Nothing But Respect for MY Dune

The Academy and seemingly my entire family fell head-over-heels for Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction classic, Dune. And who am I to disagree? But the other night I re-watched the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which recounts the great Chilean surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mid-’60s attempt to adapt the novel to the screen. He never made the movie, but in the attempt he basically invented the next thirty years of science fiction cinema. Along the way, he roped in H.R. Geiger, Moebius, Mick Jagger, and Salvador Dalí. He put his 12-year-old son into five-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week martial arts training to prepare him to play the story’s hero-messiah. And he tried to create “an artistic, cinematographical god.” In a way, he did make the movie—but just like how in the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna cannot look at Krishna’s divine form with human eyes, we’re only allowed to perceive Jodorowsky’s Dune indirectly. It’s enough.