Movie Review: Jodorowsky's Dune

Jodorowsky's Dune is a documentary on a failed attempt to bring Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune to the silver screen in the 1970's.  It's a brilliant film, told in storyboards and extensive interviews.  Even if you've only seen David Lynch's effort (or worse, the SyFy Channel miniseries) and not read the book(s), you really have to watch this movie.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean filmmaker and writer, known best for his bizarre cult films El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre.  He's also hysterical to watch in this documentary: his enthusiasm for a project decades dead jumps out of the screen, as does his anger and dismay at what happened to it.  In amusing detail he described the hoops he had to jump through to cast Orson Welles as the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and legendary artist Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe, Shaddam IV, for example, as well as special effects wizard Dan O'Bannon and the awesomely talented artist Jean Giraud (known as Mœbius).

If Jodorowsky was brilliant, what stole the show were Mœbius's storyboards.  Meticulously sketched, the Dune storyboard book is thicker than three Manhattan phone books stapled together.  What Jodorowsky had in mind for the visuals was incredible: it would have revolutionized cinema science fiction at least a year before Star Wars came out.  Legendary artist H.R. Giger's work for the visuals was also displayed, as was the art of science fiction illustrator Chris Foss.  Looking at the art for the unmade film is a terribly heartbreaking experience in imagining what could've been.

Nevertheless, if Jodorowsky's vision of Dune had been made, it would have been a gigantic, artsy mess that had little to do with the original subject matter.  Fans of the book would have been horrified at what Jodorowsky had done to it (at one point in the film, Jodorowsky himself says that he would have raped the novel, like he was raping Frank Herbert himself).  At one point, he'd intended to make the movie about 12 hours long.  So it's no wonder they weren't able to get financial backing from the big studios: it would have been a massive money pit that everyone except the art house crowd would have loathed.

Even so, it made an awesome documentary after the fact.  Five out of five stars.

Frank Herbert Would Get His Ass Kicked in a Knife Fight

I just got finished a reread of Dune.  The ecology, philosophical and religious aspects of the novel, of the universe he built, are incredible.  I'm looking forward to reading the sequels, of which there are many.  Even if you didn't know a lot about the author, even a casual reading of Frank Herbert's most famous novel would tell you that he did an incredible amount of research on life cycles, planetary ecology, Middle Eastern culture, the nature of aristocracy, and how science and religion can clash.  Herbert was a brilliant man.

But he didn't know a single thing about knife fighting, and it shows.

Part of my problem with how personal combat was portrayed in the novel was the strange hierarchy of fighters in the Dune universe.  To briefly sketch out the background, personal shield technology had been developed so that most fighting men had force fields around them that they could turn on and off.  A fast-moving object like a bullet would be deflected by a shield, but a slightly slower object, like a hand holding a knife, could slip through.  So for personal combat, you had to go fast on defense and slow on attack.  Also, if someone shot you with a laser weapon (called a lasgun) while your shield was activated, both you and the person holding the laser would be obliterated in a massive nuclear explosion, known as the Holtzman effect.  In essence, Herbert wanted to eliminate guns of all kinds in his science fiction universe.

The best individual fighters in the known universe were both attached to the main character Paul: Duncan Idaho, a "swordmaster," and Gurney Halleck, a former prisoner of Paul's enemies.  They developed a form of fighting that was so good, it rivaled and maybe even beat the most feared armies known.  What didn't work in the novel was that all of this had to be told to the reader, and not shown.  Herbert went into great detail about how the gigantic sandworms of Dune created the spice melange, but when it came to fighting, he fell back on what he knew, which was fencing.  It was unconvincing.

Fencing isn't anything like fighting with knives.  It's a long-range form of fighting (or, well, sport).  A knife fight is, by its very nature, an extreme close-quarters encounter.  Blades don't touch in a knife fight.  You can't elevate it into a fencing duel; it's too quick.

The winner in a knife fight is almost always going to be the one with more will, more speed, more strength, and more reach.  He'll get that all-important first hit in.  Let's also keep in mind that the idea of a knife duel is an entirely constructed fantasy, not unlike West Side Story.  The vast, vast majority of us don't get into knife duels. Someone looking to cut you isn't going to give you a chance to defend yourself: he'll wait until your back is turned and shank you.

There aren't a lot of places that teach knife dueling.  Filipino martial artists do flow drills that approximate it like sumbrada and hubud-lubud, but they're intended to ingrain fighting reflexes, not draw out a fight into a duel.  So the lack of resources available to Herbert isn't surprising.

Nevertheless, the fight scenes lacked authenticity.  An awesome book despite that.

"Get out of my MIND!"

I've been rereading Frank Herbert's Dune.  I've read it several times since my teens, but this is the first reread in a decade.  Now that I'm reading with both eyes open: one to be entertained and one to see what Herbert did and learn from it, I'm finding brand new things to like and dislike about the novel.  Despite some flaws, it's still captivating.

Like many, I came to Dune through David Lynch's movie.  Dune purists hated it.  The critics thought it was laughable.  It was overwrought, overacted, and, in the Alan Smithee extended version, way overlong.

I loved it.  I still do.

It's colored my reading the book.  I can't help but read Paul's dialogue in Kyle MacLachlan's too-precise voice.  Linda Hunt has become the Shadout Mapes for me.  The late, great Robert Jordan was unfortunately miscast as Duncan Idaho, a small role in the film but a massive one in the books.  Can't forget Sting as Feyd-Rautha (in later years, when my friends and I played Avalon Hill's awesome Dune strategy board game, we'd always refer to him as "Lovely Feyd" in a breathy Kenneth McMillan voice).

If I'd read the book first, I'd no doubt have a different opinion of both it and the film.  Better or worse, I don't know.  The book was definitely better: a typical claim.

Contrast that with Mario Puzo's The Godfather.  Same situation: I'd seen the movie first, then read the book.  The difference here is that the movie was much, much better.  It was tighter, more cohesive, more entertaining.  The book had some weird subplots that included a mostly superfluous Johnny Fontaine and a young woman who needed an operation on her private parts, neither of which were connected.  Characters came in and out with little rhyme or reason.  It was a fun read, but didn't do much for me.

Our current media culture tells us that the book is no longer enough.  If it's popular, it needs a movie.  Or a television series.  Or a movie sequel.  I don't attach a value judgment to this: it is what it is.  Before I became a dad, I went to see a lot of movies, and I still like to watch them when I have the time.

What the media culture creates is a crossover effect for the book.  The Dune phenomenon I mentioned earlier can't be avoided.  David Lynch's bizarre vision of Frank Herbert's universe has, in part, become my vision of it.  I know I'm not alone in this.  What's seen can't be unseen.  Lynch has put himself into my copy of the book.

The late Puzo and equally late Herbert aside, do the authors of these books know what's been done to them in the minds of their readers?  Translating them to a new medium doesn't change the words printed on the page, but it does alter our perception of them.  They no longer exist in discrete vacuums; one format informs and alters the other.