Dune

This week was given over to security doors. The contractors who are doing our new flat wanted us to consider steel doors for security. Indeed the whole building was full of double front doors with the outer one made of steel. We have stayed in flats without such doors our whole life. All of them had only a small peephole in case you wanted to take a look at the caller before opening the door. We don’t even look through it. We have lived in a gated community all our life, and we will move to another gated community.

Fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little death.
Frank Herbert, in Dune

I asked “Do we need a security door?” The contractors thought this was a silly question. “It’s for your safety,” they condescended to say. We asked “Why is steel more safe than a solid piece of wood?” “It is steel,” they managed to say through incredulous looks. “But all a burglar has to do is to break the lock,” The Family told them. “It is your choice,” they shrugged. “It is,” we agreed. “So we will do without a security door.”

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Frank Herbert, in Dune

We thought that a single door with a peephole would be fine. At best we could go with the kind of door you see above, with a little window built into it. The culture of fear is strong, but we’ll try to resist it.

One week ago we saw Dune in a theatre. It turned out to be a private show; there was no one else in the screening. It was almost like watching a movie at home, except that the hall was actually dark, and you could not adjust the sound. The Family is not a great follower of science fiction, but she had been talking to my nieces about the movie. She said it was very well made. I could agree, but I thought it seemed to be going off the rail a bit.

Of course, when you start with a novel, you are going to find it hard to cram all that material into a single movie, even if it is three hours long. The most memorable of movies work with a short story: Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Ray’s Charulata, Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Villeneuve had to be ruthless with the material, and still present something like a coherent story. While he succeeds in doing this, the story comes across like an action drama. This is only the surface layer of the novel with which it shares the name Dune.

For example, it left out one of my favourite pieces. This is the chapter of the book about a “little” dinner party the Duke has for a select segment of the local society. The conversation at dinner, and the small things that happen outside, have held critics’ attention over decades for the way it adds texture to the world that Herbert builds. I always like to re-read this chapter for one of Herbert’s recurring themes: that the way we use language, our choice of words, for example, can reveal our underlying motivations even if we try to hide them. Herbert believes that careful attention to language reveals as much as body language. But I can understand Villeneuve’s decision to leave this out. In the hands of a different director, perhaps a new Bunuel, this chapter could have become a full-length movie.

I think the book’s major failure is to gloss over the point that the hero, a fifteen year old boy, realizes very early that he is not who his parents see him as. He is not the chosen one, as he tells his mother in a memorable scene in the book when they are lost in the desert. He says “I am something unexpected. I am a seed.” The movie leaves this out, and by doing that makes him just another chosen one. In the book he becomes neither the just ruler his father wanted him to be, nor the prophetic Kwisatz Haderach his mother hoped he would be. The events of the next books in the series follow inevitably from his own actions, not from prophecy or expectation. I hope Villeneuve does not completely lose this thread of the book in the next parts of the film.

Tag: Dune

Security doors