else. I said, 'I'm not going to rehearse. There will be only one take because it will be impossible to repeat. Roll the cameras only when I signal you to [...] And I really... I really... I really raped her. And she screamed." He went on to state, "Then she told me that she had been raped before. You see, for me the character is frigid until El Topo rapes her. And she has an orgasm. That's why I show a stone phallus in that scene ... which spouts water. She has an orgasm. She accepts the male sex. And that's what happened to Mara in reality. She really had that problem. Fantastic scene. A very, very strong scene." These comments, and others made by Jodorowsky throughout his career, faced renewed scrutiny in the wake of the #MeToo movement. In 2019, after El Museo del Barrio in New York City cancelled a retrospective exhibit on the filmmaker due to the controversy, Jodorowsky stated that it was part of a publicity stunt: "They were words, not facts. Surrealist publicity in order to enter the world of cinema from a position of obscurity [...] I acknowledge that this statement is problematic in that it presents fictional violence against a woman as a tool for exposure, and now, fifty years later, I regret that this is being read as truth." Reception On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, El Topo holds an approval rating of 80%, based on 44 reviews, and an average rating of 7.1/10. Its consensus reads, "By turns intoxicating and confounding, El Topo contains the creative multitudes that made writer-director Alejandro Jodorowsky such a singular talent." The visuals were the main point of contention amongst the film's critics, who debated if the sequences and montage were meaningful or merely exploitative. Concerning the symbolism within the film, Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "They're all there, in a movie that is all guts (quite literally) but that has no body to give the guts particular shape or function." He found the film to be a con. Also writing in the Times, Peter Schjeldahl disagreed with Canby, describing the film as "a very strange masterpiece". He says, "On first blush it might seem no more than a violent surreal fantasy, a work of fabulous but probably deranged imagination. Surreal and crazy it may be, but it is also (one realizes the second