Dune On Film
By Peter Searles
‘Can you remember your first taste of spice?’
‘It tasted like cinnamon.’
‘But never twice the same,’ he said. ‘It’s like life – it presents a different face each time you take it. Some hold that the spice produces a learned-flavour reaction. The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavour as pleasurable – slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesised.’1
1. Herbert Frank, Dune (London: Hodderscape, 2023), 69.
The universe Frank Herbert dreamed up when writing the landmark sci-fi novel Dune is many things – vivid, idiosyncratic, politically complex, culturally diverse, rich in mythology, deeply spiritual. But when it has come to adapting Dune to film, one of its characteristics has historically held greater significance than all the others – its trippiness.
At the centre of the Dune universe is the substance Melange. A spice that grants heightened awareness and, in large enough quantities, can activate genes to awaken prescience in the person who ingests it. It’s a psychedelic drug and the most valuable substance in the universe. It is the spice that unlocks the latent potential in Dune’s hero Paul Atreides and starts him on the path to becoming Paul Muad’Dib, leader of the Fremen people in the uprising against their oppressors, the Harkonnens.
If it weren’t for the spice’s centrality to the story and the prominence of altered states in Herbet’s text, I’m not sure Dune would have had quite the same appeal to the first tripper who tried to bring the story to the big screen.
The version we couldn’t handle
In the fantastic documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, Alejandro Jodorowsky explains what he hoped to achieve by adapting Herbert’s novel. In his mind, he wasn’t just making his fourth feature film, he was creating what he called a ‘prophet’ – a film that would fabricate the effects of an LSD trip and open the young minds that encountered it. He said his goal was to conquer the world, a task that he knew would require madness.
Looking back at his career, you can see Jodorowsky had been building up to this. Ramping up the psychedelic potency of each successive film (reaching the almost unimaginable heights of 1973’s The Holy Mountain). Watching him explain his approach to adapting Dune, it’s clear that his ambition had ballooned beyond what could ever be achieved on this lowly plane of reality. Jodorowsky’s Dune was doomed to failure. But a mixture of madness, charisma and determination got him further than anyone would think possible.
Jodorowsky’s crew were his ‘spiritual warriors’. It’s easy to conceive of them less as a film production team and more as a tiny cult with Jodorowsky as their cherished leader. Jean Giraud (Mœbius) storyboarded the entire film and contributed character and costume design. Dan O’Bannon signed up to create the visual effects. Chris Foss was on spacecraft and planet design, with input from H.R. Giger to achieve the creepy look of the Harkonnens and their home planet. Michel Seydoux was producer, having previously helped to bring Jodorowsky’s El Topo and The Holy Mountain to French audiences, he was perhaps the cult’s most loyal convert. But with the charismatic Jodorowsky selecting and seducing each member, there was an unusual level of devotion among many in the team (O’Bannon and Foss, for example, had both agreed to leave their homes indefinitely and relocate to Paris to work on the project).
Jodorowsky remarks upon the way ‘everything became magic’, claiming several fateful coincidences took place during pre-production. He and Mick Jagger were magnetically drawn together at a crowded event after Jodorowsky had decided he wanted Jagger for the role of Feyd Rautha. A similar coincidence found Jodorowsky at the same hotel as Salvador Dali, where a courting period began for Dali’s commitment to play the Padishah Emperor (Dali’s list of conditions included a salary of $100,000 per hour and a cameo by a burning giraffe). Meanwhile, Orson Welles apparently agreed to play the obese Baron Harkonnen only if he received all the food he desired during production.
Jodorowsky cast his own son to play Paul Atreides and subjected him to a rigorous and potentially abusive regime of physical training, claiming that the sacrifice of his son was a fitting cost for the spiritual bargain he had struck for the film.
At the end of pre-production, the crew/cult had the script and storyboard for the entire film. They delivered a copy to each of the major Hollywood studios in the form of an enormous hard copy tome. All they needed was $15 million US to make the film. They were denied by every studio.
Jodorowsky’s Dune lays out a few possible reasons for the rejections:
The studios didn’t get it. They were businessmen, not spiritual warriors.
They were scared of the film, cautious of unleashing its power to change minds and conquer the world.
They were worried the film would go over budget and run too long for audiences to sit through it.
The pain and humiliation Jodorowsky suffered when his insane dream was shot down in flames was only exacerbated when it was announced another mad genius had been chosen to direct Dune.
The version we couldn’t stand
The next failed adaptation of Herbert’s novel was actually made and is genuinely loved by many. Some days I’d include myself in that many. Mostly though, all I see in the film are its flaws. To keep this on the short side, I’ll mention the main reasons I think of Dune as a failed adaptation. And to make it clear that I don’t blame the director David Lynch for the film’s failure, I’ll comment on the extended version, which surely is the best representation of the production studio’s vision for the project.
The extended version of the film Dune (1984) begins with a slow zoom onto the cover of the novel Dune. This opening shot sets the cheese level high, where it remains for the next three hours. But the shot also says a lot about the film’s ill-conceived screenplay. The creators of Dune seemingly granted themselves absolute freedom to deliver expository information in words, as if they were writing a piece of literature and not a film. In the prologue, a narrator delivers backstory for nine straight minutes while the camera pans across a series of oil paintings which were created as the concept art for the film. When we eventually move on to the action, the opening scenes are interrupted several more times so the narrator can chime in, delivering the names and biographies of major characters as the camera hovers over their blankly staring faces. We also get character specific narration in the form of voiceover thoughts, or as we watch them mutter to themselves the story details the writers weren’t creative enough to work into the scenes. Some of the more important plot points are not just stated once, they’re spoken through the screen again and again to make sure we got it (“Why Paul killed?”, “The tooth! The tooth! The tooth!”).
The film does away with surprises, preferring to explain where we’re going before we get there. We hear of the Emperor’s plot to destroy House Atreides in partnership with the horrible Harkonnens during the prologue, 90 minutes before we finally see their plans in action. While a similar observation could be made of the novel, this is not a matter of the film staying close to the source material. When Herbert reveals the story’s events in advance, it is because his characters are too astute to be caught by surprise, they have considered all possibilities and arrived at accurate assumptions about their enemies’ plans before they unfold (or, in the case of Paul, the gift of prescience has made the likely course of future events known and he is dared to manifest a different path). Nothing as interesting as this is taking place in Lynch’s Dune. The film’s events aren’t predicted by its insightful characters, they are whispered into the viewer’s ear, so afraid are the filmmakers to hide any of the details in case we get lost.
Dune turns out to be the filmic equivalent of your parents reading to you from a picture book at bedtime. But a poorly written picture book with a story completely lacking in suspense or momentum. Events are lined up and ticked off one by one, with no sense that one thing leads organically to the next. This happens, and then this, and then this – like laying down the bricks of a tomb to house the withering corpse of Herbert’s story.
To be fair, Dune is a complex story and it’s easy enough to understand how the spoon-feeding approach took hold. While the studio was aiming for a two-hour film, Lynch’s rough cut apparently ran over four hours. Heavy voiceover became one tactic to make sure the $40 million US investment resulted in a marketable product. And Universal was very much in control of the production, which famously pissed off Lynch and led to him distancing himself from the film. By the time the extended version was created (for release as a two-part TV miniseries in 1988) Lynch insisted his name be removed from the credits. The trauma of having lost control of the project set the stage for the rest of Lynch’s career as the creator of smaller scale productions in which he had complete freedom and through which he displayed a complete lack of regard for audience comprehension. You could say that Dune, in its final form, suffered a similar fate as Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks. When Lynch abandoned that show in its second season, audiences watched his charmingly quirky vision degenerate into goofy rambling at the hands of its network TV studio. That same goofiness infects Dune and may be the main reason it still has so many fans – at least it’s fun to laugh at.
But you can still see Lynch in Dune. He’s there in the exquisite set design (neither the ornate gold and green of the Emperor’s throne room nor the grotesque Guild Navigator in its enormous iron tank would feel out of place in the third season of Twin Peaks). Lynch is there in the dreamy interludes and the occasional deeply immersive sound design. In short – he’s there in the film’s strangeness.
A prime example: where the novel reads that Thuffir Hawat is delivered poison in his food and becomes reliant on the Harkonnens to receive a steady supply of antidote, the film translation involves Thuffir milking the antidote from a conjoined cat/rat creature. It’s weird stuff, but the truly Lynchian aspect of the scene has nothing to do with its bizarre conceptualisation of the plot, it’s the sight of Jack Nance (in the role of Nefud) standing in the background throughout, with a pained expression, squeezing more and more and more marshmallows into his mouth. I’m speculating, but looking at Dune alongside the rest of Lynch’s work, it’s easy to imagine that, like Jodorowsky, it was an opportunity to explore the strange and surreal that drew Lynch to the project.
The version we/I couldn’t love
37 years and one TV miniseries version later, a new version of Dune made it to the big screen. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) pulled off what had long been considered an impossible feat – the adaptation of Herbert’s Dune into a commercially and critically successful film.
Telling the story across two films is no doubt part of the reason it works (while Lynch arrived at around four hours with his initial cut, Villeneuve’s films have a combined runtime of over five hours). But the films do a lot of other things right too. The epic production design isn’t wasted on delivering shallow thrills, it’s used cleverly to conjure an immersive atmosphere. The immersion is made complete by Hans Zimmer’s score which is as monumental as the visuals, and deftly draws together elements of the story’s origins by incorporating a distinctly middle eastern flavour and references to mid 20th century progressive rock.
Thirty minutes into part one, it’s clear that Villeneuve and his co-writers Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth are not going to fall into the same traps that made the 80’s version so boring to watch. By that time, we have been introduced to the story’s main characters, we understand the broad strokes of the political environment they are manoeuvring within, and we feel the high stakes involved in the Atreides' leaving their home planet to assume the stewardship of Arrakis. We are informed and invested, and all of that has been achieved with minimal narration. Information is delivered through the scene’s action and dialogue. The writers are working within the scope of the visual medium and finding much more success at engaging and informing the audience than the creators of Dune (1984) did with their overly thorough, literary approach.
As the movie goes on, there are well considered diversions from the book that translate the story into the language of film. Where the book gets by without surprises for the reasons previously mentioned, Villeneuve’s films withhold information and deliver on the unexpected twists audiences look for in engaging movies. Hence, we come to learn the identity of the traitor to House Atreides only at the moment of the Duke’s betrayal. And the film is deliberate about establishing a brotherly bond between Paul and Duncan Idaho that just wasn’t present in the novel. That way, when Idaho dies, his sacrifice draws an emotional touchstone from a moment that is mostly glossed over in the novel. I also get the impression that the film’s creators had in mind the “reward/seizing the sword” step of the traditional hero’s journey when they chose to stress the significance of Paul’s acquisition of a crysknife. There is no such moment in the novel, Paul is simply assumed to have obtained the knife at some point in the many months that pass during the book’s third section.
As well as these functional deviations, there are some inspired changes in Villeneuve’s adaptation too. It’s nicely profound when Paul, making inroads towards acceptance in Fremen society, experiences visions of Jamis. The first man he kills delivers lessons that fuel Paul’s moral maturation. And in part two, the story’s religious themes are used to explore ideas such as conversion, control and fanaticism by introducing points of contention between the Fremen of the North and the South.
But as part 2 approached its climax and succumbed to the conventions of the Hollywood blockbuster, I lost interest. The latter stages of the book had interesting storylines – like Geurney Hallek’s misguided attempt at avenging his Duke’s death and Paul’s decision to go against tradition by not killing his predecessor when he assumes the role of Fremen leader. Even in the final showdown, the Emperor’s treachery involving Count Fenring keeps us unsure of Paul’s victory and maintains tension to the end. But in its final act, Dune: Part 2 steers away from these intriguing plot lines to give full attention to an epic battle action sequence, one which sees the good guys charging to success without the slightest difficulty. It’s all about action and payoff, which comes across as a misguided presumption of what audiences most wish to see. Personally, I felt my interest dissipate along with any sense of the characters’ struggle.
With all his control and adherence to cinematic conventions, Villeneuve made a filmic success of Dune, but in doing so, he left out all of the weird. The spiritual, philosophical, hallucinogenic aspects of the story, far from being the reason for making the film, find a place in the thematic background. They become the shading that rounds out a vision of Herbert’s story that’s all about efficient storytelling and delivering a well-executed, recognizable Hollywood product.
A soul adrift
The question that’s tempting to ask is: who came closest to the mark? Out of the three, radically different adaptation projects, which was most faithful to Herbert’s vision?
It’s worth remembering that the psychedelic substance Melange is what the whole Dune universe revolves around. It’s what makes possible every important event in the story. Herbert’s writing includes many dreamy, poetic passages. And elements of the narrative such as Paul’s prescient visions and his mother’s ingestion of the water of life are put to paper in deliciously mind-bending language.
Jodorowsky was unapologetic about his disregard for the source material. He claimed not to have read the book and fabricated key elements of the story in the version he was telling. If his epic ‘prophet’ of a film had been made, viewers would have witnessed a very different story arc for Paul. One which began with his conception from a drop of blood and ended with his spirit, emancipated by death, awakening a consciousness in the planet Arrakis so that it can travel through the universe bringing enlightenment to other planets. The shape of the story would have been radically different, but the trippiness of Herbert’s universe would be front and centre. Would Jodorowsky’s version, set so radically apart from the story of the novel, have come closer to articulating its true character by taking viewers on a psychedelic trip?
Likewise, what if Lynch had been given free rein to embrace the strange with his version? What if the studio hadn’t insisted on suffocating his vision, burying it under mountains of unnecessary exposition? Would the essence of Herbert’s Dune have made it to the minds of cinemagoers way back in 1984, delivered in the form of elegantly designed and immersive dreams?
When you take out all the weird and the psychedelic to make profitable products like Villeneuve’s Dune and Dune: Part 2, are you exorcising the soul of Herbert’s universe in the process?
Like I said, these are all tantalising questions for a fan to ponder. But to do so is to deny a simple truth – that the Dune universe is, above all things, a vast and complex construction. A definitive film version is most likely impossible. It could be interpreted many hundreds of times and never twice the same. Like the spice, it will present a different face each time we encounter it, refusing ever to be truly synthesized.
Given the film industry’s love for re-booting stories for resale to each successive generation, we may see more renditions of Dune in our lifetimes. No doubt each will have its strengths and weaknesses. Personally I will hold out hope that some future visionary artist with a devotion to the psychedelic will filter it through their expanded consciousness and give us the mind-altering cinematic vision I believe the book screams out for.
Bibliography
Herbert, Frank. Dune, London: Hodderscape, 2023.