© 2010 by James Clark
The prospect of understanding what it is Lynch communicates from film to film is never within easy reach; but it only attains to extra-galactic proportions with that battle-fatigued singularity, titled, Dune (1984), and directed, variously, by “David Lynch” and “Alan Smithee.” Lynch has been quoted as being attracted to a film rendition of Frank Herbert’s 1965 blockbuster sci-fi novel, inasmuch as there were “tons and tons of possibilities for things I loved.”
Notice he did not allude to “things” Herbert loved. As coming from a practitioner in good standing of sci-fi as “entertainment,” those latter “things”—abundantly salient in the literary plot—would occupy a groove of breath-stilling futurity (the story begins in the year 10,192) wherein awesome physical forces clash for the sake of succeeding in dominating all comers. “Domination” is the keyword; and, you know what? It ain’t new. One of the “things” Lynch loved was industrial design in the form of continuation of the occupant’s level of consciousness, and in Dune he clearly relishes enmeshing the “advanced” experiences in fusty Victorian/Edwardian decor (and garments). For instance, on a reconnaissance mission by the hero and his royal father, conducted by someone known as the “Judge of the Change,” the plush, quaint and busy interior of their flying craft (with silk-quilted walls, no less) strongly resembles that of “innovator” Captain Nemo’s submarine in the Disney version of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1954). (Design tinctures [as well as Oxbridge emanations] from other Victorian adventures, like Journey to the Center of the Earth [1959] and The Time Machine [1960] also come to bear. And, to cap things off, the desert derring-do comes saturated with tropes from the “stout chap” heroics of Lawrence of Arabia [1962].) (more…)
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