What Are You Dune with Your Time?
Dune, Pt. 1 was amazing, but also, some people have real dumb critiques of it, a sign of degeneracy in how people look at art.
Alejandro Jodorowsky was the first person to try and adapt Dune. He wrote a script “the size of a telephone book” and ran out of money before you could say “the spice must flow.” The second person to make an attempt was legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis, who recruited Ridley Scott to turn the seminally weird science fiction novel into at least one movie. Scott couldn’t navigate the material and instead turned towards making his own futuristic sci-fi thriller, Blade Runner. De Laurentiis was able to renegotiate his rights, found David Lynch, and the third crack at a Dune film turned out to be the charm. Commercially unsuccessful and critically roasted at the time, Lynch’s film, which he himself disavowed at the time, has undergone a critical rehabilitation. I’ve seen bits and pieces of it, and although you definitely need to see the whole movie to get the gist of it, I couldn’t really hate scenes with Kyle McLachlan and Sting1 having the most 1980s twink knife fight possible. I didn’t watch the SyFy Network crack at a Dune miniseries either.
Still, sci-fi nerds have wanted nothing more than to see Frank Herbert’s series of novels centering around a post-computer, interstellar empire and the hallucinogenic excrement of giant sandworms that fuels it become realized live and in person, whether it be on the big screen or, in the streaming age, on televisions at home in a serialized format. After two decades of waiting for a new adaptation overall and nearly four decades for a new movie, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, Part 1 finally dropped October 22 of this year. This version was caught up in rights exchanges and the kinds of red tape that movie studios deploy for franchise titles. One hates thinking of these properties as “franchises,” but in a post-Disney-as-IP-Pac-Man society, if you’re not A24 Studios or an indie property, you may very well be chum in the sea of movies as profit farms. Dune, Pt. 1 was already pushed back because of COVID-19 threatening its “franchise potential” anyway. It’s a reality.
Anyway, after a long wait, one that got even sci-fi casuals (like me and my wife!) interested, the first movie was released both in theaters and on HBO Max. The dual release didn’t hurt its box office numbers as it was number one two weeks in a row. That’s not interesting to me outside of that money guaranteeing that Dune, Pt. 2 and possibly adaptations of Herbert’s sequels will be made. The fact that it also reversed the critical reputation of the original Lynch film too is a welcome sight. The original texts are reputed to be dense, dry reads with labyrinthine lore that focuses a lot on imperial politics and an essential group of characters that openly practiced eugenics. Given that irreverent, Disney-owned franchises with bright lasers, shaky camera work, and lots of sarcastic, sometimes reductive humor jammed in every scene are the top of the market, it’s refreshing to see a faithful adaptation of such an oddball work of literature on the scene.
My wife and I watched it over the weekend. The movie did reflect its reputation. I can’t speak on how well it reflected the actual source material because I haven’t read the book. With fans of both Lynch’s movie and the book, I expected a tone-serious movie that might have been heavy on lore. I was shocked at how little world-building there was, to be honest, but that is not a bad thing per se. Exposition in a feature film, especially a blockbuster, should be done economically, and Villeneuve was able to establish groups like the Bene Gesserit and characters like the Emperor through narrative windows, in the latter case, without even showing him on screen. It’s hard to call a movie with a two-hour, 35-minute runtime as tight and quick, but given how much material lies in the Herbert’s universe, one could see how a starry-eyed fan like Jodorowsky could bloat a script into 17 hours. As an aside, had Jodorowsky come up during the current age, I get the feeling he could have sold a streaming outlet on a series. Alas, time works in set ways.
Aside from the economy of the story, the narrative was rich and beautifully set. The stunning deserts of Arrakis contrasted rain-soaked lakeshore residences and portside military bases. Deserts can be tricky for a cinematographer, but when they’re shot right, they’re just gorgeous as scenery. The dunes were stunning as static backdrops, but when they subducted on themselves as the sandworms moved and emerged from the depths, they achieved the heights of what the background could attain – they were a character in and of themselves. The deserts of Arrakis were as much a vibrant person in the film as Paul Atreides and Lady Jessica and Liet Kynes. For being one half of a fully realized story, Dune, Pt. 1 felt like a complete experience. The backdrops were incredible places for Oscar Isaac and Javier Bardem and Zendaya especially to chew scenery, and the story had a satisfying arc despite leaving more on the docket. Overall, I agreed with the critics and all the fans who finally got to see an adaptation of their Holy Scripture that was released in an era with IMAX.
Reaction is never going to be a perfect consensus. I expected there to be some backlash, of course. No film can have a perfect consensus in the positive direction, although I feel it’s easier to garner universal hate. Still, I expected the blowback to come from nerds who didn’t think the story had enough details from the book, or from critics who had more technical complaints. I didn’t think I would see something like this review, from someone determined to be the main character on Twitter this past Saturday:
I thought it was a metatextual shitpost at first, a commentary on the state of blockbusters today, but further down the thread, the original poster says they didn’t finish the book either and didn’t find the story compelling. No one’s saying you had to enjoy the movie if everyone else liked it, but the reasoning given feels like a symptom of where the movie industry is. I’ve written about the MCU vs. Martin Scorsese rift plenty of times, to the point where the voices I’m boosting aren’t really saying anything new, just repeated points that the people who think Scorsese is the devil incarnate for not wanting his art to be drowned out haven’t absorbed yet.
Framing the Dune, Pt. 1’s worth on the existence of jokes illuminates how homogenous the state of blockbusters has become. There are variations between the studios, sure. Disney owns so much IP that it’s so hard to see differences among the various franchises, but each movie seems to have a punchlist of things that happen, one of which is a preponderance of base visual puns and other jokes that punctuate the wrong scenes at the wrong time, generally to undermine important moments. Humor and comic relief are not unwanted elements in serious film, obviously. You can have mood lightening with jokes, or you can have a movie that grips the audience without the use explicit comedy. The idea that you have to count elements of storytelling to rack up points on imaginary scorecard is antithetical to the idea of gauging art.
The idea that there’s a “correct” way to watch a movie is wrong, but there’s a clearly incorrect way to do so. Treating a piece of art (or a piece of content, you know I differentiate between the two) for signifiers or requisite components is antithetical to the reason why one would stop to enjoy such a thing. Art, content, entertainment, sports, whatever, these are things that the working public partake in to get away from their lives of counting beans, inspecting components, checking off lists. Granted, there are some things that if they’re missing from whatever is being taken in will hamper one’s enjoyment of that thing. For example, a song without a melody might cause concern, but the rise of bands like Sigur Rós and Godspeed You! Black Emperor have pioneered music without regular melody. And that in and of itself shows that you don’t need even structural components for people to find happiness in partaking in a certain thing. You can have a story without conflict or a resolution that might tickle one’s fancy in a limited capacity. Lord knows, wrestling fans are used to seeing feuds drag on and on and on and on without a single hint that falling action, resolution, and denouement are ever on their way. So if the big things can be absent and still make something enjoyable, wouldn’t it follow that a minor thing, a joke that isn’t embedded in a comedy, is not mandatory?
Again, it circles back to the idea not everything is intended for everyone. Dune is a story for science fiction nerds, and the director of this round of adaptations is not a guy who makes light-hearted romps for families. Villeneuve is a serious filmmaker, and as such, he’s giving Dune the same gravity he gave Blade Runner 2049, Sicario, and Arrival. It only takes a little bit of googling to figure out whether or not a movie appeals to you. Trailers are available online, sometimes in overabundance. We live in the age of too much fucking information, so if regular jokes are necessary to make sure you feel like you’re alive during the course of a film, then a little bit of research would have told you that no, Dune, Pt. 1 was not the movie for you. It’s okay not to like the movie, but to put the “main character of Twitter” designation on your back and then double down when “Dune Bros” flood your mentions shows either a fundamental misunderstanding of the art or a remedial desire to have your engagement column on Twitter a fucking mess. Some people crave the latter. I don’t get it. Whenever I have multiple tweets getting ten likes on a Wednesday night during All Elite Wrestling Dynamite, I get nervous. To each their own.
The point is, corporatism in art and entertainment has watered down the collective perception of what art should be because the corporations all try to hit a scorecard to maximize profit. Art, entertainment, content, whatever you want to call it, should not be cut with precast molds from a sheet of homogeneous dough. Each discrete piece is a cake or a tart that should be made by hand, from memory each time. Each experience should be unique. You shouldn’t have expectation going in, except that the thing you’re devoting attention to should, in some way, leave you satisfied. If it fails to meet that expectation, all you’ve lost is a minuscule amount of time. To some, it’s a steep price, but for as short as the human lifespan is in the cosmic scheme of things, most lives in the bourgeois society seem, in a word, interminable. There are worse things than “sitting through” a movie that only has one joke, ten minutes in.
Gordon Sumner, not Steve Borden.