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.
The fact of Dune’s spectacular failure has come to eclipse awareness of the film itself, its reputation not helped by Lynch disavowing the compromised, expurgated version of his intended three-hour cut. (An extended TV edit around that runtime only displeased him further, compelling Lynch to remove his name from the credits.) The image of a lithe, shock-haired, baby-oiled Sting clad only in a chevron-shaped leather codpiece inspired giggles aplenty, though that’s nothing compared to the Guild Navigator, a hyper-intelligent mutant jellyfish that floats in a tank full of gas and speaks through a flapping pudenda. Our hero Paul Atreides (a miraculous Kyle MacLachlan in his first screen role) turns into a bunch of rotoscoped polygons when he fights, his family won’t go anywhere without their adorable pet pugs, and they wield sonic weapons called “Weirding Modules” invented for the film. Lynch first scripted his adaptation in two parts, and compressing them into a single feature runtime resulted in a barrage of baroque mythology, character introductions and made-up terminology altogether incomprehensible to the average viewer.
Lynch’s disinterest in broad appeal or ticket sales did not serve him at a time before being bizarre and difficult to understand became key features of his appeal, but to portray his efforts as failed would do a disservice to such a vibrantly, audaciously peculiar take on the material. However singular Herbert’s prose, Lynch marshaled his writing back toward the director’s own pet interests; for starters, the deformed newborn haunting Eraserhead gets a successor in the unborn Alia Atreides, her bloody fetal form drifting through the many blasts of future-sight visited upon Paul as the Chosen One. The abundance of opportunities for avant garde-adjacent dream sequences undoubtedly piqued Lynch’s interest in the project, the whims toward abstraction left over from art school finally allowed to run wild on a studio budget. Even the climactic battle on the dunes of Arrakis, the closest the Lynch oeuvre comes to outright blockbuster filmmaking, makes space for the unsettling non-real textures that would remain his stock-in-trade.
What was meant to be Lynch’s big crossover to the mainstream stands today as a deep cut for devotees only, most fascinating in its early signs of ideas and themes he would develop more fully later in his career. There’s one view of Dune as a warm-up of sorts for Twin Peaks, another vast spiritual odyssey in which the forces of good and evil wage war in the subconscious of Kyle MacLachlan between indecipherable prophecies. The same enigmatic orbs carrying unknowable messages to Agent Dale Cooper in Peaks’ complex melange of Jungian psychology tease Paul Atreides with wisps of enlightenment in his hallucinations, and there’s even a link be to traced from the constant whispered voiceover to Agent Cooper’s stream-of-consciousness tape recorder memos.
Lynch’s outré sensibility polluted the legacy of Herbert’s novel so deeply that every creative choice in Denis Villeneuve’s recent duology seems to have been made in an effort to distance itself. Where Lynch cranked the colors up to a fantastic saturation, Villeneuve opted for a palette of graphites, granites and grays; Lynch’s exuberant, occasionally comic register befitting a story about magic dust and megalomaniacal psychic nuns gave way to Villeneuve’s blaring self-seriousness. If the latter Dune plays like a dirge, the former plays like prog rock, packed with indulgent noodling and extravagant shows of technical virtuosity. And in the most telling sign that these films were produced in different Americas, Lynch’s version dares to include Herbert’s reference to “jihad” while Villeneuve refrained from invoking the touchier associations since placed on the word.
Posterity has granted Villeneuve the last laugh in the form of box-office receipts and Oscar nominations, a lamentable confirmation that all a studio needed to do in order to adapt the supposedly unadaptable was drain all of the whimsy out of it. But that tone has now turned Lynch’s film into a respite for viewers turned off by the near-monochrome po-faced ponderousness, genre fans drawn to sci-fi specifically for the weirding (no modules required). Even the long-windedness unavoidable when shoehorning two gigantic novels into two hours and change has its own inept charm, its rhythms so disorientingly unlike those in any other Hollywood product of the time. While he proved an awkward fit for the A-list industry hopes projected on to him, Lynch’s approach to the galactic is the rare sci-fi specimen that feels as alien as its subjects.
