David Lynch's Dune (1984) is the film that science fiction-and the
director's most ardent fans-can neither forgive nor forget. Frank
Herbert's original 1965 novel built a meticulous universe of dark
majesty and justice, as wild-eyed freedom fighters and relentless
authoritarians all struggled for control of the desert planet Arrakis
and its mystical, life-extending "spice." After several attempts to
produce a film, Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis and his producer
daughter Raffaella would enlist David Lynch, whose Eraserhead (1977) and
The Elephant Man (1980) had already marked him out as a visionary
director. What emerges out of their strange, long process is a deeply
unique vision of the distant future; an eclectic bazaar of wood-turned
spaceship interiors, spitting tyrants, and dream montages. Lynch's film
was "steeped in an ancient primordial nastiness that has nothing to do
with the sci-fi film as we currently know it," as Village Voice critic
J. Hoberman put it-only
with time becoming a cult classic. This book is the first long-form
critical study of the film; it delves into the relationship with the
novel, the rapidly changing context of early 1980s science fiction, and
takes a close look at Lynch's attempt to breathe sincerity and mysticism
into a blockbuster movie format that was shifting radically around
him.
