The Fractured Mirror 2.0 #64: Jodorowsky's Dune
We are currently in a state of Dune mania. A shiver of excitement (a disturbance in the force, as it were) could be felt throughout the internet when the cast was announced for Denis Villeneuve’s feverishly anticipated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science-fiction novel. For his wildly ambitious re-imagining of one of the most beloved and successful novels of all time, Villeneuve attracted an insanely impressive assemblage of big names, beloved cult icons and internet favorites. Timothée Chalamet! Oscar Isaac! Stellan Skarsgård! Dave Bautista! The legendary Charlotte Rampling! Jason Momoa! Zendaya! Javier Bardem!
The world seemingly couldn’t be more impressed by the incredible aggregation of talent both in front of and behind the screen. The universe was similarly atwitter with excitement when the movie’s trailer premiered.
This is, of course, not the first time cinephiles have been whipped into a frenzy of anticipation over a movie involving Dune. In 2013 film fans all over the world fell in love with Jodorowsky’s Dune, an irresistible crowd-pleaser about a charismatic lunatic who set out to single-handedly raise humanity’s consciousness with the ultimate cinematic acid trip, a mind-blowing spiritual and aesthetic adventure.
The magnetic madman in question was of course Alejandro Jodorowsky, the cult god riding high off the success of El Topo and The Holy Mountain when he decided that he was the man to bring Dune to the big screen. Jodorowsky was eighty-four years old when Jodorowsky’s Dune was filmed but he could easily pass for an unusually well-preserved, vibrant and youthful man two decades younger and boasts the energy and intensity of a man half his age.
Nearly four decades after his dream project fell apart Jodorowsky’s enthusiasm for it has not dimmed. The cult auteur remains ferociously invested in his long-abandoned dream of a magnum opus.
When Jodorowsky tried to turn Dune into the greatest, most important and spiritual movie of all time he was blessed and cursed with a messianic sense of purpose. Jodorowsky is no mere filmmaker: he has the outsized aura of a prophet, a cult leader, a shaman. That outsized charisma is on full display throughout Jodorowsky’s Dune.
Jodorowsky’s Dune director Frank Pavich has the good judgment to realize that no one can tell this story better than Jodorowsky himself. Indeed, he’s smart enough to realize that nobody can really tell this story but Jodorowsky. So Jodorowsky spends much of the film selling his vision for Dune to the audience with the same passion, personality and persuasiveness with which he once convinced some of the greatest artists of the time to be part of his epic vision.
When it came to choosing technicians and artisans to work on his Dune, Jodorowsky sought nothing less than “spiritual warriors”, like-minded souls who shared his vision, his fearlessness and his all-consuming hunger to create a movie that would be a full-on spiritual experience.
The scenes of Jodorowsky’s meticulously assembling the galaxy of singular talents that would breathe life into his delirious daydream of a movie resemble a crackling cinephile version of the “Getting the team together” sequence in heist films. Only instead of getting a safecracker and demolitions guy for the big job, Jodorowsky was recruiting legendary French comics artist Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud to create storyboards for his Dune that gloriously realized his wildest, most audacious ideas and future Alien monster maker H.R Giger to create the nightmare world of the story’s grotesque villains.
Jodorowsky’s Dune animates some of Moebius’ storyboards to give a sense of what the finished film would have looked and felt like. The scope, ambition, audacity, beauty and sheer creativity on display are nothing short of breathtaking.
For the crucial role of special effects guru Jodorowsky’s unfailing eye chose a newcomer he discovered from a funky, ingenious low-budget science-fiction comedy called Dark Star, directed by first timer John Carpenter and co-written by Dan O’Bannon, who also acted, edited and handled much of the special effects and would go on to write Alien.
Jodorowsky gave the key role of Paul Atreides, a messianic figure who attains a sort of universal consciousness upon his passing to his actor son Brontis. In keeping with his obsessive methods, the director decided that in order to play the role of a superhuman savior his pre-pubescent son would need to become the character, which entailed rigorous training over a period of years in martial arts and acrobatics as well as swords and knives.
At every step of the filmmaking process, Jodorowsky didn’t just aim high; he set his sights on the best of the best, on artists as outsized, colorful and eccentric as himself. For the role of the mad emperor of the universe, he recruited the services of the king of surrealism, Salvador Dali, who agreed to the film on the basis that he be the top paid actor in the world, making one hundred thousand dollars for every minute onscreen. For the villainous, corpulent Baron Vladimir Harkonnen he tapped Orson Welles, the king of impossibly ambitious, never-to-be-realized projects.
Bear in mind, Jodorowsky had not actually read Dune when he decided to devote his life to it. That’s true of a surprising number of the geniuses, iconoclasts and world-class craftsmen involved with the project. They signed on because they believed in Jodorowsky and wanted to help him make history and change film forever, not because they cared about the novel they were ostensibly adapting.
Jodorowsky’s cinematic conception of Dune was bigger and trippier and unabashedly different than Herbert’s best-seller. Jodorowsky mischievously compares what he wanted to do to Herbert’s book to sexual assaulting it, but doing so from a place of love. Herbert would probably have felt anything but flattered by the many ways in which his book and Jodorowsky’s ideas for his film deviate strongly but when you set out to make the greatest movie in the history of humanity, you feel entitled to certain liberties.
Jodorowsky obviously never got to make Dune yet the movie’s pre-ordained ending is less depressing or grim than exquisitely bittersweet, even hopeful and optimistic.
Jodorowsky’s Dune is a swooning love letter not just to one dreamer but to the life-affirming necessity of dreaming even when those dreams are doomed to go unrealized. Jodorowsky is an innately inspirational figure. It’s impossible to watch him describe his Dune with a twinkle in his eye and total emotional engagement and not get sucked into the beauty and vastness of his world.
Jodorowsky’s Dune didn’t just seem impossibly ambitious; it was impossibly ambitious. Even at the height of New Hollywood, the eccentric auteur’s vision was too expensive, insane, audacious, not to mention just too damned long for studios in the business of making movies and money, not grand spiritual statements.
The end, oddly and gloriously enough, did not prove to be the end for Jodorowsky’s Dune. For a movie that was never actually made, the project would go on to leave a much bigger footprint than plenty of movies that not only got made but won Academy Awards and set box-office records. And of course Jodorowsky’s film lives on through this wonderfully entertaining documentary, which is obviously not an adaptation of Dune directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky but qualifies as the next best thing.
Jodorowsky’s Dune posits that the creative DNA of Jodorowsky’s Dune can be found in a slew of science-fiction and fantasy touchstones that followed. The documentary argues persuasively that what has come to be known as “science fiction of ideas” can just as accurately be deemed “science fiction of ideas purloined, directly and otherwise, from Jodorowsky’s never-to-be-realized plans for Dune.”
Jodorowsky’s Dune died a painful death at the hands of cautious studio heads scared to bankroll the El Topo director’s exquisite madness but in doing so it attained a form of immortality. Jodorowsky’s Dune includes a montage of sequences seemingly lifted straight from the storyboards Jodorowsky and Moebius created, including Alien (which reunited O’Bannon and Giger), Star Wars, Masters of the Universe, Prometheus, Contact and Flash Gordon.
Dune did end up receiving a high-profile, big-budget, special effects-intensive movie adaptation of course. The man who ended up directing Dune was, if anything, a consummate arthouse auteur with a reputation for both brilliance and madness on par with Jodorowsky’s own: David Lynch.
As Jodorowsky recounts half-guiltily in his movie (and this really is his movie, just as Dune would have been), he was relieved when even a genius like Lynch was thoroughly defeated by the inhuman challenge of transforming Herbert’s epic tome into an actual movie.
Villeneuve’s much buzzed about take on Frank Herbert’s magnum opus won’t have too much trouble usurping Lynch’s adaptation in the public mind. But it will be difficult, if not impossible, to compete with the specter of Jodorowsky’s sacred cinematic ghost, which has the insurmountable advantage of forever radiating boundless, life and cinema-changing potential in its unmade state, whereas Villeneuve’s movie has the profound disadvantage of existing, and consequently will be judged on its merits and not by what it could have been.
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