Look, there are books and there are books, and then there are books you read when you were way too young to have developed adequate defenses against them, I mean that sort of even half-gelled-prefrontal-cortex awareness of reality that reminds you, however you might work to suspend it, that a bene gesserit is not an actual thing out there in the world, that CHOAM is a piece of compelling lexical invention and not the sort of organization that might have an HR department, filing concerns, tax professionals on staff. I don’t in general think ‘too young’ is a thing with books, but in retrospect maybe the Honored Matres could have waited until, you know, sixth grade. (On the flip side perhaps there’s an inoculation case to be made—rather than pushing any deep buttons, the really odd stuff just landed with a resounding ‘huh.’)
What I’m trying to get across is, for me to say anything comprehensive or complete about Dune, or my relationship to it and its various adaptations, especially the most recent one directed by Denis Villeneuve, would require tracing conceptual root systems and deep structures to an extent impossible without a psychic and a dental drill. But here are a few capsule reactions. If you’re spoiler averse with a vengeance, sorry, you might want to skip to the end of this letter. It’s hard for me to imagine being spoiler averse for the movie version of a sixty year old SF novel with its own Barnes and Noble edition, but, look, if that’s you, live your truth! I do have a fun Announcement, so please scroll down to the end if you’d like to see those and remain spoiler free.
Is It Good Or Not? It is… I have no idea how to answer that question! Yes. Yes I think it is good. The circuits that are activated when a thing is bad, those circuits are dormant. I didn’t disappear into it, is the thing. I felt like I was a figure skating judge watching a long program, noting what edge the skater’s riding in ever-more-complicated figures. I felt like I was watching someone solve three rubick’s cubes at the same time with a gun to their head. It was not a restful experience. It was masterfully absorbing. I cared, not just about the characters on screen, but about the choices that were being made in front of and behind the camera, why those choices were made in that fashion, and how they played out.
I have no idea how a normal person would watch this movie. My wife loved it, loved the vibe of it, and she’s not a Dune person, but she’s not not a Dune person, and she’s in it for the vibe, for the aesthetic force, which is how this movie demands to be taken. But I could see someone asking, what the heck happened to that nice Thufur Hawat fellow with the parasol that we spent so much screen time on? For that matter who are these folks with the occasionally-white eyeballs and what do they do? Why is the doctor taking pulses with his hands, rather than a tricorder? Why is there a dubstep planet? What’s up with the mouse?
I love the mouse. I love that no one names the mouse. I don’t know why no one names the mouse. It would have been such a natural end to the film, Paul’s new name, tying the visions together. Maybe that’s exactly why they don’t do it that way—it would make the visions too literal.
In general, the visions! I’m still marveling at the choice to show Jamis as a gentle man, a mentor figure. In the book, when Paul fights him, he’s basically Toxic Masculinity Dude, pissed that Paul got the jump on him this one time, eager to get his own back. But there’s something terrifying, too, the way the visions use him, as they use Paul. He is Paul’s teacher. He teaches him how to kill, which is how to live as a Fremen on Arrakis; he sets the tone for the rest of human history. Read one way it’s chilling. Read it another way it’s a moment of compassion for all those crushed under the wheels of Paul’s destiny, giving Jamis an intimacy with Paul that the constant forward march of camera frames can’t allow. It shows, too, the terror of Paul’s gift—that he can know people, really know them, even the ones he is killing.
How claustrophobic is this universe! They cut a big banquet function scene between the spice factory / worm attack and the Harkonnen invasion, which would have made the political stakes a lot more clear, but I can see the why of it. That scene trades understanding and worldbuilding for tension. The Harkonnen attack feels out of pace, breathtaking in suddenness, brutality—even if you’re a book fan! But also removing that banquet means that only a double handful of people in this movie ever converse on camera. The social world feels so small and isolating, the natural so big—you see humans dwarfed by this cosmos, utterly failing to fill it with their culture and their songs and their stories (and their dubstep). It also marks the Fremen off from galactic society in a neat way—proportionately, a lot more of the Fremen we see get to speak. So: which is the functional society here?
Harkonnens. Man. This is the third vision of the Baron we’ve had, and… look, dude’s a big Problem, in the books, when it comes to modern reading and especially adaptation. He’s your archetype Coded Villain. Coded for what? Everything! I can see people taking issue with his portrayal here, too, no arguments. But I love how powerful he is. In Dune ’84 he was a cackling cruel jester type, who had his boils milked by slaves and bobbed around like a beach ball in the pool. Here he fills the screen, haunts it. In the book the dude gets around in an antigravity chair because he’s lazy, gluttonous. Here, he gets around in an antigravity rig because he’s a terrifying awful mighty ghost-man. You get the sense he doesn’t have time for walking, or for gravity, or for the borders most humans obey. (Was that spider-thing supposed to be what was left of Yueh’s wife??? Probably not, and awful to conceive, but it’s the kind of question that arises given how few characters we see. Everything feels significant.)
Did anyone else remember that Matt Keeslar of the Middleman played Feyd Rautha in the SciFi Miniseries back in 2000? Because I sure didn’t until Scott Lynch pointed it out. What the hell. Miniseries Feyd wasn’t as… loincloth’d as ’84 Feyd, but still, I do remember him getting the (poisoned hip thrust needle) point across.
All the tiny worldbuilding details that get respect without mention. One reason Paul’s fight with Jamis goes on so long, is that Paul’s used to fighting someone with shields, so he’s slowing his cuts to penetrate a shield that Jamis isn’t wearing. Or: no computers! Like, of course they didn’t go into the Butlerian Jihad and all that, but I love how hard they work to envision a no-computer, no-AI universe in 2020. I love the tiny Orange Catholic bibles, the filmbooks. Thufur’s button mic.
More general thought: cinema isn’t really about words, even though it has words in it. We had movies before movies had speech. Yes, a lot of genre entertainment ends up on screen now, but I think this is a bigger gulf than we appreciate at first glance, especially for modern properties. In modern genre lit, ‘omniscient’ point of view—the storyteller voice whose authority we accept to tell us what’s happening, what it means in general, and what various characters are thinking—is out of fashion, except in (broadly speaking) satire, where authors like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett carve out stylistic breathing room. The fashion now is for extreme close third person writing, to the point of stream of consciousness—which makes it difficult for the writer just to tell the reader salient facts about the world, since why would a person who knows basic things about the world, tell herself those things? There are lots of ways to deal with this—relying on the readership conventions of an educated SF audience is one, classic New Wave move, a bit inscrutable at times; having your POV character be a slow-on-the-uptake farm boy is another. There are real wildfire solves like Jemisin’s in the Broken Earth books, which seem at first to be written in second person but are actually written in first person by a practically omniscient narrator, who is nonetheless situated in the world of the text in a way that, say, Tolkien’s narrator (or Herbert’s) is not. But a common solution (that I employ all the time) is to have characters discussing salient points of the setting with one another—nobody knows everything, after all. Many of these approaches (except for the farm boy) don’t transfer well to film, because they rely on long stretches of dialog—fun in a book, but a challenge to film effectively. I wonder if this is why the default tone for the Marvel Cinematic Universe is light irony—to sugar the expository dialog. Refreshing to watch a film that takes another tack: everything about the world is visual, is… well, cinematic.
Can’t get enough of how weird the Voice is, how weird the Bene Gesserit are.
Violence. Complicated issue here. There’s a story at the heart of most action franchise films, and a lot of genre lit too, on the interaction-design level, which is: violence, moment by moment, is fun, pretty, cool, rad, effective. Wolverine looks awesome when he does Wolverine stuff. Villeneuve directs some excellent action sequences here, Jason Momoa especially shines as space Musketeer Duncan Idaho. But it’s not cool, I mean, maybe it’s impossible to make Jason Momoa uncool, but it’s certianly not cool the way Aquaman is cool, it’s not ‘I doodled this during math class’ cool. When Gurney Halleck comes hard at Paul in training in the opening reel, we think: oh man this dude is over the top, this is a lot, there’s no light joking vibe here, and it comes clear that the reason Gurney’s hard like this, is that from Gurney’s perspective Paul really could get himself killed someday if he keeps fucking around / having emotions. People honestly die in this movie. Lots of them. The Marvel Cinematic Universe version of the Paul / Jamis fight would have ended on a big dramatic twisty jumpy move and a slow motion super rad special move death scene and then a Quip after Jamis falls, and no one learns anything. Instead Paul just… steps aside and stabs him. It’s so sudden and brutal it matters, even for the Fremen.
Now of course there’s nothing wrong with a bit of comic book action. It’s just that the funny, quippy, look-how-awesome-all-this-is action style shows up all the time in places where it doesn’t belong. (The Watchmen adaptation, say.) It’s interesting to see someone get franchise-level money to make a film with a lot of action in it, and deliver that action, in spades, but without draining away the tragic brutality of it all, the feeling of real loss-of-life. When people in this movie sacrifice their lives for Paul, I do believe they’re giving up something of value.
So, that’s my $0.02. Of course there have been many valid points made about this film’s context, especially about the lack of talent from the Middle East and North Africa in a film based on a book that borrows so heavily from the region, in its linguistic and cultural structure, and about the book itself, on similar grounds. Good perspectives to have and hear.
But I’m so grateful to have seen a Dune adaptation that took Dune seriously.
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ANNOUNCEMENTS!
—Less an announcement, but: I found this essay of Fonda Lee’s on medium to be a great summary of the modern social media meta, and major challenges writers face within it. Worth a read.
—Also: The secret of the universe! Yes, that’s right folks—there’s now Craft Sequence merchandise, made possible by the fine entities at Voidmerch. Ever wanted a Red King Consolidated skateboard? A Hidden Schools coffee mug? T-shirts? Shower curtains? They’ve got you covered. I’m in love with Jordan’s design vision for the Sequence. Give them a look. Remember, the Death of the Year approaches, and soon you’ll be looking to stash some brightly colored parcels beneath your Year Death Trees!
The Jamis through-line is maybe my favorite adaptation choice in the film. If anything, I wish they'd leaned into it harder: Make Paul very clearly an Arjuna at the outset with Arrakis/Jamis his Krishna.
The Harkonnens and their agents drive most of the external action, so Paul's journey is necessarily internal. Give Paul a *reason* for his ambivalence about fighting. Make him realize on Arrakis that he's been *attached*, however unconsciously, to his water-soft world and his insulation from war. "He will know your ways as if born to them" is alien, a destiny unlooked-for, an ontological change. The fight is a choice and an initiation, Jamis his bridegroom of blood.
Alternately, make Dune Part One Jessica's story. She's traditional protagonist material. (As a kid I pictured her as Sigourney Weaver!) Or at least stamp her influence all over the scenario, like Morgan in THE GREEN KNIGHT.
Max! I love everything about this post. We went to see Dune at our local IMAX and it didn't disappoint, that's for sure. I really got the sense that Villeneuve both loves the source material and respects it. He's taking it seriously--it's so nice to see a SF epic that takes its story seriously instead of devolving into quips or detached irony. And I appreciated how the actions scenes *weren't* frenetic and hard to follow--it put them in context of the story, as opposed to a story hung around these big set pieces.
I want more Bene Gesserit, more mentats, to see the barely-human Navigators, in part two. I need to go see part 1 again. I'm sure there's a ton I missed.