David Lynch’s Dune is a maddening failure. But what a failure!
After Eraserhead set midnight audiences’ brains on fire, and Mel Brooks shepherded The Elephant Man into an art house hit, Lynch was offered the chance to move up to the Big Leagues and helm Return of the Jedi. He opted to adapt Frank Herbert’s epic and unwieldy space opera instead, and the rest is history. It bombed and Lynch settled back into his art house auteur wheelhouse, burrowing into the darkest recesses of his subconscious with his masterpiece Blue Velvet.
But in our current era of anonymous and focus-grouped-to-death blockbusters—including, arguably, Denis Villeneuve’s adventures on Arrakis—it’s a trip to revisit Dune because, fiasco that it is, there’s a lot of Lynch in there. Many of his favorite players crop up—Kyle MacLachlan in his film debut as our hero Paul Atreides, Brad Dourif, Jack Nance, and Dean Stockwell—plus you get grotesque gloopy practical FX, spice-induced nightmare visions, a score by Toto featuring Brian Eno, and the immortal image of Sting in a huge cod piece.
As it buckles under the weight, Dune descends into glorious kitschy fun, the kind that only the decadent 1980s and an in-over-his-head visionary filmmaker could produce.