all – painter, writer, actor, singer, player, musician,” Lennon admitted during A Hard Day’s Night. “I want to try them all, and I’m lucky enough to be able to. I want to see which one turns me on. This is for me, this film, because apart from wanting to do it because of what it stands for, I want to see what I’ll be like when I’ve done it.”
The problem was he turned out to be a sub-par actor. While mega-fans might say that he was a consummate performer who didn’t have enough of a chance to work with a serious director, even the foolhardy would have to admit that we weren’t dealing with a bespectacled Marlon Brando here. Nevertheless, he certainly had a passion for cinema, and it was an art form that unquestionably informed his outlook as a musician. So, he decided to contribute to the medium in a less involved manner.
As the 1970s dawned, he was looking for films that took a leaf out of his book and brought the scenes of ‘I Am the Walrus’ to life. With El Topo, he found a film that the director, Alejandro Jodorowsky, would describe as “LSD without LSD.” The maddening movie came with the tagline: “Too much perfection is a mistake,” and it certainly stood by that mantra.
El Topo impressed both Lennon and Ono as they sought progressively groovy spiritualism. The couple began attending every screening of the surrealist movie that they could. They watched it obsessively, studying its strange ways. For the hip couple, it seemed to realise the unbound potential of art—the sort of free-form splurge of meaning without borders that Lennon had hinted at in the splurge of ‘A Day in the Life’. They arrived at the conclusion that this was what the world needed to see.
Ultimately, Lennon loved El Topo so much that he told his manager to hand $1 million to Jodorowsky for any new project he wanted to make. With Bob Dylan and Roger Waters also jumping aboard the shocking cinematic bandwagon, the film became the counterculture’s new picture fixture. “We thought El Topo was a great work of art, and we thought it should get exposure,” Lennon enthused.
The film sees a gunfighter wayfaring through a mystical Western landscape and encountering a slew of surreal situations and far-out characters along the way—with a solid dose of sex and violence thrown in. While that might sound aimless (it is, largely), there was a conceptual point behind it all akin to Ono’s own artistic work, which is perhaps why she called Jodorowsky a “rare genius”.
The Chilean-French filmmaker would go on to make six further features and a documentary following El Topo. He remains a shocking tonic to the mainstream—a visionary who embodies how art can take an anti-establishment stance without coming out and saying so.
