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American actor George Shannon plays Aden, a rich playboy who, in the middle of the desert, meets Marvel, a small, grotesque and primitive being equipped with mystical capacities. The friendship marked by a fascination that unites the two men turns turn into love and Aden's return to civilization in the company of his new friend will not be without consequences. I Will Walk Like A Crazy Horse abounds with themes that are generally expressed through provocative metaphors. While the idea of a castrating mother is already present in Viva La Muerte as well as allusions to religion and politics, this time Arrabal builds his film on an opposition between nature and modern civilization. The mother's unhealthy influence and her death serve as a catalyst here. Aden's childhood seems to be killed by the discovery of his mother's sexuality (see the dead child). The castrating hold—seen in images—that she exerted on him plays a significant role in his relationships with women. The fear and hatred he experiences towards his mother has rendered him a misogynist, regarding woman as an object; one is then hardly surprised by his homosexual inclinations. His meeting with Marvel officiates like a return to roots, making him discover a primitive life in communion with nature and paradise (his name Aden is not by chance) that he embraces, finding happiness and love with Marvel. Aden then decides to return to civilization, taking Marvel along with him, whose strangeness will make him a "freak" of the Elephant Man sort who makes us discover the aberrations of our society (as in the scene at the fair). Thus begins a satire of modern life through the city of Paris, the urban and polluted monster. The arrival is marked by the presence of hanging skeletons, a kind of totem predicting the death of Man. And it's precisely what modern and urban life represents in Arrabal's eyes: the death of man as an individual, who disappears into the mass; an idea repeated when Aden, an urban creature then disguised as a woman, gives birth to a skeleton head. Another misdeed associated with the city, pollution is omnipresent, from traffic to the anonymous bodies making love hidden behind gas masks. Arrabal also makes an amusing reference to the cigars that he compares to an Oedipal vice where man finds the maternal breast. Always in opposition between nature and modern civilization, the animals are considered sacred beings—Marvel is never separated from his goat—while for "civilized" man they are only used as food. Rather than devouring meat Arrabal prefers vegetarian food and preaches a return to the earth through the intermediary of Marvel, who grows a vegetable garden in the middle of the apartment. But the source of any modern scourge, however, is found in this barn, this manger where baby Jesus is replaced by a handle of bills. Arrabal concludes his film on an indigenous belief that says that one can absorb the spirit of a human being in an act of cannibalism. If Arrabal's taste for provocation is found in many scenes, those were somewhat defused by the wear of time, proving to be more grotesque and amusing now than truly shocking. Whether one is sensitive or not to the artist's ideas and imagery through which they are expressed, I Will Walk Like A Crazy Horse emerges as the archetype of the "lampoon" film.
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