Santa Sangre

A young man, Fenix, is institutionalized in a Mexico City psychiatric hospital. We see him in flashback as a child performing in his parents' circus. His father, Orgo, is a knife-thrower and tattooed strongman. His mother, Concha, is a trapeze artist and the leader of a heretical Catholic cult that venerates 'Santa Sangre,' a saintly girl who was raped and had her arms cut off by attackers and is now memorialized in a temple built around a pool of her blood. The cult is destroyed by the Church. Orgo is unfaithful to Concha. Concha throws acid on Orgo's genitals. Orgo retaliates by cutting off Concha's arms with knives. He then slits his own throat. The boy Fenix witnesses everything. Years later, the now-adult Fenix escapes the hospital. He finds Concha. They reconstitute their stage act: she stands behind him in elaborate matching costumes, slipping her stumps inside his sleeves, controlling his arms. They perform together. She uses him to kill women she perceives as threats — including his beloved Alma, a deaf-mute he has not seen since childhood, who arrives to reclaim him. He finally resists the mother's voice, attacks her, and discovers in the film's last shot that she is a mannequin he has been carrying in his head. He had killed her years ago and built her in his mind to continue commanding him. He is arrested. He raises his hands.

On release the film was praised internationally and ignored in the U.S. due to its distribution arrangements. Critics noted Jodorowsky's commercial restraint compared to his earlier work. Roger Ebert championed the film. It remains less seen than it deserves to be.

Underneath the surreal surface, the film is conducting the most direct cinematic depiction of Jungian individuation ever attempted. Jodorowsky has read his Jung — he wrote books on psychomagic and the tarot, has been in dialogue with depth psychology his entire career — and the film is the application of Jungian theory to the specific clinical condition of mother possession with structural and visual precision.

Orgo, the father, has a large eagle tattooed across his chest. The tattoo is the symbol of his masculine self-display. He is the strongman, the knife-thrower, the womanizer. He is the father in his most cartoonish form — physically dominant, sexually excessive, emotionally absent except in the form of violence.

Concha's response to his infidelity is to throw acid on his genitals. The choice is precise. She is castrating him for his transgression. He has used his masculine instrument against her dignity; she destroys the instrument. His retaliation — cutting off her arms — is symmetric. She has used her hands to wound his masculinity; he removes the hands. The reciprocity is operational. Each parent attacks the other at the point of the other's offending capacity.

The young Fenix watches all of this. He has, in the space of one night, witnessed his father's symbolic and literal castration, his mother's symbolic and literal disarming, and his father's suicide. The trauma is total. The boy has no available developmental path through it. He cannot fully identify with the father (the father is dead and was monstrous in life). He cannot fully separate from the mother (the mother needs him in a more concrete way than most mothers need their children, because she has no arms). The Oedipal triangle has collapsed in a way that leaves the son with no exit.

This is the structural diagnosis the film delivers. The son's possession by the mother is not a failure of will. It is the only available adaptation to the catastrophic loss of all other developmental positions. He cannot grow up because growing up requires a triangulation that the trauma has eliminated. He remains the boy. The mother takes the boy's body as her arms because the body is available and the boy cannot refuse.

Santa Sangre transmits the most precise depiction in cinema of what individuation from the maternal apparatus actually requires. Most films about overbearing mothers stop at the recognition of the dynamic. The protagonist sees the mother is too present, decides to assert independence, and either succeeds or fails dramatically. Jodorowsky's film goes further. It shows that the actual operation is not a confrontation with the actual mother. The actual operation is a dismantling of the internal mother — the apparatus the original mother installed that continues to operate after she is gone.

What the film leaves the viewer with is a permanent suspicion of the voice in one's head. Whose voice is it, exactly? When did it begin? On what authority does it continue to give instructions? What hands are currently moving on its orders? The questions are uncomfortable. The film makes them difficult to evade.

Jodorowsky's later work — Endless Poetry, Psychomagic — has continued the project of using cinema as therapeutic intervention. Santa Sangre is the cleanest example. It is not too much. It is not self-indulgent. It is a focused, structurally precise depiction of an extremely common psychological condition presented with sufficient theatricality that the viewer cannot file it as merely realistic. The theatricality is what allows the structure to be seen. After the film, the structure is visible. What the viewer does with the visibility is the viewer's life. The film cannot do that work. The film makes the work possible.