Nicolas Winding-Refn’s frustrated film noir Only God Forgives is out now on DVD and Blu-Ray. It tells the story of Julian (Ryan Gosling), a boxing promoter/drug dealer unable to escape the domino effect of revenge that starts with the murder of his rapist brother and escalates by way of his cruel and conniving mother. A meandering sense of inevitability hangs over the plot, making suspense irrelevant and punctuating the druggy narrative drift with brief brutal violence that refuses to deliver even cheap Tarantino movie thrills. The centerpiece fight scene of the movie finds leading man Gosling failing to land a single punch.
Ultimately, Only God Forgives is about familial bonds and the way that intimacy and obligation can create a mutated version of regularity that passes from one fucked-in-the-head generation to the next. And like every revenge flick that matters, this one’s hardly celebratory, calling attention to the soul-sucking pointlessness of eye-for-an-eye-and-then-some thinking. It’s a difficult, hateful follow-up to 2011’s Drive.
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When Only God Forgives comes to a close, half its cast of characters dead, a dedication to cult movie director Alejandro Jodorowsky scrolls down the screen (“For Alejandro Jodorowsky”), and the movie actually begins to make some sense. Now, perhaps we’re dealing with a fairly flawed movie if a key to understanding it hinges on your knowledge of the stoner-spiritual aesthetic of the avant-garde filmmaker to whom it is dedicated. But Jodorowsky’s shout out certainly helps unpack the deeply misunderstood Only God Forgives and its martian pacing, anti-Western world sensibility, and refusal to afford the viewer even the most basic rewards of a crime flick.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is best known for 1970’s El Topo, a Eastern philosophy-informed Western filled with little people and amputees, and 1973’s Holy Mountain, a picaresque spiritual quest that includes, among other things, a detailed recreation of the Spanish conquest of Mexico featuring frogs, lizards, fake blood, and firecracker explosions. In particular, Only God Forgives, an Oedipal genre riff pushed past its breaking point, seems stepped in the creeping dream-like dread of Jodorowky’s 1989 movie, Santa Sangre, a freewheeling, hyper-Freudian refix of Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho.
“Jodorowsky’s influence on pop cinema is enormous,” director Nicolas Winding-Refn told me over the phone, a week before the DVD/Blu-Ray release, “and with Only God Forgives, I wanted to acknowledge that.” Refn’s 90-minute Jodorowsky tribute arrives at a time when Jodorowsky’s legendary reputation is on the rise thanks to a combination of his past work finally becoming readily available again (El Topo, Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre are all on Blu-Ray; many of his mindbending graphic novels from the ’80s and ’90s have been reissued by Humanoids Inc.), and the Cannes Film Festival premiere of his latest movie (and first in 23 years), Dance Of Reality (check out this video clip of Jodorowsky, age 84, naked, introducing the movie).
In particular, Jodorowsky’s visionary work, which combines earthy neo-realism and pulpy surrealism, has been ripped off frequently by music videos. The 2007 DVD release of El Topo and Holy Mountain coincided with a transitional period for indie culture, in which it was suddenly filled with new age vibes and drum circle dance moves. As a result, Jodorowsky’s movies, hard-to-find for three decades, visually stunning, and catch-all spiritual, were stripped for parts so that they could fit the burgeoning, slightly rhythmic, hippie hipster indie aesthetic of the late ‘aughts.
High profile videos for MGMT’s “Time To Pretend” (directed by Ray Tintori) and Santigold’s “L.E.S. Artistes” (directed by Nima Nourizadeh) extensively quote Holy Mountain. MGMT’s video recreates a scene from Holy Mountain in which a group of materialists and capitalists, making the first step towards enlightenment, burn all of their money along with effigies of themselves. Yeasayer’s “Ambling Alp” (directed by Radical Friend, 2009) quotes the same scene (and copies a few shots from El Topo and combines them with Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon); and the moment in AlunaGeorge’s “Best Be Believing” when the patients gather around a healing light fixture, also seems like a reference to this memorable Holy Mountain sequence.
Santigold’s “L.E.S. Artistes” liberally quotes from one of Holy Mountain’s tour-de-force set pieces: scenes of violence and suffering in which all of the gore is replaced by food products, calling attention to the artifice of filmmaking while also somehow making the imagery more disturbing. In 2009, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs released an El Topo-esque short film for “Snakesweat” (directed by Barney Clay), complete with a narrator who sounds a lot like Jodorowsky and stark black and white that recalls Jodorowsky’s 1968 movie, Fando and Lis. Photogenic indie dance crew Late of the Pier swiped the opening credits sequence of Holy Mountain for their “Heartbeat” video (directed by Megaforce). The 2011 video for Siinai’s “Anthem” consists of rearranged footage from Holy Mountain.
To point out that these videos only afford Jodorowsky’s work a surface-level reading seems obvious and besides the point—they are pop music videos, after all. Still, Only God Forgives‘ full-stop embrace of the Jodorowsky aesthetic, without ever explicitly referencing or visually quoting the filmmaker’s work is significant. Figuring out a more mindful and immersive way to explore Jodorowsky’s work was important to Refn. The goal was a tribute that avoids “the specifics” something less restrictive and more “general”. An arduous, over-the-top scene of torture in Only God Forgives in which a man is impaled over and over again, while all of the women in the room politely cover their eyes (as they’re ordered to do), set in a chintzy sex club abundant with kitsch, captures the absurdist humor and life-or-death stakes of Jodorowsky’s worldview better than Vimeo-friendly music video visuals that gets every set design detail down just right.
Only God Forgives builds on top of a half-decade of superficial video riffs and visual quotes and gets to the mood and tenor of Jodorowsky’s emotive, psychedelic work. Perhaps we needed Urban Outfitters-friendly indie swiping Jodorowsky’s steez to get to the thorough homage of Only God Forgives. “He’s become invincible,” Refn intones, suggesting that Jodorowsky’s oft-quoted aesthetic can’t be corrupted by commercial culture vulture filmmaking no matter how many times people try, “But eventually he will die. And Only God Forgives exists to say, ‘Thank you very much for having been around.’”
