Denis Villeneuve’s recent film adaptation of Dune is generally considered to be superior to the late David Lynch’s, from 1984 — though even according to many of Lynch’s fans, it could hardly have been worse. In a 1996 piece for Premiere magazine, David Foster Wallace described Dune as “unquestionably the worst movie of Lynch’s career,” not least due to the miscasting of the director himself: “Eraserhead had been one of those sell-your-own-plasma-to-buy-the-film-stock masterpieces, with a tiny and largely unpaid cast and crew. Dune, on the other hand, had one of the biggest budgets in Hollywood history,” marshaled by super-producer Dino De Laurentiis. But could even a master blockbuster craftsman have made cinematic sense of Frank Herbert’s original story, “which even in the novel is convoluted to the point of pain”?
With its two parts having been released in the twenty-twenties, Villeneuve’s Dune practically cries out for Youtube video essays comparing it to Lynch’s version. The one above from Archer Green first highlights their differences through one scene that was memorable in the novel and both films: when, being put to the test by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the young hero Paul Atreides, played in the old Dune by Kyle MacLachlan and the new one by Timothée Chalamet, inserts his hand into a box that inflicts extreme pain. Superficially similar though they may appear, the two sequences reveal defining qualities of each picture’s look and feel — Villeneuve’s is shadowy and full of ancient-looking details, while Lynch’s looks like a piece of retro-futuristic Jacobean theater — as well as the contrast between how they dramatize the source material.
The new Dune is “a very modern-looking film that goes for a realistic and grounded aesthetic, and it feels more like a serious prestige sci-fi movie,” says Archer Green, “whereas old Dune is more surrealist: it’s elaborate, grungy, and ultimately quite over the top.” Their having been made in different eras explains some of this, but so does their having been made at different scales of time. Viewed back-to-back, Villeneuve’s Dune movies run just over five and a half hours. Lynch openly admitted that he’d “sold out” his right to the final cut in exchange for a major Hollywood project, but he also seldom failed to mention that the studio demanded that the film be “squeezed” to two hours and 17 minutes in order to guarantee a certain minimum number of daily screenings.
This pressure to get the runtime down must have motivated some of what even in the nineteen-eighties felt old-fashioned about Lynch’s Dune, like its extended “exposition dumps” and its “having characters’ thoughts audibilized on the soundtrack while the camera zooms in on the character making a thinking face,” as Wallace put it. The film’s failure “could easily have turned Lynch into an embittered hack, doing effects-intensive gorefests for commercial studios” or “sent him scurrying to the safety of academe, making obscure, plotless 16mm’s for the pipe-and-beret crowd.” Instead, he took the paltry deal subsequently offered him by De Laurentiis and made Blue Velvet, whose success he rode to become a major cultural figure. In a way, Lynch’s Dune fiasco gave Chalamet the eventual opportunity to become the definitive Paul Atreides — and MacLachlan, to become Special Agent Dale Cooper.
Related content:
Hear Brian Eno’s Contribution to the Soundtrack of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)
The Glossary Universal Studios Gave Out to the First Audiences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.