Been There, Dune That
The long, strange history of Arrakis on film: Part one of our series on Dune.
      by pisher

The deserts of Dune. Photo © 2000 VTP Inc.

(Scene: A harsh windswept desert environment, barren and inhospitable, seemingly devoid of intelligent life. Yup, American Television. There is a storm brewing in the distance. As we look more closely, we see strangely garbed shapes moving furtively among the crags overlooking an impressive looking Imperial edifice. Several of these figures converge upon one lone brooding individual, intently surveying the scene below. One lifts her hood and beneath the tubes of a Fremen stillsuit, we see it is none other than -- )

Sarah: pisher, do you ever tire of these amateur theatricals of yours?

pisher: (not taking his eyes off the edifice below) pish-ul.

Sarah: I beg your pardon?

pisher: My open name among you is pish-ul, Sarah of the 11th Sietch. My secret name is mad'pish. But it's secret! Shhh!

Sarah: (sighs wearily) O-kaaaaay. "pish-ul" -- what are we doing here? Why are we outside the corporate headquarters of the USA Network, palace of the USA Emperor, Stephen Chao? Oh this exposition is so lame.

pisher: Yeah, I know. Let's try a voice-over and see how that works --

(voiceover)
The desert warriors of the 11th Hour have gathered with the coming storm, led by the mysterious Prophet King, mad'pish, to demand justice from the USA Emperor, Stephen Chao, and to exact vengeance for the evil deeds of the Baron John Harrison, who has perverted Frank Herbert's classic genre novel "Dune" to his own demented purposes. This doesn't really work either, does it?

pisher: No, but it keeps the article from running too long. Sarah, perhaps your valiant consort, Davegar, who has actually read Dune, can provide us with further excuses for confusing plot exposition. Davegar -- do we have squirrelsign?

Dave: (grinning wolfishly) pish-ul -- we have squirrelsign the likes of which even GOD has never seen!

There are only a handful of "genre" novels that have reached mainstream audiences and at the same time given rise to devoted and highly possessive fanbases. Tolkien's trilogy of Middle Earth novels is one example, and is currently being adapted for the big screen for the third time, with the fans looking on with bated breath, praying for a classic, fearing another debacle like Ralph Bakshi's well intentioned animated feature, Fritz the Hobbit. (Okay, it wasn't actually called that.)

Frank Herbert

Another is Frank Herbert's novel of the early sixties, Dune (I am not going to try to summarize the plot and you can't make me). Unlike Tolkien, who lived his whole life in the rarified atmosphere of British academe, Herbert was a hardcore professional SF author, who never finished college, published in pulp magazines, and lived a most peripatetic professional existence for much of his life. Tolkien's other fields of expertise were ancient languages and mythology, Herbert's were ecological science and journalism -- but he was also interested in old languages and folklores, and the creation of new ones.

The two men had one thing very much in common -- both were driven to create fictional worlds of staggering breadth and complexity, meant to express the author's views on life, love, God, politics, truth, and just about anything else you could name. Worlds that were so carefully thought out that the authors would suggest more details than they revealed -- yet so carefully had they built their realities that what was left out of the published work was somehow still there, lurking around every corner, waiting to be exposed by the guesswork of more zealous readers, spelled out to some extent in glossaries and apocryphal works of history. Worlds that would be thought out in such painstaking complexity that you could almost see them spread out before you when reading of them -- though obviously no reader would ever see exactly the same world. Which isn't a problem, so long as everybody has his or her own copy to read.

One small slice of the Dune universe brought to life by artists.

But unlike Tolkien, who basically poured the greater part of his power as a storyteller into one great trilogy, and some peripheral writings, Frank Herbert wrote many fictional works completely unrelated to the Arrakis cycle, some of them fairly successful in their own right -- but none of them ever approaching the popularity of Dune. In retrospect, it is clear that unlike Tolkien, he never really decided how or if his desert saga should end. A careful reading of his work tends to show he didn't believe in endings anyway.

He continued to produce sequels to the first novel, none of which equaled its power. But the second book, Dune Messiah, was a sobering dash of cold water in the face of the first novel's deceptively triumphant Messianism, Herbert pulling the rug out from under Paul Atreides -- and then giving him a last moment of greatness. Each subsequent book was less and less well received, by fans and critics alike. Yet they continued to sell amazingly well for science fiction, the primary reason he continued to write them, and why his son Brian continues to commission sequels and prequels to that first seminal tome. For author and reader alike, it is difficult to let go of the universe Frank Herbert willed into being, even though clinging to it so stubbornly seems to violate the very essence of its message. Such is the allure of the first novel and the loving detail he had lavished upon that desert planet. As it was with Paul Atreides, once you have fully entered that world, you can never fully escape it.

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