Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Dune (1984), part 1
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Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. This is Rob Lamb. We have a vacation week here for the show, so this is the perfect time to roll out a Weird House Cinema two-parter. This is going to be part one of our episode on the late David Lynch's Dune from 1984. This episode originally published 3-8-10.

2024. So we put this out before the passing of the great David Lynch. So keep that in mind as you roll into it and appreciate this weird and wonderful picture. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick. And oh boy, have we got a movie to talk about today. We're pretty sure this is going to be our first and perhaps only ever two-part episode of Weird House Cinema. And you're

you might be thinking what movie could possibly cause them to split Weird House Cinema into two parts. It's David Lynch's Dune from 1984. That's right. Yeah, we normally try and keep Weird House as a single episode installment situation. But the cast is too rich here. The weirdness is too deep. And with the release of Denis Villeneuve's Dune Part 2, obviously Dune is in the air once more. Everybody's going crazy for this film, and rightfully so.

And that gives us the excuse. All right. Everybody's digging Dune right now. We can do a two-parter on Weird House Cinema about David Lynch's adaptation. Wait, did you see the new one?

Yes. Over the weekend, just slammed the Dune. My son had never seen Dune Part One, so we rewatched that with him. And then we all went out to the movie theater for three hours and watched Dune Part Two with the full cinematic experience. We didn't get the popcorn bucket, but we still had a great time. It's definitely a film worth seeing on a big screen.

Well, I'm very jealous of that experience because I am so excited to see it. I haven't been able to make it out yet because we, you know, we got a 17 month old. We don't get out to movies these days. But as soon as it hits streaming, I'm going to be there. And I'm very excited about that because I really did love the 2021 Dune. And that one was,

really surpassed my expectations in so many ways because Rob, you know, we've long been fans of the book and talked about it on the show all the time and have been in certain ways fans of the movie we're talking about in this episode today. But it is not a book that lends itself to the screen. You know, it is like it is a wonderful novel, but it almost feels like it was written to be specifically difficult to adapt to the movie format. Yeah.

Yeah, it is. It's a complex novel full of interstellar feudalism, psychotropic drugs, sandworms, lots of plots within plots, lots of conversations. And then when the action does take place, when there are big action spectacles, they generally happen off the page and are referred to after the fact, you know. So it's not one of these things where you can just like plop it on the table and like this is what we're filming today. You know, it's yeah, it's

It has a reputation for being a difficult adaptation. And yeah, credit where credit's due, Denny V nailed it. I think he nailed it in part one. And then part two, he really seals the deal. And it's a true spectacle. With the caveat, I have to say, like, I've always been a Dune book first fan. And I don't mean that in a snobby way. I mean that in like, that's how I read it for the first time. It's how I explored the world for the first time. And therefore, like, that's always my starting point.

And given the difficulties of that, of adapting it, you know, you have to go into it with the expectation that any filmmaker, regardless of what they're working with, they're going to have to pick and choose as with most adaptations to varying degrees. But, you know, you're going to have to pick and choose like what aspects of Dune you're going to realize on the screen, what aspects of the characters you're going to realize and what you're going to condense and what you're going to leave out. Yeah. Well, I mean,

I think some stories do just naturally translate to the screen more easily if they're, I don't know, you know, if the story is written more like a play, like if it's very dialogue driven already, if, you know, if a lot of the story is contained already in the exchanges between the characters. And so if it's already kind of an external story, Dune, I think, is really difficult for

at least a couple of reasons I can think of. One is that understanding the story relies so heavily on like this deep understanding of the setting and the world, which relies on a glossary actually, like there's, you know, an encyclopedia. So it's very fun to explore in written format and to like learn all the, the politics and the technology and the, you know, the strange world that Frank Herbert created and,

But it's hard to get all of that into a movie format without having just big dumps of exposition, which unfortunately the Lynch movie does have. There are scenes where there's just characters sitting around explaining or even voiceover narrating lots of stuff about politics and technology and what happens in the Dune universe. And it does get kind of overwhelming at times.

Another thing I would say, though, is that in addition to the importance of the setting, there's also just a lot of internal stuff in Dune, like characters having visions, thinking through things. A lot of the drama is within characters' minds. And so that's also kind of difficult to externalize in a way that the viewer can participate in without just having people again doing like...

voiceover of their internal monologue, which Lynch's adaptation also does and is occasionally funny. Yeah, especially. We ended up watching it when I rewatched this with my wife, who was...

I was surprised she was game for it. Monday night, the day after watching Dune Part 2, we watched David Lynch's Dune. And we watched it with the subtitles because I'd read somewhere someone advised like this is a good choice because you can keep a little better track of who's saying what. But there's a lot of internal voice, colon, which makes it a little more hilarious at times when this occurs. Yes.

Especially, well, actually, one of the funniest parts of it is that you will often get a close up of the actor making like a serious face while we see them thinking. Yeah, it's a hard one to pull off. But that being said, you know, if you're going to do it, commit to it fully. Don't do it just in a couple of places where it's like, oh, they lost track of what they were doing. This scene wasn't working, so they're going to do a little bit of this. No, no, it's throughout the film. So in a way, it's more forgivable since it's ubiquitous.

But hey, we're not here to knock the 1984 Dune because I would say that I'm going to be forthright and acknowledge this movie has a lot of shortcomings. There are many things about it that don't work, but also I love it. I love David Lynch's Dune. Yeah. I mean, is it the most faithful adaptation? No. Is it the best? Well, it's hard to...

hard to make an argument for that perhaps, but is it absolutely weird? Is it consistently entertaining? Absolutely. Yes, yes. It's also shorter.

Uh, and, and caveat here, we are going to be only dealing with the theatrical cut of the film. The only cut that, that David Lynch ever, you know, acknowledged and approved. Um, and we'll get back into that later on, but yeah, it's like, it's, it's a reasonable, reasonably linked film. Uh, that's also part of the problem here we'll discuss, but, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's shorter than some of your other options.

Right. So on the downside, that does mean, especially in the first half of the movie, you do get a lot of scenes of incredibly just...

heavy deposits of exposition where there's like a narrator just telling you a lot of stuff really fast. And I think especially if you were not already familiar with the story, you'd just be like, what, what, what? All this, like it just comes thick and fast when you're not really ready for it often, I think. So that is a problem with trying to cram this much story into this short of a runtime. On the other hand, given how much they fit into this short of a runtime, I am shocked how well it works. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I imagine we had the same experience on this, but because I think you have something in the notes to this effect. But a lot of the reviews for this film make a point of saying it's incomprehensible. You have no idea what's going on at any given point. I did not have that experience rewatching the film. And I don't think you did either, obviously, because we know the major beats. We know what's going to happen. We know who everyone is supposed to be.

Right. So we can't really come at the movie cold. Like I read the novel before I saw this movie. So I already knew the story. So it's kind of hard for me to imagine what it would be like not being familiar going in, though. I when I try to imagine that I can say like, yeah, I think this opening narration would be a little would be a little hard to get past. You'd be like, wait, I can't keep track of everything you're saying. What's the spacing guild? Huh? Yeah.

Yeah, and people have these issues too, even with the more recent adaptations. Like I remember seeing stuff online where people with the first film were confused and thought that perhaps the Baron was also the Emperor. They were a little unclear on that. And I know that

My wife initially had some confusion over two different blonde characters in part two. I'm not going to reveal who they are, but she was like, at least momentarily, like, wait, are these the same character? No, these are two different characters.

And so, yeah, that stuff's going to happen anytime you're adapting something so complex. Now, speaking of fitting a lot into a limited runtime, I also just want to quickly note that, you know, this movie has been out for a while. It has a cult following. It is a David Lynch movie. There have been multiple great documentaries, books, papers, et cetera, on this production, on previous attempts at producing Dune for the screen, subsequent productions. We can't possibly get into all of that, but we'll reference a little of it as we go.

Have you watched the documentary about Jodorowsky's Dune? No, I had read about it plenty before it came out, and I've just never gotten around to watching it. But that is, of course, a fascinating slash infamous example of, you know, what if? What if Jodorowsky had actually made this stupendous semi-adaptation of Dune with this just colossally bonkers cast? I'm glad he didn't.

And not just because I'm protective of Dune to a certain extent, but also because you see the influence of Dune in his later works with Mobius and the Meta Baron series. These are graphic novels that Jodorowsky wrote. And those are tremendously fun and trippy. And they have elements of that kind of like Dune feudal psychedelic world. But it's it's.

removed from Herbert's novels and it can be its own thing. So I think like ultimately everything landed for the best on that regard. That makes sense. So you're saying you'd rather instead of seeing Jodorowsky like impose his vision upon an adaptation of Dune, you'd rather see him take a bunch of influence from Dune and make his own thing. Exactly. Yeah. I think it worked out for the best.

Well, on that note, let's go ahead and listen to some trailer audio. Specifically, I believe this is a radio spot. I love it when we can feature a radio spot since it is ideally tuned for the listening audience here. This one, I found this one online. This was apparently something that aired in Salt Lake City. So let's have a listen.

No. The most widely read, talked about, and cherished masterpiece of a generation comes to the screen. Dune. I see two great houses. The unique. A world that holds creation's greatest treasure. He who controls the spice controls the universe. And greatest terrors. No!

A world where the mighty, the mad, all I can see is an Atreides that I want to kill. And the magical, the sleeper has awakened, will have their final battle. A world called Doom. Lord Fighters! We will kill until no Harkonnen breathes Arrakeen air.

Dune. A world beyond your experience. Beyond your imagination. Details about the Dune Adventure in Washington, D.C. are coming soon from Universal Pictures, Eastern Airlines, and 106FM KCGL.

You know, Rob, I went to rewatch this movie on Max, HBO Max, I guess, formerly. And Max has a great little thing where it's like, you know, some of these streaming services do this. They say, hey, if you liked this movie, you might also like. Do you want to know what the fan of Dune 1984 might also like? Let's have it. OK, it's Dune 2021. Guess that's not surprising. Leviathan 1989, one of our faves. Yeah, yeah.

War Games and Escape from L.A. You know, I've never had the courage to watch Escape from L.A. Love Carpenter. Love the cast for Escape from L.A. And I remember it had a fun soundtrack that came out at the time. Not anybody's best work. Speaking of Max, that is also where I ended up re-watching it.

But anyone out there, if you want to go watch 1984's Dune in full before continuing with these episodes, yeah, it's also widely available in digital and physical formats anywhere you might want to watch it. Unlike the sci-fi miniseries, which is a little hard to get your hands on right now, you can definitely get the 1984 adaptation any way you want to get it. Arrow Video put out a very nice Blu-ray package of the film in 2021 if you're a collector and or want that physical media.

Speaking of, I've never seen the sci-fi miniseries. Have you? Yeah, I watched the first one, and I've only seen bits and pieces of the follow-up where they adapted Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. And I remember it being lavish. It has some very great costumes. It has a lot of good casting.

And some great casting in places. So as we proceed, I'll at times refer to alternate castings for some of these characters and which ones I like, which ones I didn't. And they did nail it, at least on a couple of the castings. So it's, I don't know how the effects hold up, but the costumes are great and some of the performances are nice. I've never seen it. And in saying this, I don't want to malign it. Maybe it's better than it.

looks, but in some screenshots or stills I've seen from it, it does kind of have that made for TV look. Yeah. Yeah. Or almost kind of like a film stage production sort of a thing. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

One more thing I want to quickly add about this version of the film that we're watching today. Again, I was kind of a book first fan. And I remember the first time that I bought a copy of Dune at the, I think it was at a Books a Million. So it wasn't like a nice cozy local bookstore. It was one of the big warehouse bookstores. But the cashier was so excited when I brought up the book. And she was like, oh, you are going to love this. This is a great novel. This is one of the best books.

And she explained to me that she and her husband were huge fans of Dune and they were such huge fans that they would watch David Lynch's Dune or at that time it was just the movie. It was the only movie version out. They would watch the movie version every night as they went to sleep.

Every night, this film. And so I think from an early age, despite the criticisms and rejections of this film that were already out there, it's like I knew it's like this lady and her husband love this film and they love the book. So it can't be too far off base. And therefore, I think I've always been more than a little willing to invite aspects of this film and its look and its sound into my head version of Dune.

That is fascinating. So literally, as you said, as they go to sleep, so they're like drifting off to the sounds of like Baron Harkonnen's doctor singing love songs to his boils as he's poking them with a needle. Yeah. Or Baron Harkonnen like just laughing maniacally and floating around the room. Yeah. Yeah.

It's their lullaby. I hope they're still doing it. I hope they're still together and they're still watching David Lynch's Dune every night. My bear and I love your precious diseases. There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anabase sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

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All right. Well, let's start getting into the connections here. We're going to tackle everything a little differently here. So, you know, first of all, on some of these, we're going to try and maybe spend a little less time with them just because we have such a huge cast to go through. And additionally, we're going to talk a little bit about the

We're not going to just divide the episode like normal. We're not going to do like just connections, just cast and crew in this episode and then plot in the next. We're going to run through like a few key behind the scenes individuals. And then we're going to get into the plot and then talk about the key actors as they appear in the narrative. Okay. I think that is a good approach for a two-part Weird House episode. Yeah, yeah. We labored over this a little bit and this is what we came up with. Okay. Yeah.

Alright, let's start at the top. Yeah, the director, also the writer, the adapted screenplay on this one is, of course, David Lynch, born 1946. Now, I'm going to have to defer to you, Joe, on some of the details of David Lynch's filmography and certainly about the texture of what a Lynchian film is because I haven't seen as many David Lynch films. I've basically just seen his

his Dune. I've seen Eraserhead and I've seen Mulholland Drive, but that leaves out a number of like huge films that are highly influential in his sort of like neo-noir, weird aesthetic. I think if you've seen Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, you have a pretty good idea of what some of his dominant themes are, but we'll come back to that. All right. Now,

At this point in his career, this was Lynch's third full-length motion picture, following the ultra-weird Eraserhead in 1977, and this was more in keeping with a lot of his previous short films, and 1980's The Elephant Man.

You know, I think I also have seen The Elephant Man, but I'm not sure if I've seen The Elephant Man in full. I've at least seen enough of it to know what it's about. That, at least, was a box office and critical hit. Yeah, I actually haven't seen The Elephant Man. I've meant to for years. I know it's a widely revered movie. People say it's great. I have seen Eraserhead. Eraserhead is...

It's funny to contrast that with Dune because Eraserhead is only barely a narrative film. It is much more like a, uh, uh, what is sort of a, uh, an art horror film. I would almost say it is a, uh, a film about, uh, images and feelings. And the, I would say the main emotion that it conveys is, uh, fear and desperation. Yeah. It's a feel good hit for sure. Yeah.

So at this point in David Lynch's career, he was like a hot up and comer, you know, at the time he was even discussed as a potential director for Return of the Jedi. So a lot of big producers were eyeing this guy as, you know, as they still do today, you know, hot new director. And then in comes a producer in this case, like Dino De Laurentiis.

who's come up on the show multiple times before, you know, major producer of the time period, putting together such epics as Flash Gordon, which we recently talked about on the show. And he was definitely the kind of guy who was attracted to talent. Like, he wanted to bring in someone that had vision, but would also, of course, fall in line and play the studio game. Yes. So I think this was not a match made in heaven with David Lynch. Yeah.

Yeah, it ended up not to be the case. I don't know. I mean, we have this film, which is such a joy to watch and discuss. And this is the trajectory we're on. We can't go back and change it. But yeah, while this vision of Dune eventually earned a cult following, it was a commercial and critical disaster at the time. Considered, again, by many to be just an incomprehensible mess. You look back at what Ebert said about it. Everyone was just like, this is awful. Tunt, tunt.

Yeah, tons of critics at the time said it was impossible to follow the plot, that it was super confusing. They didn't know what was going on. People thought it was weird and unpleasant. People thought that it looked...

despite the fact that it was an incredibly big budget production, like huge, you know, and you can see it in some of the like gorgeous lavishly realized sets and costumes and all that. Yeah. People did single out that there were parts of it that looked cheap. And I actually do kind of agree. There are like most of the, the design in it does look amazing, but there are some weird shots that look kind of slapped together in there and don't know where that comes from.

Just generally, critics were very, very harsh about it. It made a lot of like worst movie of the year lists and things like that. Yeah, yeah. And again, we can't keep all of this on Lynch. The novel is a lot to tackle. There were a lot of cooks he had to deal with here. His initial initial cut of the film apparently came in at over three hours and was eventually cut down. But the producers and because the producers in the studio wanted more of like a two hour cut. You know, they're like people need to be able to go to the bathroom again.

You know, this is good. We want it to be successful. And this is what you need to have for success. Yeah, they wanted a big commercial hit. They wanted something like Star Wars and something that would be a big sci-fi movie that made a lot of money. And, you know, you make a three hour movie at the time. The thinking was nobody's going to want to see that. They don't want to sit there that long. That's it's a bunch of artsy fartsy stuff. Just, you know, cut it down. Just get get get to the action.

Yeah. Now for context, Denny V's combined Dune adaptation, the recent adaptations, come in at more than five hours in length total. That sci-fi miniseries adaptation is more than four hours in length if you're just dealing with the initial cut. Yeah.

Yeah. So there's a lot of story to cram in and it's, it's amazing what this movie does with in the end, what is like two and a half hours or so. Yeah. Yeah. So numerous cuts were made. New scenes were apparently filmed. Whole scenes were just cut entirely or there, there are various points in the film where they're clearly, you're having a character briefly remember a scene that clearly had to be cut or they're just shoehorning just a clip of that scene in. So you see, you see the seams.

in this final theatrical cut of David Lynch's Dune. He has long considered the film a failure and

He generally opts not to discuss it in interviews. He disowned the extended TV premiere of the film and has long dismissed the idea of doing a director's cut. At least I've read until very recently. Now, I don't know if he just happened to be in a really good mood in some of these interviews, but I've read that he was like, you know, maybe it's been enough time. Maybe I could look back at it and see if there's anything that I could piece back together. But I don't know. It doesn't sound like we should necessarily get our hopes up.

Yeah, I'd be interested to see that. But I remember reading that David Lynch not only considered the movie a failure, he was extremely upset by the process of making this film and the way the producers tampered with and in his view, I think, sabotaged his vision for it. And he believed this to the extent that he said he wished he had never taken the project at all. Like speaking to an interviewer years later,

He said, quote, The experience has taught me a valuable lesson. I learned I would rather not make a film than make one where I don't have final cut. Well, you know, I think it might have ultimately been the terrible purpose that that he had to face. Right. He had not directed this film. What if someone had made a far worse version of Dune? Because you read the reviews and it's like, oh, it couldn't have been worse. Oh, it could have been worse.

Oh, yeah. Oh, there were there were undoubtedly worse options out there. So, yeah, we would just been a bit on an entirely different trajectory with science fiction and with adaptations of Doom. Well, yeah, I mean, I think I would have a hard time disagreeing with somebody who said that this

movie in a sense fails to be a great adaptation of the novel Dune that there's a lot of things about the book that it kind of misses other things that it does get in there but it just kind of like

crams in in a way that doesn't, doesn't really work, but it is, there is a lot to love about it. And a lot of what there is to love about it is just like the way it is realized as a kind of David Lynch vision. There's so much like weirdness, even things that are not in the books at all that are just brought in that make it a very enjoyable movie experience, at least for me, maybe not so much for critics at the time. But one of the other things that,

I wanted to mention about Lynch's terrible experience with the version of this movie that was released. Despite his extreme dissatisfaction with how Dune turned out, doing this movie, from what I've read, sort of set Lynch up to be able to make the kinds of movies and TV that he would go on to create later, the kinds of things that he's celebrated for now. And I think he is also personally more proud of things like Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive and all that.

So I think it's very interesting. Like, I strongly sympathize with Lynch's point of view about Dune. It is terrible to, in one sense, be like,

Absolutely. Yeah.

It's really difficult to imagine where David Lynch's career would have gone had he not taken Dune. Outside of where Dune in science fiction would have gone, what would his career have consisted of? What would his next project have been? And or what, like if he had not taken Dune on as sort of the big...

I don't know, arguably sellout project before moving on with the rest of his career. What would it have been? What were some of the other... What if he'd taken Return of the Jedi instead? What kind of world would we live in today as far as Star Wars and as far as David Lynch are concerned? I'm not saying Return of the Jedi would have been better under his direction. I don't know. But I would like to see that movie. Oh, man. Those Ewoks. How weird would those Ewoks have been?

Talking backwards Ewoks, walking backwards Ewoks. So anyway, so you asked me to kind of fill in more thoughts about the texture of David Lynch movies. And I wanted to start off by characterizing my relationship with David Lynch's work by contrast. So there are a lot of movies, you know, big example that comes to mind today are like the superhero movies that I watch on airplanes that feel designed to me as

to be as frictionless and entertainment experience as possible. So they are pleasant and enjoyable for the time I'm watching them. I don't hate them. They're, you know, they're fun. Um,

There's nothing to really jar or unsettle the viewer, nothing to cause doubts or reflection or make you wonder, why am I seeing this? It all just kind of it all flows. It makes sense. It goes down smooth. And then I forget about it and possibly never think about it again. My history of experiences with David Lynch movies are exactly the opposite. Frequently, I have had the experience of watching a movie by David Lynch.

Finding something full of strange and disturbing imagery that made me feel uneasy and to quote the Reverend Mother, profoundly stirred. Initially deciding after the movie's over that I did not like it. But then thinking about elements of it over and over in the months or years that followed until I felt like I had to go back and see it again. And then when I did, finally deciding that I loved it.

So David Lynch movies are full of scenes, scenes and images that do not go down smooth. They do not flow with the logic of standard entertainment storytelling. To use like a musical analogy, there are a lot of motifs that use notes from out of the song's key.

And yet they end up producing something that is very memorable and feels very true and revealing, almost kind of ancient. A metaphor I've thought of before is that

I feel like when I'm watching a David Lynch movie, it's like somebody is showing me a film of a bad dream I had 20 years ago and completely forgot about. And now it is only vaguely familiar in a way that makes me uncomfortable because like I realized somebody put a movie camera in my subconscious. It's a really powerful artistic sensibility that can create a feeling like that, that like I'm seeing something that is at the same time

very strange and disturbing, but also very familiar in a way that's hard to identify. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. There's a particular scene in Mulholland Drive like this, and I'm not going to spoil it, but anyone who's seen it probably knows which kind of terrifying moment I'm talking about. Oh, yeah, yeah, I think I know. Well, there's one sudden, absolutely terrifying moment in the movie, but there's a lot in that movie that's just...

meaningfully ominous, you know, conversations people have that almost kind of like remind you of something. It's like, what, what are they talking about? This, this connects to something, but it's hard to put it together. Yeah. So I wanted to run through some themes that come up a lot in David, David's

David Lynch movies because specifically in the context of Dune, Dune is often considered an outlier in Lynch's filmography. It's not like the rest of his work. And of course, he didn't write the original underlying story. But I was trying to think if any of these favorite themes of his are in any way hinted at in Dune through his interpretation of the narrative. I'm not sure if any of them are, but we'll see.

So things that come up in a lot of Lynch movies, people in places that seem wholesome and clean on the surface, but hide horrible secrets.

Hmm. Well, maybe not so much with this film. Yeah. It doesn't really seem all that wholesome on the surface, does it? No, no. Most of the unwholesome characters are unwholesome on the surface by definition, like intensely so, as we'll discuss. Another thing is people who can't remember something important or something important that happened to them or something important they know and they can't put it together. I guess we see kind of shades of that in this, however, you know, distantly echoed.

Mm hmm.

Sometimes this will be a character with a split personality, other times a character literally changing bodily into another person or not knowing which person they are. Lynch is really obsessed with doubles. Well, you know, not so much of that in this film, but it's this is a case where it's a shame he didn't get to make a sequel.

Oh, man. Yeah. Wait, which plot element from the sequels are you calling out there? I mean, there are a couple. I mean, you have the goulas, the essentially clones, specifically of Duncan Idaho. And then you also have the face dancers. So you have a few different possibilities there where he could have leaned into it. And certainly given his...

how he weirds up some of the already weird elements in this film, you could imagine him having some fun with these concepts. Yeah, yeah. And from what I recall, I think I read that David Lynch did love the source material. Like, he read the novel or possibly multiple novels and was like, yes, I'm on board. I love this. Yeah, I've never seen anything where he was, he, like, even retroactively trashed the novel and said, like, I didn't like it and I didn't want to adapt it. Like, you know, he says that he loved it. He found things in it that...

that exhilarated him. And I, and I think that shines through in his script. Uh, if, if, even if it occurs at times in a way that are perhaps detrimental to the film, like, you know, it inspired him. It was not something where he's like, okay, I just need to, I need to hit this because it's in the novel. It's like, no, it gave him ideas. Hmm.

Okay, other Lynchian themes. Kind of reversals of reality. This would be the kind of setting equivalent of the doppelganger principle, where there will be kind of a mirror world or a world above and a world below. Yeah, maybe not so much. I guess you could make an argument for Galadin and Arrakis being kind of mirror worlds in a way. I can see that. Characters who...

like suddenly realize they are responsible for something bad happening and had been oblivious to their responsibility. Yeah, maybe not so much here, but there could have been room for it, would have been room for it to have the series continued. Right. A way that David Lynch approaches violence, I think is interesting. He uses violence that is in its physical form,

running against the grain of cinematic conventions. So people who, you know, get shot in a movie often look a certain way. Lynch seems to go out of his way to make violence look strange, kind of alien to everyday life.

almost bordering on comedic sometimes, but in a way that makes it even more shocking and unpleasant, like showing people's bodies reacting to violence in unexpected ways. I just think of one example from the movie Blue Velvet. There is a bizarre and haunting image of a man who has been shot in the head and apparently killed, but remains standing up, kind of swaying in a daze between life and death. I think we definitely see elements of this in Dune.

Yeah. Another thing is a kind of aesthetic affinity for the 1950s running through his work. Oh, there's like a rockabilly, leave it to beaver, gee golly sensibility, which of course is always put in startling contrast to like the warlock logic nightmare imagery and the violence.

Well, obviously not this one, really. But yeah, I guess that is a theme of his work. Oh, I don't know. I wonder if I see a little bit of Elvis. I see a little bit of Elvis-iness in Dune here. There's like the pompadour hair. We see some of that. Like Lady Jessica's haircut feels kind of Elvis-y. I don't know. There's some of the outfits feel... I think I'm reaching here. I'm trying. Yeah.

there's a peculiar technical thing that David Lynch does that I think does come through in Dune. I wanted to call this out. This is Lynch's use of sound design to create a mood. And I specifically, I mean, not music though. He does use music well in his movies and, and we can get to the music in Dune in a minute, which I think has, has highs and lows, but the highs are great. Yeah. Um,

Lynch specifically uses ambient sound in a way that has a powerful effect on the feelings of the viewer, specifically sound missing from scenes where it should be or strange sounds in scenes where they should not be. So as an example of each, like imagine...

A scene at a party, which is silent and there's no background noise and the chatter and the music and everything is removed and it's unsettlingly silent. Or maybe imagine a bedroom with inappropriate sounds of machinery and steam venting and things like that.

There's a scene I shared with you, Rob, from the movie Lost Highway, where Bill Pullman's at a party. It's a famously creepy scene. Bill Pullman's at a party and a guy, a mysterious stranger comes up to him and starts telling him that he actually a double of him, that he's in two places at once and that he is in Bill Pullman's house at that moment. And that's,

The way sound is manipulated in the scene, like the sound of the party drops out as the two of them start talking and it creates a really focused dreamlike effect that heightens the horror.

Yeah, I had never I haven't seen this film in full before and I had not seen this this sequence. But this is great. Yeah. Where we have this uncle festerized Robert Blake character with no eyebrows come up to Bill Pullman and just start talking like the craziest stuff to him. And and and during it, the sound is dropped out and become this it's become this ambient drone sound.

That is just so creepy and creates this sense of unreality. You know, like this is like a cross-dimensional stranger that has that is like freezing time as they talk to you, that sort of thing.

That's a great way of putting it. And and I think does Lynch use any of that kind of sound design technique in Dune? I think a little bit. It's not as overt as it is like in Lost Highway, but there is a little bit of it. It reminds me a little bit of how you have to be sort of even handed perhaps to when you're dealing with overtly sci fi elements. Yeah.

and then potentially using sci-fi design or illusions. I don't know. I think about how many times Coren McCarthy in his books will compare something mundane or Western to something arcane and mythical and bloody and hellish in a way that you couldn't really get away with if you were, say, writing about something that was overtly bloody, hellish, or mythic and

Yeah. Yeah. It's like the contextual inappropriateness that makes it striking and profound. Yeah. So anyway, I guess we can think more as we go along about to what extent Dune feels like a David Lynch movie or does feel, as some reviewers have said, like an outlier that's not like the rest of his work.

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There are places on Earth where science and mystery collide, and Skinwalker Ranch is one of the most fascinating examples.

In the newest season of the History Channel's The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, the team, made up of experienced scientists and engineers, is literally digging into the unknown to get to the bottom of a mysterious material discovered inside the mesa. This goes far beyond folklore. We're talking actual physical evidence that defies everything we know about geology, physics, maybe even reality itself.

If you're drawn to the edges of scientific discovery beyond the world of what we think we know, this season is going to fascinate you. Just how deep does the truth lie? Find out on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. New season premieres tomorrow at 8, 7 central, only on the History Channel. Today's episode is brought to you by USPS.

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All right. We have to, of course, mention the source material here. It is, of course, the novel by Frank Herbert, who lived 1920 through 1986. Legendary American sci-fi author whose earliest short stories date back to the mid-40s and his first sci-fi stories to the early 50s, I believe. His first novel, 1956's The Dragon in the Sea, is a near-future submarine tale. He

He began research on Dune in 1959 and following serial publication in Analog magazine, it published in 1965 after numerous rejections. This is another one of those films, another one of those books rather, that is often held up is like, oh, look at all the rejections it got. And then it, you know, it became the most successful and influential sci-fi novel of all time, pretty much.

It seems like almost every really great novel, people initially have the reaction of, I don't know how to market this. Yeah. Yeah. It's because it's not going to be the next whatever. It's going to be Dune. And we see that reflected in some of the films, too. You know, it's like even with this one, they're like, we need the next Star Wars. Bring up the Dune. Well, you know, Dune may have inspired partially inspired Star Wars, but it's not Star Wars. It's not going to hit the same. Mm hmm.

So Herbert followed Dune up with numerous standalone novels, two other series, but the Dune saga remains his most well-known work. Dune Messiah followed in 69, Children of Dune in 76, God Emperor of Dune in 81, Heretics of Dune in 84, and Chapter House Dune in 85.

Herbert died in 86 before he could write the seventh and what was supposed to be the final book in the series. His son, Brian Herbert, and author Kevin J. Anderson would eventually continue writing stories set in the Dune universe, including their version of an ending to the original saga. Mm hmm.

And like we said, there have been various attempts to adapt these books, especially the first book, to the screen. There was the Jodorowsky attempt in the mid-70s. There was even an earlier early 70s attempt that may have even had David Lean attached at one point to direct. But I don't think that went anywhere. And then when Dino De Laurentiis got the rights, he was working with Ridley Scott initially. And like that happened.

That was like in pre-production for a little bit before Scott had to sign off, I think for like personal reasons. I think there'd been a death in his family. But also they were perhaps butting heads a little bit, weren't like getting to where they they thought they needed to creatively on the project.

You know, I had some notes here about what we already talked about earlier, about just the difficulty, the inherent difficulty of adapting Dune to the screen, because it's just not written in a way that naturally translates to the screen. I mean, some scenes do, you know, scenes with the sandworms and all that is very cinematic. But as we talked about earlier, so much of the book is either

contextual about the broader setting in the world in a way that's like hard to fit into a movie without a lot of heavy exposition or it's internal people's internal monologues and struggles in a way that's difficult to do without you know having these internal voice narrations which don't work great in this movie and in a way I think that really should

be like that difficulty should be to the credit of what these filmmakers have done with it. That I think Lynch did a better job than should have been expected. And then the new movies or the one I've seen at least, and I, from what I've heard that the new one as well, Denis Villeneuve's adaptation really exceeded all my expectations in adapting this, that they found the,

clever ways to illustrate the world and fill in a lot of this internal and contextual detail without it just feeling like you're getting tons of narrative exposition all the time. Yeah, and finding smart ways to sort of narrow in and focus on particular things like, you know, the plotting behind the fall of House Atreides has a number of players in it. And Denis V's adaptations tend to lean more on the Bene Gesserit's

while Lynch's adaptation leans more on the space and guilt, you know, they're both players in what happens. Uh, but ultimately you have to make some choices on the screen. And what are you going to focus on this actually? Well, I'll save this for the, uh, for when we get into the plot, but I am curious what you think of the way Lynch's movie really explains everything right at the top. Oh God. There's so much world create. Like he goes ahead and mentions X. Yeah.

Yeah. He's mentioning planets and factions that are not going to really become important until later on in the series. And, you know, and sequels that did not come to fruition. Oh, that's true. Also, I mean, explains everything about the conspiracy against. Oh, yeah. It just like leaves nothing to be to be revealed or discovered, essentially, except for.

The only thing I think is like who the traitor in House of Traities is everything else is like told right up top. Here's the conspiracy. Here's what they're going to do. Yeah, not just to the viewer, but like the characters. No, like Paul knows he's like, I figured it out. Yeah, I it's been a while since I've read the book, but I don't remember all of that being revealed up front. I remember that being a thing that you discover as you go through the story.

Yeah, I think that's correct. But then again, it's been a couple of years since I reread Dune. And, you know, not all the details stick with me. But again, that's the joy of rereading books. You get to forget a little bit, you come back in, slightly new experience each time. That is nice.

Now, we're going to hit a few more behind the scenes individuals here, as we often mention, especially on big, lavish productions like this. We can't possibly mention everybody that had a role in making this film what it was, even major players. As with the adaptation of Dune, you have to look at the conspirators and just focus on a few. And so I do want to call out that cinematographer Freddie Francis worked on this.

He lived 1917 through 2007, British director and cinematographer with extensive credits in the horror and sci-fi genre, including 63's The Day of the Triffids, 64's The Evil of Frankenstein, the 1972 Tales from the Crypt movie, and one of his later works was 1987's Dark Tower, replacing Shockwave's director, Ken Whitehorn, during production. Dark Tower. That's not Stephen King, is it? No, no connection to Stephen King. Okay.

It does have a connection to Shockwaves, which we covered on the show in the past. As a cinematographer, Francis had worked with Lynch on The Elephant Man and worked with him again later in 1999 on The Straight Story. Other credits include Return to Oz, which we've talked about on the show, and two films for which he won an Academy Award, 1961's Sons and Lovers and 1990's Glory. Let me tell you something. I didn't put this together until just now, but I...

But I think there is a lot of shared visual, uh,

genetic material between return to oz and david lynch's dune do you see that with the sets and the there's something about the the sets and the costumes and the way the film looks that there's a great similarity there yeah yeah i know what you mean kind of like this sort of baroque weirdness uh i don't know a lot of kind of gold and jade things uh yeah very baroque like you say um

There is a mix of things that look scary and things that look funny all jumbled together. Yeah, I think it's a good connection.

Now, again, a lot of people went into the visuals on this film and the effects and so forth, but I do have to call out Carlo Rambaldi, sometimes credited just as Rambaldi. He has creature creator credits on this, and I bet everyone knows what creature we're talking about. We're talking about the Guild Navigator. Oh, I thought you were going to say the Sandworm, but here we go. Well, you know, that's right. There is the Sandworm. I bet he worked on both of them. I believe I've read he worked on the Guild Navigator, but I bet he was in on the Sandworm as well. Okay.

So, yeah, he lived 1925 through 2012. Legendary effects master who worked on films such as Planet of the Vampires, E.T., Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Barbarella. Oh, man. And finally, we have to talk about the music for David Lynch's Dune. The score...

is by Toto. Yep. The American rock jazz fusion band, best known for such late seventies and early eighties hits as Africa, hold the line and Rosanna. Joe, uh, is rock jazz fusion, uh, the, the correct descriptor for Toto genre. I, I've really struggled with this. Uh, I don't know that much about Toto other than like their singles and, and the role in the movie here. Uh,

I don't know how much jazz I hear, but like, I don't really know their whole, uh, discography. I would say that their hit songs sound to me just more like a rock band. Yeah. I've heard people make a case for prog rock with Toto. Uh, um,

But then also I have to say, like, their biggest hit, Africa, which I did a deep dive, a semi-deep dive. I waded in a little bit into the Toto filmography yesterday. And most of it is not for me. However, Africa is an all-time great. Like, Africa is a great track. And I think you could make a case for looping Africa in with the kind of like yacht rock kind of sound. Oh, yes. Yeah.

Yeah, it's I mean, it's very, very smooth, but it's a but it's a catchy song and it has, you know, people I think people would call it out for being cheesy, but it does have some transcendent melodies. Yeah, it's a great track. It is a cheesy track, but it's a great track. I have it saved to my phone in one of my playlists.

So Toto formed out of a collection of sessions musicians. And at the time of the recording of this score, the band consisted of Steve Lukather, David Posh, Steve Porcaro, Mike Porcaro, and Jeff Porcaro. Bobby Kimball, the vocalist had, I believe just left the band. And I'm not sure on the full story there, but at any rate, at this point, Toto had achieved some of their biggest hits, uh,

And they had never scored a motion picture before. And they have not scored a motion picture since.

You mentioned they were session musicians. I know Steve, however you say his last name, Lukather, Lukather, whatever that is. I know he worked on like a bunch of other big songs from artists you would recognize. Like he played the guitar on Beat It and stuff like that. Yeah, so they were very technically proficient and also obviously commercially proficient. They were a big deal at the time. They're not just coming out of nowhere to score Dune.

And yet this is a choice that has long confused me. You know, you can understand the desire on Dino De Laurentiis' part. Okay, we're going to take this mid-60s sci-fi tale, but we want

We want a hit. We want we want to connect with modern film viewers. We want it to be a mainstream crossover. And so you can understand why he might want something similar to what he did with Flash Gordon in 1980, bringing in Queen, even though that, of course, is the tone of that film is totally different from what they're going after in Den. I mean, Queen.

was perfect for flash Gordon. It's like, it is a perfect fit. As we were saying that, like the, that, that harmonized guitar sound that Brian may makes and the kind of, uh, can't be theatricality that queen was already doing on their studio albums just is flash Gordon. It's that perfect embodiment of the feeling of the film. And so, yeah, it couldn't be a better fit. Um,

Toto in this movie, I don't want to knock it again because there are elements of the soundtrack that I think do really work well, but I don't know if it fits quite the same way. Yeah. Yeah. Like Dino even apparently wanted Conan the Barbarian to have a rock and roll score, but John Milius was like, like, no, we're not doing that. This is what we're doing. And, you know, I think that was the correct choice. Conan the Barbarian score by the Scorpions. Yeah.

so i always kind of like assumed that like okay dino must have forced his hand here it's like bring in toto toto's popular let's have toto score it but i was reading uh in an article published on the thin air by stephen rainey titled what happens when you add toto to david lynch that dino actually wanted uh giorgio maroder uh for the gig maroder is

It's tremendous. He did the score for The NeverEnding Story, for example. According to Rainey, it was Lynch that pushed for Toto. I'm not sure exactly why. And, you know, Lynch doesn't talk about Dune much at all in any interviews. I've seen some members of Toto discuss it in some interviews, but it tends to just sound like, well, things just sort of came together. You know, we met and he thought we were right for it. And that's how it came to be.

Okay. I would not have expected that. We should have also point out that there is one track on the score, Prophecy Theme, in which Brian Eno and Daniel Linowis also contribute. And that, of course, is a great track as well.

Okay, folks, I just had to like pause recording here to go figure out which track that was and listen to it. And then it was like playing all these YouTube ads at me. But anyway, great theme. Yes, I agree. This is the one with the swelling synthesizer chords. And it's sort of the music from the hearts of space of this film. Yeah, yeah. Obviously, I love that track. Well, love Eno. Anything Eno touches, it's hard to find fault with. Yeah.

But I do want to stress the whole score is pretty solid on the whole and at times great. It is a legitimate film score that sometimes sounds very Toto slash Africa. But otherwise, it commits to tones and tempos that are cinematically informed and cinematically appropriate. For instance, Dune Desert Theme, that track feels very Toto and Africa inspired.

And is great in that sense. While the main title, you know, this is the bum, bum, bum, bum. It's more brooding and cinematic. It's a great track. Totally fits the film. My personal favorite aside from that is Robot Fight. This is when Paul was training early in the film. It's chonky. It's synthy. It's pulsing.

The box is also nice. And the floating fat man, that's the title of the track in parentheses, the Baron is a high energy synth organ number that I think would feel perfectly at home in virtually any Italian horror movie.

Yeah, there's a lot of great stuff in this score. A lot that I really like. I also really like the robot fight number. It's just got some, it's got some kind of percussion in it. It sounds sort of like wood blocks or something. Yeah. And that's a great one. This is the scene where Paul fights the stabbing robot and,

Yeah. But there are some parts of the score that I think don't work quite as well. And the parts that I think don't really work as well are the ones, the parts that sound more rock. It's not a great fit. Yeah, there's at least one point late in the film where Fremen are riding sandworms and you get like a guitar lick. And it's like a giggle a little bit. It was amazing, though. I'm glad I wouldn't want it any other way.

All in all, I'd say an effective and interesting score. You know, comparing it to the other films, you know, I have to say I'm a huge fan of Hans Zimmer's Dune scores. I think this is probably his best work. Not that I've listened to all of Hans Zimmer's scores because he scored some really uninteresting and awful movies at times. But yeah.

But we have to acknowledge his approach is altogether different. It's from a different era. So you can't really compare. You can't compare a Toto score to a Zimmer score. They're both great in their own way. Sorry, I'm just looking at what Hans Zimmer has scored now.

Oh, he did Twister. There's just a lot of stuff in there. It's like, I don't even want to check. Like, I doubt Twister has a great score. I'm sure it's effective. I'm sure it's fine, but I'm just not going to go listen to it. I'm sorry. It's not even that Twister. It's a different Twister that is also a movie about tornadoes. Oh, okay. They didn't adapt the board game or the floor game. Twister, the motion picture. Ah.

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There are places on Earth where science and mystery collide, and Skinwalker Ranch is one of the most fascinating examples.

In the newest season of the History Channel's The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, the team, made up of experienced scientists and engineers, is literally digging into the unknown to get to the bottom of a mysterious material discovered inside the mesa. This goes far beyond folklore. We're talking actual physical evidence that defies everything we know about geology, physics, maybe even reality itself.

If you're drawn to the edges of scientific discovery beyond the world of what we think we know, this season is going to fascinate you. Just how deep does the truth lie? Find out on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. New season premieres tomorrow at 8, 7 central, only on the History Channel. Today's episode is brought to you by USPS.

Business owners and shipping managers, let me ask you something. How confident are you in your shipping process? If you're not using USPS Ground Advantage service, you might not be as in the know as you could be. Here's the deal. With USPS Ground Advantage service, staying informed isn't just an option, it's the standard. Imagine this. When your shipment leaves the dock, you know about it. It's in transit, boom, you know. And when it reaches your customer, you guessed it, you're in the know again.

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Okay, what are we doing now? Are we going to go start talking about the plot and introduce some actors as we go along?

Yes, let us attempt to do this. Bear with us. We have not really done it this way before, but I think this is our best path forward. So say it, the Guild Navigators. Okay, well, the movie starts with, what do you want to guess? It's a sci-fi movie from the 80s. What do we open with? It's a star field. Kind of an overused convention, but we start looking at the stars.

And then we come in on the eyes, extreme close-up of the eyes of Virginia Madsen playing Princess Irulan.

Yeah, so she is part of House Carino. For modern fans of the more recent adaptations, she was not introduced as a character until Dune Part 2. Virginia Madsen, born 1961, Oscar-nominated actress for 2005, Sideways. And this is, I believe, her second or third credit. Dune is, not Sideways. She was in the 1983 comedy Class, as well as 1984's Electric Dreams.

Her subsequent credits include 91's Highlander 2 The Quickening. There you go. 92's Candyman. 1995's The Prophecy, the Christopher Walken angel one that we might get to at some point. And various other TV projects. Rob, are we going to do Highlander 2 The Quickening this year? We should. You know, we have that older Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode about Highlander 2 The Quickening, but it wasn't the Weird House approach. Right. So, you know, it doesn't really count. We could come back and do it.

I think the question for that would be, is there a way now to get our hands on a copy of the superior bad cut of the film as opposed to the inferior improved cut of the film? That's true. You know, last time we watched it, we had to watch a rip of the VHS or something like that. So that's what we need to do.

find out we need to find out if we have a good source material here they're trying to only make accessible the versions that take out all the good stuff and don't have you know sean connery waving the sword with the flashlight on him and stuff anyway virginia madsen who by the way is the sister of michael madsen um perfectly fine performance here uh though she doesn't get to do all that much um

I should know that Julie Cox and Florence Pugh have also played the role. And certainly in the more recent adaptation, this character gets to do a little bit more and will be even more important in the next Dune film. Yeah. So in this movie, because it's just an adaptation of the first novel, Princess Irresistible

Irulan's role is not huge within the plot, but it is huge within the film just because she does so much voiceover narration. Like she explains everything about the world to us. Yeah, she lays it on us and she's looking right at us and she's like weirdly conversational. She's like,

Oh, by the way, I totally forgot to mention this other thing. Like she gets into some, into an important plot point. Wait, so I feel like I should just actually read her opening narration so you can get a sense of it because, uh, it feel like you can feel everything just raining down on you.

So she says, a beginning is a very delicate time. Know then that it is the year 10,191. The known universe is ruled by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, my father. In this time, the most precious substance in the universe is the spice melange.

The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the spice has mutated over 4,000 years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space. That is, travel to any part of the universe without moving. Oh yes, I forgot to tell you. She does say that.

The spice exists on only one planet in the entire universe, a desolate, dry planet with vast deserts. Hidden away within the rocks of these deserts are a people known as the Fremen, who have long held a prophecy that a man would come, a messiah who would lead them to true freedom. The planet is Arrakis, also known as Dune.

Now, this should bring us back to what we were talking about earlier, that audiences at the time quite famously complained that this movie was incomprehensible, that they could not follow the plot. I'm at a point where I'm so familiar with the world and the story that I don't really trust myself to assess what this movie would be like to someone who came in cold. But just like trying to be objective and look at this opening narration in isolation, I

Despite it being fairly straightforward, like everything is phrased in a very clear to understand way, I

I think it could still leave a newcomer feeling kind of overwhelmed because it's just piling so much on you before any of it means anything. I think a better way to develop this sort of thing is to give you a little bit of exposition and then show you some story to allow that exposition to kind of like materialize and be connected to characters that you care about.

And then once you have characters that you care about, you can start learning more about the premise and the setting and all that. And at that point, it'll feel like it's meaningful. With just all this opening narration, we haven't even met anybody else. It just kind of washes over you. And I think you would probably forget a lot of it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's also fascinating, but everything you, you know, springing off of everything you just said, like the intro itself begins with a beginning is a very delicate time. And, you know, you can't help but think about that in terms of the storytelling. Like this is a delicate point in the movie. We are easing you into a complex, rich universe, and we have to give you some information, but we don't want to give you too much information. Um,

And therefore, yeah, it is very delicate. It's a very delicate point. I mean, it makes sense that Princess Irulan would be the one telling us this because it's her historical writings that often preface various Dune chapters in the novel. And, you know, it's probably the better choice as opposed to the extended prologue that I imagine was cut and then ends up

reappearing on those disavowed extended TV versions where you have a bunch of like production stills of various factions and characters and then a lot of additional narration about the different factions. But that prologue is still pretty fun. You can find it on YouTube and stuff. And also, I'm sure, in DVD extras. It's amusing. Yeah, I haven't seen that. I would like to. I'd like to see what they could have done with it.

Another thing you pointed out is that she gets conversational in this, but I think there is a strange mix of tones. So like one sentence in this opening narration is, know then that it is the year 10,191. That's almost like a biblical kind of phrasing, know then that it is. But then she also says, oh yes, I forgot to tell you. It's like the voice doesn't feel very consistent. Yeah.

Yeah, it's ultimately a weird start to a weird film. So the title and credits play out over images of wind sweeping sand from the dunes of the lifeless desert. We get that heavy brooding dune theme. You know, it's very it's very.

dark and, you know, it feels like bad things are coming. Then we get more narration straight into more of an unknown voice talking to you. I think this is a member of the Spacing Guild. We see the Spacing Guild logo, I think, in this sequence, which is great. Yeah, it's like the three planetary spheres connected by a line, like a horizontal line. It's great. I don't think I'd ever really paid it much attention before, but now I love it.

So this narrator says a secret report within the guild that

Four planets have come to our attention regarding a plot which could jeopardize spice production. Planet Arrakis, source of the spice. Planet Caladan, home of House Atreides. Planet Gidi Prime, home of House Harkonnen. Planet Ketan, home of the Emperor of the Known Universe. Send a third-stage guild navigator to Ketan to demand details from the Emperor. The spice must flow.

So hitting you again with like a lot of factions and stuff before we've met a single person. Yeah. Anyway, we see a giant ship landing on the surface of Catan in front of a kind of industrial palace in the night. Catan appears to be a very urbanized planet with brightly lit city skylines in the background. This, I guess, is sort of the imperial capital planet. Hmm.

And strange figures are seen disembarking from the ship. We see pale skin, bald heads, some people in full environment suits, all in shiny black clothing that seems somewhere between a monk's robe and like a hazmat barrier. Yeah, yeah. Everything is very...

industrial slash regal, uh, you know, in a very fitting way, you know, and, uh, and the members of the guild that even we've seen so far have a very sickly power, you know, and they're kind of like oozing in places and so forth. This idea that, you know, they're, you know, rightfully, um,

spice junkies to some extent and or the rigors of spice use and or interplanetary interstellar travel have taken a toll on their bodies. One thing I really like about the design of this movie, and I think to some extent this is carried over even into Denis Villeneuve's adaptation, is the like the costume designs and stuff that appear to mix the

Influences of industrial technology and influences of like high church and religion. A lot of characters and the ways they're dressed and their environments look like a cross between, you know, like monks and priests and cathedrals of the Middle Ages and also people working in a in a factory that produces hazardous chemicals. Right.

Yeah, this is an aesthetic that fans of Warhammer 40,000 are very familiar with. And I think you can rightfully wonder to what extent that aesthetic would be present in Warhammer 40,000 without this adaptation with Dune. And I think you can rightfully wonder if Warhammer 40,000 would exist at all in any recognizable form if it had not been for the influence of Dune itself. Yeah.

So we see inside the emperor's palace next where everything is green and gold with these pale milky jade floors and gold walls with columns bearing a kind of this texture that looks like perforated wasp nest.

You know, it has these tubes and columns. And so we see courtiers milling about everywhere, also dressed in black. So the women in the palace are dressed like mourners in black dresses and black veils, old men in black military uniforms, imperial dog walkers leading packs of bulldogs around. Yeah.

Most of the courtiers leave the throne room as the guild navigator approaches. And we see the emperor conferring anxiously with an advisor, a woman named Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohium. And he tells her that he wishes her to read the guild navigator's mind and present a report after she leaves. Then she professes loyalty to the emperor and says that she is his truth sayer.

Now, this will be the first of many characters introduced to have some level of psychic power. Some characters in Dune have psychic clairvoyance, like a kind of foreknowledge and ability to engage in remote viewing and see what's happening elsewhere or to see into the future. Other characters have the ability to read people's minds. And it's kind of like this to some extent in the book as well. These various types of psychic powers are present here.

Um, though I do kind of sympathize with, uh, some critics at the time when this came out said like, uh, a lot of characters in this movie are psychic. I wish we were psychic so we could understand the plot. You know, that's kind of an, maybe an unfair jab, but I do see a point they're making that like,

Who has what psychic powers and why is not exactly clear. And so you don't know what kinds of knowledge different characters have access to, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Like...

This adaptation is very concerned with you knowing what breeds of dogs are important to which houses. Maybe it's a little shakier on who has what form of psychic power. But anyway, so she's there. We should talk about these two actors, though. Oh, wait, I'm sorry. Yes, the Emperor and the Reverend Mother. Both, I think, great performances in both cases. Yeah, yeah. So as the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, we have José Ferrer,

who lived 1912 through 1992. Puerto Rican actor and film director best known for such films as 1950's Cyrano de Bergerac, a film for which he was the first Hispanic actor to win an Academy Award.

He was also in 54 as the Kane Mutiny. But his filmography, like a lot of folks, ultimately includes everything, you know, across the spectrum from 1962's Lawrence of Arabia to 1977's The Sentinel and Zoltan, Hound of Dracula, a.k.a. Dracula's dog. Oh, boy. I like Jose Ferrer's approach to this role, which is kind of.

unassuming like he plays this character in a different way than you might expect you might expect the emperor to have a more imposing presence and to be more to be more dominant and commanding but instead he plays this character like a careful politician someone who is who is clever and circumspect and trying to carefully manage his his relationships and allegiances and

Yeah, I think that's a good read. Uh, there are a few scenes where I feel like he comes up a little bit befuddled. Yeah. I'm not sure to what extent that was intended or if it's like, I don't know what these lines mean, but I would imagine it's, it's more on the intended scale because yeah, this was a great actor. Um,

We've talked about his son, Miguel Ferrer, before because he was, of course, in Robocop and he was the uncle of George Clooney. Miguel Ferrer was great at a lot of 80s movies, just like playing jerks. Yeah.

Now, real quick, I will mention that this is a character that has also been played by Giancarlo Giannini. That was in the miniseries and more recently by Christopher Walken in Denny V's adaptations. I need to see Dune Part Two once more before I fully make up my mind on Christopher Walken's performance. Okay.

All right. And the other character, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, is played by Sean Phillips, born 1933. So, again, not a member of House Carino, but she is the emperor's truth sayer. She is a member of the Bene Gesserit Order. We've talked about Phillips before because she played Cassiopeia in 1981's Clash of the Titans. And she played the Night Witch Charal in Ewoks, the Battle for Endor.

Oh, I forgot about those connections, but she is wonderful in this role. This, this is another character who, you know, kind of like the emperor in both cases, you

at first is shown to be a, you know, just a character of kind of mystery and power. You're wondering, like, what is their power and what are they trying to do? But ultimately is revealed to kind of be a politician. Like she's managing relationships between different factions. She's trying to to keep the balance of power and keep her plans on track.

And I think she does a great job with this role. Yeah, yeah. The Bene Gesserits are masterful politicians and masterful manipulators. And I think that comes out more in the recent adaptations than it does here, perhaps. But

Because, again, you know, one film focuses more on the guild and the other films focus more on on the Bene Gesserits. But I have to say, as far as Sean Phillips presence and her and her acting go, I always loved her in this role. Her costuming and hairstyling is just absolutely on point. And she brings just wonderful energy to the role. I'm hard pressed to pick a favorite character.

Reverend Mother here across the various adaptations because Charlotte Rampling is also great in recent films. Oh, yes, yes.

All right, well, let's dive back into the scene. Okay, so we have here the emperor and the reverend mother. And then the giant golden doors to the emperor's throne room peel apart into recesses. And here comes the guild navigator. But at first, we do not see the guild navigator in bodily form. We just see...

A giant black cylinder venting out these blasts of steam. It looks like a solid iron locomotive rolling along the floor, approaching the throne, flanked by all these weird monks in black. And I love this approach. It's just like, what is this object?

Yeah, the absolute weirdness and grandeur of this sequence cannot be overstated. While we never meet a guild navigator or a guild steersman in the first Dune novel, they do become important later on. There's an important character that is a guild navigator in Dune Messiah.

But this sequence in this film does a great job of just setting the bizarre tone for the rest of the film. You know, intrigue, Baroque splendor, grotesqueness and a lingering sense of confusion.

So, yeah, I absolutely love it. So as you say, this scene is not in the first novel. We never meet this weird character in the first novel. We're about to explain how weird he looks. So this is like purely a I guess I don't know for sure whose choice it was, but it seems like a David Lynch choice to just make this movie monotonous.

much weirder than it had to be right at the beginning. Yeah, because to be clear, the new adaptations have no guild navigators in them. We briefly see the spacing guild in Dune Part 1, but we certainly never see a guild navigator.

So, yeah, these monks approach with this giant black train, essentially. One of the monks picks up a weird-looking microphone and starts speaking into it with this inhuman language, and it translates to...

The Bene Gesserit witch must leave. So the emperor bids her leave. The reverend mother has to go to the other room. She does. When they are alone with the emperor, wheels begin to turn on the front of the locomotive and metal doors are unlocking. And then the dark panels on the front of this huge object spread apart and they reveal inside a giant tank, almost like a fish tank. But it is filled with oil.

orange smoke occupied by a gigantic octopus like creature and this is the guild navigator it's someone who i think the the lore is that this is somebody who was once human in form but was mutated through it through their extreme use of the spice melange

Yeah, essentially. And in the novels, they're kind of described more as like taking the form ultimately of like a fish man. Like that's that's the form that they have mutated into. Yeah.

In this, they go in a more almost kind of like embryonic direction. The creature is stranger, even stranger to behold. And it is it is glorious. It is it is an unforgettable visual aspect of the motion picture. And it's just, again, brilliantly weird and sets the tone for the whole picture. So speaking to the emperor, the guild navigator says we have just folded space from Ix.

And the emperor says, yes. And the guild navigator explains that it has psychically sensed a plan unfolding. In fact, not just a plan, but plans within plans.

It suggests that it foresees a war between two great houses, House Atreides and House Harkonnen. And it asks if this is according to a plan of the emperor's doing. And the emperor admits that it is. So the emperor says, the Atreides house is building a secret army using a technique unknown to us, a technique involving sound.

The Duke is becoming more popular in the Landsraad. He could threaten me. I think the Landsraad is like the parliament of this universe, essentially. He could threaten me. I have ordered House Atreides to occupy Arrakis to mine the spice, thus replacing their enemies, the Harkonnens.

House Atreides will not refuse because of the tremendous power they think they will gain. Then, at an appointed time, Baron Harkonnen will return to Arrakis and launch a sneak attack on House Atreides. I have promised the Baron five legions of my Sardaukar terror troops. So once again, we alluded to this earlier, but they just lay out the whole plot right there. Yeah.

I don't know what I think about that choice. On one hand, it might make the story easier to follow if you're not already familiar with it.

On the other hand, it does kind of like spoil some of the surprise because this is exactly what happens. It just lays it all out there. Yeah. Anyway, the guild navigator seems okay with this, but it says that through its clairvoyance, it perceives that this plan may be complicated by Paul Atreides, the son of Duke Leto Atreides. And the guild navigator says, I want Paul Atreides killed. I did not say this. I was not here. I love this moment. Yeah.

And then the guild navigator like retreats and the space monks scurry along with it, like running vacuum cleaners over the floor, which is a laugh out loud moment. But it's I'd love that detail. I don't know what it means, but it's really good. Was were they I'm not I'm unsure on exactly what's happening here either. But did they like slide the guild navigator enclosure out on like a thin layer of oil or slime? I don't know. And then retreat on it and they've got to like clean it a little bit.

It's it's it's wondrous. It's wondrous. Yeah. So Emperor Shaddam is is left wondering what the spacing guilt why would the spacing guilt be so afraid of Duke Leto's son? He's just a boy. Mm hmm.

Meanwhile, in the other room, the Reverend Mother has been conducting psychic surveillance on the meeting. She knows what has been asked, and she goes back to a group of her Bene Gesserit sisters and says they must examine Paul Atreides. They must understand his significance.

And you know what? We're looking at time here. And as we predicted at the beginning, if we tried to do this all in one episode, it would be like a three to four hour episode of Weird House. So I think what we're going to have to do is divide it here. We'll leave you hanging with this prologue that is mostly not from the novel Dune itself.

And then next time we're going to come back and discuss more of the rest of the plot of Dune 1984, more of the cast, and maybe have some retrospective thoughts once we get to the end of the plot about, I don't know, how the movie relates to the source material, how it fits into David Lynch's filmography and things like that.

Yeah, yeah. We'll wrap it up in the next episode of Weird House Cinema. And who knows, in the future, if we do a Weird House Rewind of this episode, maybe we'll cobble it all together into one big director's cut. We'll see. Just an unmanageable chunk. Yeah, yeah. Just drop directly onto your phone.

Yeah. All right. Well, I'm looking forward to continuing the discussion, continuing our journey through David Lynch's Dune. In the meantime, we'll remind you that here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Stuff to Blow Your Mind Feed, we're primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

That doesn't mean we haven't done core episodes about Dune. If you go into our back catalog, you will find we did some episodes on the science of Dune, on the philosophy of Dune, have a few short form episodes here and there that deal with things from Dune. I did one monster fact, these are on Wednesdays, about donkeys of Dune.

because nobody ever adapts the donkeys of the planet Arrakis. But in the books, it is clear that there are donkeys on this planet and they are used and they do wear a modified still suit. Oh, boy. Yeah. The books have so much weirdness in them. Suit up your donkeys. Yeah.

Let's see. Mondays we do listener mails. And yes, indeed, on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you want to see a list of all the movies we've covered thus far on Weird House Cinema and sometimes get a glimpse at what's coming next,

Go to letterboxd.com. That's L-E-T-T-E-R-B-O-X-D.com. It's a fun site overall for, you know, chronicling movies, seeing, you know, what the different connections are between different productions. But we are on there as Weird House. That's our username. And we have a list. And you can look at all the things we've covered thus far. You can throw on different filters to see like, okay, which movies from the 50s did we do? Which movies, which sci-fi movies did we do? Which fantasy movies and so forth. It's a lot of fun.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

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