I fall asleep every time I watch Ronin (1998) and Dune (1984). Ronin is a classic, a throwback Cold War thriller with innovative car chases and an incredible cast, and I don’t mind falling asleep because it gives me a chance to rewatch scenes. The other has a puppet pooping radioactive navigation waste.
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.
I was three years old in Christmas 1984, so we’re still in the pre-memory years. I was far too young to engage with movies that I loved later in life, like The Brother from Another Planet or Repo Man. But before the 80s had ended, I caught up to the long-lived blockbusters of 1984 like Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone. Being a Gen Xer, we had several hundred movies recorded on VHS or purchased through Columbia House and BMG, so Joan Wilder and Egon Spangler and Sullah were deeply ingrained in my young psyche.
I’m juking, though. You thought I was gonna zig into Zemekis and Spielberg and Reitman. NAH. Let’s zag into Dune.
Gabriel Bros. (known colloquially as Gabe’s, but apparently it is officially called Gabe’s now?) is a regional clothing store chain like Marshall’s or Burlington Coat Factory that sells offseason and irregular clothing and household goods at deeply discounted rates. My first experience of Dune was a children’s flip book (see image) that was in a bin near the registers, probably 1987ish. It is wild to me now that they’d make such a thing (and that a Gabe’s buyer would stock a bin with it 3–4 years after the movie flopped), but I don’t know what to say except that it was a different time. I remember seeing the Sting/Kyle MacLachlan knife fight, and I remember seeing a floating Baron in all his grotesquerie, and I very much remember a sandworm. But I didn’t really think about Dune again for almost a decade after that.
From there I grew into a huge fantasy and scifi nerd, but my reading options were limited by what was at the Oakland Public Library, the school library, Scholastic Book Fairs, and Goodwill. So there were many classics that existed in a vague mental checklist. Cut to 9th grade, I think, circa 1996–1997. My family makes a road trip north across the border. We decamped for Niagara Falls and kept on trucking across Ontario. The border experience was minimally invasive… full disclosure, I was squirrely and the border guards searched our entire Dodge Caravan. This is understandable, but I was manic most of the time back then, so me being twitchy was just bad brain chemistry and not a sign of smuggling or whatever they thought it implied. Regardless, we made it into Ontario and spent a pretty cool few days driving around national parks. Among my other acquisitions in Canada were the Spawn soundtrack (which honks to this day) and a Karplusan Forest pulled from a Magic: The Gathering pack of either Fifth Edition or Ice Age.
I’ve lost track. I’m talking Dune.
My favorite activity on planet Earth is to visit used bookstores in other cities. During this trip to Canada, I procured a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune at some tiny bookstore in a tiny hamlet on a big lake. Dune is a novel that I wholeheartedly recommend. It blew my mind a million different ways.
A guy in the late 1960s cared about the environment and knew that industry was wrecking the planet, and he talked about this in the bestselling scifi novel of all time? And we still did nothing about it?
You can talk about different religions without using words like “blasphemy” or “heathen?”
I want to live in a desert!
There are sandworms in the novel, like in that kid’s book from Gabe’s!
So I was quite protective of that copy of the book for sentimental reasons. (It should be noted that I’m a romantic to my core, but not particularly nostalgic about stuff.) That copy still sits on my bookshelf after 15+ relocations. It is also the very copy in the header to this essay. One good thing (the only good thing?) about our planet being mapped out by megacorps was that, a few years back, I used Google Maps to look up the bookstore’s address that was stamped in the paperback. And there on my screen was the tiny street and the tiny dock on the lake, and it was like I used a time machine to step back into the late 1990s.
The movie Dune is a less rewarding experience. The story of its production is fascinating—see the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune for an infamous failed attempt at adaptation—but the finished product is deeply flawed. There is far too much reliance on narration, which works pretty well in the book but makes the movie feel like a lot of people standing around. There is far too little interest in the political maneuvering and opressive tactics of religious and social institutions that represents the heart of the novel. And the complex mathematics of the Guild Navigators is replaced with a glowing poop magical teleportation. David Lynch nailed the tone, and he got some of the mysticism, and I think that the movie’s aesthetics are incredible. But the need for a tidy ending and a short runtime damned the project. This is to say nothing of the ungainly noise weapons of the Atreides.
I am, to date, reminded of this family road trip and that flip book any time I think about any iteration of Dune. Lynch’s 1984 movie sits in a web of Dune memories for me, and I wonder if the upcoming two-part film will join its brethren.
Other 1984 Candidates (insanely good year): Beverly Hills Cop; Stop Making Sense; Paris, Texas; Ghostbusters; Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; Gremlins; Romancing the Stone; Splash; Repo Man; This Is Spinal Tap; Brother from Another Planet; The Terminator