Taking another kick at the Dune can
The cinema-rumour websites are hissing with whispers about the upcoming adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune from Canadian director Denis Villeneuve. Folks who still swear by science-fiction movies live in a state of constant unease about tent-pole projects like this. After an adaptation of cherished object X by messianic genius Y is announced, there are still a hundred things that can go awry with the script or the finances or the cast, and one of those hundred things, or some interaction amongst them, usually does. But the buzz is that everything is, so far, in order for Villeneuve to begin shooting early next year.
Dune (published in 1965) is somewhat esoteric and bizarre, and as source material for video it has had a difficult history, one that is itself now the subject of legend. One of the most celebrated documentaries of 2013 was Jodorowsky’s Dune, the chronicle of a failed Seventies attempt to shoot the book with an art-cinema giant at the helm.
The book itself is almost defiantly unfilmable. Dune flings technicalities and background references at the reader to an almost sadistic degree without ever lifting one finger to engage in conscious literary exposition. This was, indeed, part of the reason it revolutionized science fiction. The book is driven by gimmicks, like any good SF story, but the reader is expected to not only solve narrative puzzles (what the heck is a “Mentat”?) but to bring some knowledge of history and science to the game.
This is why nerds adore Dune, and it is why the pleasure of the sequels is subject, notoriously so, to fast-diminishing returns. Reading the fourth Dune book is like doing your 5,472nd Sudoku.
Despite having been written as if Herbert specifically intended to make adaptation impossible, Dune has reached the screen twice: as a 1984 feature directed by David Lynch (who is what Alejandro Jodorowsky would be if Alejandro Jodorowsky were a grownup Eagle Scout from Montana) and as a 2000 TV miniseries for the Sci-Fi Channel. All of this is to say that Dune carries a lot of baggage, and the stakes for Villeneuve, whose Blade Runner sequel is thought to have lost a lot of money, seem positively alarming. A directorial career is a tightrope: everyone is one blunder away from plummeting into an abyss, even though particular blunders may be survivable.
The afterlife of the various Dune adaptations has, itself, been an interesting little drama to follow over the years. When I was a young man in another century, it seemed to be widely agreed that David Lynch’s Dune was a disaster. There is arguably as much of David Lynch in the movie, or more of him, than there is of Frank Herbert. The television mini was meant to be, and was sold to the SF-reading public as Dune done right — done in the spirit of a true believer, with proper respect for the sacred narrative artifact.
What seems to have happened is that an abundance of Y2K computerized special effects and a bland cast recruited at cable-TV prices made some people turn away from Dune Done Right — which was pretty good, in a cable-y sort of way — and regard Lynch’s Dune with new admiration. Science fiction made before the rise of computer graphics has acquired its own dead-media charm: old-time matte movie backgrounds, physically painted effects, and puppets have acquired the innate attractiveness of the observably handmade. Dune fans further removed from the book’s original cult impact may have been able to see Lynch as less of an obtrusive reinventor and as more of a visionary collaborator.
It didn’t hurt that Lynch’s artistic reputation took off after Dune and has never really stopped ascending. The popularity of Jodorowsky’s Dune helped, too, emphasizing that a film version of the book would necessarily have to represent some real person’s vision of the source matter. And why not David Lynch’s? He may be a weirdo, but Frank Herbert, a New Age-y eco-freak polymath from the Pacific Northwest, was pretty weird, too. Can you really film a book about Bedouins fighting Hapsburgs over worm poop without it getting weird?
That, I suppose, is one question facing Villeneuve. I love Dune, and while I am not a Villeneuve fan, I completely understand why he is seen as a good candidate for another Dune Done Right. Whether that is a reasonable expectation at all — well, that’s a separate issue. But every Dune guy (of any gender) in the universe must have done a self-satisfied little fist pump when Villeneuve, in a magazine interview about his adaptation, promised to deliver “Star Wars for adults.” That is pretty much how we have felt about the book all along.