Doin' Dune
Movies and podcasts and reading protocols, oh my...
On Saturday, we were considering Movie Night options, and I half-jokingly said “Wanna watch Dune?” SteelyKid replied “What’s Dune?” so I thought that was a non-starter when I set out to walk the dog. By the time I got back, though, Kate had sold it, so we watched Denis Villeneuve’s Very Big Movie on HBO Max.
The quick reviews: The Pip didn’t even pretend to watch, SteelyKid was surprisingly captivated, and Kate thought it was kind of boring. I thought it was very good, probably about the best it would be possible to do in bringing (the first two-thirds of) that book to the screen. It’s a great visual spectacle and the cast are very committed to what they’re doing, but at the end of the day, it is Part One of a book that’s very internal, and breaks in a place that deliberately avoids the spectacular conclusion.
I probably would’ve just saved this for the next This Week In Movie Nights post, but it was the subject of the latest episode of the Ringer’s movie podcast, The Big Picture, and I found it really interesting to hear their reactions, and my reaction to their reactions:
Some years back, I remember Jo Walton talking about “reading protocols” in SF (in the broad sense of “speculative fiction”), arguing that there’s a characteristic approach to fiction that sets readers of the genre apart from readers of other genres. This 2010 essay at Tor.com gets the idea, but I think she was talking about it even earlier than that. I was always a little skeptical of this claim, because, to put it bluntly, there’s a long tradition of self-congratulatory horseshit in genre fandom (“fans are slans” is the shorthand, a reference to an ancient A.E. Van Vogt story), and this seemed a little too close to that.
That said, the idea never seems more plausible than when the Big Picture crew watch anything in genre, or even genre-adjacent. I really genuinely like and enjoy their commentary about movies in general, and find them smart and perceptive— they regularly pick up on stuff that wouldn’t’ve occurred to me, which is a significant part of why I listen (though the most significant reason is that I enjoy their banter). Sean Fennessey and Chris Ryan also geek out on comic-book stuff in ways that feel very similar to the ways SF fans approach their genre (Amanda Dobbins, not so much), so it doesn’t seem like the “reading protocol” for SF should be all that alien (heh) to them.
So I always find it a little disorienting when the film of the moment is in the spec-fic space, and they go Full Mundane. They regularly act bewildered regarding things that seem perfectly clear and obvious to me (and I’m way on the normie side of genre fandom these days), and go all “Whoa, slow down…” regarding what seems to me like relatively simple worldbuilding. In this episode, Ryan made a reference to the SyFy/Amazon show The Expanse as being way too exposition-heavy, which always stops me dead (this is not the first time he’s said that about that show). One of the things I’ve really liked about that show is how little formal exposition it contains, and how gracefully they handle the bits they do need. (This is maybe the place to drop a link to the other genre-media podcast I somewhat regularly listen to, Space the Nation with Dan Drezner and Ana Marie Cox, which started as a show just about The Expanse…) The idea of that being Too Much is just bewildering to me.
The Expanse came up in the context of saying that Dune was much smoother than that, and I don’t disagree— it’s a really stripped-down presentation of the world, to the point of not really asking the viewer to process very much. This does leave some gaps, though— at another point, Dobbins asks why it is that battles in the interstellar empire are all swordfights, which is a feature of the world that you could figure out from the movie, but is so subtle that it’s super easy to miss. The true answer to the question is “because Frank Herbert wanted a book with knife fights, and contrived to make that happen.” The in-universe answer is the shields that you see Paul Atreides and Gurney Halleck wearing in the sparring scene: they stop fast-moving projectiles, mostly protecting the wearer from guns, but allow slow-moving blades through. Thus, swordfights.
This was spelled out much more explicitly in the book (there’s also a bit about how they have energy weapons in this universe, but shooting a shield with them causes both shield and shooter to explode, which is just incredibly dumb from any standpoint other than “Frank Herbert wanted knife fights, physics be damned”), so I knew it was coming. It’s there in the movie— there are a handful of scenes showing slow-moving sharp things working through a shield, and Gurney says “The slow blade penetrates the shield” (or something close to that) during the sparring, but if you’re not looking for it (in a Waltonian “reading protocol” sort of way), it could slide right past (as it obviously did for the whole Big Picture team). I was able to point it out to SteelyKid, who got the idea right away.
It was also interesting to hear them talk about expectations for the movie (and possible sequels), given that none of them had read the book recently enough to know much about it (I’d be stunned if Dobbins ever read it at all; Fennessey and Ryan seem like guys who might’ve read Herbert as teens, but not since). Having recently done a re-read for the first time in probably 40 years, I found this kind of amusing. They talked a bit about how the source material was really druggy and trippy, but one of the most striking things on re-reading was how little trippy stuff there was in it. This isn’t a book where people are routinely taking spice and having wild trips— there’s one sequence where Jessica has a mystical experience, and that’s about it for explicitly druggy content. Paul’s big mystical awakening takes place off-screen (as it were), and is not described in all that much detail. There’s way more time spent on the political machinations and aristocratic etiquette than drugs doing amazing things.
(To some degree, this could be a question of eras— it might’ve seemed druggier back when it was published in the 1960’s. But even in that context, it’s not all that far out there. Naked Lunch came out several years before Dune for example, and that’s a genuinely trippy book, doing some weird and experimental things. Despite its reputation, Dune is remarkably straightforward, with prose that’s really serviceable at best.)
Anyway, as noted above, I’ve always been a bit toward the normie side of SF fandom, and in more recent years have felt even farther removed from the core of the genre. So it was an interesting experience to have this movie at this time make the “reading protocol” business feel more real.
I should maybe note again that I really do like The Big Picture, and their discussion was enjoyable in spite of the limitations discussed above. Anyway, if for some reason you find this multiply-meta discussion captivating, here are some buttons:
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Huh, I really need to do a reread. It's been 20 years since I read Dune, and my memory of it now is that Paul spends a loooot of time tripping in the desert.