Dune has always tended to be the odd film out in David Lynch’s filmography — something taken as the price he paid to be able to make Blue Velvet (1986), though how anything this strange and Lynchian could be called anything but a personal film beats me. The film starts with a scene — that might almost be an extension of The Elephant Man’s ending — of Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen) floating in space and explaining the most basic of basics of the set-up. It’s even done in a charmingly offhand manner, especially when she vanishes, only to come back with, “I forgot to tell you,” and adding to the foreword. This is not your normal movie.
Very quickly we’re plunged into the strange worlds — there are more than one — of Dune with an emissary of “the Guild” paying a secret visit (“I did not say this. I am not here”) on the Emperor (Jose Ferrer) of the known universe. This would not in itself be startling — except that the emissary (a grotesque being like the Eraserhead variant on 2001‘s Star Child) arrives floating in some fantastic, glassed-in container that looks like a steampunk train, and is tended by weird leather-clad minions who, among other things, mop up some never explained secretion like a slug’s trail. Again, this is not your normal movie — except maybe your normal David Lynch movie. And that means that the film expects — demands — you accept its strangeness without question. Not necessarily without revulsion — as in almost everything involving the evil Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan) — but without question. This is either the most twisted space opera of all time, or an unsung visionary masterpiece. Maybe both.
The Thursday Horror Picture Show will screen Dune Thursday, Sept. 10 at 8 p.m. in Theater Six at The Carolina Asheville and will be hosted by Xpress movie critics Ken Hanke and Justin Souther.
I am pro-Dune.
We’re up to two!
Possibly in all of WNC!
Make it 3 Human beings. I consider appreciating this movie a real life Gom Jabbar test.
Ill be there. It’s definitely worthy of a cinema viewing. Ive tried to watch it twice on dvd but I just couldnt “get it”. I guess I couldn’t swallow the Spice. Here’s hoping the big screen helps.
If you can’t just accept the Spice, you probably will like it no better large.
I took a day of vacation to see the matinee debut of Dune in 1984. It has always been one of my favorite movies of all time. The Spice is Life!
Call it three now. I have never seen a better rendition of a novel’s character than Baron Harkonnen. He was truly the epitome of “revolting”.
He isn’t very nice, is he?
Anybody see the fan re-cut version before it got removed from Vimeo?
http://digg.com/video/dune-david-lynch-complete-saga-fan-recut
No.
It was nice to see this movie held up to my teenish self’s assessment (fresh from reading the book for the first time) of it as a vastly underrated movie. Despite the flaws and mostly harmless deviations from cannon, this movie really captures all the essential elements of what the book was about at its core. I think it does qualify as Gothic Space Opera, perhaps the only of its kind. Thanks for allowing me to see this on the big screen for the first time in over 30 years. As a side note, out of the many familiar faces from the ensemble cast, did any else recognize the appearance of the dog from Men in Black?
sic canon. The movies aim was without fault.
Glad you had a good time. I was kind of sorry no one wanted to argue about it afterwards, so I could watch their faces when I said I like it better than Star Wars by a long way (and I do). Gotta admit all I noticed were some pugs, not a specific one.
Pretty sure that is the one pug in multiple nuanced roles, a la Peter Sellers in Dr. Stranglove. Here is hoping my drollness translates better after a night’s sleep and that I am in turn not missing yours. I am surprised no one wanted to argue with you afterwards, I heard one person in particular lowly booing at the end of the movie. If not for the late hour, I would have stuck around in hopes of a heated discussion or two defending the film. I have this theory that, if inflected properly, Philistine is a death word.
I’d like to try that theory out…
Fortunately, the volume was high enough that I could rarely hear people who’d come to ridicule the film with their laughter. (There is a small group of regular attendees who think Ken’s Thursday programming is rooted in MST3K logic. They need to have their heads examined.) I was ready for someone to walk by on on his/her way out saying, “That was awful” and me to reply, “Nope. Try again.” Didn’t happen.
I was really expecting abuse after Bliss and was surprised when it wasn’t forthcoming.
saw it when it came out; walked out after an hour. visually appealing and then all at once repulsive, revolting. but the dreamlike edge of the world light quality stayed with me. great ambience, horrible story etc
I just fell asleep half-way through. I don’t know which is worse, a movie bad enough to upset me or one bad enough that I cannot stay awake to the end.
I would be interested to hear anyone’s take on the author’s use of the Islamic concept of Jihad, or holy war, which Frank Herbert utilized in the book series decades before 9/11 or even the Soviet Afghan conflict as if it were an otherworldly phenomenon. I cannot recall if the concept was carried over in the film. It happened late in the first book, so if it was in the film, I was probably already asleep.
jihad is certainly relevant for discussion in the world we now are living in; but no one wants to really discuss it since no one really says what it really is and what causes it and what will dispel it. jihad to the west is like a dream about something unpleasant that makes you feel bad when you are sleeping…and then you wake up and forget about it and do things to blot out such a thing as being real, though you know it is very real; which is a way of saying that the west is in denial and compromised to the point of refusing to actually deal with the situation because it is unpleasant and because the reality of it is borne by at once the denial of it and the moral vacuum western culture has become politically: The US political culture via one half of its political body openly actively and agressively promotes–and subsidises, — infanticide and homosexuality (with the whole wide world and its children watching) : planned parenthood and gay marriage; the US press having become mostly a promoter of moral oblivion and vacuum; rather than a press that actually does the autopsies and investigations neccessary to find out why who and what and where and wherefrom and to what end so as to sound an alarm that will incite and guide sensible thought and action defensive of the weak the ignorant the poor and the meek. which gives us a world where western values and lifestyle are extolled as imperative even as infanticide is said to be a choice and homosexuality (dressed up as ma and pa and baby) is presented and promoted as moral vanguard. and yet most of america along with the world doesn’t agree with or want this. so who does and why? is the real question deserving of an honest answer which the press and most elements of the media are not going to give. once again, why? the political and public culture and a great deal of the arts have been suborned by delusion or greed or something to create a moral vacuum that cannot but call for and be displaced by what isdisplacing it: human beings who have not ordered their lives according to moral delusions. thus, millions fleeing and headed to europe and US. what to do? what should have been done and not left undone. the west publicly and obviously–everyday– cedes the moral high ground of life and even everyday life. the west–once actually known by and to itsself as christendom– has near completely ignored the moral dimension of this clash with islam which is attacking the west and israel at any and all levels as itsself, as islam being of G-d against what is godless. this is the pr of radical islam which has never been publicly and politically acknowledged so as to be refuted. there are no moral arguments made against the murder, against the theft, against the lie. hardly surprising but so discouraging, since there is not allowed any moral high ground from which to make them. It is wonderfully simple to refute the murderers: “if mohammed is, as is said, the seal of the prophets– then why are you murdering little jewish children and jewish mothers and fathers in the name of islam and mohammed? when the very prophets you say mohammed is the agreeable seal of, the same prophets every one prophesied by G-d that the land of israel is of G-d for the people israel and moreover that G-d wold return israel to israel? how is it that you fight the hand of G-d in the name of G-d? is it not rather that you lie and steal and murder for a lie so that you might lie and steal and murder?” you asked for a take on jihad. probably too much. hank may exile me. how about the film el cid? thats the latest film on islam and christendom and thus jihad that I can think of as relevant. and it is relevant.
Geez, I wasn’t looking for extensive political commentary, just wondering if anyone else found it interesting that Frank Herbert had transposed an earthly phenomenon, little heard of in 1965, into a work of science fiction?
Also, Herbert’s jihad in “Dune” (the novel; I am unsure if it was in the movie) had an entire planet’s indigenous population spreading out amongst the known galaxy to spread their beliefs. There is no such pan-Islamic movement in the world today, only a fanatical minority trying to achieve by terror what they cannot by other means. Herbert’s jihad is a fictional version of what Islamic jihad is SUPPOSED to be: a movement which encompasses ALL of the adherents of a faith. Thank goodness that is NOT what we really have going on now. The millions of Muslims entering Europe are victims of this terror seeking relief and a better life, not an invading force seeking to impose Islam on the West.
Why can’t you spell the word “God”. Afraid of Jihadist retribution?
because the high water is not the high ground. and no. not afraid of the head-choppers. fear of G-d puts them in true perspective: kids that have been told lies and given cash and sex (by liars thieves and murderers) to do what they are doing: lies, murder and theft. but you might look into Herbert’s interest in T.E.Lawrence… as a point from which to proceed and digress.
Yes, well…
My apologies, Ken, for bringing geopolitics into this thread. I really just wondered if the religious aspects of the novel made it into the movie. The discussions about what is going on the world today clearly belong somewhere else. Next time I will know better.
Mr. x is pleased to be loquacious.
However, to answer your actual question, the word “jihad” appears once in the film just prior to the climactic battle. Its meaning is not addressed in any depth.
the odd twilight-in-iceland ambience carries over into blue velvet–a movie that probably would have disappeared as deeply as dune but for roy orbison and dennis hopper.
Yes, well…
will you ever show andrei rublev?
If we did, it would be an AFS screening, not a THPS one. In any case, I won’t say no, but I will say I’m not leaning toward it. Is this question purely academic or do you come to these screenings?
after posting the question, I searched rublev on your site search bar and it looks like you’ve shown it in the past. I’ve seen it only once, about a dozen years ago, just by chance. a one of a kind movie, for me anyway; the film equivalent of how very fine music creates of itself(motion-movement, shape, space)–the creation itself creates–if you follow me. no, I’ve never been to the screenings.
No, it wasn’t us who showed it. It was Classic Cinema from Around the World.
“…as the world turns, so are the days of our lives; lived on the edge of night, even as we seek a guiding light.” loquacious or concise? … or just ham and corn?
There’s something quite…wrong with you.
says hank: Ken Hanke
20 hours ago
There’s something quite…wrong with you.
***
ok, hank. its your circus. run it your way.
but it reminds me of a story:
There was nobody in the room.
It was octagonal, draped in black velvet from floor to ceiling, with a high remote black ceiling that may have been of velvet too. In the middle of a coal black lustreless rug stood an octagonal white table, just large enough for two pairs of elbows and in the middle of it a milk white globe on a black stand. The light came from this. How, I couldn’t see. On either side of the table there was a white octagonal stool which was a smaller edition of the table. Over against one wall there was one more such stool. There were no windows. There was nothing else in the room, nothing at all. On the walls there was not even a light fixture. If there were other doors, I didn’t see them. I looked back at the one by which I had come in. I couldn’t see that either.
I stood there for perhaps fifteen seconds with the faint obscure feeling of being watched. There was probably a peephole somewhere, but I couldn’t spot it. I gave up trying. I listened to my breath. The room was so still that I could hear it going through my nose, softly, like little curtains rustling.
Then an invisible door on the far side of the room slid open and a man stepped through and the door closed behind him. The man walked straight to the table with his head down and sat on one of the octagonal stools and made a sweeping motion with one of the most beautiful hands I have ever seen.
“Please be seated. Opposite me. Do not smoke and do not fidget. Try to relax, completely. Now how may I serve you?”
I sat down, got a cigarette into my mouth and rolled it along my lips without lighting it. I looked him over. He was thin, tall and straight as a steel rod. He had the palest finest white hair I ever saw. It could have been strained through silk gauze. His skin was as fresh as a rose petal. He might have been thirty-five or sixty-five. He was ageless. His hair was brushed straight back from as good a profile as Barrymore ever had. His eyebrows were coal black, like the walls and ceiling and floor. His eyes were deep, far too deep. They were the depthless drugged eyes of the somnambulist. They were like a well I read about once. It was nine hundred years old, in an old castle. You could drop a stone into it and wait. You could listen and wait and then you would give up waiting and laugh and then just as you were ready to turn away a faint, minute splash would come back up to you from the bottom of that well, so tiny, so remote that you could hardly believe a well like that possible.
His eyes were deep like that. And they were also eyes without expression, without soul, eyes that could watch lions tear a man to pieces and never change, that could watch a man impaled and screaming in the hot sun with his eyelids cut off.
He wore a double-breasted black business suit that had been cut by an artist. He stared vaguely at my fingers.
“Please do not fidget,” he said. “It breaks the waves, disturbs my concentration.”
“It makes the ice melt, the butter run and the cat squawk,” I said.
He smiled the faintest smile in the world. “You didn’t come here to be impertinent, I’m sure.”
“You seem to forget why I did come. By the way, I gave that hundred dollar bill back to your secretary. I came, as you may recall, about some cigarettes. Russian cigarettes filled with marihuana. With your card rolled in the hollow mouthpiece.
“You wish to find out why that happened?”
“Yeah. I ought to be paying you the hundred dollars.”
“That will not be necessary. The answer is simple. There are things I do not know. This is one of them.”
For a moment I almost believed him. His face was as smooth as an angel’s wing.
“Then why send me a hundred dollars-and a tough Indian that stinks-and a car? By the way, does the Indian have to stink? If he’s working for you, couldn’t you sort of get him to take a bath?”
“He is a natural medium. They are rare-like diamonds, and like diamonds, are sometimes found in dirty places. I understand you are a private detective?”
“Yes.”
“I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission.”
“I get it,” I said. “I’m stupid. It sank in after a while.”
In the first place, my name is not “hank.” Neither, I suppose, is your name “mickey x.” (I always find it amusing when people feel the need for anonymity to discuss movies, though that doesn’t actually be your aim.) And, though I am the moderator of this part of the Xpress site, it is not my circus.
I’ve no idea what the point of “your” story was (I’m assuming it’s not really yours, since the shift key and some notion of spacing was employed), but I will say it was preferable to the previous paranoid right-wing homophobic ramblings.
homo-phobic: fear of man. not accurate, ken. not accurate at all. all I’ve said is relevant. you know its relevant. that s why you’ve responded as you have. homophobic? what’s that supposed to do for me? or to me? make me ashamed? or something? as for the story. you really should know the story. you probably already know the story. you’ve just forgotten it, maybe. but its from an author so sublimely central to modern film and story and literature–even to culture thereof–that I just didn’t feel the need to paste his name down. thought you’d get it. maybe you did, but your concerns are elsewhere. anonymity? its a great thing. the whole idea of a modern state rests upon same: the secret ballot. but if your idea of a modern state is crushing tyranny and endless soul and joy destroying inquisition, then anonymity is not what you care for. take a look at a book “I.B.M. and the Third Reich” by a writer by name of Black. the hollerith card–or punch card–was a great enemy of anonymity (was designed to destroy it) that enabled the national socialists (a.k.a.Nazis) to lay hands on group x after group x with fateful efficiency. is the technology evil? no, ken; not the technology but the animus behind the application of the technology.
You are a tiresome little creature.
bye, hanke. what a difference a letter makes.
https://youtu.be/mpIftdXefsE
41
It took over three months to find Velma. They wouldn’t believe Grayle didn’t know where she was and hadn’t helped her get away. So every cop and newshawk in the country looked in all the places where money might be hidng her. And money wasn’t hiding her at all. Although the way she hid was pretty obvious once it was found out.
One night a Baltimore detective with a camera eye as rare as a pink zebra wandered into a night club and listened to the band and looked at a handsome black-haired, black browed torcher who could sing as if she meant it. Something in her face struck a chord and the chord went on vibrating.
He went back to Headquarters and got out the Wanted file and started through the pile of readers. When he came to the one he wanted he looked at it a long time. Then he straightened his straw hat on his head and went back to the night club and got hold of the manager. They went back to the dressing rooms behind the shell and the manager knocked on one of the doors. It wasn’t locked. The dick pushed the manager aside and went in and locked it.
He must have smelled marihuana because she was smoking it, but he didn’t pay any attention then. She was sitting in front of a triple mirror, studying the roots of her hair and eyebrows. They were her own eyebrows. The dick stepped across the room smiling and handed her the reader.
She must have looked at the face on the reader almost as long as the dick had down at Headquarters. There was a lot to think about while she was looking at it. The dick sat down and crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. He had a good eye, but he had over-specialized. He didn’t know enough about women.
Finally she laughed a little and said: “You’re a smart lad, copper. I thought I had a voice that would be remembered. A friend recognized me by it once, just hearing it on the radio. But I’ve been singing with this band for a month-twice a week on a network-and nobody gave it a thought.”
“I never heard the voice,” the dick said and went on smiling.
She said: “I suppose we can’t make a deal on this. You know, there’s a lot in it, if it’s handled right.”
“Not with me,” the dick said. “Sorry.”
“Let’s go then,” she said and stood up and grabbed up her bag and got her coat from a hanger. She went over to him holding the coat out so he could help her into it. He stood up and held it for her like a gentleman.
She turned and slipped a gun out of her bag and shot him three times through the coat he was holding.
She had two bullets left in the gun when they crashed the door. They got halfway across the room before she used them. She used them both, but the second shot must have been pure reflex. They caught her before she hit the floor, but her head was already hanging by a rag.
“The dick lived until the next day,” Randall said, telling me about it. “He talked when he could. That’s how we have the dope. I can’t understand him being so careless, unless he really was thinking of letting her talk him into a deal of some kind. That would clutter up his mind. But I don’t like to think that, of course.”
I said I supposed that was so.
“Shot herself clean through the heart-twice,” Randall said. “And I’ve heard experts on the stand say that’s impossible, knowing all the time myself that it was. And you know something else?”
“What?”
“She was stupid to shoot that dick. We’d never have convicted her, not with her looks and money and the persecution story these high-priced guys would build up. Poor little girl from a dive climbs to be wife of rich man and the vultures that used to know her won’t let her alone. That sort of thing. Hell, Rennenkamp would have half a dozen crummy old burlesque dames in court to sob that they’d gone blackmailed her for years, and in a way that you pin anything on them but the jury would go for it. She did a smart thing to run off on her own and leave Grayle out of it, but it would have been smarter to have come home when she was caught.”
“Oh you believe now that she left Grayle out of it,” I said.
He nodded. I said: “Do you think she had any particular reason for that?”
He stared at me. “I’ll go for it, whatever it is.”
“She was a killer,” I said. “But so was Malloy. And he was a long way from being all rat. Maybe that Baltimore dick wasn’t so pure as the record shows. Maybe she saw a chance-not to get away-she was tired of dodging by that time-but to give a break to the only man who had ever really given her one.”
Randall stared at me with his mouth open and his eyes unconvinced.
“Hell, she didn’t have to shoot a cop to do that,” he said.
“I’m not saying she was a saint or even a halfway nice girl. Not ever. She wouldn’t kill herself until she was cornered. But what she did and the way she did it, kept her from coming back here for trial. Think that over. And who would that trial hurt most? Who would be least able to bear it? And win, lose or draw, who would pay the biggest price for the show? An old man who had loved not wisely, but too well.”
Randall said sharply: “That’s just sentimental.”
“Sure. It sounded like that when I said it. Probably all a mistake anyway. So long. Did my pink bug ever get back up here?”
He didn’t know what I was talking about.
I rode down to the street floor and went out on the steps of the City Hall. It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.
I first saw this film when I was less than ten years old. I didn’t understand it at the time – owing to my age. But the imagery and score struck a chord with me that left me with an immense sense of awe for being so young. I’ve watched the film at least ten times already and read the book three or four times) and I’m still impressed by some of its scenes. While its shortcomings are more apparent to me now, I still think its criticisms are far from deserving. Even the most reasonable complaint – that it’s not true to the source material, misses the point.
Criticizing a film for not being like the book is not only missing the point, it represents a shaky understanding of film.