Dune it Right
Plus, an interview with filmmaker Daniel Ott
As promised in last week’s newsletter, the guest on this week’s episode of Lamniformes Radio is filmmaker Daniel Ott. Daniel and I met while at Columbia College and played together in the band Sharpless for a few years. Since then he’s moved to Los Angeles to work in the film industry. In addition to writing and making his own movies, he works for Secret Movie Club, which screens movies in a variety of theaters across LA. The two of us talked about how Daniel learned to make movies as a kid, his journey from Tulsa to Chicago to LA, working on music videos, and his upcoming short film Apartment Story. Check it out!
One thing that Dan and I did not talk about is the movie Dune. If you don’t mind, I would like to talk about the movie Dune.1 I’m going to start talking about Dune by talking about something else first. First, let’s talk about Iron Maiden.
Iron Maiden are a metal band from England. They are by any reasonable metric one of the Greatest Metal Bands Of All Time. Their Greatness is such that it requires superfluous capitalization. Their Greatness is such that even the parts of their music that would normally make them worse instead make them better. A good example of this bad-to-better transmutation is Iron Maiden’s lyrics. Iron Maiden’s lyrics are often not that good, which is why they are Great.
Appropriately for a band openly name checked in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Iron Maiden’s lyrics sound like a book report written the night before the deadline. You can’t knock Iron Maiden’s scholastic ambitions, they’ve attempted to adapt everyone from Edgar Allen Poe to Yukio Mishima. Sci-fi, epic poetry, military history, and mythology are all common topics for the band. Where they stumble, gloriously, is in their execution. Iron Maiden’s lyrics frequently read either like stoned bullet point recitations (“Alexander The Great”) or made-up-on-the-spot guesses about contents of the subject based on the title (“Brave New World” or “The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner”).
The band get away with this because singer Bruce Dickinson delivers these half baked adaptations with the verve of Wishbone’s owner had he been an aerobics instructor. Whether their audience is familiar with the books they cite or not, Iron Maiden intend to keep them entertained. So they aim big and hit big. Their music is so good that the clumsiness of their writing becomes charming, funny, an added touch of light heartedness that suites the band’s exuberance.
One of the best examples of this is from their 1983 album Piece of Mind. The album, their first with drummer Nicko McBrain who I’ve written about extensively before and will soon have occasion to write about extensively again, ends with a song called “To Tame A Land”. Written by bassist Steve Harris the song is a loose retelling of Frank Herbert’s “Dune”, which at that time was being adapted to film by David Lynch.
I should probably take a moment here to sum up “Dune” for those who are not familiar. If you’ve already read many such paragraphs with this aim in the last two months since the release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune feel free to skip over this one. “Dune” is a sci-fi novel about a desert planet in the far flung future home to the universe’s most valuable resource, a bunch of giant sand worms, and the site of a conflict between two factions of an intergalactic empire. All of this serves as the occasion for the son of one of these two families to become a long foretold space messiah. Because this book was published in 1965, the most valuable resource in the universe is also a psychedelic drug. It is a supremely dorky book with a die hard cult audience. An audience big enough to warrant a Hollywood movie adaptation and to include the members of one of the Greatest Metal Bands Of All Time.
Lynch’s Dune arrived in theaters 19 months after Iron Maiden released “To Tame A Land.” Both the band and the director narrow in on the same two things in “Dune”. First, the “chosen one” rise of Paul Atreides from young prince to Space Jesus. Second, that which will allow them to most be themselves. For Iron Maiden that means a vaguely middle eastern setting that gives them an excuse to write a bunch of minor key harmonized guitar parts, and a rise to power that fits perfectly with one of their stadium sized build ups. For David Lynch this meant building a bunch of freaky practical effects and rendering the villainous Harkonnans in an orgy of blood.
Lynch’s “Dune” attempts to squeeze the unruly sprawl of Herbert’s novel into a Stars Wars shaped box. The container doesn’t hold, and most of the movie’s redeeming qualities derive from the overflow. Lynch lavishes attention on the novel’s barely present mutated guild navigators. He turns the expository Princess Irulan interludes into a fairy tale framing device. Most delightfully he casts himself as the warden of a spice harvester, covering himself in soot in a way that recalls his time spent in Pittsburgh, PA. Even if it sands off the nuances of “Dune”’s politics and the darker implications of Paul’s messianic arc, and even if it lacks any dramatic momentum, Lynch’s Dune feels like the product of a real weirdo finding what interests him in the work of another equally real weirdo. This communion isn’t enough to save Lynch’s Dune from being a boring slog, but viewed without the burden of being the only cinematic Dune on the market it makes for a charming sci-fi oddity.
“To Tame A Land” is similarly slight, especially when stacked up against other Iron Maiden show stoppers from the same decade. The band hardly play it live, in part I’d imagine because of the legal issues Dickinson described in the live video I embedded above2, but like the best parts of Lynch’s Dune it feels like the overeager attempt to cram the appeal of the book into a shape that it simply isn’t able to fit.
All of this is to say that if David Lynch’s Dune is a knowingly ridiculous Iron Maiden deep cut, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is an album length doom metal song. It is downtuned, it doesn’t have drums for the first 10 minutes or vocals for the first 20, it sounds like it was recorded in an aircraft hanger made of wood. Maybe it’s got a violin over it.3
Lynch’s Dune is Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Villeneuve’s Dune is Until The Light Takes Us. Villeneuve’s Dune is serious. It is vast. It is slow. Where there was once light there is now shadow. Where once levity, gravitas.
This isn’t a surprise given Villeneuve’s previous work, and if anything its his dedication to grim grey scaled sci-fi seriousness that made him an appealing pick for Warner Brothers. Here’s a guy that loves supersized critters, massive oblong spacecrafts, and managed to direct a Blade Runner sequel that people seem mostly chill about. If there was anyone that was going to wipe the silliness stain off of Dune and repackage it as a Big Deal modern science fiction blockbuster, it was this guy.
As far as their financial interests are concerned Warner Brothers picked right. Dune is a certified hit, a critical success, and the subject of memes (memes, Jerry!). Maybe that isn’t surprising to you. After all it’s a big loud movie with big loud movie stars. It’s got Aquaman AND Thanos in it. Oscar Isaac’s here to look like everyone’s safe for work and otherwise concept of “daddy”. That kid with cheekbones that make me understand on a visceral level why a girl I dated rolled her eyes at the mere mention of Scarlet Johansson plays the main character. Zendaya is Chani. It’s as if Villeneuve saw the premise “planet full of people who are very hot” and it took it the wrong kind of literally.
But still, it’s not like this assemblage of A-list talent is being put to work towards an algorithmically generated crowd pleaser. Instead they’re here to adapt a book in which the characters have to drink the moisture from their own excrement to survive. Even if this particularly gross detail of Herbert’s novel didn’t make it into Dune, the movie relentlessly and thoroughly yokes itself to the dense grandeur of its source. Over and over again as Josh Brolin or Rebecca Ferguson read out lines taken directly from Herbert’s unbearably stiff dialogue with complete dedicated seriousness I found myself thinking “wow, they really made Dune into a movie.” Whereas while watching Lynch’s Dune I repeatedly thought “wow, they really tried to make a Dune movie.”
Not to suggest that Villeneuve’s movie is effortless. Quite the contrary, it is a Dune movie because it is effort-full. It clearly took a LOT of work, and it isn’t going to make you forget it. Villeneuve is going to slow pan over every single one of his blobby spaceships while they take off and while they land. You’re going to see all of the worms coming miles away because you’re going to see every single one of those miles on screen. Dune barely scratches the surface of it’s novel’s bottomless pit of lore (check out this great post by Max Read if you want a detailed list of the stuff Villeneuve alludes to/elides over) but it doesn’t need to. Those endless landscapes and the imposing scale of the movie’s set design simulate slogging through pages upon pages of details about the inner workings of CHOAM. Villeneuve took the core sensation of reading a barely-qualifies-as-literature, deeply uncool science fiction epic and translated it into a movie that is about as close to 2021’s ideal of cool as you can get.
That is an achievement worth praising, but it doesn’t come without a cost. Villeneuve’s Dune is many things that Lynch’s Dune is not, almost certainly by design. Dune 2021 is all the way committed to being a serious movie, and its commitment to being one thing at all makes it a better film than Lynch’s tonally conflicted effort. The cost of this seriousness is draining the movie of color. The cost is hiring Hans Zimmer, who used the job as an excuse to plaster every portentous moment with central casting ululation and lower every second scale degree like he’s producing for Busta Rhymes in ‘09.
I say this as someone who thinks Dune looks god damn incredible and as someone who will use the Phrygian mode every chance he gets. I loved that the movie treats Paul Atreides’ rise to power with moral ambivalence. I loved that the film’s most sublimely religious moment is dedicated to the appearance of a brain-bendingly huge sand worm. I love that big spaceship shaped like a pre-rolled joint. I just wish someone behind the camera had smoked it before filming.
This is the ultimate paradox of Villeneuve’s Dune. Somehow a nearly three hour long movie that “you gotta see in IMAX, bro” was not druggy enough. The hallucinatory visions of Paul’s violent future were appropriately ominous but hardly felt like hallucinations at all. If I were less inclined to cut this movie some slack I’d say that they felt more like a trailer for the movie’s as of yet un-filmed second half. Instead I’ll settle for saying that they felt like the studio’s self-consciousness about not appearing too weird bleeding into the film.
“Dune” should be weird, and I don’t accept that we have to choose between a Dune that’s serious and cool and a Dune that’s off-putting and weird. Villeneuve was the right guy for the job of making Dune “correctly” but that doesn’t mean that he’s able to cross-pollinate those two contrasting versions of this story. Maybe the perfect director for that job hasn’t been born yet. Maybe conceiving of that director would take thousands of years of careful planning and social engineering. Only time will tell.
While I await this cinematic Kwisatz Haderach I’ll happily enjoy the much shorter wait for Dune Part Two. Villeneuve will have many chances to get real weird with that half of the novel. I hope he takes those chances.
Things I am not going to talk about in this letter while talking about Dune: The documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune or any of the sequels to the novel “Dune.” I have not watched the former or read any of the latter. If you believe that this disqualifies me from having a fully fleshed opinion about the two movies I’m going to talk about in this essay, then you are free to email me with an offer of compensation for catching up on this material in anything other than my own time.
Did you think you could get through this newsletter without listening to any Iron Maiden? Better luck next time, buster!