Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #245 Dune (1984)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m deep into a look at the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well.
Between re-watching Dune and sitting down to write this piece I skimmed one of the many vitriolic pans the movie received at the time of its release and the ensuing decades.
I didn’t read much of the article but I read enough to get extremely annoyed with it, its author and more than anything, its tone, which was snarky and condescending in the way negative reviews often are.
How dare this asshole follow lazily in the footsteps of seemingly every film writer in the world and look down on a goddamn genius like David Lynch from a place of utterly unearned faux-superiority?
Who did he think he is? Why did he think the world needed yet another article about how Dune sucks and is an enduring embarrassment to its legendary creator?
The twist, and one I suspect you saw coming, is that the article in question was a My World of Flops piece from a decade ago in which I heaped scorn on Dune and deemed it a Fiasco.
I feel differently now. If I were to write up Dune for My World of Flops it would be a Secret Success. I’ve softened with age. I judge movies for what they are rather than what I think they should be.
I love Nothing But Trouble for many of the same reasons I have come to love Dune. If nothing else Dune and Nothing But Trouble are two of the strangest, most grotesque and deliberately repulsive movies ever released by a major studio.
Our system is set up specifically to keep movies this original and audacious from being made yet these two glorious outliers slipped through and caused a simultaneously confused and horrified moviegoing public to urgently inquire, “What the fuck was that?”
Dune was supposed to be the next Star Wars. But then they hired the lunatic who gave the world Eraserhead and The Elephant Man to write and direct. It would be difficult to find a less commercial director for a film with blockbuster, tentpole aspirations or an auteur less interested in creating a lucrative franchise or making his corporate masters money.
It could also be argued that it would be difficult to find a filmmaker less interested in making sense and being coherent as well but I found Lynch’s Dune to be infinitely less confusing this time around.
Since I’m watching and writing about Dune as part of a patron-funded exploration of the films of Virginia Madsen I should probably start by discussing her peculiar role in this most unusual of films.
Madsen was a neophyte to film acting in her early twenties when she was cast in a role that is at once absolute essential and what Madsen herself has described as a “glorified extra.”
It’s absolutely essential because Dune would not make a goddamn lick of sense without Madsen beginning the film by delivering an orgy of exposition about mapping out the central themes and conflicts in Frank Herbert’s elaborate science-fiction mythology.
It is from Madsen that we learn of the conflict between the House of Atreides and the House of Harkonnen as well the importance of Spice, the most powerful and sought after property in the universe, a game-changer that expands consciousness, makes interplanetary travel possible and does a bunch of other neat stuff as well. Spice can be found only on the desert planet of Arrakis. This renders Arrakis the most important planet in the universe.
This opening should be unbearable. Imagine if The Phantom Menace opened not with the crawl that begins, “Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute” but rather with an unknown actress directly facing the camera and delivering the same information.
The poor actress in question would never work again and/or be tarred and feathered but Madsen’s otherworldly beauty and ethereal presence make this inelegant info-dump infinitely less painful than it has any right to be.
Lynch gave an unknown the impossible task of vomiting a trilogy worth of information while maintaining unnerving eye contact with the audience and she more or less pulled it off.
Another newcomer, Kyle MacLachlan, made a memorable cinematic debut as Paul Atreides, the son of a powerful Duke and the heir to the House Atreides.
MacLachlan is a figure of prophecy. He is Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, Neo in The Matrix, Jesus Christ in the motion picture The Last Temptation of Christ.
The ambitious young man intuits that he has a destiny that will elevate him to the level of a man-God, a living messiah who commands not just respect but something approaching reverence.
Paul begins the film in a place of innocence and unknowing and ends it older, wiser and not just ready but eager to realize his role as a savior.
MacLachlan was Lynch’s leading man of choice because he has the looks and essence of a clean-cut All-American boy yet there’s something warped and weird and wonderful just below the surface.
That’s MacLachlan here and it lends his hero’s journey a distinctly Lynchian darkness. Paul comes of age as a leader and a man when he’s called upon to travel to Arrakis and aid its righteous natives the Fremen in their battle with the nefarious House Harkonnen.
The miserable souls of House Harkonnen are ugly inside and out but none is more unforgettably repulsive than Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. The film’s primary villain is a corpulent creep with a flying suit and a face full of puss and boils. If the Bubonic plague were to become sentient, it would look and act like this cursed villain.
As played by the great character actor Kenneth McMillan, the bad Baron is easily the most vomitous creature in the history of space operas. I mean this as high praise. He makes Jabba the Hut look like a male model by comparison.
The House Harkonnen are a miserable lot and ugly as they come with the exception of Feyd-Rautha, a fearsome warrior a scene-stealing Sting plays as a muscular, well-oiled, feral fuck-beast who lives to destroy.
For a spectacle-rich blockbuster Dune is shockingly intimate. It’s a film of hushed intensity that allows us to listen in on the interior monologues of many of its characters, primarily Paul as he moves from boy to man to man-God.
Dune finds paradoxical beauty in ugliness. It’s best understood and appreciated not as an adaptation of one of the most successful and influential science-fiction novels ever written or a swashbuckling epic in the Star Wars mold but rather as the most expensive and high-profile head movie ever made, a trippy stoner movie.
It’s much more satisfying as a gloriously excessive buffet of freaky-ass shit to see while baked out of your gourd than as a conventional space adventure.
What kind of freaky-ass shit? Most famously, Arrakis is home to massive sandworms that are at once phallic and vaginal at the same time. Then there’s the film’s exquisitely eccentric ensemble, which is full of legendary character actors who make everything they’re in better. Jack Nance doing his weird Jack Nance thing! Brad Dourif at his most menacing! The late Dean Stockwell with a sinister mustache that broadcasts his turn towards villainy! A very young Alicia Witt as our hero’s terrifyingly precocious, monster-voiced sister. Lynch himself as a miner on Arrakis!
Lynch’s presence as a bit player as well as the film’s auteur should be distracting. It should take us out of the story. Instead it’s just one more gloriously insane element in a movie overflowing with messy madness.
I didn’t just find things to like about Dune this time around: I straight up dug it. For me at least the question now isn’t whether Denis Villeneuve will fix the problems that plagued Lynch’s much-maligned adaptation but rather whether it will match the film’s demented genius.
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