The Mind-Killer
Fear of a desert planet and its adaptations
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
—Dune, “The Litany Against Fear”
I’m going to further my reckless new habit of writing about movies and TV shows I haven’t actually seen with a post inspired by Denis Villeneuve’s new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction epic Dune. Dune was probably the first “adult” science fiction novel I read, back when I was about fifteen, and I found it heavy going—it was probably the first “difficult” novel I ever read, and the difficulty proved to be part of its charm. It was the first time I became aware, though not on a fully conscious level, of the tension between worldbuilding and narrative that sinks many a would-be science fiction or fantasy story and propels others into becoming permanent fixtures of the culture.
My treasured Ace mass-market paperback edition of the book appends nearly a hundred pages of notes on the ecology of Arrakis (the planet at the story’s center otherwise known as Dune), its religion (closely based on Islam, a radical move for a Western text to take, then and now), the mysterious cult of the Bene Gesserit, etc. Each chapter has an epigraph taken from various fictional paratexts, most of them attributed to a comparatively minor character, the Princess Irulan, who is looking back at the history recounted in the main narrative and framing it as something near to a sacred text. But Herbert is a good enough writer to present that text as a story—the novel gets off to a cracking start with its account of young Paul Atreides, the future messiah-emperor, and his encounter with a mysterious old woman administering the life-or-death test of the gom jabbar.
Worldbuilding is the great temptation of the SFF writer, a temptation I know very well from the hours I spent as a teenager drawing imaginary continents and cities on graph paper and typing up notes very similar to the appendices of Dune, and the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, and the “Encyclopedia Galactica” entries that stud Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (coming soon to an Apple TV near you). Like many another lonely young geek, I didn’t just want to lose myself in stories of these imaginary places—I wanted to live in them.
Fantasy novels centered their appeal on the promise of a heightened reality, an overdetermined fairy-tale world in which all of the protagonist’s actions were charged with significance; naturally, I read these stories with prodigious main-character energy. Science fiction was a bit different, offering something I hungered for without quite knowing how to name it: call it philosophy, call it ideas or the life of the mind. Hari Seldon’s “psychohistory” was heady stuff, imagining that it might be possible to collect enough data on the socio-historical moment that one could predict the course of things to come with perfect accuracy. (This appealed greatly to someone for whom everyday life and ordinary human behavior were deeply mysterious.) I was equally fascinated by the essentially Kantian ethical philosophy that Asimov designed for his robot stories and novels, and for much the same reason; the robot characters seemed a good deal more relatable to me than the human ones, and I craved rules for living. I was a selfish reader, literally looking for myself in what I read, for the scope and possibility of a life beyond what seemed possible for a socially awkward and physically uncoordinated kid.
The real heavyweight in science fiction, as far as ideas were concerned, was Dune, a novel which combines sophisticated thinking about the interconnections between religion and politics and ecology with a ripsnorting plot, a little like the way Tolstoy combines his philosophical plotline about Levin with the romantic tragedy of Anna in Anna Karenina. The intellectual content generates a lot of gravity. And though the feudal armamentarium of the novel sets it up as an epic battle of good versus evil, the monstrousness of the Harkonnens ends up being balanced, if not eclipsed, by the novel’s broader consideration of the risks of colonialism and messianism. Finally, although it doesn’t get talked about much in this way, Dune is also a novel of manners, finely attuned to its characters’ inner lives and their relationships and their need to understand, protect, manipulate, deceive, or love one another. There’s at least one dinner party scene as good as anything in Jane Austen or Patrick O’Brian. And we get a great deal of interiority—notoriously and awkwardly replicated by the innumerable voiceovers in David Lynch’s clumsy adaptation, all of which have the effect of bringing the story to a screeching halt. I’m curious as to how and whether Villeneuve has dealt with that problem.
When my students write science fiction and fantasy stories, which they do quite often, I see the impulse toward escape and self-fashioning at work. Sometimes the world of the story has an off-the-rack quality—the generic pseudo-European setting adapted from Tolkien or Harry Potter or Game of Thrones remains the default. Sometimes, the writer goes to elaborate lengths to establish the story’s world, lavishing attention on its rules for magic or how the technology works, as though they were developing the setting for a role-playing game. Very often they fall into the trap of neglecting story—the narrative can come across as an afterthought. While students who choose generic settings also tend to choose generic stories (I get a lot of badass princesses), some of them never quite get around to telling a story at all. It’s a little bit like trying to sell merch from a movie that doesn’t actually exist. The reader’s been given no reason—no story—that will lead them to invest their own imagination in the writer’s world. Ideas, too, tend to be a little thin on the ground—something that’s found to happen when you draw upon the SFF megatext without quite realizing that you are doing so.
The boundaries between fiction, fan fiction, and adaptation are blurry ones, but it’s been that way for a long time. An IP giant like Star Wars began as a nostalgic homage to Flash Gordon-style serials—its melange of influences include Dune itself (Tattooine is a low-rent Arrakis and you don’t have to squint too hard to recognize the Sandpeople as inarticulate Fremen). What’s different today is the access fans have been given to the machinery of narrative, whether that takes the form of online fora in which writers follow up the fates of minor characters, write prequels, or present events from the novels (there are at least five sequels, each of them a little bit worse than the book preceding it) from new perspectives. How to separate that sort of fan fiction from the prequels written by Frank Herbert’s son Brian (co-written with Kevin J. Anderson)? Well, Brian Herbert presumably gets paid for his work, and it’s available in book form, but is it necessarily of better quality than what the fans are writing? I suspect not.
Then there are the adaptations. Most notoriously, there’s David Lynch’s 1984 version, universally excoriated for its turgid unwatchability. (Some terrific visuals, though, and the costumes and character designs strike me as definitive—I can see them echoed, though in a far more muted palette, in the stills I’ve seen from the new film.) There’s also the curious case of Alejandro Jodorowsky, the polymathic Chilean-French avant-gardist whose visionary failure to adapt the novel in the 1970s (he was going to cast Salvador Dali as the Padashah Emperor and the run time would have been at least ten hours) has been immortalized in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. (This ought to be a genre by now, or at least some sort of class: artworks about the failure to create art. My syllabus would include The Five Obstructions, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, and Lost in La Mancha, a documentary about Terry Gilliam’s struggle to adapt Don Quixote, something he finally pulled off a decade and a half later.)
Frank Herbert’s Dune, a mini-series adaptation of the novel, aired in 2000 on the SciFi channel, and I watched a few episodes and found it watchable, but inert. Like so many adaptations of books with enormous and vocal fan bases, it foundered on the imperative to be as faithful to the book as possible. In the end, that’s my problem with adaptations of all stripes: when a writer or artist is faithful to the letter but not the spirit of the original, it can kill our experience of both. Too often, I think, we sit down to write ourselves into a pre-existing story not because we are genuinely inspired to explore what’s fresh in it, but because we are faithful to our own naïveté and to the feeling of wonder we experienced when we first encountered the original text. My feeling for the original Star Wars trilogy are inseparable from the experience of being seven, eleven, and thirteen years old when those films were shown in theaters. Even the most watchable of the innumerable sequels and sidestories that have been produced since stir up in me only the faintest nostalgic recollection of what it was like to be a boy who quite literally didn’t know any better. When I watch The Mandalorian—which is pretty good!—it’s only a ghost of that original feeling, coupled with the desiccated pleasure of ticking off the references to old Westerns and samurai movies.
Jodorowsky’s Dune, had it ever existed, would have been I think the right sort of adaptation: an inspired work of art born of enthusiasm for the spirit of the original but not overly beholden to the letter. Jodorowsky himself is far too eccentric a figure to have contented himself with shepherding expensive intellectual property into a corporate franchise. To adapt the Litany Against Fear quoted above, an adaptation faithful to the spirit of the times in which the adapter is working means letting the original text to pass over and through you, following its path with your inner eye, and seeing what of your own concerns remain.
Whether Denis Villeneuve has it in him to respond to the novel this way remains to be seen. I think it’s possible. I went to see Blade Runner 2049 a few years ago in a spirit of skeptical weariness. A sequel to Blade Runner seemed completely unnecessary, a cash grab, beside the point: that film has already generated what are in effect dozens of sequels derivative of its visual design and neonoir characters.
I came away from Villeneuve’s sequel half-impressed. The story didn’t do much for me—like so many sequels it was predictably obsessed by a need to reproduce the beats of the original. But the images rose to or exceeded the high level achieved by the original film, doing homage its visual world while extending it into something that connects vitally with the actual 21st century in which it was made. The overhead shots of the walls guarding 2049 Los Angeles from the sea; the ruins of Las Vegas with its holographic gyrating Elvises; above all the image of the main character’s virtual girlfriend Joi, hauntingly under- or overshooting the mark in her attempts to be human, whether that’s because she’s a Baudelairean giantess or because, in an echo of a scene from Spike Jonze’s Her, she tries to overlay her virtual body on the physical one of another woman so as to make love with K, who is himself a non-human.
I guess what I’m saying here goes back to my Henry James post: I want my science fiction and my fantasy to have some connection with the palpable present-intimate. The story of Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t really have much to say about global climate instability or the fate of migrants and others deemed unpersons by the corporate state—but its images do. It’s possible that Villeneuve’s Dune has been made to speak to 2021 the way that the 1965 novel, like any real classic, can be made to do. Desertification, neofeudalism, postcolonialism, religious war, anxiety about the warping psychological and social and environmental effects of computers—it’s all there. Will the film bring out those themes and make them freshly available and vital to twenty-first century viewers? Or will it just recycle and amplify cool shit?
Sometimes, cool shit is enough. That final image of the sandworm erupting—the scale of it—is as powerful and endemic an image as one could wish of nature’s reaction to the rhythm imposed on it by an imperial humanity that is nevertheless puny and utterly outclassed by the forces it has aroused. One cynical evening slumped in bed I will probably stream The Chair and chuckle and wince at its familiar follies. But I’ll be upright in a theater for Dune, hoping for something that, against all the odds, doesn’t simply reproduce what I already know.
