> jim rossignol

In the 1960s science fiction promised an entirely new literature. It seemed as if this artform of ideas would develop into a distinct and valid canon, one which would speak in entirely new spaces and with an agenda of bold new directions. Creating a new frontier for imagination and expression was pretty much what writers of Moorcock’s New Worlds era thought they were doing. (The William Burroughs of this era was science fiction, although it is never filed as such in bookshops). Sadly the dream never unfolded as the pioneers had anticipated and, as the normalising slumps of the Seventies and Eighties rolled in, the dream flickered and died. Only a few relics, which stood outside the continual retelling of old stories and the recycling of over-familiar ideas, remain as part of that unrealised future.

One of those pieces of writing is the novel ‘Dune’ by Frank Herbert. This book is regularly picked upon as one of the most over-referenced and over-wrought pieces of 20th Century sci-fi, but it is unique amongst science fiction novels, because it is one of the few works that seems to speak beyond itself and to fulfil what the genre had promised. It is mythic in tone and has impacted uniquely on most of the people who have read it. Messianic and cruel, it outlines something cosmic, a set of wild and hysterical ideas of the kind that are obscured into extinction in contemporary culture.

Dune is one of those rare works that cannot help but upset psychological levels, especially those of writers. Consequently it has also been uniquely over-exploited, even by Herbert himself, who dragged the book far beyond the original single novel into a bloated and bizarre epic, culminating in the sprawling ramblings of ‘God Emperor of Dune’. Herbert’s son, and others, have written more Dune sequels, and there has even been a TV series. Everyone, it seems, has had some idea of what should be made of Dune.

Most controversial of these was Lynch’s Dune project. I don’t think anyone could have been satisfied with it. As cleverly as Lynch played the psychodrama, and as intricate as the set design was, it still failed to reach the high psychic watermark that is suggested (if not always realised) by Herbert’s prose. Lynch (or more accurately De Laurentis, as DAT points out in the comments) mutilated it for their own purposes, as everyone who has had a hand in converting the book in some way seems to have done.

The most interesting of those mutilations is the unmade film developed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a man not unfamiliar with ideas of mutilation. His personal account of the project can be found here. For Jodorowsky the quest to make a Dune film took on a religious significance, having received instructions to do so in a dream, before he’d even read the book. Of Herbert he reports: “I felt in enthusiastic admiration towards Herbert and at the same time in conflict (I think that the same thing occurred to him)… He obstructed me… I did not want him as a technical adviser … I did everything to move him away from the project… I had received a version of Dune and I wanted to transmit it: the Myth was to give up the literary form and to become Image…”

Jodorowsky’s Dune project dominated a large chunk of his life, and it has powerful links to the work he has produced in later years. His bizarre and exquisite space-opera comic, The Metabarons, has many links and references to his version of Dune, most of which are detectable, but merely implicit until you read his account of the failed Dune project.

European, kitsch, insane:

“I want magical entities, vibrating vehicles
To prolong to be to it abyss
Like fish of a timeless ocean. I want
Jewels, mechanics as perfect as the heart
Womb-ships anterooms
Rebirth into other dimensions
I want whore-ships driven
By the sperm of passionate ejaculations
In an engine of flesh
I want rockets complex and secret,
Humming-bird ornithopters,
Sipping the thousand-year-old nectar of dwarf stars… ”

And what a sad world it was in which Jodorowsky’s project was to disappear, unmade. Orson Welles was interested. Jodorowsky had his trained his young son in knife combat and logic, so as to mirror the young Paul of the book. The starship designs were by Chris Foss, special effects by the Dark Star team, set designs by Giger (pre-Alien), and an ageing Salvador Dali was to play the Emperor of The Universe, sat atop a toilet-throne, and his presence costing the project $100,000 an hour…

“The Dune project changed our life. When it was over, O’Bannon entered a psychiatric hospital. Afterwards, he returned to the fight with rage and wrote twelve scripts which were refused. The thirteenth one was Alien.”

There is an alternate history: one in which the past three decades of science fiction cinema were dominated not by Star Wars and Alien, but by a European, surrealist version of Dune, orchestrated by a man who killed three hundred rabbits with his bare hands for a single scene in his masterwork, El Topo. Lost masterpieces only imagined, we salute you.