Through a High Window: Frank Herbert's Dune (2000)

Dune (2000)

Midway through Frank Herbert’s Dune (directed by John Harrison, 2000), young, deposed royal Paul Atriedes encounters a mouse in the wilderness of the desert planet Arrakis. For Paul, it's a momentary yet pivotal scene: the Atriedes heir goes on to assume the mouse's name, mua'Dib, and become a messiah figure for humankind. For the audience, it is a moment of decision: to believe in the magic of the film—or to reject it.

When I first watched Dune during its Sci-Fi Channel premiere twelve years ago, the scene jarred me, the mouse clearly stop-motion. I wanted to like Dune, but I couldn't get past the creature's jerky, clockwork movements. 

And it wasn't just the mouse. Elements of the film broke my immersion in scene after scene: an unrealistic lighting effect, the seam lines on a backdrop, a character that was clearly a puppet. I wanted to love Dune, with its interstellar machinations, desert tribes, and richly-drawn personalities, but I couldn't. The visuals killed it.

I'm a little older and marginally wiser now. Looking back, I can see how science fiction epics have evolved over the last couple decades, and I'm prepared to make two claims:(1) that sci-fi cinema faces a significant problem with creating immersive realities, and (2) that, in retrospect, Dune epitomizes not the problem but a solution.

Dune, in fact, does some things very right. So, let me explain why the clockwork mouse matters—and why you’d be making a mistake to reject Dune the way I did twelve years ago.

Spoilers after the jump. 

Yeah, that's definitely a real mouse.

The post Lord of the Rings, post-Avatar era, ruled by the powerhouses of ILM and Weta Digital, has transformed us into literate consumers of computer effects. We sense unreality adeptly. We know when hair moves unrealistically or an alien steed lacks the heft of a real horse. Who, in this climate of skepticism, buys the stop-motion mouse?

Being critical isn't bad, of course. Demanding increasingly photorealistic imagery from film helps propel the industry, after all. 

At the same time, however, films that push the boundaries of effectswork seek not to echo reality but to transcend it, to become indistinguishable from the real thing. It's as though contemporary effects-driven cinema—and I'm thinking here of sci-fi in particular—fears the artist's signature and perceives detectable artifice as tantamount to failure.  

To me, however, this visual transcendence means the loss of the human. I marvel at the winged monster in its sleek digital embodiment, but I feel nothing.

What Dune does, in contrast, is insidiously and destabilizing: Harrison's film seeks not transcendence but immanence. His film does not replicate reality; instead, Dune is a theatrical performance, operating according to the rules of its own arena rather than the expectations of the photoreal. Rather than obscuring the technical work of its artists, Dune revels in the making and shaping of story (albeit with a couple lapses). I see it, and I feel what I see. 

So, let's consider what film isn't doing and what Dune does.

Delicate Beginnings

Dune originates in Frank Herbert’s 1965 Hugo-winning novel of the same name, hailed (rightly, I think) as The Lord of the Rings of science fiction.

Herbert's Dune is set primarily on the desert planet of Arrakis—Dune—the only source of the spice mélange in the universe. Spice grants vitality, psychic prowess, and the ability to cross immense interstellar distances. Therefore, whomever controls Dune is incredibly powerful—and an obvious target.

Om Nom Nom.

Thus, when Duke Leto Atreides, Lady Jessica, and their son Paul inherit the stewardship of Dune, the family becomes the target of an interstellar plot to destroy their House. The Duke is killed, the stewardship ends, and Paul and Jessica, son and mother, flee together into the great wilderness of Dune, where the giant worms roam.

Backing into the Future

Herbert’s story is immense and cinematic—political, ecological, spiritual. Alejandro Jodorowsky attempted to film Dune in the 1970s, hoping to place Dalí himself at the center of the director's surrealistic vision, but the adaptation never materialized. David Lynch did film Dune in 1984; despite pacing and editing problems, Lynch’s Dune remains an electric dream with an unstable center, visually astonishing, convoluted, and fascinating thirty years later.

In contrast, the 2000 Harrison production (here, the 2002 Director’s Cut), is something else: a deep draught, pungent, aromatic, shot through with harsh notes. Not film, really, and not television: Dune describes itself as a photoplay, a self-contained and unabashed theatre production in moving images—something from which contemporary sci-fi, with its obsession with realism, could learn.

Dune, put simply, never tries to fool us. It rejects a world where better art means photorealism. There is a certain visual sublime to the world Dune constructs, and I use that term carefully: I’m referring not to the high sublime of the philosophers and romantics, but to the experience Tolkien describes in The Lord of the Rings:

"The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder.

It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no color but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful."

Ah, Tolkien. He says the right words well, doesn't he?

What I’m thinking about, then, is beauty produced through artifice—Frodo’s window, for instance—capable of striking deeply and honestly at our minds and hearts. What might that look like? Let's stick with Middle-earth for a minute. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, despite the bombast and slapstick, captures a taste of visual sublimity in a few scenes, I think.

The falling star, the demonic vision, the apocalyptic field, the grave of the king: these are beautiful visions, approaching the sublime through their use of artifice: in this case, miniatures, digital effects, live action plates. At the same time, there’s something disturbing about them. Quite simply, they obscure the human.

Each frame is not one vision but many, collapsed together inside the computer, and I simply don’t feel them as intensely as I would like. To be fair, The Lord of the Rings' visuals do make me feel something, and I chalk that up to its admirable use of models and miniatures—the tactile—in a digital era. (By comparison, James Cameron's stunning and CG-heavy Avatar feels almost entirely vacant.) I don’t sense the hands of the animators, technicians, and sculptors because, I hypothesize, these films seek to transcend—to make their artistry invisible and synonymous with the real. In contrast, Dune is immanent, seeking to manifest something beautiful from its own well, irrespective of what is or isn't "real." 

That, I think, is what sci-fi has lost.

To be fair, Dune is messy, flawed, and a little confusing. It doesn't rouse so much as it permeates and quietly takes hold. It's unnerving at times, unbalanced, but then I'm not interested in perfection but in the honest, rough-edged expression of beauty on film. Lynch did it in his Dune. I think the Harrison Dune does, too, in a period when filmmakers forget how. The use of stop motion, for instance—a film art for over 100 years now—represents a kind of backward-thinking, on-stage innovation I miss in something like Avatar. 

So let’s explore Harrison’s Dune.

Desert Power

First, however, let’s start with an example of where things really go wrong. This is a frame from a vision scene in The Lord of the Rings, in which a poisoned Frodo is tended by half-Elven healer Elrond:

Mumblefuzzymumblemumble.

Good lord. With respect to the talented Mr. Jackson, whatever ethereal beauty we are supposed to feel here is deafened by inelegant digital rotoscoping. The shot feels artificial; I don’t connect to it. In fact, it jars me out of the film.
 

 By contrast, here’s a vision scene from Dune, in which Paul awakens in a tent in the desert to the apparition of the Reverend Mother Ramallo, the spiritual leader of Arrakis’s desert people:

 “When religion and politics ride in the same cart, the whirlwind follows.”

In this sequence, Dune creates its vision entirely on stage, using only lighting and an adjustment to the camera’s focal length (note that the tent wall never wholly disappears but merely goes out of focus; likewise, note that Paul’s head goes out of focus as the Reverend Mother goes into focus). Is it crucial that this vision be performed on stage? No, not really. Does the film benefit from the performance? Yes, absolutely. 

Unlike The Lord of the Rings, Dune does not hide its artifice, and we can understand how the shot was created because it isn't a composite but an indivisible whole. It never existed any other way than as it is. There is little for the film to hide. In moments like these, Dune is at its most accomplished, innovative, and tangible.

Inviting the Audience Inside

The film is replete with this kind of on-stage magic. For reference, here’s the classic final scene of Herbert’s novel, which finds Lady Jessica talking to Paul’s concubine, Chani, about the book’s unseen narrator, Princess Irulan:

“Do you know so little of my son?” Jessica whispered. “See that princess standing there, so haughty and confident. They say she has pretensions of a literary nature. Let us hope she finds solace in such things; she'll have little else." A bitter laugh escaped Jessica. "Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives."

And so ends Dune. It’s a brilliant ending, shifting the novel’s focus unexpectedly away from Paul. In the film, Jessica narrates over the film’s closing images—not to Chani, but to the audience.

JESSICA (V.O.): You see her standing there? So haughty, so confident.
Let us hope she finds solace in her writing and her books; she'll have little
else. She may have my son's name, but it is we, the ones who carry the
name concubine, that history will call wives.

First, I'm impressed that Harrison kept this scene. Second, as in the book, the narrative sidesteps Paul and, in doing so, reframes Dune as Jessica’s story.

And note how the lighting reinforces the importance of Jessica's word, dimming as she speaks as though this were not the end of a movie but a play. Visually, we'd expect this directorial choice to undercut suspension of disbelief in a film world. And it does, but not to ill effect. Instead, it tells us that we aren’t meant to believe Arrakis extends beyond the stage any more than we're to believe that some mechanism of the planet’s weather altered the lighting or that Jessica is narrating out loud to the entire population of the hall. Dune jars us from our position as spectators to ineluctable events, repositioning us as participants in a performance, in a telling—not a replica—of history. To me, this makes the work feel honest and livable in a way sci-fi, with its digital toolkit, often fails.

Beyond the Wall

The film repeatedly insists on performance, in fact, as when the Baron Harkonnen  breaks the fourth wall (in rhyming couplet, no less) while discussing his treacherous plans. Likewise, it’s hard to watch Jessica comfort Paul without realizing that the spinal mountains and twilit moon of Arrakis is a backdrop or translight. In both instances, the film is not a closed system in which the audience is invisible; instead, we are asked to be Frodo looking through the high window on a vibrant world newly made—and it must be newly made, always, because it does not seek to capture reality as we know it but to perform a vision into which we may enter, again and again.

Certainly, we are aware that the actors can only move a few feet in any direction without betraying the artifice of the world, but that awareness allows us to appreciate the luminance of the wall, to value its presence. Like the on-stage camera and lighting work used to materialize Paul’s vision of the Reverend Mother, the translights help construct a complete vision of the stage on film. How often can I watch science fiction and know that something existed on stage just as I see it on screen? That, to me, is magical.

Arr Gee Bee

Briefly, it’s also worth noting the color design of Dune. Beyond shifts in light and dark, the film employs wildly surreal RGB combinations and transitions between and during scenes. I can’t think of another recent production that put something like this on screen:

This transition occurs not from one shot to another but visibly as we watch. Initially, the effect is jarring and reality-breaking, and it's clearly intended to do just that. Paul and Jessica's ease at the beginning, accompanied by muted golds and blues, gives way to emotional chaos and harsh reds as they fracture from each other.

This is a world that must be staged and acted into being. There's something timeless, resilient, and participatory about a stage play, and Dune, with its political intrigue and its dense storytelling, demands the atmosphere, garishness, and artifice of the arena. It works.

The Film as a Whole

I’ve really only talked about the visual component of the film, and so I suppose I ought to put it in context: the visual allows the film to succeed, to survive its own shortcomings. Which is to say that Dune has some flaws. 

Dune does use CGI in places, and it’s either excellent or terrible depending on the scene (for excellent, see the shot of the worm and 'thopter near the top of this entry). And I have to admit that the Guild Navigator puppet used in Dune lacks the whimsy and character of computer-generated Edric the Navigator from Children of Dune:

One of these fellows you'd invite to tea. The other...

Even given that concession, isn’t there something compelling about the puppet? Doesn’t it exude a presence, a sense of age and weariness? I think so, but I have to admit there's beauty in the digital design, too.

Additionally, some crucial details of world-building go missing, such as Ix, the Butlerian Jihad, and the Orange Catholic Bible, elements that dictate the political landscape of Dune and explain the absence of computers and the presence of computer-like mentats. At times, some events occur too quickly after one another to feel quite natural. Nonetheless, the world is so richly drawn and passionately constructed that these are minor quibbles.

Likewise, despite a couple lackluster performances, the primary actors are effective. I’ve concluded that any successful adaptation of Dune requires three key performances to be excellent: Paul, Jessica, and the Baron Harkonnen. And all three are solid.

Newman takes his Paul from intelligent but entitled youth to alien, unhinged, and, yes, terrifying messiah (and further still in Children of Dune, from genocidal tyrant to wandering prophet to guilt-wracked human man). Similarly, Saskia Reeves is a brilliant Jessica: at once fragile, guilt-ridden, dangerously powerful, and fiercely loyal. And, of course, Ian McNeice is deliciously fun as the Baron, an intelligent, deceitful, impish man.

Not the droid you're looking for.

Others, too, turn in good performances: Uwe Ochsenknecht as Stilgar sells the Fremen as a people, and Barbora Kodetová as Chani imbues her role with pathos and quiet strength. Alia, like her big brother Paul, is terrifying. P.H. Moriarty, as Gurney Halleck, is a believable veteran—sorry Patrick Stewart, as much as I adore you, you were miscast in Lynch’s film.

Perhaps most notably, Julie Cox as Princess Irulan marks the single major departure from Herbert’s novel, stepping outside her role as narrator to become the imperial counterpart to Paul: capable, shrewd, and adept at managing her role in her tragic father's misguided empire. 

The single oddest performance comes from William Hurt playing William Hurt: that is, monotonous, inexpressive, and only 65% present in any given scene. Yet it sort of works: his Duke Leto has the air of a doomed man consigned to his downfall and capable only of ensuring his son’s survival.

It is credit to all involved that the film’s visual magic supports its acting talent and teleplay. By crafting an immanent, indwelling visual space, Dune sustains itself. It has the feeling, at times, of having been written both sparsely and economically and sodden with immense depth; no line feels wasted and yet the film asks the viewer to drink deeply. I still find myself replaying scenes as I watch just so that I can inhabit their texture and complication again.

Unfortunately, sci-fi in general does not operate this way anymore. We are not asked to celebrate what other humans make but to believe in originless creations. We are not asked to wonder but to marvel. We are in the process of losing a vibrant storytelling genre without realizing we're losing it; I'm afraid that, if we go on glorifying sci-fi for its realism, we will be left with only realism, a world without feeling.

What I'm saying, then, is that we must relearn to appreciate the simplicity of the clockwork mouse. Because Dune works. Even in at its shakiest, the film offers a compelling vision, much the way that some directors of animated features (for instance, Miyazaki) liberate us from collective realism by enriching our collective imagination. Ultimately, Dune beckons us toward a lyrical evocation of the world—not the world itself—onward through the high window.