Pressed inside an old book of mine is a gray sheet of paper, folded in uneven quarters, titled “Dune Terminology.” On it, there are thirty-seven words and phrases, including a baffling array of place names (Giedi Prime, pronounced “Gee-dee”), machinery (ornithopter, a “small aircraft capable of sustained wing-beat flight in the manner of birds”), and rituals (kanly, a “formal feud or vendetta under the rules of the Great Convention”). Moviegoers with tickets to David Lynch’s “Dune,” which premièred December 14, 1984—I saw it on opening weekend at a mall, in suburban Buffalo—would have picked up the glossary from a stack as they entered the theatre, though the guide was unreadable in the dark, and it contained more than a few spoilers. To the novice, it must have looked like homework. It must have looked like no fun at all.
I didn’t need the cheat sheet—at fourteen, I was conversant with the “Dune”-iverse, having already read Frank Herbert’s best-selling science-fiction novel. By 1984, the book had sold over ten million copies and spawned four sequels. Focussing on the fifteen-year-old hero Paul Atreides, the story unfolds twenty thousand years in the future, on the desert planet of Arrakis, home to sandworms as big as spaceships, a group of guerrilla survivalists called the Fremen, and the coveted spice known as melange, which allows its users to “fold space”—a necessity for interstellar travel—and which colors the entirety of their eyes blue. “Dune” mesmerized me. I scribbled the Fremen rallying cry, “Ya hya chouhada,” in the margins of my notebooks and studied the vibrant cover painting, with its dozens of tiny people fleeing a rampant sandworm, its maw lit up like a jet engine. The movie couldn’t arrive fast enough.
Lynch’s adaptation, alas, was faithful yet disappointing. The corridors of power looked hypnotically ornate, but the outdoor scenes and battle sequences felt flattened and rushed. Sting—then the superstar frontman of the Police, riding high on “Synchronicity” and prominently featured in the film’s marketing—sneered for lack of lines. Linda Hunt stole one scene and then died. Max von Sydow had to say, “Remember to breathe in through your mouth and out through this nose tube.” Kyle MacLachlan, making his screen début as Paul Atreides, was definitely not fifteen. I folded up the sheet of “Dune Terminology,” a dispiriting souvenir, and exited into the cold night.
Herbert’s “Dune” was originally serialized in the science-fiction magazine Analog, and first produced in book form in 1965 by Chilton, a publisher better known for automotive manuals. The novel eventually entered the late-sixties Zeitgeist for its ecological, anti-imperialist overtones; the trippy properties of melange made it a drug story, too. In the preface of my chunky paperback edition, Herbert recalls his grand ambitions. “It was to be a story exploring the myth of the Messiah,” he writes, one that would “penetrate the interlocked workings of politics and economics.” He imagined an eco-fiction, in which “potable water was to be an analog for oil and water itself, a substance whose supply diminishes each day.” (The author was wary of charismatic leaders, with a particular disdain for John F. Kennedy and the cult of Camelot; in the fifties, Herbert had worked as a speechwriter for various Republican candidates.)
“Dune” is the epitome of world-building, packed with invented history, complex new-old religions (the Zensunni faith seems to meld Islam with Buddhism), and names and phrases informed by a slew of languages, most notably Arabic. The setting is so unforgiving that you can taste it; Fremen wear “stillsuits,” which recycle body waste into drinkable water. But what really hooked me—and countless teen-age boys before and since—from the very first chapter was Paul Atreides, the book’s messiah-in-waiting, whose family relocates to Arrakis from their lush home world of Caladan under imperial orders. Trained in combat by his father’s henchmen and in mental witchery by his mother, Lady Jessica, Paul masters his harsh surroundings and survives attempts on his life. His role as the chosen one is thrillingly realized, and by the book’s end he’s the most powerful figure in the universe. As an adolescent power fantasy, it doesn’t get much better than “Dune.”
Denis Villeneuve’s new, propulsive adaptation, fortunately, doesn’t need a glossary. The French-Canadian director has already revamped recent science-fiction cinema, interpreting worlds that originated with two of the genre’s best authors, in “Arrival” (based on a cerebral Ted Chiang story) and “Blade Runner 2049” (a sequel to Ridley Scott’s indelible imagining of Philip K. Dick). Those films are brooding and immaculately lit, with sparse plots. The storytelling in “Dune” is much denser but lucid at every turn; the dazzling, deadly sandscape is a character in itself. The omnipresent heat and arid, embattled vistas are at once prophecies of climate change and, inevitably, evocations of “Star Wars,” another series in which a young hero on a desert planet is tapped by a quasi-mystical sect to fulfill his revolutionary destiny. When Paul and his mother escape into the stillness of the desert, you half expect them to encounter Jawas, not Fremen. (David Lynch turned down the chance to direct “Return of the Jedi” and, in making his “Dune,” was determined not to shoot anything that would resemble the George Lucas rendition of outer space.)
Unlike Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky—the Chilean-French filmmaker who planned and failed to make a hallucinogenic twelve-hour version of “Dune” in the seventies—Villeneuve was a “Dune” fan from childhood, having come to the book at age thirteen. His connection to the material shows. The melancholy atmospheres of the alien-contact tale “Arrival” and the dystopian “Blade Runner” sequel are transmuted into a sort of interstellar emo, so that the dreams, fears, and ambitions of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) become as central to the film as the special effects and political skulduggery. Chalamet is twenty-five—the same age that Kyle MacLachlan was when Lynch’s “Dune” came out—but slighter, more vulnerable, closer to the “stringy whipcord of a youth” that Herbert describes.
Chalamet and Villeneuve bring verve and terror to the confrontation that opens the novel: a primal scene of teen-age powerlessness in the face of what appears to be arbitrary adult wickedness. The Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit, a notoriously strong, mostly female religious sect, commands Paul to place his hand in a strange box. When he asks what is inside the box, she replies, “Pain.” He complies with her command, while she holds a gom jabbar—a needle tipped with “meta-cyanide”—by his neck, ready to fatally stab him if he withdraws his hand. He’s in agony, imagining the flesh burning off his fingers. In the book, Paul resists the urge to withdraw by contemplating a Bene Gesserit saying that his mother taught him: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer.” (In Villeneuve’s staging, it’s Lady Jessica, played by Rebecca Ferguson, waiting anxiously outside the locked room, who murmurs the incantation.) When you’re a teen-ager, it can seem like authority figures are forcing you to do pointless, excruciating things all the time. The gom jabbar scene pushes this dynamic to an Expressionist extreme, turning up the volume all the way on both the indignity and the eventual victory.
A sad irony of Herbert’s life is that, for all his attunement to adolescent yearnings and worries, he was often a terrible father to his two sons. In “Dreamer of Dune,” a mostly proud but occasionally bitter 2003 biography, by Herbert’s elder son, Brian, the novelist is shown to have little understanding of children, which Brian attributes to his father’s own difficult childhood—as the son of two alcoholics, Herbert had to be self-reliant from an early age. At times, Herbert locked Brian and his brother Bruce out of the house so that their noise wouldn’t distract him from his writing. A stickler for language, he flew into a rage when they used the word “try,” just as House Atreides’s “warmaster,” Gurney Halleck, scoffs when Paul says that he’s not in “the mood” for sparring. In another colossal failure of parenting, Herbert would use a U.S. Navy lie detector on his sons “if anything came up, such as an item missing from his desk or questions about where I had been after school,” Brian writes.
Brian sees this practice reflected in the gom jabbar scene. It’s as if Herbert, the parent, couldn’t recognize the anguish he caused his sons—but Herbert’s fiction could, sublimating and allegorizing it. Paul’s triumphant emergence—the hand unscathed, his life spared—is a rebuke to the father-interrogator. Paul’s ability to face down the gom jabbar is a rite of passage into the world of adults, which can be cruel and mysterious even if you’re not the Kwisatz Haderach.
Villeneuve’s version renders this world as emotionally warmer than in past iterations. A moving early scene between Paul and his father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), has a just-be-yourself vibe that is a far cry from the businesslike tête-à-tête of the novel. The duke’s right-hand men—Halleck (Josh Brolin), the swordmaster Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), and the security head Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson)—all serve as surrogate fathers to Paul. But the most important adult in Paul’s life is his mother, Lady Jessica. In Lynch’s version, she was a snooty cipher; in the new film, Ferguson makes her a true maternal presence and literal copilot—a concerned parent helping her teen-age son navigate his problems, albeit ones involving the fate of the universe. (Their interactions are at once fantastical and real, as when Paul throws a tantrum of the timeless I-didn’t-ask-to-be-born genre over the pressure he feels from the Bene Gesserit; later, before a big duel, Jessica blurts out that her son has never killed someone before.) Villeneuve and all of his players intuitively understand why “Dune” has remained so resonant for generations—they deliver a maximal teen-age power trip, made more believable by all-too-human details.
No comments:
Post a Comment