‘The Holy Mountain’: The trippy film John Lennon financed
Let’s be honest: By 1973, The Beatles were flush with cash. By this point, John Lennon seemed to be burning a hole in his pocket when he funnelled some of his earnings into Alejandro Jodorowsky’s hallucinogenic, cinematic trip, The Holy Mountain.
The work of Jodorowsky first appeared on Lennon’s radar thanks to George Harrison’s intrigue surrounding his earlier film El Topo. A quick overview of the film’s plot and the director’s interests is all that’s necessary to make that make sense. Inspired simultaneously by tarot, Christ, alchemy and mind-opening transformative rituals, The Holy Mountain basically just sounds like a year in the band’s life in the late 1960s.
But if it genuinely was, I doubt the group would’ve made it through to make those final albums as Jodorowsky’s film spirals far beyond a jaunt to a yoga retreat. Instead, this psychedelic flick weaves between different schools of thought for a mind trip that’s, at once, enlightening and utterly ridiculous.
Beginning with a man lying in the dirt, representing the Fool card in tarot and symbolising new beginnings but also an inexperienced uncertainty, he also takes the shape of a pseudo-Jesus. In a wordless opening sequence, the director wastes no time pushing the viewer into a wild world that can’t be placed in any country or time, where frogs reinact historical scenes, and the man we met first has to escape from a Jesus factory where a bunch of nuns are trying to make casts of his body to sell to churches.
It’s one of those films where you rarely have a clue what’s going on, but you don’t mind. Especially when the man enters a mysterious tower and is forced to essentially get high on his own boiled shit as a mystic declares “You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold”, and then is introduced to a committee of other figures, each with their own backstory sequence and representing a different planet; the tale only becomes more untethered.
But then it finds a focus. Now part of this committee, the group of ten set off on a spiritual and literal journey. You’re never really sure what the aim is, but as they go forward, they move through a series of rituals and trials, seeking out The Holy Mountain, perfectly in tune with The Beatles’ own missions and side quests to find their sense of spiritual understanding.
Clearly, something in this beautiful fever dream of a movie resonated because Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, as they coughed up a lot. The exact amount is unknown, but it’s said that the couple gave the director around a million dollars to make the film, as well as encouraged Allen Klein to also chip in.
Who knows how much of that was spent on the copious amounts of LSD Jodorowsky was partaking during the making of the movie, or the Japanese Zen master he paid to guide him through a week of absolutely zero sleep before they began, but in the end, the money led to a visually stunning and utterly baffling flick that begins with an otherworldly feel and then finishes with deadpan humour in a final twist—another thing with which Lennon likely connected.
