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.

While I had a really busy November and December in 2021, I found a few islands of escape with my headphones and the podcasts of my friends. Our friend, Ryan (FKA “The League”), has been running The Signal Watch podcast where he hosts a “cadre of co-contributors” commenting carefully on cinematic capers. This November and December, Ryan hosted outstanding episodes that I wish I could have commented upon in a timelier fashion.

I really “got” some of the subtler nuances of the November/December arc at The Signal Watch. Its tenor and resonance seemed just right for a second pandemic / resurgent omicron variant Christmas. I’ll admit I was a little bit blue between the stress of home, the holiday expectation of positivity, and the nagging feeling that what I wanted most of all was my loved ones to be near — or, heck, to even conceivably have the possibility of being near.

• The Signal Watch
  • “Foundation (TV)”
  • “Jingle All the Way”
  • “Scrooged”
  • “The Apartment”

I wanted to put a plug in for a podcast that’s produced by my former colleague, Jen Meyers, along with her co-host Jessi Chartier: Quiet Little Horrors. It’s a podcast devoted to “unsettling” horror of the psychological variety. Their takes on some landmark (and niche) horror has really made me rethink some movies I’ve seen and get interested in some I haven’t. They’ve just started season three, so now’s a perfect time to subscribe or to catch up.and of the slow-to-uptake-but-now-whoa-Nelly medium of podcasting: they’re maintained by amateurs for niche audiences.

Some of my favorite episodes are the following, of which I’ll cite an archival, a recent, and hot-off-the presses episode:

• “The Others”
• “Repulsion”
• “Last Night in Soho”

One of the things I like most about this podcasts is what I liked most about the promise of the original web (cira 1995), it’s made with the zeal and care of amateurs. And by no means is the show amateurish, I rather mean that the show, like the word amateur itself, has the root of “to love” (ama) at its heart. The hosts bring a warmth and genuine affection for the topics that make the short episodes fun, intimate, and energetic.

Recently I had a chance to praise my friend Ryan’s podcast. While we had kicked around the idea a bit, Ryan reached out and suggested we actually do a podcast on “A Clockwork Orange” like we’d discussed via email. So we did!

I thought I’d include my notes for the podcast based on my most recent watch in this post as well.

“The Automat” is a joyous film that recalls the arrival and departure of the automatic restaurant, the automat, Horn and Hardart in Philadelphia and New York. Guided by and framed with interviews with H&H aficionado Mel Brooks, the story of a scrappy restaurant that believed in good food for the people, all people, in a beautiful environment was nostalgic, tender, and sad. As Brooks recounts: you could never make it today, it makes no sense to accounting that something so naive and good and cheap could ever be conjured again.

As we shuffled out my seat neighbor leaned over and confided: “They didn’t mention it, but the mashed potatoes were pretty darn good, too.”

In a previous post, I went heavy on the nostalgia about my mom and I enjoying trash sci-fi in the beginning of the Reagan era. The object of my reminiscence was Xanadu, but I thought I’d write about another favorite: 1981’s Flash Gordon.

We seem to be living through some sort of an AI blossom after the AI winter that began in the mid 1980’s. In the intervening years, many in the tech community had given up on the hope of AI. However, the rise of cheap, heavy-computation-friendly GPUs meant the birth of “machine learning,” “data science,” and “(un-)supervised learning” to train models. With these models trained, applications could be built that churned out uncanny and remarkably good results e.g. ChatGPT4.

For the first time in recent memory, it seems that specific-purpose, if not general-purpose, AI may be a fact of our lifetimes.

And this is just the beginning.

Not only are AI manipulating strings of text seemingly intelligently, they’re generating art and images from text as well. We’re even using AI to create new artifacts for special purpose. For example, an AI-designed aerospace product was recently commissioned by NASA. The component looks more like an alien spacecraft or biomechanical art than a functional component. But it functions to its purpose and meets the prescribed tolerances.

This product is eerily different, freed as it is from the burdens of humanity’s history of ideas around Earthbound biomechanical motion:

or Earthly geometry as in Euclid’s Elements:

or Earthly paradigms around materials’ behavior and economic constraints.

It’s trite, but necessary and profound to note:

Alien intelligences produce staggeringly alien artifacts.¹

But can we see alien intelligence’s products among us today? I’m sure there are factual examples, but what came to my mind were the alien-looking artifacts the created by alienated among us in art. In the AI-designed space components, I saw an aesthetic similarity to the Gynecological Devices for Operating on Mutant Women from the 1988 David Cronenberg film, “Dead Ringers.”