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Thoughts about "Dune"

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Ryan wrote a thoughtful post about catching a 35mm print of Lynch’s “Dune” at the Alamo Drafthouse. He notes that despite arriving “DOA” in 1984, it was, today, “a bit of a cult movie.” I thought I would take a few moments to write down why I am a member of the “Dune” cult following. In short, the reason I love “Dune” is because it is an artistically rich disaster.

The Critical Response

For a standard opinion on the movie, I refer to Roger Ebert’s review of January 1, 1984:

This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time. Even the color is no good; …David Lean solved that problem in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, where he made the desert look beautiful and mysterious, not shabby and drab.

The Financial Response

“Dune” cost its production company, de Laurentiis Productions, approximately $40M to make. It grossed ~$30M. A $10M loss before DVD, resale, and licensing agreements was a staggering loss.

So I can make neither the argument that “Dune” was misunderstood by audiences: they voted no with their dollars. Nor can I say this was an artist’s movie, a beautiful avant garde that only the critics grasped. Yet nevertheless I admire and respect this movie. Why?

Why I love “Dune” anyway

Filming the Dune Universe is a Grand Dream

The Dune universe is so expansive and thoroughly-conceived that it is like the vast desert of Arrakis itself. When your imagination finally collapses, dehydrated, cooked and lost in the middle of a sand sea, you realize just how engulfing Frank Herbert’s vision was, and that you’re nowhere close to any respite from its expansiveness.

It asks, in its (roughly) 6 books, What would civilization look like after the machines take over (Matrix-style) and after humans re-take control of their destiny sans “thinking machines?” It imagines how humans could alter, drug, and meditate themselves into filling the void left by the proscription of computing and asks what would happen if there were a constrained commodity that was the fulcrum for this replacement? It even goes on to ask “Can any one being assure humanity’s success against its inherent favor for the easy path and its naïve assumption that the universe is a benevolent place.”

Furthermore a great deal of the plot action is entirely mental. Thanks to his genetics and mass overdose of spice, Paul’s (portrayed by Kyle MacLachlan) consciousness is literally being rewired. This is not a change that suits a visible medium.

These constraints should scream out to anyone: “this is unfilmable.” Nevertheless, Lynch and de Laurentiis tried, joining a club of the truly audacious film-makers. I would put them in the ranks of “Gone With the Wind,” or “Citizen Kane,” “Apocalypse Now, or “Fitzcarraldo.” While those productions ended in vaunted success, “Dune” did not. They aimed for the moon, and falling short, left us a beautiful, broken body of Icarus in which we can find the beauty of grand, failed, ideas.

But it is not only the act of making this film which was a grand dream, there are beautiful dreams inside of the film’s content which speak to a grand and majestic artistic vision.

The Beautiful Wreckage that Speaks of a Grand Dream

The Costumes and Sets

They are beautiful artifacts that will stand witness to generations to come of a time when movies hired artisans to bring forth in façades, veneers, and lighting the imagined dreams of science fiction. While these dreams can be hacked together in days by talented computer scientists or teens with time and rendering software, there was a time when sets were conceived in lumber, lights, and fabrics.* The loss of this skill and this style of movie making is economically expeditious, logical, and very, very sad.

The Acting and Actors

Here in the Bay Area many people choose to work at start-ups. Many of them fail. Here we have a shrug attitude toward failure. You meet people, you work as hard as you can, and then, sometimes, you fail. Sometimes those friends you make in the failing are the crucial people you wind up needing in the successful launch. For example, the much-vaunted Twitter hatched from the now-forgotten odio.com.

“Dune” is similar because it is a weird and fascinating waypoint for so many actors’ and type of actors’ careers that it maintains a fascinating magnetism.

  1. David Lynch’s Favorites
  2. Kyle MacLachlan established his Lynch bona fides here and went on to wonderful and weird pairings: “Twin Peaks,” “Blue Velvet, et al.”
  3. Freddie Jones: Last seen in The Elephant Man
  4. The BBC drama / Royal Shakespeare Company
  5. The “I, CLAVDIVS” crowd. Finishing in 1976, this miniseries starred 1. Sian Philips: The mother from Hell, Livia to become the Reverend Mother from Hell, Mohaim in “Dune” 1. Patrick Stewart: Sower of insurrection, Sejanus to become arms-master Gurney Halleck, to become CAPTAIN MOTHER!@#%% PICARD
  6. Francesca Annis: Recently of the BBC’s Lillie and in an odd genre cross-over, “Krull.”
  7. Culty Actors:
  8. Virginia Madsen: Beautiful beyond words, you could believe she might have been the emperor of the Known Universe’s daughter, but with that Lynch-y iciness repeated again with (oh geez, where to start) Isabella Rossellini in “Blue Velvet” or Patricia Arquette in “Lost Highway.”
  9. Brad Dourif: Just courted a Oscar in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” plays human computer Piter de Vries
  10. Jürgen Prochnow: The captain from 1981’s “Das Boot” (what a movie!)
  11. Max von Sydow: Enough said.
  12. Richard Jordan: Co-star in the iconic “Logan’s Run”

But, as Ebert rightly said in his review, many of the actors are terribly underutilized. They stare, they stand, they do not emote. They wear weird BDSM-y tight-fitted leather suits.**

The Director: David Lynch

In 1984 David Lynch was coming off of the success of the indie freakshow “Eraserhead” and the mainstream drama “The Elephant Man.” How de Laurentiis decided that Lynch, one of the most cutting-edge of directors this side of Un Chien Andalou, was the right call for space opera I’d love to know. If you like films that are both banal and horrible, American and international, rich and gruesome, erotic and complex, then the Lynchian element only adds to this film’s grounds for fascination.

Soundtrack by TOTO

‘Nuff said. This worked so well for Queen / Flash Gordon, apparently, they wanted another electronic-y rock act to rock-opera-tize the background sounds. Sweet.

Was the Audience Too Unready?

Yet for all the grandness of vision, the film didn’t connect with audiences. As Ryan noted, a movie that tries to sum up the setting in its poster is in trouble. An even worse portent was that a glossary of terms was handed to attendees*** to help them make sense of this world (on the assumption that they hadn’t read the book(s)). Can I blame anyone for thinking that this movie isn’t worth a second look? Can I blame those Pac-Man Fever beseiged folks of 1984 for not attending enough “Dune” showings? No, I admit, I cannot.

Maybe by all objective measure “Dune” was a failure. Yet somehow in all that failure, “Dune” still feels more like a success, of a sort, to me, due to its fascinating fallout. And perhaps this is what’s important about why I like “Dune:” liking it says something about me that I like to imagine about myself. And this is certainly the mechanism of how “cult” films work: to like “Dune” or “Rocky Horror Picture Show” says something about us, the “Dune”-o-philes.

The Dune Shibboleth

While most fans will concede the criticisms against the movie, it is in spite of them, or perhaps because of them that, we, fans, love it even more. I think it’s because to say “I love this failure, warts and all” says something about you.

It says that you believe in the triumph of Romanticism, and love, and intelligence against the forces of military control and exploitation. You love that an artist’s artist somehow conned a reputable (shush you, there in the Peanut gallery) production company out of tons of money to attempt to film the unfilmable. You’re proud that Lynch and de Laurentiis, struck out to take that huge block of marble and fashion something great out of it. You’re proud to say that scary boundaries should be pushed and that when the attempt fails there can still be a wonderful fallout. In fact, what the great literary philosopher Craig Ferguson once said of “Dr. Who” holds true for “Dune.”

One thing is consistent, though and this is why the show is so beloved by geeks and nerds. It’s all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism…and if there is any hope for us in this giant explosion that we inhabit…it’s [that] intellect and romance triumph over brute force and cynicism (source

Conclusion

There’s something different about this failure that makes it greater than other cinematic failures (say Uwe Böll’s “Blubberella”). It wasn’t a failure in art, or a failure to dream, it was only that the dream was too big for its container, the project too vast to manage, the source material too rich to be handled by mere mortals and technology of 1983. As ever, I think of amicus loquax Ovid:

solis
mollit odoratas, pennarum vincula, ceras; tabuerant cerae: nudos quatit ille lacertos, remigioque carens non ullas percipit auras

the sun
softens the fragrant wax, the bindings of the feathers the waxen joints melt: the boy shakes bare forearms, but, stripped, he holds the air no more with his strokes

I hope there are always those who dare to dream magnificent dreams. They shall always find me in their corner, cheering them on against the odds and eagerly awaiting the beautiful lessons they find on the edge of failure and regardless of whether they fall into that chasm themselves.

Footnotes:

*: I even feel this now as I watch the original-original-original versions of the “Star Wars” trilogy. The seduction of George Lucas to the dark side of CGI-driven special effects might be a fitting meta-trilogy for an enterprising documentary director.

**: How much do I love to parse Dino de Laurentiis’ motivations. This is a man whose movies never, ever apologized for projecting the virgin / whore dyad (Dale / Aura in Flash Gordon, Irulan / Chani in Dune, Valeria / Witch in Conan the Barbarian, The Queen / Sonja in Red Sonja) into their arc with appropriately provocative / diaphanous fabric choices to match. I know it’s not PC, but I also like his naïvité as a post-war cinema content generator. I can imagine what he would have said: “Look, ya gotta have a pretty good girl, and a pretty bad girl. Why are you hasslin’ me about this?”

***: This also happened at “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” this year. We were given brochures that broke down the “spy lingo.” Knowing this story on “Dune” I was worried for TTSS. Thankfully it turned out to be comprehensible (even without the insert).