Dune at 40: David Lynch’s oddball adaptation remains a fascination

Auteur’s strange and exuberant 1984 epic was the subject of ridicule in years following but it deserves a second chance

In another universe, Star Wars ended with David Lynch. Intrigued by the monochromatic surrealism of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, George Lucas approached the oddball auteur to take the reins on the third installment of the breakout space opera, only for Lynch to decline. If he hadn’t, however, he would have pushed the grotty practical effects and the Jedi’s quasi-mystical soup of east-west philosophizing to new extremes strafing the inscrutable. The resulting film would have been so aggressively strange, so unconcerned with commercial appeal or even basic legibility, so deeply ensconced in its creator’s circle-obsessed psyche that the hoped-for franchise would be regarded as radioactive for decades, its intellectual property arable again only after nearly half a century. The film Lynch did make, 1984’s Dune, allows us to visit this universe.

As the rights to Frank Herbert’s doorstopper novel bounced around producers and directors through the 70s before landing on the docket of the risk-taker Dino de Laurentiis, chances are good that the elevator pitch eventually came to include mention of Star Wars, maybe with a “meets Jaws!” appended to tease the sand-worm spectacle sequences. Ambitious showbiz types wanted to believe that a hit was embedded somewhere in Herbert’s intricate jumble of metaphysical lore and interplanetary geopolitics, requiring only an artist of sufficient vision to get it out. The image may seem laughably remote today, but on the heels of The Elephant Man’s eight Oscar nominations, Lynch cut the figure of a thirtysomething awards darling capable of marrying grown-up entertainment with boundary-pushing formal daring. (David Lynch: at one time, the Damien Chazelle of his day!) Once the attached Ridley Scott dropped out to make Blade Runner and Lynch fell in love with the source text, it seemed like all the stars had aligned.

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