Ferdy on Films, etc.

Dune (1984)
Director: David Lynch

By Roderick Heath

Frank Herbert’s Dune, published in 1965, is my favourite science fiction novel and a clear contender for the greatest of the genre. A monumental work of mythic imagination, it marked a bridging point of the literary scifi form, linking the mind-bending modern genre with its space opera past. David Lynch had only two feature films to his credit—Eraserhead (1976) and The Elephant Man (1980)—when he was chosen to direct Dino de Laurentiis’s huge-budget adaptation of the novel. Lynch’s film of Herbert’s novel hardly lived up to the stature of either artist. Instead, it signaled Lynch’s retreat from a mainstream career and the beginning of the end of the scifi film boom of the late ’70s early ’80s.

Why was Dune such a big bust? There are a few standard answers that can be offered: the book was too long and complex to adapt; the FX demands too great even for post-Star Wars Hollywood; the cinema is inimical to much of what the novel was about—metaphysics, moral complexity, speculative physics, political intrigues, oh my! As far as Lynch’s career goes, Dune is sort of a black hole these days—too weird for fanboys and not weird enough for fans of Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks. Dune surely needed the love, running time, and technical wizardry Peter Jackson gave to The Lord of the Rings. It needed to encapsulate a huge amount of geek expectation while selling itself to a mass audience.

In essence, the plot of Dune isn’t that complicated. In the distant future, computers are banned. We who are fed up with Windows XP might sympathise. The Goodies—the Atreides family—take over the planet Arrakis, where spice is mined. Spice is really cool shit that lets some people who make up the Spacing Guild fold time and travel through space, lets others live really long, and inspires many to develop incredibly bad fashion sense. The spice is produced by giant worms that infest the sands of Arrakis. The Baddies—the Harkonnen clan—used to run Arrakis, and they plot, with the help of the Emperor (Jose Ferrer), who fears the Atreides’ growing popularity, to take over again. Plots unfold. The Duke of the Atreides, Leto (Jurgen Prochnow), is betrayed and killed; his wife Jessica (Francesca Annis) and son Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) escape and meet up with a Merry Men-like mob of wild freedom fighters, the Fremen. Paul meets a hot desert chick, Chani (Sean Young), and soon confirms that he is the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy and the product of generations of selective breeding by the weirdo, quasi-religious, scientific sect called the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. Paul is a potential superhuman who can read minds, kill with a shout, and see the future. He leads the Fremen in a guerrilla war to halt spice production, avenge his father, and bring the universe to its knees.

Boiled down to essentials, it reads like a fast-paced adventure yarn, not so far from Star Wars. Indeed, Lucas borrowed elements from Herbert—a universe ruled by feudalism and pseudo-scientific religion. The Force, like the Spice, is a metaphysical trope that contradicts the technofascist drift of scifi. De Laurentiis undoubtedly thought he’d be making an upscale Star Wars. But it’s the endless digressions, folklore, and ideas that fuel the narrative that distinguishes the novel. Working out what to stress and what to render inconsequential separates a good adaptation from a bad one. Peter Jackson, for instance, never let Tolkien’s goobledygook get in the way of sword fights and battles, trusting that an intelligent audience will absorb a new glossary in the experience. Lynch, writing his own script, fails badly. His efforts to explain are usually garbled, clumsy, and infuriating. Storytelling, never a Lynch forte, almost completely eludes him here, and though much of the novel’s material is present, it never gels into a narrative. Dune, a novel filled with complex manoeuvres not just of plot but also of thought and philosophy, is not so much an action story as a tale of characters thinking of how, why, and when to take action. Its nature inevitably changes on the big screen.

But the film is rife with missteps, intriguing aesthetic choices though they might be. Lynch’s breadth of imagination and comfort with alien imagery undoubtedly landed him the job of making the film, and Lynch is indeed most at home with the novel’s most difficult aspect—its webs of vision, prophecy, and mysticism. His most arresting work comes in the associative, psychedelic montages that reveal Paul’s prescience, and indulge familiar tropes of his visual imagination, such as alien planets, falling stars, perverted births. However, Lynch’s approach elsewhere is a pasteboard affair, shunning the detailed realism Lucas, Kubrick, and Ridley Scott worked so hard to give to the genre, in favor of a broad, almost cartoonish atmosphere. It’s hard to tell the degree to which Lynch conspired with or was undone by the shoddy work of his special effects, set design, and costume departments; de Laurentiis’ associates seem to have thought they were still working on the parodic Flash Gordon (1980), and for the most part it just comes up tacky.

Possibly Lynch, a true surrealist, was delighted with the pastiche, matching his thinking that film should be flagrantly unreal. If The Matrix was a selection of systematic, market-driven images—techno chic, leather jackets, and drugs of choice—without a narrative to match, Dune is the opposite; it desperately needs Neo’s stylist, rather than the absurd proliferation of Austro-Hungarian and Stormtrooper unforms, big bushy eyebrows, and toy spaceships it’s got. The effects, despite being the work of masters Albert Whitlock and Carlo Rambaldi, are startlingly pathetic in comparison with the contemporaneous work in Alien (1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Blade Runner (1982). The action scenes suck, from the lame-o ray gunfire to the cheap battles of the extras from a leftover sword-and-sandal movie.

One aspect of this film that is definitely Lynchian, and yet bugged genre critics and fans most, is the grotesque villains. Lynch’s manifestations of evil are always leering, caricatured, extreme visions (think Frank in Blue Velvet or the old couple at the end of Mulholland Drive), and the Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth MacMillan) and his progeny Feyd-Rautha (Sting) and Raban (Paul Smith) fit right in. Lynch’s evil caricatures are slightly different to Hollywood patent villainy; Lynch tries to evoke the weird, threatening people who inhabit the corners of adolescent nightmares, like escaped pieces of the Id. But that’s not Herbert; the novel’s Harkonnen is monstrous and a sadistic homosexual to boot, but he’s also a master tactician, a figure fit to lead a Roman army. Lynch’s Harkonnen viciously slaughters toyboys and drools over Sting’s oiled pecs, has boils weeping from his face, and rants a lot. There is no impact to his sticky demise; he’s just too lame, a step away from a Popeye opponent.

Dune was hacked down by De Laurentiis, destroying much of its potential texture and clarity. But this would not have saved the film from these miscalculations. I’ve seen both Lynch’s original cut and the extended network television edition he took his name off, which sports a long prologue and new voiceover explanations in addition to extra footage. But rather than making it more fluent, these changes strip the film of one masterful quality—its dreamy tone, set by Virginia Madsen’s Princess Irulan’s appearance at the start (echoing the final image of The Elephant Man). Appropriately for a future run by feudal government and religious orders, the stylisation of the film is often gothic, but never as competently designed as it should be.

Worst of all, Dune just can’t come to grips with Arrakis as a place. Where the novel captures a sense of vastness and infinite possibility, Lynch’s setbound fakery reduces epic scope to tinny cavorting. David Lean’s camera in Lawrence of Arabia made the desert a living thing; David Lynch’s makes it a sandbox. Lynch, aided by the striking photography of Freddie Francis, stages intermittently memorable scenes and imagery: the thunderous surf of the Atreides’ home planet; the first appearance of a worm during which a huge machine is swallowed from below; Paul and Jessica trying to survive in the desert under a worm’s attack; the gory placenta shots of Paul’s embryonic sister Alia being transformed by the Spice’s influence. Yet Lynch can’t really do justice to Herbert’s most striking and memorable moments, and his gorgeous perversities, like the orgies of the Spice-drunk Fremen and the wild Alia, a fully sentient infant (played here by Alicia Witt) gleefully cavorting on the battle- field slaying soldiers with a knife.

This inadequacy leads to another failure. Herbert’s novel portrays a future whose most genuinely alien quality is a lack of contemporary morality. Herbert provokes us with notions—Paul’s victory bringing on a reign of bloodshed, Alia as a child housing a sexually knowing and psychotically violent adult—that upend idealistic expectations and easy identification, and are poisonous to the type of melodrama Lynch finally made. In Dune’s universe, modern liberalism and democracy have been replaced by a nascent medievalism, Byzantine webs of loyalty, intrigue, power mongering and servitude. The universe is infinitely corrupt, and change will be brutal, as Paul, in his visions, realises his ascension as the “Kwisatz Haderach," the great male witch and messiah, will bring on a cosmic-scale slaughter, his “good" distinguishable from “evil" only in being dedicated to collective renewal rather than self-interest. In this way Herbert evokes the undiluted pagan strength of classical myths like those in Die Niebelungen and the Trojan cycle, where the forces of history, identity, and spirituality warp and overwhelm petty human concerns. Lynch, trying to provide the Lucasian blockbuster, can’t come anywhere near this type of monstrous catharsis, with the end merely promising love, order, and peace, as Paul brings the rain to Arrakis by magic tricks.

For all this, the film is watchable, even enjoyable, and looked at from a slightly different angle, its apparently egregious failures seem like intriguing possibilities—which any Bene Gesserit would appreciate. If the film is not as triumphantly weird as the novel, it is bold, original, and weird in its own, distinct way. Lynch’s anarchic design that evokes the technology of the 1920s (for example, a translation device with the large, round head of a vintage microphone) and bizarre costumes throughout feels authentically punk in attitude. Lynch embraces rock-accented music (the score, by progressive-pop legends Toto and Brian Eno, is perhaps the film’s best feature) in trying to make a new kind of epic. The film’s flourishes, I think, sank as deeply, but more stealthily, into the zeitgeist as the more widely appreciated Blade Runner in providing visual counterpoints to cyberpunk writing, graphic novel illustration, and music videos, as well as especially influencing the films of Jeunet and Caro. Despite its failures, the film still has the heft of a mega-production, and the casting is, for the most part, perfect. Kyle MacLachlan, Lynch’s discovery for the movie, makes a pretty, dashing hero. Further down the cast list, Patrick Stewart as the Atreides’ steward Gurney Halleck, probably won his role as Jean-Luc Picard with his nobly hammy diction, and both he and Sian Phillips, who plays the Bene Gesserit leader, came out of the TV production I, Claudius. l