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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34440 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Dune, as a franchise, seemed a bit impenetrable to me, despite the available media. Maybe it was just that I never worked up the urge to actually read the original novel for whatever reason, but I often saw the novel as this mystery land of deepness and esoteric-ness.

I read the books in my early 20s and recently re-read the first 3 books in honor of the movie coming out and was immediately immersed. I completely agree with you that it deserves it's place as a classic.

I think the "problem" with adapting Dune and the reason that it has the reputation for esotericism that it does is that so much of the story and world-building happens "off screen" as it were. It happens in the little snippets of in-universe media that introduce each chapter, it happens in the footnotes about the empire's economy, and it happens in little vignettes were a piece of music will remind some character of an incident from their childhood. This works well when presented in the original format as an illustrated serial or as a bound book, but it presents challenges in adaptation. A classic example is the famous(infamous?) banquet towards the middle of the first book. For the those unfamiliar the book basically starts out as a spy thriller. The Atreides family (our protagonists) know they are being set up but not by whom or to what purpose. Paul Atreides is working the room at a state dinner trying to get a read on who the various factions are and who is plotting with whom. In prose it's a fairly important scene that establishes a couple of recurring themes, forshadows some of the main characters' future choices, and it advances the ongoing mystery plot by giving the audience some clues. However, if you were to do a straight translation of it to stage or film what you would get is basically 5 minutes of Paul making small-talk with a bunch of minor functionaries/side-characters while everyone else sips whine and looks pensive. It's just kind of hard to stage a scene where most of the action is happening in the form of internal monologues.

Edited to Elaborate

Yeah, it's a shame that amazing scene has been left out of both film adaptations, but at the same time, I don't know how you could include that in filmic form without going all Edgar Wright on Dune. And as you note, that's just one example of something that makes Dune difficult to process into other media.

Edgar Wright's Dune is an alternate history production i didn't know i needed.

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