Messiah Quest
Another adaptation of Frank Herbert’s landmark 1965 science fiction novel Dune has hit the theaters, this time directed by French-Canadian auteur filmmaker Denis Villeneuve.
To describe the plot of Dune is not a simple undertaking. The hero of the story, Paul Atreides (played by a moody Timothee Chalamet in this new adaptation), is the son of Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), the rules and royal family of the planet Caladan. Leto is charged by The Emperor of the Known Universe to take on the fiefdom of Arrakis, otherwise known as Dune, a seemingly barren desert planet, but highly important one. Arrakis is the only planet in the Emperor’s vast empire that produces the spice melange, a resource necessary for space travel. It also happens to be a mind altering drug. Arrakis is home to The Fremin, the mysterious native people of the planet who do not appreciate the empire’s presence. There is also House Harkonnen, the previous rulers of Arrakis led by the vile Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), who wish to take the desert planet back. Did I mention that Paul Atreides was bred to have psychic powers in hopes that he may be “the one”?
Already, this is a lot to take in and, to add onto it, there are space witches, giant sandworms, complex technology, and individual machinations that all play important relevance to the narrative of Dune.
This is only the second attempt to bring the psychedelia of the novel to the big screen (three if you count Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed project) with David Lynch’s being the first. In a move very unlike David Lynch, his 1984 adaptation tried its hardest to decode the tangled web of lore to make it easy for mainstream audiences to understand. He granted long monologues explaining the finer details of plot points and allowed viewers to occasionally hear what every character was thinking. Even with these graces, Lynch’s Dune not only feels impenetrable, but it also is boring. Despite this, it has a distinct charm. It is beautifully shot with some outstanding Gothic inspired production design. Dune (1984) also marks the beginning of David Lynch’s long working relationship with Kyle Maclachlan, who, by contrast, played Paul Atreides cheerily and like he was excited about the concept of being the chosen one.
Conversely, this 2021 adaptation of Dune is filled with dread. Although the Gothic influences are still there, but often feels more in line with Villeneuve’s bleakly colored Arrival (2016) where the alien ship looks alien because of its modernist smoothness and enormity. Scale ends up being everything with this adaptation of Dune. Not only are the space ships impressively and impossibly huge, but every opulent room of these royal families were huge. Landscapes were beautiful and vast, but not as expansive as the spacescapes seen throughout the film. Every complex political plot that all the characters have are dwarfed by the natural sublime of the world of Dune.
The sublime is something like evoking the sense of awe. Seeing something so beautiful, massive, extraordinary, or otherwise indescribable that the only expression is a mixture of wonder and terror. It makes you feel both incredibly insignificant and incredibly connected with the world.
There is a moment in one of the many climaxes of Dune where Paul flying a plane through a sandstorm and Paul struggles to keep the plane on course. Throughout the film, he has attempted to reject, expressed frustration with, and brooded over his place in the universe. He did not choose to be born into House Atreides where he will inherit his father’s title and nor did he wish to be bred to have access to “The Weirding Way” (the psychic powers I mentioned before). He was struggling against this role chosen for him by his parents, the path of the chosen one the space witches laid before him, the political engineering of the other houses, the universe for even creating him, and even fate. Paul becomes gifted, through “The Weirding Way” and the spice melange, and can see visions of his future. He sees the fate of his friends and the eventual role he has to play in the Fremen uprising and his overtaking of the empire, but while he flies that plan through the sandstorm he sees a vision of a man he has not yet met. This Fremen man advises him not to try to fly against the wind, but to let it carry you. Paul, left with no other option, decides to let go and let the sandstorm carry him. From this point on, Paul is done fighting his fate and decides to use the cards he was dealt to not change his life, but to change the world, the universe, around him.
Instead of fighting Dune, in this moment I realized that to “get” Dune (in this form at least) is to embrace the sublime. Although I don’t understand all of it, watching it and taking in the extraordinary majesty of the whole thing was far more rewarding. The interwoven plotlines of the myriad power-seekers only help build this incredible tapestry. Instead of picking apart the threads, look at the entire piece and see the glory that is Dune.
Dune is in theaters now and is available for streaming on HBO Max.
Goings On About Town
It has been a consistent quality of film director Wes Anderson’s body of work (The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), and Moonrise Kingdom (2012) to name a few) that he includes an impressive amount of imagined detail to the worlds created in his stories. With each subsequent film, he seems to have found smaller and smaller details in grander and larger stories. This is also reflected in the growing number of cast members for his films. Anderson’s first film, Bottle Rocket (1996), starred Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, (both of whom had not made it big yet) and James Caan while his latest film, The French Dispatch (2021) is so star studded that it’s almost blinding. These big name actors, in no matter how small of roles they find themselves in The French Dispatch, add some level of detail to each of the three stories told in the film.
The French Dispatch reenacts the three articles (and brief forward) of the last issue of the fictional eponymous magazine, The French Dispatch. Each story has a distinct voice (because each has its own distinct writer), but are tied together by Anderson’s distinct visual “dollhouse” style and by a distinct love for the arts, however you may describe it. The first story is literally about a jailed artist (Benicio Del Toro), his muse (Lea Seydoux who’s deadpan delivery is a perfect match for Anderson’s sensibilities), and the art collector who wishes to make the artist famous so that he may coast off “discovering him” (a high strung Adrien Brody). The second story tells of youth protest movement (led by Timothee Chalamet who is, in this writers opinion, the funniest cast member of the film) from the perspective of an older woman (Francis McDormand). The third and final story being a reporter (Jeffrey Wright) being caught in a hostage situation while he is supposed to be reviewing The Commissaire’s (Matthieu Amalric) personal chef’s (Steve Park) cooking.
Each story, while explicitly or otherwise, is about one’s passion for art. Whether it to be making art regardless of monetary worth, writing a manifesto for political purpose, or indulging in the art of others to find some comfort in the world. The journalists also use the act of writing these articles as a way to express their own passions. Even outside of the narrative, Anderson makes many of his cinematic inspirations known (Jacques Tati, Jean-Luc Godard, and French New Wave cinema) through direct nods and his direction highlights the artistry of the world and, through some spectacular stylized moments, makes the world more beautiful. The first story has a motif of freezing chaotic violent moments into renaissance style compositions, reflecting the violent artistic prisoner’s unstable personality servicing his artwork. The dynamism and volatility of youth is represented through overly political discourse and written word in the second story, but the joy of youth is truly celebrated in genuine moments of bliss like listening to music or a stylized motorcycle ride that evokes Nobuhiko Obayashi’s His Motorbike, Her Island (1986). In the last story, a chase sequence is rendered in animation meant to resemble bandes dessinees (Franco-Belgian comics), giving an otherwise harrowing experience some comedic levity. There is room for sorrow with unexpected deaths, loneliness, and heartbreak, but as the editor (a graven and fatherly Bill Murray) of The French Dispatch magazine reiterates throughout the film, “No crying”.
The French Dispatch is in theaters now.
Folklore for the Modern Age
Found footage films are pretty passé these days. After the glut of Paranormal Activity films and countless other movies trying to save on production costs by intentionally shooting on cheap equipment, I can understand many people’s reservations about watching one. Of course, there are found footage films that rise above the motion sickness and amateur acting like the unnerving Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018), the funny Grave Encounters (2011), the bizarre Trash Humpers (2009), and the pulse pounding finale of [REC] (2007), but nothing will ever surpass what kicked off the trend at the turn of the century, The Blair Witch Project (1999).
Before The Blair Witch Project, the concept of a found footage movie (a film made to appear as if the movie the audience is watching was recovered, unedited, from a real life incident) was quite rare. There was Cannibal Holocaust (1980) where the individuals who recovered the footage and the studio heads who wished to sell the footage were characters in the film and Man Bites Dog (1992) where a documentary crew follows a serial killer without awareness of what is going to become of them, but these films did not do what Blair Witch would do. They did not make it seem real.1
Verisimilitude was an important element of the film before it even became the film. One early idea was one long uninterrupted take with a video camera through an abandoned house and the audience would be trapped with this fixed viewpoint of diving deeper and deeper into this house until cultlike activity was found in the basement. It would seem real because of the intimacy created by the camera. Through conversations with each other and friends, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez altered the story and shaped it into something resembling the film as we can see today. Preparation for The Blair Witch Project involved nearly ten years of The Haxan Five (directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, and producers Gregg Hale, Robin Cowie and Michael Monello) developing the lore and world of The Blair Witch. An entire timeline and mythology would be created around this urban legend that would serve as the backdrop for their horror film.
Those details would prove invaluable in marketing the film. Websites and fake documentaries were made treating the Blair Witch as real folklore in anticipation of the release of the film. While filming the movie, the directors fed the featured extras, who would be interviewed by the cast, stories from their extensive fictional timeline of Blair Witch mythology so to make the cast and the audience believe in the world they created. Missing posters for the main cast were posted around film festivals where The Blair Witch was screening and the mother of one of the actors was sent many condolences for the perceived loss of her daughter. Audiences truly believed, for a moment, that three documentary filmmakers went missing in the Black Hills of Burkittsville looking for the legendary Blair Witch.2
In short, it worked and, even now, the film feels effectively real. The Blair Witch Project taps into a very traditional fear of the unknown. Despite all the detail and mythology provided, the filmmakers leave big gaping blank spots, they obscure certain elements, and leave things for the audience to imagine. Most urban legends and folklore hinge on that fear of what isn’t known and, for a long time, that was being out in the woods or out after dark. Blair Witch helped bridge that gap into the modern day by introducing technology into it and providing mythology on the internet.
Today, the metaphorical Black Hills of Burkittsville aren’t real forests, but rather digital ones. Creatures like Slender Man generate fear of exploring the new unknown, the internet. These scary stories warn the population not of the forests long since satellite mapped, but of the dark corners of the internet that we do not yet understand. Folklore is extremely powerful (just look at what Slenderman and The Momo Challenge wrought on our youth) and seeing a film, like The Blair Witch Project, that understands that and uses it will always be effective.
The Blair Witch Project is available for digital rental on most streaming services, although this writer recommends finding a VHS copy, digging out a VCR, and watching it alone at night.
Spooky Season: Part Four
This month of October, I thought it would be fun for me to share some autumnal media recommendations to celebrate the Halloween season. For this last part, I want to recommend works that are full on scary. Works that make you run when you turn the lights out at night. Of course, your mileage may vary, but the intention of these works aren’t to thrill you, they’re meant to scare you.
It Follows (2014)
It Follows pretty early on demonstrates its place in the horror canon with a scene where the protaganist, Jay (Maika Monroe), is attending class. She is clearly distracted, looking out the window instead of paying attention to the lecture. This moment is visually similar to scenes in Halloween (1978) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) where the heroine is bored in class, not knowing that outside that window lurks a killer. In It Follows, the killer isn’t a man in a mask like Halloween’s Michael Myers, nor is it a talkative demon like Elm Street’s Freddy Kruger, but a eerily unexplained thing. Jay is being followed by some being that relentlessly pursues her, like Michael Myers, and seemingly has supernatural powers, like Freddy Kruger, but it remains completely oblique. The origin of this thing is never revealed beyond the fact that Jay has it following her because a guy she was dating passed it onto her. This thing can take the appearance of anyone, from an old woman, a giant man, to a friend of her’s. This is an extremely modern and bare bones take on the genre and it is terrifying, no doubt due to the incredible score by Disasterpiece.
It Follows is available for digital rental on most streaming services.
World of Horror (2019)
World of Horror is an indie game meant to evoke classic rpgs and the work of manga horror maestro Junji Ito (more on him later). You can choose to play as one of many young protagonists investigating the strange occurrences around your small Japanese city. These mysteries have multiple endings ranging from enigmatic to explicitly apocalyptic, but the narrative is firmly dour as your goal isn’t to defeat the evil, but merely to delay its coming. The gameplay is difficult at first and one is likely to see many haunting game over screens, but once one learns how to manage their inventory and which skills to build up, it becomes more feasible to tackle the more complex mysteries. Some of these stories are absolutely chilling, but the enemy “Something Truly Evil”, which requires certain requirements to encounter, creates several terrifying moments in the game. It’s also got a bangin’ soundtrack.
World of Horror is currently available for Windows with plans for it to be released for the Nintendo Switch and PS4.
The Work of Junji Ito
One of my all-time favorite illustrators and my favorite mangaka, Junji Ito is most famous for his horror stories. A landmark work, for me, was his Uzumaki3 (1998-1999) which terrified me for days after I read it. Uzumaki depicted the strange events occurring in a town that all involved spirals with each event tending to be more bizarre and fatal than the last. Naturally occurring spirals (snails, eardrums, curly hair) turn deadly and bodies eventually bend into spiral shapes too. His other horror manga like Tomie (1987-2000), the tale of a beautiful demonic girl who kills the men who lust over her, and Gyo (2001-2002), an end of the world scenario initially starting with biomechanical fish walking on land, are also insanely well done, but I find his short story work to be his strongest. The Enigma of Amigara Fault (2002) being one of his most famous, touches on the idea of obsession that runs throughout all his work. In Amigara Fault, an earthquake causes a sheet of rock to surface in Japan, but the odd thing about it is that there are person shaped holes in the fault. Stranger still, each hole seems to go on an unknown distance into the earth. People become obsessed with these holes and claim ownership of these holes (“This hole…It was made for me!”) and begin plugging themselves into them, beginning their form fitting descent into the rock. I won’t spoil their fate, but in almost all of Ito’s work, even his latest manga, Sensor (2021), those who obsessively chase any idea, person, or object while neglecting themselves and those who they care about, tend to meet similar dreadful fates.
Ito’s work is published by VIZ media and can be found wherever you can read manga.
Stray Observations
Happy Halloween! OoooooooOOOOOooOOOooo! Halloween is just about my favorite holiday next to New Year’s. I always like to dress up for the occasion. Next issue I’ll be sure to post my costume(s) from this year.
I would be remiss not to include the infamous and official Scooby-Doo parody of The Blair Witch Project with this issue.
After all the Dune related memes and having seeing both of the films, I have gotten my hands on a copy of the book. Regrettably, I fear I am on the path to become a big Dune fan.
Full disclosure, I am feeling totally burnt out. Taking next week off from I Liked It!, but I am always happy by all of your support! Please continue to like, share, and comment. If you have any corrections, submissions, or kind words, please forward them to Nick.Dauphin@gmail.com. Have a happy halloween!
Point of order: Cannibal Holocaust, similar to The Blair Witch Project, did ask many of its actors to lay low when the film was released, but was accused of being a snuff film for the realistic deaths of some of the characters. Even so, Cannibal Holocaust depicts the events of the film as purely fictional, hence the framing device of the characters who found the footage.
I gathered most of this info from the great book on the film’s production, release, and reception, The Blair Witch Project by Russell Gomm.
Soon to be adapted into an Adult Swim television series. Not much has been released outside this short teaser, but I am super hype.