Is Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s Psy­chomag­ic art or exploitation?

Two feud­ing broth­ers stand shirt­less before one anoth­er in a room, their eyes closed in a trance-like state. Sud­den­ly their moth­er appears and they all wres­tle while the cam­era looms over. A depressed elder­ly woman – a migrant-hater who feels she’s wast­ed her life – begins a new dai­ly rou­tine, going each morn­ing to water a near­by ficus tree. A singer song­writer with an absent father ham­mers ran­dom­ly at his piano before strip­ping off his clothes to per­form a strange bur­lesque dance. A man who hates his fam­i­ly takes a ham­mer and smash­es pump­kins with each of their faces on, before send­ing the shards back home by DHL. A sui­ci­dal addict, a vic­tim of child abuse, is buried alive on screen while car­rion pick raw meat from around his head.

These are all exam­ples of ​‘pyschomag­ic’, a form of artis­tic ther­a­py coined by the Chilean avant-garde direc­tor Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky. This is some­thing he’s writ­ten about for years and which has now, final­ly, been giv­en ded­i­cat­ed screen-time in a crowd­fund­ed doc­u­men­tary of the same name. The idea behind psy­chomag­ic is sim­ple: that tech­niques from the­atre, film, dance and oth­er arts can be used to enhance the pow­er of psychoanalysis.

While most ther­a­py tends to involve speak­ing, and for­bids phys­i­cal con­tact, Jodorowsky’s pro­pos­al is explic­it­ly, often exces­sive­ly, tac­tile. Much of his focus is on ​“unlock­ing” child­hood mem­o­ry and over­com­ing shame asso­ci­at­ed with trau­ma. Some of the sce­nar­ios are fun­ny, oth­ers are dis­turb­ing. All are absurd. And yet, Jodor­owsky insists, he is an anti-sur­re­al­ist. His pur­pose is not to rep­re­sent the uncon­scious but to rebuild the world around it.

If noth­ing else this is a dar­ing work of cin­e­matog­ra­phy, and pays homage to the unique aes­thet­ics the direc­tor pio­neered in his ear­ly works, El Topo and The Holy Moun­tain (both of which are spliced into the edit). The chap­ters are short, offer­ing tasters of each case, and each trau­ma. Just as we’re begin­ning to get under the skin of a cer­tain char­ac­ter, we’re intro­duced to anoth­er. For the view­er, the fas­ci­na­tion, and plea­sure, is premised on the voyeuris­tic plea­sure of watch­ing peo­ple do sil­ly things.

It’s excit­ing, poet­ic and to some extent cathar­tic. The idea, pre­sum­ably, is that as we watch we begin to feel less ashamed of our own secret kinks and anx­i­eties. And yet this isn’t a fic­tion film. Many of those on screen are real­ly, des­per­ate­ly, in need. In one scene, Jodor­owsky accom­pa­nies a woman on her first return vis­it to the tow­er block from which her hus­band threw him­self to his death in the days fol­low­ing their wed­ding. The woman begins to weep, and when the direc­tor reach­es out to hug her she is vis­i­bly uncomfortable.

Beyond shock val­ue and provoca­tive taboo-bust­ing, it’s hard to say what this doc­u­men­tary accom­plish­es. If the idea is to prove that ​‘psy­chomag­ic’ is an effec­tive ther­a­py, then the jury’s out. Only a few high­ly selec­tive cas­es are shown to have pro­vid­ed long-term term ben­e­fits. Most of the clips are lim­it­ed to the pro­tag­o­nists’ imme­di­ate reac­tions. The film treads on par­tic­u­lar­ly dan­ger­ous ground in its penul­ti­mate scene, in which a woman is appar­ent­ly relieved of can­cer by a the­atre of well-mean­ing peo­ple push­ing ​‘ener­gy’ towards her.

The point is not to sug­gest that such rit­u­als can be a replace­ment for chemo and radio­ther­a­py, insists the direc­tor, but to make the woman feel strong, and to become a par­tic­i­pant in her own heal­ing. There may indeed be some­thing in that. The fact that the chapter’s open­ing cap­tion deploys the word ​“cure”, though, is naïve at best, if not active­ly irresponsible.

The film ends with footage of thou­sands of peo­ple march­ing through the streets dressed in cos­tumes of skele­tons and zom­bies to cel­e­brate Mexico’s Day of the Dead fes­tiv­i­ties. At a cer­tain point Jodor­owsky emerges from the crowd and encour­ages those around him to repeat­ed­ly chant, ​“psy­chomag­ic against vio­lence”. Is this an inno­cent effort to fuse his own eso­teric project into a broad­er social rit­u­al? Or is the direc­tor appro­pri­at­ing this tra­di­tion, treat­ing it – rather arro­gant­ly – as an exten­sion of his own brand?

How­ev­er gen­er­ous one’s inter­pre­ta­tion, this moment exem­pli­fies a fun­da­men­tal ten­sion that re-remerges through­out the film, between the auton­o­my of the sub­jects on cam­era and their selec­tive fram­ing by the magi­cians in the edit­ing suite.