On Dune and reading and watching
I grew up reading Dune. I read a lot of them, including the prequels Frank Herbert's son and Kevin J Anderson cooked up. I read a lot of sci fi in general, to be fair. But Dune was something my mum and I shared an interest in, so it was different somehow. Fantasy, epic, image, allegory, a great sense of historicity and somewhat surreal edge to it all. It certainly shaped my horizons, though I read a lot of discontinuous stuff as a kid, having parents who didn't really follow any rule book or canon per se. Dune rubbed shoulders with Neal Stephenson and Ben Okri and Jamila Gavin and Isabel Allende and Greg Bear and Samuel Delaney and Rushdie and Roth and so on. There wasn't any plan here. Just go for it, dig in and see. The Dostoevskys, Joyces, Naipauls, Manns, Morrisons and Melvilles came later, and by then I was already over-determining the work as academic study wonts, saturated by literary discourse and aesthetic judgement.
I rather enjoyed the first Villeneuve Dune, and this second part tickled my fancy too. In the oeuvre of Villeneuve you could see he had it in him. A modern epic, grand images and intricate political machinations. Arrival, Sicario and the Blade Runner sequel put him in good stead. Of course this was a very different beast to the botched 1984 Lynch production, with its schlocky campness and confused editing. A Kronenbourg or Peter Greenaway production might have offered an alternative timeline of the direction of sci fi cinema. In any case, Ridley Scott turned it down for the first Blade Runner and history was made.
The revealing documentary, Jodorowsky's Dune (2013), details that mad scientist's - Alejandro Jodorowsky - mammoth attempt to produce a 9-hour feature film adaptation of the novel, luring figures like Orson Welles, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Udo Kier and Pink Floyd to the fray. His gargantuan storyboard did the rounds amongst the Hollywood studios, and, while he was ultimately turned down for his unyielding ambitious visions, much of his work was pilfered, laying the groundwork for the mainstreaming of sci fi cinema in the 1980s. Alien, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Terminator and more owed various elements to Jodorowsky's foresightedness.
Contemporary sci fi is of course somewhat different now, with prestige titles such as Interstellar, The Martian, Gravity and Ad Astra garnering huge attention, merely to drift away from popular consciousness as some ideological fad. In some ways Villeneuve's Dune sits better alongside the Oppenheimers, recent Scorseses, Batmans and so on; huge epic scenery taking on the Marvels and Star Wars franchises while pushing forward an auteur, artistic direction divorced from any grassroots experimentation. There is gesture and dust and bass drops and glacial intricate earnestness all pointing to the spectacle of a medium dealing with its existential reckoning of what public discourse and art should be.
Hanif Kureishi in a recent post writes of how the current age of prestige television exhibits the sort of creative experimentation and public conversation that was once previously found in pop music. It is an interesting parallel and makes one think of where film sits in that frame. Perhaps more akin to the novel in its bourgeois specificity and mainstream derivation.
Cord Jefferson's American Fiction is probably a good place to think about this. In adapting Percival Everett's Erasure (2001), we are brought into the strife of a black writer trying to negotiate the limits and coercion of representation of race, all the while stuck in this meta-drama where the book becomes the film in the film that was once a book. It speaks to a publishing and film industry working on generic models of culture with monopolisation rife and wider interest waning, without Jefferson really exceeding those limits (I cannot pass comment on Everett having not read the novel, yet). Even the relative contemporary strength of independent cinema and publishing relies on a fragmented, cosseted idea of what niche looks like, often tied to a rationalist identity-formation which seems to shear itself away from wider cultural conversations and antagonisms. Perhaps we are developing autonomy in a cynical system; it feels like an uphill battle.
Anyway, enough doom-mongering; I am off to read more and watch more and write more, as should you. Now where can I find a copy of that Dune….