What’s the matter with Lynch’s Dune? Turn off the sound!

[Paper presented at the Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, March 21-23, 2001.]

David Lynch’s film version of Frank Herbert’s classic sf novel, Dune (1984), has its admirers, but it is generally regarded as “a disaster of the very first order” (as it was put by Halliwell’s Film Guide 7 [Liddell 122]). Lynch himself was unsatisfied: “There’s something wrong with that film,” he told an interviewer in 1986. “I don’t really know what it is, and I’m not certain you could ‘fix’ it. It’s just so big, you know, and there’s so much there. A lot of it I like, but a lot of it I don’t like. It’s just got problems…” (Hewitt 4). The main complaint about Lynch’s Dune is its infidelity to the novel. Despite the film’s striking set designs and use of sound, most viewers familiar with the original text believe that Lynch removed the heart of the narrative by excising the concrete depiction of the Fremen and their complex ecological and anthropological connections with the giant sandworms. Indeed, the film is characterized by inept storytelling, scandalously poor continuity within scenes, and marmoreal acting, its superb cinematography butchered by slipshod direction and editing. The film simply makes no sense as a big budget space epic.

Nonetheless, I believe that there is a method to this madness, albeit an unconscious one. Vivian Sobchack believes that Lynch’s Dune strives for the transparency of epic sf film. But I believe there is a completely different aesthetic at work. We know that Lynch was not very familiar with sf as a genre. He had not even heard of Herbert’s novel before he was offered the project by Dino di Laurentis (Sammon 31). From his later, more typical films, it is clear that he has no great love for narrative or transparency.

Lynch was perhaps the most inappropriate person to undertake the filming of Dune, because he had no feel for what makes a film — or indeed any art — science-fictional. (It must be said that this didn’t seem to occur to anyone at the time. Lynch in fact refused the offer to direct The Empire Strikes Back to do Dune; had it been otherwise we might never have had any other Star Wars sequels.) Lynch had no sense of the generic tradition, and, pivotally, no respect for the realistic conventions that sf relies on for constructing its imaginary referents. His natural style is surrealism — which I consider to be antagonistic to sf, in that surrealism detaches all referents from their familiar contexts, and tries to generate wholly new and individual rules of context-construction — hermetic, opaque, evocative, suspended. Science fiction, by contrast, depends on an enormous thesaurus of themes and codes enshrined in its fluid megatext, which it introduces via the narrative syntax of realistic cause and effect. Sf demands that its imaginary world be treated as a real world, in some sense continuous with ours; surrealism demands that we view its work-worlds as discontinuous with ours.

While watching the film in small doses it occurred to me that Lynch was attempting to make an sf film as if he could invent it himself, as it were still in its infancy, not only as a genre, but as a medium.  So his models were strikingly out of the ordinary: on the one hand, grand opera (as if he understood the term space opera to be directly related to music theatre), and, on the other, silent film. It is this latter form I would like analyze here.

One of the most irritating aspects of Lynch’s Dune is the constant intrusion of voice-over to represent the interior monologues of characters – the italicized thought-bubbles of the novel. This technique is redundant in the film, because the actors’ expressions and gestures should be sufficient to convey the meaning. The thoughts are very rarely complex and out of the ordinary. It dawned on me that these thought-bubbles function just like interpolated caption cards of silent films. The closer I looked, the more I saw that some of the film’s aesthetic flaws (though far from all of them) would have been considered proper procedure in a silent film.

Some examples:

—  long takes, carefully composed for their visually intricate, but static design, requiring leisurely contemplation at a distance;

— extended close-ups with either stylized and exaggerated facial gestures to carry signs instead of words, or, alternately, static, “underacted” iconic close-ups used to display a face for contemplation;

— ensemble or group shots with very little cross-dimensional movement, as if on a stage;

— static dialogue, used sometimes for “infodumps,” but mainly (because of the narrative discontinuity) to create the impression of verbal exchange;

There are also aspects of the film’s production that convey a retro feeling, as if to create the impression not of a contemporary version of a silent film, but a bona fide silent sf costume drama in the German-Russian modernist tradition of the 1920s. For example:

— the uniforms and costumes evoking some hybrid Hapsburg Vienna and Romanov St. Petersburg (underscored by the marked resemblance of Duke Leto [played by Jürgen Prochnow] to Czar Nicholas II);

— the sandworms, whose artificiality is so pronounced they seem to call attention to their artificiality, as if they were intentionally retrograde special effects;

— Sting’s portrayal of Feyd-Rautha and Brad Dourif’s portrayal of Piter de Vries, which are clever simulations of expressionist villains — with extremely broad gestures and exaggerated visual traits;

— crowd scenes constructed with no sense of how open space or a moving camera might be used. (This was partly because of budget limitation, as well as the astonishing oversight of building the sets to be immovable and roofed, hence preventing many kinds of crane shots.)

— in dynamic exterior motion sequences, a stunning lack of any attempt to co-ordinate the speed of movement in the long shots with the close-ups. For example, in Chapter XX, as the Duke, Paul, Doctor Kynes and Gurney Halleck fly over the Arrakean sands visible through a window of their ornithopter, the interior of the ship does not even vibrate, as if the landscape was moving under an immobile structure. 

— the obvious use of models, with little care to make their motion seem realistic.

— exaggeratedly stylized actions on the part of most characters (the exception is Jose Ferrer’s Emperor, the only nuanced performance of the film), which may have been caused by the lack of adequate rehearsal.

Many of these traits appear to imitate science fiction films created under the production conditions of German-Russian silent studios, with immovable but visually arresting set design, exaggerated gestures carried over from stage acting, static close ups necessitated by inflexible cameras, and a low premium placed on naturalism.

I believe Lynch — consciously in some respects, unconsciously in others — tried to construct an sf epic based on the earliest models, and thus turned Dune into a spectacle of artificiality, an aesthetic not a little at odds with the problematic of the book and with the generic tradition of sf film and writing.  The only aspects of the film that appear as authentic commitments — and thus break with the system of tableaux characteristic of the rest of the film — are the scenes in the Harkonnen palace, where Lynch added repulsive grotesqueries absent in the novel (the Baron’s pustulating skin, pulling the heart-plug of the boy-slave, etc.), which are performed with disgusting gusto by Kenneth McMillan.

Basically, I believe Lynch’s Dune is an attempt to make an sf film without using the resources of sf, or only the most archaic ones.

To test all this, I digitally edited four scenes from the film, muting the soundtrack, interpolating narrative caption cards, and then superadding a music track. This last was a problem. The musical score of Dune is not great, but it’s passable; the sound design, however, is quite good. Hence I lost a lot with this operation in terms of sound. What’s more, the soundtrack CD, which I had to import from France, did not give me enough score to work with. I superadded, in a form of mashup, two unrelated scores: a track from the first Afro-Celt CD, and some bars from Kenji Kawai’s famous theme from Ghost in the Shell, to fill out the sequences.

I edited two of the episodes as I believe Lynch’s aesthetic dictates, and two others as I believe a contemporary silent film might appear. I excised very little from these sequences, and nowhere did I shorten a shot — though I did experiment a good deal with the placement of caption cards within shots. You will see, I trust, that in most scenes, extremely broad gesture, static tableaux, and stylized dialogue force the viewer’s attention away from the story (which has been simplified, if only because so little of the imperial intrigue and Arrakeen ecology are comprehensible in the film) and toward visual pleasure. The attraction of this project for Lynch was, I believe, precisely this combination of surrealism and exoticism that encouraged visual hegemony, while the scientific, historical, and science fictional ideas underlying the novel meant nothing to him. Without thought, words too are unnecessary.