I’m not saying it’s at all bad that there’s a song, “Puke + Cry,” for anyone who needs such a song, I’m glad for them that they have it. Me, I may not need it.
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)
I think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything l’ve written there is a thread of this: a man’s seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.
— Rod Serling, LA Times, 1967
Posts like this perforce date me, but I was in the movie house to see the release of the David Lynch/Dino de Laurentiis Dune. I loved it then and love it still. I appreciate that a devotee of the books would have cause to look askance at it. (I say thus, having myself looked askance at Frank Herbert’s novel for a long time—on which, more later.) For myself, Lynch’s movie is quite an artifact of its era (1984) and my enjoyment is largely in those terms. All the character actors I feel a fondness for, e.g. It seems, too, to be a very early role for Brad Dourif, and a toothsome character for a young pup of an actor to play. I love the moment when Patrick Stewart’s Gurney and Kyle McLachlan meet back up near the end. After seeing the Villeneuve movies, I appreciate what a peculiar choice Sean Young was for Chani, even allowing for the fact that this character is much more fully developed in the recent movies. What I appreciated more than almost ever (“almost” because I’ve been reminded of the impression from the big screen) is: just as Ridley Scott is an expert draughtsman and was very hands-on with the art design of Blade Runner, Lynch was a talented and curious artist who took a similarly active interest in the art design of Dune. Not to call the Villeneuve movies anything other than beautiful in their own right, I find the Lynch movie wonderful to watch. Overall. There are also, of course, the very creepy bits. One of the easier contrasts between the two presentations, perhaps is that Villeneuve’s Harkonnens are relatively coldly pathological, where Lynch’s are almost more disgusting than they are a menace. Speaking of artifacts, Frank Herbert’s Dune was published in 1965, so it is not much to be wondered at that its personnel refer to what we have by now termed nuclear devices as atomics.
Back in the deeps of time, when I worked as a teller for New Jersey Bank, possibly the summer of 1979, I was summoned for Jury Duty for the first time. I was never impaneled, as it turned out, so I spent my time in a Courthouse in Hackensack reading two books I was then curious about. One was The Sword of Shannara which I found the palest and baldest of Tolkien imitations. I applaud the author and publisher for exploiting consumer demand, but Lawd I found the book unbearable drivel. I then turned to Frank Herbert’s Dune, which suffered from the dep recent disgust with Shannara. There were things that I liked about Dune even so, but there were other things, some admittedly trivial—like Herbert using the French word for mixture (mélange) as the “name” of his spice, the most important commodity in the Universe. Understand: fresh from Shannara, which beats one over the head with its dull lack of original invention, I found this dodge in the case of this key element of his world an occasion for disappointment with Herbert. Setting the question of nomenclature aside, the spice itself is of course a highly interesting and, erm, spicy invention. I believe I finished the book, but it is possible that I lost patience with it and left it unfinished. As noted above, Lynch’s movie came out later, in 1984, and I liked it very well, right off. And at that point, I felt that the movie would serve me pat as far as Dune was concerned. Villeneuve’s two-part Dune, though, has me tempted to try Herbert’s novel afresh, and who knows, I may even find myself drawn to the sequels.
An unrelated Columbo coda. Our favorite detective is always reserved about his own name. I forget in which episode, but once he is directly asked what his first name is, and he replies, “Lieutenant.” The series also makes the Lieutenant’s family (particularly his wife something of an ongoing question. Suzanne Pleshette asks him if he really has a cousin. In a couple of episodes, the Columbos go on vacation together, teasing the audience with the prospect of meeting the missus, at last. Audiences were ultimately invited to believe they were meeting her in the unsuccessful spinoff Mrs Columbo (after all, the detective credited her with crucial breakthroughs in more than one case. Last night I rewatched one of the episodes directed by the great Patrick McGoohan, “Agenda for Murder,” in which the Lieutenant asks a presidential hopeful for an autograph for his wife. “What’s her name?” “Mrs Columbo.”
