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

The rumor is that Herbert made Dune into an open ended publishing franchise because his wife needed expensive medical care. His second wife, Beverly, was unquestionably the love of his life, and quite possibly the model for the pivotal character of Lady Jessica. Meeting her future husband in a creative writing class, she would eventually put aside her own work as a romance writer to help support him during the lean years, and was yet another of those unpaid editor/collaborator type spouses that show up in the biographies of successful male writers with such suspicious regularity.

Was Beverly's worsening illness the only reason Herbert wrote so many Dune books? Maybe not, but when reading the first novel, there is a recurring theme of spousal loyalty as an overriding interest. The pitiable Dr. Yueh commits his betrayal of House Atreides for love of his kidnapped Bene Gesserit wife. Duke Leto's deepest regret at the moment of his death is not marrying his Bene Gesserit concubine, the Lady Jessica. And Jessica's resistance to her son's union with a Fremen girl is put aside at the end with her futile entreaty that he not betray his true love with a political marriage of convenience. Herbert's heroes all have agendas that come between them and the women they love -- and while they always have good reasons, Herbert seems far from certain the reasons are sufficient to justify the betrayal.

It is convincing and contradictory human elements such as this that make Dune far more than the smugly arrogant chronicle of a superior human's rise to power over the inert bodies of foredoomed antagonists. To Frank Herbert, power and knowledge matter little without conscience -- the only thing that separates human from animal. It seems likely that, had he so desired, he could have created a far more successful religion than L. Ron Hubbard's cynically calculated Church of Scientology. Fortunately for us all, he was possessed of that most redeeming of all human traits -- a self-mocking sense of humor.

In some of his peripheral Dune writings, Herbert displays a rueful mood of resignation with regard to his own position within the Cult of Dune. Having set this pop cultural phenomenon in motion, he could exercise little control over where it went, and had effectively become its prisoner, being unable to create anything else that would hold people's attention. Nor could he stop well-meaning fans of his work from sometimes saying rather fatuous things about it. He could only be grateful that they didn't have real crysknives and the jihads they embarked upon were bloodless (and nowadays pretty much confined to the realm of computer gaming).

Here's a link to an online transcript of a tape recording Herbert made in 1979 -- he's basically creating his own apocrypha. The bitter irony at the author's own expense is everywhere. Pay particular attention to the interview between the condemned historian and the Fremen inquisitor. Here Herbert is split in two -- he is both the critical historian commenting upon the prophet trapped within his own legend and the prophet himself. And as the historian, he stands condemned by his own readers -- for giving them more truth than they wanted to hear, even as they worship the myth he created. Or so it seems to me, anyway. More than one interpretation is possible, as Herbert himself would be quick to point out.

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/6790/truth.html

But however ambivalent he might sometimes be about it, Herbert had a best-selling book, avidly read by millions, that seemed to possess all the elements of an epic film; intrigue, adventure, sex, conspiracy, swashbuckling fighters, scheming nobles, Machiavellian villians, complex heroes, exotic cultures, kick-ass chicks, futuristic visions, scenic locales, and huge phallic worms that burrow through sand. Okay, so maybe it added a few new elements.

Herbert was himself an aspiring screenwriter who made several documentary films, and he made his own attempt at a Dune screenplay -- which he later pronounced a failure. He thought it was too faithful to the book. Writers. Go figure. Though reportedly his fondest wish would have been for a really long (16-plus hours) serial adaptation of Dune, he was willing to settle for a more abbreviated version, as long as it expressed at least some of his basic themes in a visually powerful manner. His understanding of film was sufficient to know that this would mean substantial change to his original story. He could live with that.

Let's be honest here. When it comes to film adaptations of famous novels, "more faithful" does not necessarily mean "better". By far the best film adaptation of Frankenstein is the James Whale/Boris Karloff version and its sequel -- neither of which bear more than the slightest resemblance to the story in the book. And that film's enduring popularity is probably a big reason why the novel was on all our high school required reading lists (I think they figured we'd be more likely to actually, you know, read it. There are paperback editions with the Karloff creature on the cover, you know.)

Stephen Jay Gould may deplore Whale's film for "dumbing down" the novel and replacing Shelley's reasoned discourse on scientific responsibility with the axiom "There are things man was not meant to know" -- but you know what? James Whale was far more interested in the monster as a grotesque (and very funny) visual metaphor for his own closeted homosexuality, and science had nothing to do with it. Since most people who saw the film had never read the book, nobody cared that much. I go back and forth about whether I would have wanted to know this recently revealed fact about James Whale as a kid or not. Maybe not. But I'm glad I know it now. It explains so much.

And Jack Pierce's eerie flat-top creature makeup will always be the first image evoked in our collective consciousness by the name Frankenstein. With Peter Cushing's smugly self-serving Hammer Films Doctor F. coming in right after that. And way way at the back of the line will come Robert De Niro and Kenneth Branagh in "Mary Shelley's" Frankenstein, which sort of tries to adapt the book, but can no more resist the impulse to "improve" upon it than any other version since the silent film produced by Thomas Edison in 1910.

Please note that director Kenneth Branagh would never have screwed around with his beloved Shakespeare like that. True, Shakespeare wrote his own scripts, but he didn't understand screenplay format. Branagh may play with Shakespeare, but he won't revise him, and I respect him for that. Frankenstein is another matter entirely, though. It's a genre thing.

Frank Baum made two attempts to film The Wizard of Oz during the silent era, but we will always remember the version made after his death, with Judy singing by the haystack in sepia tones, and Margaret Hamilton on her broom and all those great Tin Pan Alley songs and Ray Bolger bouncing around and the bittersweet "Was it all a dream?" ending that doesn't quite say what Baum was trying to say -- but still somehow speaks to us. And again, many of us remember the book largely because of the movie, though it is worth remembering in its own right. Actually, the second Oz book was better in many ways, and that was very faithfully adapted to film. And almost nobody remembers that movie. Do you happen to know what a "Gump" is? No, not the one who likes chocolate.

Planet of the Apes the novel is a work in the tradition of French Fabulist satire, and ends with the narrator escaping the satellite of the simians (which is not earth), visiting other worlds, then returning to earth -- and finding apes have taken over there as well. No doomsday weapon, no bald people in a cave. No Statue of Liberty either. And there is no way I would ever have read this book if I hadn't seen the movie first.

And don't even get me started on Disney.

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