RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Archeo-Futurist Messiah

Aug. 15, 2014 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:29:21

Archeo-Futurist Messiah

Greg Johnson and John Morgan join Richard to discuss the universe of *Dune *, as expressed in both Frank Herbert's original novel and David Lynch's underrated film. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	Greg, John, welcome.
	Let's talk about Dune.
	Thanks for having me on.
	Yeah, thanks.
	Sure.
	I know that you are both veterans of the Muhadib's Jihad, in which 60 billion people perished, and the galaxy was unified under one true religion.
	So I think you'll have a lot to say on this one.
	Indeed, my eyes are blue.
	Yeah, mine too.
	Blue within blue.
	Well, why don't we start out talking about our first impressions of Dune and also how we came to Dune.
	And I'll mention before we say that, we're certainly going to talk about Frank Herbert's novel, Dune.
	But I think we might be looking at it through the lens of...
	David Lynch's 1984 film, Dune, which is actually remembered as a kind of disaster.
	But I certainly think this, and I think Greg and John agree, that it is kind of a flawed masterpiece.
	And I think it actually does get at the heart of the book, and I think it does represent the book well.
	I don't think the definitive Dune has yet to be filmed, but...
	Or maybe it can't be filmed.
	But I do think Lynch's movie is quite interesting.
	But why don't we just talk a little bit about how we came to Dune, the book and some of the films.
	So Greg, you first.
	What is your own personal history with this world?
	Well, I was introduced to the first Dune novel by some of my older hippie cousins in Canada.
	And they were really into it.
	I think they were smoking a little too much spice, and they were sort of into living on communes and strumming guitars and stuff like that.
	And so that's what they were responding to in it.
	They were responding to the drug themes, the ecological themes, the anti-colonial themes in Dune.
	And I read the book, and I was too young to really appreciate it.
	But I did enjoy it.
	And when I saw the Lynch movie, I was very disappointed in it because it didn't accord with my vision of things.
	And it made me realize, though, that reading the Herbert book imparted a very strong vision in my mind of how this all should be.
	And it was one of the books that I had read that gave me the most specific and strong imaginative vision of its contents.
	I think the only other author who I was reading at the time who really exceeded that was Ray Bradbury, who I think is probably the greatest science fiction stylist ever.
	But anyway, I was very disappointed in the Lynch movie.
	And it was only years later when I got a copy of it on VHS.
	I think it was still VHS at the time.
	I watched it again and enough time had passed and the strong impression of the novel had faded and I could sort of see it for what it was and I really think it is a great, flawed film.
	There's a long list of great, flawed films and it's near the top in terms of greatness, I think.
	I think it's interesting that Greg said that these hippies were into Dune and that before we went on air, we were talking about how this really is a profoundly reactionary novel and it could only have been written.
	I think it's interesting how this appeals to both of these things, both of these people, and it really speaks to them.
	Psychedelic quality to it, you could say.
	And it certainly has very strong ecological themes, and it certainly has anti-colonial themes of the Fremen as an oppressed, demeaned people that rises up and defeats the emperor.
	But then at the same time, it also has these strong currents of a kind of fascist current, a very strong current of reviving the old world of feudalism, So I think this speaks to the greatness of the novel, that it touches on all of these things that are kind of outside the contemporary American world.
	It kind of brings us to different ways of being that might be considered right or left, but they're all outside of the world.
	Yeah, I mean, Avila in Ride the Tiger...
	He has a chapter there on the hippies because he was writing in the late 60s.
	And he actually says that, oh, it's far, from a traditionalist point of view, it's far preferable to be a hippie than to be a bourgeois.
	So yeah, I mean, he's understood.
	He's like, well, even though they lack proper reference, I think is how he put it, they still intuitively grasp this need to kind of rebel against the modern world.
	And I think that Dune, alongside Tolkien, was a big influence on the 60s generation.
	It was published in 1965.
	The sequels came out in the late 60s, the second and third books.
	It was very, very widely read by counterculture types in the United States and Europe.
	And it had a – it fit in with their revolt against the modern world definitely in the same way that Tolkien does.
	And yet at the same time, there's a profoundly reactionary dimension to both Tolkien's.
	Yeah, without question.
	Well, John, why don't you tell us a little bit about your own personal history with Dune?
	Well, I saw it in 1985, shortly after it came out.
	I think it came out in December of 84. Just because as a kid, I loved anything that was science fiction.
	And I remember really not liking it at all.
	I was only 11 years old at the time, and my taste at that time was Star Wars, Star Trek.
	I'd just gotten into 2001.
	And I couldn't really make sense of Dune.
	Like, to me, it was like, but this is like some weird fantasy story.
	It's not really science fiction.
	And I just kind of dismissed it, and I never really thought about it again for many years after.
	And then when I was an undergrad, a friend of mine who was really into the books kept insisting that I read it.
	So finally I sat down and I did, and enough years had gone by that I...
	I really just thought it was amazing and wonderful, and even now it's one of my favorite science fiction novels, definitely.
	And then shortly after I read the book, I re-watched the film.
	And at first I kind of had the same reaction as Greg.
	I was really disappointed in it.
	I mean, especially having just read the book beforehand, I mean, it leaves out so much.
	I mean, I think...
	Only maybe 10% of the book is actually in the film.
	And so I kind of laughed about it and I didn't really like it.
	And then a couple of years went by and I watched it again.
	And what I came to realize was that, well, as an adaptation of the book, I don't think it's very successful.
	And I actually think if you haven't read the book first, it would be almost impossible to understand.
	I say that both because of the experience I had with it as a kid and also that's the response I've gotten from people I've shown it to who knew nothing about Dune before.
	They can't even understand what's going on because there's so much that Lynch tried to cover.
	I mean, Dune was still very early in his career and even he has admitted he probably wasn't fully prepared to do it at that stage.
	But yeah, in subsequent viewings, I came to realize, well, as an adaptation of the book, I don't think it's entirely successful.
	But where it's brilliant to me is that it really does capture the vision of the book.
	I mean, I think Lynch really did a good job of capturing the feel of the book and the look of the book the way I saw it in my mind.
	So in that sense, I think it's great.
	I've often said, you know, if I could...
	You know, pick a film that I would actually like our future to look like.
	It would probably be Lynch's Dune.
	I mean, to me, it just embodies, you know, this sort of archaeo-futurism, as Fahey would say, that we're after.
	For the costumes alone, I want that to be our future, yes.
	Well, it's really, I mean, I've watched it, I've shown it to friends before who have no particular political inclinations.
	And, you know, when the...
	The House Atreides soldiers on Dune first show up there.
	I was like, oh, those are like Rommel's troops.
	I mean, they really do look like the Africa Corps or something.
	Yeah, as for me, I actually was one of those people that saw the movie first.
	I did not read the book when I was a young adult.
	When I was a kid, I was hugely into Star Wars.
	I was one of these kids that had the Star Wars toys before I even saw the film.
	I think I might have even read a comic book or something.
	I got some of these toys for Christmas and I was just playing with them.
	I certainly did eventually see the movies.
	When VHS came out, I'm sure I re-watched them a number of times.
	I think I also was...
	Like many people responded to that mythical quality of Star Wars.
	And I think...
	That quality is derived from Dune and Frank Herbert.
	I think he really introduced that into the world.
	And George Lucas was certainly deeply indebted to Herbert.
	But I actually did not know anything about Dune.
	And it was actually at a David Lynch film festival that I attended when I was at the University of Chicago in 2003.
	And I had...
	And I am a David Lynch fan, and I had been for a number of years.
	And I was kind of curious to see some of those things that I hadn't seen, like Eraserhead and things like that.
	And at this film festival, I think I saw them all, and at this festival there was just a sense of whiplash where you went from Eraserhead and then you had Dune.
	And probably like a lot of people, if you see this movie in 2014, say, it evokes laughter.
	I mean, I remember in the theater where there was some point where Paul meets Chani.
	And she says, tell me about your home world, Usul.
	And he thinks in his mind, tell me about your home world, Usul.
	It's like they're not answering questions.
	They're telepathically communicating.
	It's very funny.
	There are a lot of other things that were just a little bit silly, very 80s.
	In a way, you could watch this movie and think, it's so bad, it's good, or whatever.
	But even when I watched it, despite these problems and despite some problems in the special effects, just as a I think some of the special effects are amazing.
	I think the worms are really great.
	And some of the ships in space look pretty clunky.
	They look like toys hanging on invisible thread in a dark room.
	You can see the boxes around them.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, there's some real problems with the film.
	I don't think anyone denied that.
	But even when I first saw it, and despite all these, you know, the kind of laughing at the picture that was occurring, I realized that there was something else going on.
	And that Herbert was giving us this vision that the future is the past, that the past is the future.
	He was giving us this vision, a very anti-American, certainly anti-liberal vision, of the power of harnessing religion and the state.
	And this messianic power and some of these hints in the film that when you read about in some of the sequels, and you get hints of it in the book, but that after the end of the action of the book, Paul will lead a jihad that I mentioned in which they essentially take over the universe and create one religion to rule them all and kill 60 billion in the process.
	You know, I realized that there was something terrifying about this whole vision of Herbert.
	And I mean that in a very profound and strong way, that there's a lot more to it.
	So I did become a fan, and I've read the book, and I've also listened to a brilliant audiobook version of it, which I'll put in the show notes.
	It really is, this novel really...
	In a way, should be heard.
	And let me just jump into...
	I'll use that as a segue to jump into something, you know, a theme that I want to talk about, and I'll get both of your opinions on this.
	But when I said that, the Dune is a work that almost deserves to be heard and not just read.
	And what I mean by that is that there are all these different tonalities that occur throughout the book.
	You can hear this in the different words and names that evoke different feelings and different times and places.
	And at some points, the language seems to evoke early modern English or middle English when you hear some of these lays that Gurney will sing to Paul.
	You have Atreides evoking...
	The Greeks and things like that.
	And then you have all these other different valences.
	Needless to say, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who of course is Paul's grandfather, which you've learned.
	Spoiler alert there.
	But anyway, obviously he's evoking...
	The East, or Russia, or maybe some kind of sadistic, Stalinist world.
	And then you get to the Fremen and Dune, and you end up in this Middle Eastern world, where they'll use words that have become familiar to us now, like jihad.
	But the quizak sadarak is Hebraic.
	Muad'Dib is obviously this Arabic resonance.
	But I'll just go to Greg, you first.
	What do you think about these different tonalities that Frank Herbert's using?
	What are the effects of these?
	And why do you think he's making these clear gestures to different times and places?
	Well, I think that...
	The first thing that we need to say, and I guess we've already said it beforehand, is that no liberal could have written Dune.
	It's an anti-liberal book, and it's very consistent with a lot of thought currents that have flowed into the new right.
	I'm not, I guess I'm not going to speak so much to the different cultural references and things like that in there, except to say that the overall feel of it is that the only people in the universe who are really players in this are white people.
	I mean, ethnically, that seems to be the underlying assumption.
	There's one little reference to somebody who has a hint of an epicanthic fold, which But otherwise, you know, everybody else seems to be Europid.
	There are no aliens with, you know, beaks or trunks or extra tentacles or things like that.
	It's just a human universe with people who all seem to be described and who feel spiritually to be quite European.
	It's a very Eurocentric thing.
	And that said, you know, there are different peoples in the cosmos and there are different fields to the planets because they've evolved.
	For thousands of years in semi-isolation.
	Because the thing about space travel is that things are very widely scattered.
	And what that means is, and this is Herbert's thinking, you know, at the end of the Roman Empire with the breakdown of central authority and communications, the roads stopped, you know, working and things like that.
	They became too dangerous.
	People had to be decentralized.
	And so you had the roots of feudalism.
	I mean, feudalism started really at the beginning of the 4th century, especially in Western Europe.
	And that is consistent with space travel.
	I mean, things are widely spread out.
	And so he was picturing that if we're going to be traveling through space and colonizing space, we're going to have...
	And also because space travel takes time, you're going to have to have people who think and plan over great long spans of time.
	And so you don't have democracy anymore, because as we know, that doesn't lead to any kind of long-term thinking.
	So you have these hereditary monarchies and aristocracies.
	You have guilds.
	And you have holy orders of various sorts.
	And all of these are features of medieval Europe.
	And I think that he's basically saying, look, if man is going to go out into the cosmos and if we're going to adapt to space exploration and colonization, we're going to have to...
	to an older form of social organization.
	It's not going to be Star Trek style liberalism.
	It's going to be a kind of updated feudalism.
	I think that's the thing that really struck me about it.
	And so the plurality of different cultures and voices and things like that really does seem to be based on simply the fact that separate evolution.
	It's been taking place for thousands of years on these planets which are only occasionally linked because space travel is very expensive.
	Space travel is described in the way that the railroad monopolies were described in 19th century America where basically every bit of profit out of commerce practically is just siphoned off to the guild.
	That makes it possible.
	And practically, of course there's some profit left to the buyers and sellers or commerce would stop at all.
	But it really does strike me as generally a universe where people are isolated from one another.
	Yeah.
	And there's a line in the novel where he talks about the jihad and...
	He almost says that there's like a biological force that is behind this and that biological force is a desire to overcome this isolation, to overcome these isolated pockets of genetic diversity and to mix things up again.
	He actually talks about it that way, which is really kind of fascinating.
	Yeah, it's a very...
	Dionysian way.
	I think he says that it's when Paul is about to fight Fade Rautha to the death.
	And Paul talks about having this bubbling up feeling of race consciousness.
	And that is of this, you know, this...
	It's the desire that is the negative of the desire to be one with your family and to be rooted.
	It's this desire to go out and conquer and mix blood, and those that are most vigorous will survive.
	And he describes that as race consciousness.
	Of course, immediately after the action of the book, the Fremen do essentially conquer the universe or pillage the universe.
	And again, no white liberal writes about race consciousness.
	No.
	It's simply not done.
	And it's certainly not race mixing in the way that liberals think of it, which is about love, you know, like, oh, how could you keep these two good people apart?
	No, and it's not really race mixing because, I mean, again, everybody's sort of portrayed as like Europid, but they're separate nations and pockets of European-type peoples scattered around the cosmos.
	a little inbred, perhaps.
	They're getting a little stagnant.
	And that's another thing about Dune that's so interesting.
	Herbert is thinking and pondering these great issues of civilizational health and decadence on grand historic scales.
	It's really, really absorbing to...
	To sort of follow where his mind goes on this, he seems to believe that history moves in great cycles.
	And, you know, there's vital barbarism that then becomes more civilized and decadent and then brittle and then the life force wells up and smashes these brittle forms to bits and things start over again.
	Yeah, I mean, once the guild and the Bene Gesserit become these decadent witches and the guild are these stale people and the empire is corrupt, you need these barbarian Fremen to come and smash everything and put it back together again.
	Yeah, yeah.
	John, why don't you talk a little bit about the religious aspect to this world?
	Because just to kind of set you up for that, I mean, what we were talking about is that This world of Dune is the anti-Star Trek.
	Yes, yes.
	Roddenberry and all these other people who write these Star Trek movies.
	The future is a kind of quaint, multicultural liberalism where everyone's united in some kind of united nations where we go and explore the galaxy.
	All this kind of stuff.
	For civil rights.
	For civil rights.
	I mean, not to get on a Star Trek tangent, but there's this prime directive of you shouldn't intervene in the development of civilization.
	But they always break that in order to keep backwards civilizations, to bring them towards freedom and liberty.
	Oh, and when it's convenient for the Federation.
	Right.
	If you really look at, uh, you know, Star Trek, that's, you know, they, they're always willing to break it when they need to, which is, you know, actually quite apropos if it's supposed to be America.
	Uh, right.
	I think there is a kind of Americanism to Star Trek, without question, and certainly a liberalism.
	But Dune, it has this world of religion, united to the state, of the world where the Bene Gesserit have this extreme power that you can have a Messiah again.
	I mean, all this stuff really fascinates me.
	Why don't you just talk a little bit about the religious aspect of this universe?
	I'll definitely do that.
	I just wanted to follow up first with what you and Greg were talking about.
	I thought Greg had a very good point about the political nature of Dune.
	Dune is profoundly anti-democratic, as we've been saying, and that's actually a theme that's common to almost all the best science fiction, strangely.
	A lot of literary critics have noticed this, which is, I think, one of the reasons why they've been reticent to sort of admit science fiction to the literary canon.
	It's because if you look, the themes of science fiction in general always tend to...
	You know, there's very thinly veiled racialism.
	There's always critiques of democracy.
	I mean, you can talk about things in science fiction that you can't really talk about in any other form of literature anymore.
	So, yeah, I think Herbert was in that tradition, although he did it extremely well, and clearly a lot of meditation on politics and history went into the writing of Dune.
	Like you said, a war as a renewing force and this belief that a strong ruler is needed to set things right.
	I think that's why it appeals to people like us and probably many of the people listening to this podcast.
	As for the religious aspect, the most clear influence...
	Is from Islam and I've looked into it a bit and it's specifically Shia messianism.
	And where this probably comes from is that Frank Herbert himself, before he wrote Dune, he was a geologist who worked for the oil companies in Saudi Arabia and actually spent some time there.
	So I've never actually been able to find any actual biographical proof, but it seems pretty evident that he must have...
	You know, either through people there or through his reading, had some influence from Shi 'ism.
	And there's actually a website, I can't remember the name of it now, but I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find on Google, which details all the references to Islamic theology that are in Dune.
	And it's quite extensive.
	It's more than just a few things.
	And to Arabic in general.
	Yeah, Herbert must have been influenced by that somehow.
	As for why he would do that, I should also mention, it's not just Islam.
	I mean, there's also kind of a Buddhist tone to some of it.
	Not so much among the Fremen, but among the Harkonnens and the Atreides.
	What's that line that the Mentats use?
	Like, oh, it is through my will alone that I set my mind in motion.
	Yeah, that all sounds more Buddhist or something like that.
	Fear is the mind killer.
	I will let the fear pass over me.
	Yeah, yeah, even more.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So, yeah, I think he's drawing on a number of different sources.
	But I think the reason is because, well, obviously, I mean, his references to Islam, he was writing in the 60s.
	I mean, they didn't have the political valence then that they would have today.
	I have to always suppress the urge to kind of read present events backwards into the film or the book.
	There's that line in the film when House Atreides occupies Dune and they say, well, they knew that the Harkonnen would leave many suicide troops behind.
	And it's like, oh, you know, this must be some sort of allegory for what's going on in the Middle East, but obviously it couldn't be.
	But I think that the reason why Herbert perhaps drew on that, if he spent time in Saudi Arabia, was it probably impressed him that Islam, whatever we think of it, I mean, it has probably more than any other religion retained more of its resistance to modernity.
	I mean, that hasn't always necessarily been a positive thing, especially as far as our civilization is concerned.
	But I mean, Saudi Arabia is a monarchy and it has this very strict theocracy.
	And, you know, perhaps that's why Herbert felt that that was a good source to draw on for the religion in his world.
	I also, you know, we talked about this before we started recording, but it's pretty evident that he drew on T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.
	I think you could sort of read, this is like a science fiction version of that in some ways.
	Yeah, with Paul as T.E. Lawrence, who goes and raises the tribes up in the desert to rebel against the distant emperor.
	Yes.
	Yeah, very much so.
	And of course, Islam...
	At least in its ideal form, is very feudal in nature.
	And there is an interview, I can't give a source, although I'm sure I did read it from him.
	I read an interview with Herbert where he was asked about all these feudal elements in Dune.
	And he replied that he actually believed himself that feudalism was the ideal way of organizing human society.
	And that he was convinced that eventually we would go back to that.
	Which kind of reinforces the point Greg was making earlier, I think.
	Well, we'll go back to that if we ever leave our increasingly befouled earthly nest and go out into the universe.
	But it looks less and less likely that we're going to be conquering the final frontier because all of our resources are going to providing cell phones and vaccinations for...
	You know, Epsilon semi-morons who are going to basically, you know, flood the earth and foul our nest, and that'll be the end of mankind's Faustian aspirations.
	Well, I mean, that'll force us into feudalism here.
	Yeah, yeah, feudalism now.
	Anyway, you know, on the religion thing too, John, you know, it strikes me that...
	He's thinking of religion in two ways.
	He's thinking of religion as a control mechanism.
	So there's a kind of political religion that is consciously manipulated by the Bene Gesserit.
	And then there's religion as the fanatical, messianic, destabilizing force that can't be controlled.
	And one of the things in the...
	That theme is explored in one of the appendices of Dune, where they talk about the religion of the empire and how at a certain point after the great upheaval, they decided to create an ecumenical religion.
	And they came together, all these scholars, to edit a Bible, you know, called the Orange Catholic Bible.
	And it gets orange.
	It's like the orange Protestant.
	So orange and Catholic together, it gives you a sense of...
	You know, ecumenicism.
	And that this process took many years, and what they were trying to do is they were working on the assumption of the transcendental unity of religions, but as this process of editing the text and creating this unified religion moved forward slowly over years,
	There were all these anti-ecumenical riots and disturbances as people who resisted the idea of giving up their religion's claim to exclusive truth were battling it out and I've been sort of exploring with reading and writing about Jan Osman, the conflict between an attempt to...
	Unify religions in a syncretic way or a traditionalist way versus basically the biblical religions' claims to be exclusively true.
	And he's exploring that too, which I think is really interesting.
	Yeah.
	Without question.
	What do you think the Bene Gesserit represent?
	I mean, is that a kind of...
	Is that a kind of clericalism gone wrong?
	It's a religion without being connected to the life force, and instead just a religion that is I think there's actually one part where the Bene Gesserit reserve the right to, in order to better rule planets, to create kind of myths that scare the inhabitants.
	Well, they have something called the Panoplia Prophetica, which is this compilation of prophecies and stories they sew around the galaxy to make people receptive to the Bene Gesserit when they show up.
	Ah, this has been foretold.
	And of course, you know...
	Paul and Jessica benefit from the sowing of these prophecies on Arrakis.
	The Bene Gesserit is really not a religion.
	They have a religious organization.
	They're organized like a mystery cult or a religious.
	disorder, right?
	And yet their goal is eugenics.
	Right.
	And the Bene Gesserit is a sisterhood.
	And the sisters don't take vows of celibacy.
	They are, in fact, they're kind of whores.
	They go around and seduce various aristocrats and people who have valuable sperm and make sure that their bloodlines are preserved and they christen cross them.
	They provide consorts to the dukes and emperors.
	And their goal is to create...
	A kind of super being, which they call the Kwisatz Haderach.
	And it's very obscure, really, in the book, what the goal of that is.
	I mean, one of the things that the Bene Gesserit have is they have the reverend mothers have the memories of the previous reverend mothers who come before them.
	But they don't seem to enjoy the memories of the male lines.
	And I think the Kwisatz Haderach will enjoy those male memories.
	Male ancestral memories, which will, of course, enormously expand his consciousness.
	But also, he has some kind of psychic prescient power that the women lack.
	Again, and there's a strong...
	Human biodiversity element here, specifically between men and women.
	He has strong biological essentialist notions of masculinity and femininity.
	And that he's embroidering with these ideas of ancestral memories and prescience and things like that.
	But what the Bene Gesserit are trying to do is they're trying to control things through breeding people.
	And they're trying to breed a man.
	Who can exercise prescient powers into the future and access male ancestral memories.
	And he's a tool for them to increase their power.
	What their ultimate goals are is sort of a mystery.
	And, you know, of course, what happens, though, is the best laid plans go astray because Jessica decides to have a son rather than a daughter.
	And the son turns out to be the man who can do these things, but he's not planned for, and he's not under their control.
	And so everything is upset.
	And that's another factor that I really like about the Dune books, and it's very systematic.
	And I really noticed this when I was rereading Dune.
	Herbert is constantly...
	You know, playing with the desire for predictability and control, which of course is at the root of technology, but it's also at the root of eugenics and psychic training and things like that, versus the random, the unpredictable.
	The things that upset that.
	And he doesn't think that can be eliminated.
	And indeed, he doesn't want it to be eliminated.
	And this is sort of a Heideggerian thing in a way.
	You know, Heideggerians like the event, right?
	The contingency, the things that upset the Gestelle.
	Attempted predicting control.
	And when you get to the fourth Dune book, The God Emperor of Dune, which is a really dreary and depressing book, frankly, it becomes clear that Paul's son, Leto II, his entire purpose over a period of very long life of more than 3,000 years is to breed a human
	being who can no longer be predicted by prescience and therefore can no longer be controlled by people like the Spacing Guild or the Bene Gesserit.
	And that's a really interesting project.
	I mean, he's really on the side of human freedom against technology and other kinds of systems That's almost like Siegfried in Wagner's Ring.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	A being who even the gods cannot control.
	Yeah, right.
	Who's not bound by fate.
	I think it's interesting of what gives Paul his power.
	And I was just thinking about this, is that the Bene Gesserit were trying to breed a Kwisak Sadarak as basically their source of power.
	Because in this world, there's a tripartite political structure where you have the Bene Gesserit and the guild who control space travel and therefore are obviously indispensable and powerful.
	And then you have the landswrought nobility of all these noble houses under their ruler, the emperor.
	I think what's interesting about it is that he is a man, and Paul isn't just Paul, he's Muad'Dib.
	He actually takes that name, Paul Muad'Dib, and he actually will speak of himself in the third person, particularly in that final section of the book, where he was talking to the emperor, and he was like, well, Paul will guarantee your safety.
	However, Muad'Dib...
	Might need to slaughter you all, you know, in some kind of thing.
	So he kind of understands himself as having two beings and as being this synthesis of opposition, of being a synthesis of witchcraft on the one hand.
	I mean, he's the one man who can drink the water of life and has the power of the Bene Gesserit, is as powerful as his mother.
	But at the same time, he has to have the nobility of the duke.
	And he fights Phaed Rautha simply as something that...
	Is not really necessary for Muad'Dib, but is part of his ducal person.
	And I just think that's kind of why Paul can be so powerful, is that he combines these different elements.
	There's the Messiah to him, but then there's also his father and the benign, though certainly ruthless, leader.
	And that you kind of need both of those aspects existing in one person.
	I think another theme that I found really interesting that I'll mention to you both, you can pick up on it, is Herbert's, I don't know the right way of describing it, but Herbert's sense that you have to go through something and you can't fight it or you can't go with it as well.
	You have to go through it and kind of turn it on its head.
	And I think this happens over and over again in the film.
	Or in the book, in the film, through his plotting.
	And I was thinking of, you know, Paul doesn't just oppose the Bene Gesserit as this...
	You know, powerful brood of witches.
	He uses their power against him.
	And at the end, he says to the Reverend Mother, you know, look at that place where you dare not look, and you'll see me staring back at you.
	And I think what that is, is that he's taken on their power, and he is now more powerful than they are, that they could imagine, and he's staring back at them.
	So he has to kind of go through their power.
	He can't just fight the Bene Gesserit.
	He's got to become one of them.
	And you kind of see this again and again.
	There's this one scene in the book where Paul and Leto is talking to Paul, you know, when Leto's still alive, and Paul is kind of a young man.
	And he's telling him that, oh, you know, we're now...
	We're operating the Chome Company on Arrakis, so we'll be involved with the Spice.
	And the Harkonnen, they might be stockpiling Spice, so they might want to sabotage our ventures, but it can be very profitable to us, and so on and so forth.
	And so it's basically this kind of Wall Street-style hedging your bets of, you know, this is a really important commodity, so maybe if it went down, you could make money, or if it went up, you could make money, blah, blah, blah.
	And Paul just...
	He flips this totally on his head, and he says, no, the power to destroy a thing is the person who controls a thing.
	And so he basically, he doesn't play the game of the guild and the emperor and the Bene Gesserit.
	He flips over the gaming table, and he says, at the end of the book, he says, I will destroy all spice production on Iraqis, which is the only place where it is produced.
	I will destroy it all purely out of spite or perhaps on we sense of I I'm willing to go there.
	I'm willing to destroy this whole world in this game.
	It's kind of the difference of saying, do you want to make a billion dollars in the stock market, or do you want to create some cataclysmic crash that makes...
	That makes all stocks equal zero and therefore you powerful.
	It's that way of going above something.
	You see that throughout Frank Herbert's plotting.
	I think that's really brilliant.
	I think Romain Bernard mentioned this metaphor.
	I really like it.
	Is there a flood coming?
	Do you want to start futilely piling up sandbags or do you want to grab a surfboard and survive?
	This kind of idea of...
	Going with something and turning it into something that it's not.
	And I just think that's really an amazing aspect of Frank Herbert's plotting.
	And I think that kind of raises the level of this book to something higher than just a space epic.
	It brings it to something more philosophical, and it kind of allows us to look at the world of Dune and certainly our own world in a different way.
	Thank you.
	I was just going to say, like we were discussing before we started recording, about how you can see the spice as so many different things.
	I mean, you can see it as a substance that civilization has become dependent on, sort of like oil is.
	It's a psychedelic drug.
	I mean, it has so many different ways of looking at it.
	I mean, it's a great symbol that Herbert constructed.
	Although, along the lines of what you were saying, something I remember from the book, and my memory of it is much hazier than the two of you, so correct me if my impression is wrong, but I remember Paul keeps having these visions in the book that what he's doing on Arrakis is going to lead to this sort of bloody, destructive jihad of the Fremen through the universe under the Atreides banner.
	And he sort of realizes it's necessary, but he's also kind of afraid of it.
	But isn't there kind of this sense that...
	What happens in the first Dune book is almost like predestined in a way, that he's just sort of following the script.
	There are a lot of aspects of it where he fears this notion of what he's unleashing.
	But I think he also thinks it has to be unleashed, and it is unleashed.
	Yeah, that's kind of about constantly peering down different pathways into the future, trying to see ways of avoiding this.
	And he doesn't see any way of avoiding it.
	It just seems like it's this force that cannot be stopped.
	And so, yeah, he grabs his surfboard and rides it.
	I think there's a kind of Hegelian master-slave dialectic going on here in the sense that wealth and power and spice are the control mechanisms of the system in the universe.
	Everybody's dependent upon it.
	You know, all these great houses, they're extremely futile and archaic in the sense that they practice, you know, they're highly macho and they fight with blades and they have codes of honor and codes of vendetta and things like that.
	And yet they all get together behind closed doors and they trade directorships and shares in the Chowam Company that controls...
	The spice that controls the universe.
	And so it's a kind of corruption, right?
	They're aristocrats in their pretenses and their manners and they're oligarchs behind closed doors.
	And they're all sort of controlled by this oligarchical system.
	And the only way to break out of the control of that oligarchy is for Paul to say, look.
	I'm not going to play your game.
	I am willing to lose more than you, and therefore I am the true free man and you are the slaves.
	I'm willing to forego spice entirely.
	You can't do that.
	You can't contemplate that, and therefore...
	You are the slaves and I am the master.
	And that's really when he becomes the emperor in fact, if not in form, right?
	Or spiritually, if not externally.
	Because he is capable of foregoing these things.
	The guy who's willing to fight to die over honor is the master type.
	The kind who's not willing to die over honor.
	And in this case, the whole universe, the whole system is very bourgeois because they will fight to the death over petty things, but they will not consider the possibility of doing without the spice.
	It's one of the little mantras, the spice must flow.
	And he's willing to cut off the spice.
	One of the things that influenced Herbert's thinking was Carl Wittfogel's book on Oriental despotism, which is a kind of Marxist book, but it's an anti-Soviet.
	Marxist revisionist book because he's trying to explain how Marxism and the Soviet Union became this monstrously despotic system and he comes up with this notion of hydraulic despotism where if you control all the resources and he's thinking of these societies in the Near East where water could be controlled centrally and therefore the guy who controls the water and can cut off the water He becomes
	a despot.
	Well, that's what Paul is becoming.
	He's becoming the hydraulic despot because he's willing to cut off the spice.
	He's willing to cut off its flow.
	And so he thereby becomes the guy who's most capable of ruling.
	What is the spice?
	I think this is an interesting question.
	It is all these different things, and I think there's clearly a metaphorical quality to it as well.
	I mean, because it has this psychedelic quality.
	It's a drug that perhaps could be compared to LSD, you know, more than anything in its effect on people.
	But it's also a kind of poison, and a poison that even inspires mutation, not just of your eyes.
	But I think in Lynch's film, he takes this really far, where the ultimate, you know, high-level guildsman is this big, you know, brain jellyfish in a vat, which is very...
	Yeah, that's going to be the great-great-great-grandchildren of all the junkies today, perhaps.
	Right, right, right.
	So it has that...
	Oh, go ahead.
	Oh, I didn't mean to interrupt you, Richard.
	I was just going to relate that to...
	Well, if you had another point, go ahead and finish it.
	I was going to relate that to the role of technology in the Dune universe.
	Yeah, just hold that thought.
	Let's talk about spice first.
	I would like to talk about technology because I think that's very important.
	So it has these psychedelic qualities, these drug-like qualities as a poison.
	It will lead to your mutation.
	But then also with the guild itself, this guild based on pure mathematics and, I guess, relativity, but they need it in order to fold space so that you can travel without moving in the world of Dune.
	But do you think this is also...
	I think it's clear, particularly with the idea of Dune as a desert planet and all of these Islamic references that come throughout the book, that spice is at some level a metaphor for oil.
	And I think that, in a way, unlocks so much about the book and its resonance for us in the sense that so much of what we do is simply impossible without oil.
	You know, the population of the earth would be a hundredth of what it is without fossil fuels undergirding agriculture, production, transportation, and so on.
	And all of the industry is on top of that.
	And yet it comes out of this...
	To a large extent, out of this region of the world that, at least in comparison with modern America, is shrouded in mysticism and old religion.
	It's a very dangerous region.
	It's a region that has not benefited as much as others from the productive capacity of fossil fuels and so on and so forth.
	I was going to say in the book, the Fremen are able to...
	Led by Paul, are able to bring the entire political system to its knees, even though they have hardly any weapons, because all they have to do is halt the spice production.
	Yeah, and one could do that as well.
	I mean, if one turned off the spigot of oil, you could bring even the American empire to its knees immediately.
	So it's kind of a...
	It's a really fascinating notion.
	I think a very radical and very subversive notion in a way that Herbert's putting forward.
	It's a vision of overturning contemporary society.
	Yeah, and quite prescient since the concept of peak oil I don't even think had even been theorized until the 70s.
	So perhaps Herbert's experience with the oil industry gave him some advance insight into that.
	Well, you know, there was that Arab oil embargo in the early 70s, and it didn't really bring civilization to its knees, but it did get a lot of people's attention.
	That is definitely true.
	Because at the moment, to go back to the master-slave dialectic, The Middle Eastern world, they are not masters in the sense that they are not willing to stare death in the face.
	The oil must flow, and they benefit from it.
	Indeed, a lot of these people have become ridiculously wealthy through oil.
	And so they're not willing to do what Paul is willing.
	Paul is willing to risk death and willing to die, and they're not.
	They want to kind of remain, you know, piling up gold coins in their cellar.
	Yeah.
	But it's a true revolution.
	I'm just saying that Herbert is...
	Herbert's getting at that ultimate fragility of any kind of system, that even a system that seems to be extremely powerful, wealth-producing, backed up by the military, totally stable, so on and so forth.
	that there's this little crack in its facade and if you put pressure there the whole thing will explode and again I just you know whatever you think about that and I'm not saying I would recommend it I'm sure that you know it would be horrifying we wouldn't be talking on Skype right now if someone did that but it's just kind of it's a fascinating notion and a really radical and subversive one.
	Well, I would say that the spacing guild in the world of Dune is more like the oil states today.
	Because they have this amazing gift of they take the spice and then they can fold space and so forth.
	But they're using it to make loads of money and they want to have Paul assassinated because they're worried that their power is going to be threatened.
	So they're more like what you're describing as the people who control oil today, whereas Paul is the true revolutionary.
	Yeah, definitely.
	There's a real anti-colonial dimension to the Dune book that really came out when I reread it, because there's Dune with its resources, and there is this extractive colonial presence, the Harkonnens, and then the Atreides come along.
	And they don't even know how many Fremen there are on the planet.
	They don't care, right?
	They just don't care.
	The lives and the well-being of the people of the planet mean absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.
	The planet is ruled by satraps from the outside who are there to extract resources.
	And what do the Fremen want?
	The Fremen want to They want to live in a society where they don't have to recycle their own sweat and urine constantly.
	They want to ecologically transform Arrakis and make it into a better place to live.
	And to do that, they need to control...
	It's resources.
	And that's just the classic story of any kind of colonized society where you've got this extractive colonial third world economy in place that does not benefit the people who actually live there.
	Oh, without question.
	I think there's also another question about this.
	I mean, Muad'Dib, his name comes from a little mouse that runs around on the desert floor.
	And there's a sense that if you transformed Dune, that Muad'Dib as the mouse would disappear.
	And there's also something that's very clear in this book about how ecology forms mankind.
	The environment creates, you know, it influences genes, it influences culture, it influences mentality.
	And, you know, some of us don't like that notion because we might associate it with, you know, egalitarian environmentalism.
	But, you know, without question, in Darwin, it is not just a nature versus nurture.
	It is a nature inflecting, environment inflecting nature, you know, dialectic where...
	The gene pool is plastic, and it is influenced by its environment.
	And you see that certainly with the Fremen, and also with the Sardaukar, who are kind of like the SS of the emperor.
	And the secret to their power is that they come from this planet similar to Dune.
	Seleucus Secundus.
	Seleucus Secundus.
	SS for short.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that was definitely not a coincidence.
	They come from the SS planet where it's a harsh environment and they become these fierce, almost indomitable warriors.
	And the Fremen, even though they might want a purely natural desire to have...
	Bourgeois comfort, have a little garden and not need to wear a still suit.
	And, you know, when someone dies, try to squeeze every last drop out of their corpse.
	You know, it's a purely natural desire.
	But at the same time, the Fremen would, in a way, disappear.
	I mean, what gives them their power is Dune.
	And in the fourth book, the desert has shrunk dramatically.
	There are no more sandworms.
	And the Fremen live in little villages and tend little gardens and they have lost who they were.
	There's a tremendously strong Darwinist dimension of this, and social Darwinist dimension, and it's explicit.
	Powerful, strong people are being created by putting them in...
	That's how he talks in Dune.
	You know, again, no white liberal or no liberal of any sort would ever write a book with those dimensions to it without bemoaning them as horrible.
	This gets back to a theme that we've talked about in our three podcasts, which is that sometimes when you make a comic book movie or a sci-fi movie, you can explore these themes that you could not explore if you made a realistic film.
	If you had a realistic film or a non-fiction book and you talk about culling the weak, people consider you a monster.
	But because you put it 10,000 years in the future.
	You can actually explore some of these things.
	It kind of opens up doors for you to explore these anti-liberal themes.
	Why don't we talk a little bit...
	John, let's go back.
	Before we bring this conversation to a close, let's definitely bring up the theme of technology.
	Just to set you off, I think one thing that's very interesting about Dune is that...
	Unlike so much of science fiction, the absence of technology is most conspicuous.
	As opposed to cool little techno gadgets or transporters or things like this, we actually have this non-technological spiritual world in Dune.
	Well, technology in Dune has been integrated organically.
	Into the people, which actually, I mean, I think personally, I mean, I'm no expert in the matter, but from the little bit of understanding I have of these issues, I imagine that if the Faustian element of our civilization that Greg mentioned earlier survives, that's probably the way it's going to evolve, is that we're going to get away from plastic and metal and technology is going to become something organic that's integrated into ourselves.
	And you see that in Dune in the Mentats, which are actually called the human computers, who I guess, you know, when they have a substance that they take, which enables them to do what computers would ordinarily only be able to do.
	I think it's just briefly mentioned in the film, but there's more about it in the book.
	There's a reference to...
	Is it the Butlerian Jihad where they – you get the impression they had sort of like a Star Trek universe centuries earlier and then something went wrong and the machines rebelled and there was this huge war and then the humans thought, well, we've got to figure out a different way.
	Yeah, I think it was maybe even a WALL-E universe or something.
	The machines were essentially making all decisions, and human beings were just big fat.
	consuming blobs.
	And there was this Butlerian jihad, a religious revolt against the machines.
	And this, you know, Ludditism was actually, in a way, greatly transformative in the sense that we learned that we had to become greater organic beings.
	Right.
	It was specifically a war against artificial intelligence.
	And therefore, Things that were done by thinking, by mechanical brains, which were banned throughout the universe, had to be taken over by human brains.
	And so there was an emphasis on human mental training and physical training to take up the slack of things that were no longer doable by machines.
	Yet there is technology.
	There are these techno-worlds, Ix and Riches are mentioned, where machine civilization still exists.
	And, you know, everyone goes there when they need a little techno-wizardry.
	But generally in the universe, things are very strictly governed by compacts and rules.
	You know, there are rules against atomic warfare.
	There are rules against mechanical brains.
	These things are enforced rigorously.
	Also, technologies seem to have evolved to the point where they cancel each other out.
	So they do have laser beams and things like that, but they also have shields.
	And if the two meet, everybody gets blown up in the vicinity.
	So basically they're just discarded as useless.
	And so you have shields, which means you can't have projectile weapons.
	What penetrates the shield?
	The slow blade.
	Right?
	And therefore, It's kind of an interesting vision of things.
	Yeah, I think he was clearly trying to bring the past as the future and the future as the past.
	He created this technological world where you could have fights to the death with a blade again.
	I think this gets back to that archaeo-futurist aspect.
	I also get the impression it was his idea of civilization after it's grown up.
	Now we sort of have the philosophy that just because we can do something technologically, we should.
	Whereas in Dune, they've come to realize that progress isn't good for its own sake.
	It should be controlled and directed.
	That was kind of the impression I got from it.
	You can see this in other works of profound science fiction.
	In 2001, remember, Bowman has to turn off his computer in order to experience the spiritual awakening.
	I think this great enlightenment of the future is something beyond a mainframe computer.
	And Luke Skywalker has to turn his off before he blows up the Death Star.
	Yeah.
	Oh, right.
	I forgot about that.
	Use the Force, Luke.
	Well, we should do a Star Wars podcast, actually.
	I know that Star Wars is not, the universe is not as great as the Dune universe, but I think it probably would be worth talking about that.
	Oh, sure.
	Yeah, let's add it to the queue.
	Well, should we cover...
	Go ahead, yeah.
	Oh, I was just going to ask if you wanted to talk about Dune within the context of Lynch's career at all, but if you had something else, Richard.
	No, why don't we do that?
	Let's wrap up on that note.
	Talk a little bit about that, of David Lynch's Dune.
	Well, Dune...
	I mean, Lynch wasn't really very well known.
	When he made Dune, besides his student films, he had only made two feature films, Eraserhead, which is an amazing film but was really only widely known on the arthouse circuit in the 70s.
	And then he did The Elephant Man.
	And then Dune came right after that, and I read an interview with him where he actually admitted that when they called him up to ask if he wanted to do it, he had thought that they had said June.
	And he thought it was a woman's name.
	And he was like, oh, a film about a woman.
	That'll be great.
	And he'd never heard of Dune before.
	So it was only later that he realized what he'd gotten into.
	And yeah, I mean, if you look, I mean, it's very unusual in Dune's career, in Lynch's career, because usually his films are very...
	focused on a small set of characters.
	They're very introspective and psychological.
	There's a little of that in Dune, but it's very much an epic film and perhaps that's why he's always been a little bit embarrassed by it, I suspect, because he knows I agree.
	And I would say that if you just look at the two films of how they hold up, I think something like The Empire Strikes Back holds up a little bit better than Dune.
	I mean, unfortunately, there are these aspects that evoke laughter in Lynch's Dune.
	But at the same time, I think I might weirdly like the world of Dune more.
	And I think there are also these interesting Lynch-isms in Dune.
	Just, you know, one of them is attempts to communicate visually through these flashes in Paul's imagination where he'll see a Bene Gesserit witch, he'll see a hand, he'll see the drop of water on dune and things like this.
	I think, and then there are these...
	I think there's the clear, what you could call Jungian or Freudian elements within Frank Herbert's Dune that Lynch emphasizes as well.
	So I think in a way, Dune is a Lynch film.
	And it's definitely part of his oeuvre.
	It's not outside it.
	As I was rereading the book, I've watched the film so many times.
	I basically know the script and so I was reading through it and I was underlining every line that Lynch would use and he really did a brilliant job in taking the best lines and taking conversations that would take half a page and condensing them without loss of meaning into two or
	three I think the technological look really influenced steampunk, which is a good thing.
	Generally, where he departs from the novel, I think he improves it.
	In the second novel, there is an audience with a guild navigator.
	That doesn't take place in the first novel at all.
	But that is such an interesting idea visually that he had to kidnap it and transport it into Dune.
	But he uses it to get some background story in there that just has to be...
	The novel starts with the Reverend Mother's visit to Paul to test him.
	And you don't know why this is happening.
	There needs to be a little narration, a little background, and I think he does a really good job of getting that in.
	I think also the weirding way is actually an improvement.
	The weirding modules?
	He turns that into Star Wars kind of stuff.
	I don't know about that.
	Well, I think it's – no, we might disagree on this.
	I think it's actually an improvement because the weirding way is jujitsu or something in the novel.
	But with Paul, he kind of – again, this is part of this spiritual and – I think it was an
	improvement, the weirding.
	And that is also something that could really change.
	The power of the Empire is to turn into some big explosion.
	But you're doing it through your mind.
	I mean, it's kind of amazing.
	And then Paul discovers that his name is a death word.
	Yes.
	Someone says Muad'Dib, and the wall explodes.
	I think that Lynch is...
	I think the heart plug, which doesn't exist in the book, is one of the most Utterly loathsome gestures of totalitarian power.
	I'll just unplug you if I don't like you.
	It's remarkable.
	It's really remarkable, his vision of things.
	David Lynch is a very dark person.
	you know, he went to a place inside himself and brought out the Baron with his running sores and heart plugs and all this other stuff that certainly wasn't in Frank Herbert.
	No, no.
	The Harkonnens are kind of normal in the book.
	Yeah.
	Well, he engages in pedophilia, but somewhat normal.
	Well, that's sort of treated as normal.
	But here's the thing.
	The Harkonnens in the book are, well, especially the Baron, He's this Machiavellian plotter and utterly subtle and psychologically insightful and yet totally petty and bound by the smallest of considerations, wealth and revenge.
	And the emperor...
	When Duke Leto arrives on the planet, he's a military man.
	He's a leader.
	The Atreides are all natural leaders of men.
	And they're gallant and they're decent.
	And when they arrive there, they realize that the greater resource on the planet may be the Fremen, who are these magnificent fighters.
	And when the Emperor learns about the Fremen...
	He simply cannot believe that the Baron Harkonnen could have overlooked a treasure.
	This great.
	And he actually, in the book, he insists that the Baron must have been plotting against him to raise an army of Fremen.
	And the Baron is totally oblivious to this dimension of things.
	He's a totally petty bourgeois and ultimately apolitical figure.
	So he's kind of fascinating.
	He's a sensualist.
	And he's totally blind to...
	The masculine, the military, that whole dimension of things that the Atreides are very keyed into, and that the Emperor is very keyed into.
	It's totally beyond the ken of Baron Harkonnen.
	Oh yeah, he thinks of just squeezing something until the pips squeak.
	He doesn't understand ruling or being a leader or anything like that.
	There's also an interesting film that hopefully will...
	Yeah, sure.
	You know, it's a worthwhile documentary.
	If you have an hour of your time and you kind of want to think about one of the most Interesting, crazy films that was not made.
	It's really worth your time.
	But he was a surrealist filmmaker.
	He still is.
	He still is, yes.
	I have to admit, I've not seen any of his films.
	But at least from what I got, the impression, it was kind of like Louis Buniel on steroids.
	Or acid.
	Well, El Topo is more like Clint Eastwood on acid.
	It's like a spaghetti.
	A psychedelic spaghetti western, yeah.
	We should do a Buniel movie or others.
	But anyway, I think what this documentary puts forth is that he came up with some of these There's this huge book that is his Dune book, and they, through a, what was his name, the cartoonist, there's a brilliant...
	Mubus.
	Yeah, Mubus, Mobius or Mubus.
	They basically create a kind of a comic book, a really detailed storyboard of the entire film that was never made.
	And this film...
	The documentary puts forth the notion that this storyboard really influenced all of these science fiction films later on, and certainly including Star Wars.
	Flash Gordon.
	Flash Gordon.
	It really did, because he sent copies of this book to all the major studios, and also people who were creatively collaborating with him on...
	His Dune project went out and worked on all these movies.
	One thing that's not mentioned, though, is that there are a couple things that are in the Lynch Dune that come from the Hodorowsky Dune.
	One is when you get to Gidi Prime, the Harkonnen planet, you see this big face, belching fumes, which takes off from the Harkonnen palace design that Giger came up with.
	And the other thing is that Dune ends with a miracle.
	In the Lynch version, it doesn't happen in the book.
	And that miracle-type ending, which is different in Hodorowsky's Dune.
	It was still something that Hodorowsky came up with, and Lynch sort of takes up the idea that we're going to end the movie with a miracle.
	So I think that it's tremendously influential.
	I want Taschen to bring out a giant, gorgeous coffee table version of Hodorowsky's Dune book.
	That's a natural thing.
	I have to get onto that and say, you must do this.
	Surely there's some way of suggesting it.
	Well, actually, one thing, another thing in that film, I think Hodorowsky made comic books with Mubis afterward that utilized all of these motifs and themes.
	Yeah, it's in the Meta Barons.
	It's in, what's it called?
	The In Call.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, he didn't lose a lot of this stuff.
	A lot of it was recycled.
	And then Giger, in a way, took a lot of his aesthetic motifs, and those were used with Alien and all these other films.
	Yeah, Alien was co-authored by Dan O 'Bannon, who worked with Khodorovsky on the Dune Project.
	So he knew Giger from that.
	And the person who introduced Hodorowsky to Giger was none other than Salvador Dali, who was going to play the emperor.
	And that would have been really something.
	Wow.
	So there's some very amusing stories about how they were going to deal with Dali.
	Dali wanted to be the highest paid film actor in the universe.
	And so they came up with the idea of paying him $100,000 a minute.
	And the producer, Michel Sedoux, said, well, how many minutes are we talking about?
	And Hodorowsky said, eh, three minutes, five minutes max.
	But he would be the highest paid actor of all time.
	By the minute, yeah.
	And he also wanted a burning giraffe, and then suddenly the film cuts to the page of the storyboard, and off the side of the storyboard there's a drawing of a giraffe labeled, a giraffe enters the scene.
	I lost it.
	I just lost it.
	That floored me.
	If Dolly wants a burning giraffe, we're going to deliver.
	I'm going to have to find a copy of this documentary.
	It's really entertaining.
	It's out on Blu-ray and DVD.
	I actually download it on iTunes, so I assume that's widely available for everyone.
	I just wanted to say before we wrap up, Lynch was actually under contract.
	I think it was three Dune movies.
	Oh, really?
	Of course, the first one did so badly at the box office that they just cancelled the whole thing.
	But it is kind of interesting to wonder what the other films would have been like based on, I assume, the second and third books in the series.
	I think it's actually probably good that it did because...
	He insisted that his contract for Dune includes the right for him to do a film basically about anything he wanted, which became Blue Velvet, which, you know, let's face it, it's a much better film.
	The greatest bequest of the De Laurentiis family to world culture is producing Blue Velvet, I think.
	Now, it is interesting.
	There is a sci-fi channel, Dune.
	And then they did a sci-fi channel Children of Dune, which is basically the story of the second and third books.
	The sci-fi channel Dune is quite flawed.
	I don't recommend it to anybody who isn't a total fanatic.
	It does have a couple little improvements, but overall it's a very flawed thing.
	It's a little bit boring, don't you think?
	It's a little bit boring, and it's a little bit badly acted in a lot of places.
	However, the sci-fi channel's Children of Dune...
	It's far more visually appealing.
	It really is a very worthwhile sequel.
	And so my recommendation is to watch The Lynch Dune and then get the sci-fi channel Children of Dune, which includes the stories of both Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, the second and third Dune books.
	I have all these fantasies of like, you know, if I had all this capital and I could just create all these movies, it might be interesting just to create a big definitive dune.
	And you wouldn't be bound by all the conventions of Hollywood in like two hours.
	Just, you know, give it to a real visionary director and do it right.
	Who do you think?
	I mean, maybe...
	Maybe Lynch, now that he's a much older man, 30 years later, he should do a big, just six-hour film-the-novel Dune.
	Have either of you seen the uncut...
	Lynch actually insisted that his name be taken off it, so it's directed by Alan Smitty, which is this name that they use in Hollywood when the director doesn't want his name on something.
	Hollywood's most prolific director, it turns out.
	And somebody really should do a mock, sort of auteur critical book on the works of Alan Smithy, pretending like he's one man.
	At least an IMDb page of Alan Smithy through the century.
	Well, have either of you seen that book?
	It's like six hours, I think.
	No, it's not that long.
	It just seems like it.
	There's some scenes that I think should be added to the ultimate cut of Dune.
	We did Blade Runner that has four or five versions.
	Dune could have that.
	I think it's worthwhile knowing that the water of life comes from the worm because that's so important in the whole.
	You know, Ecology of Dune, and that's taken out in Lynch's, you know, theatrical cut, but it's in the extended cut.
	I think it should be added.
	But at the same time, there's also this, like, 15-minute prologue that's about films of, like, you know, colored pencil drawings, and they just...
	Basically, explain the world of Dune as if it were written by Wikipedia or something.
	I just thought it was terrible.
	Basically, they decided that morons couldn't understand Dune, so they needed a version that morons could understand.
	And unfortunately, they got some morons to do it.
	And so they thought, well, we can't just have somebody be on one planet, then another planet.
	We have to have a little ship.
	And so they cut in like ships moving around, and it's the same thing over and over again.
	It just screams for Mystery Science Theater 3000.
	That's what it turns into in my living room when I try and show it, you know?
	But yeah, it is full of awful stuff.
	The stuff on Kytane at the beginning, there's extra stuff that was cut, and I really think Lynch was right to cut that.
	I think...
	I came to appreciate him as an editor tremendously.
	There are some things on Caladan that I wish were left in, little tiny details that didn't really interrupt the flow.
	And then there's stuff on Arrakis that I wish had been kept in.
	And I kind of wish that Lynch would revisit the thing.
	I don't think he ever will.
	I think he's got all kinds of bitter feelings about it.
	But it would be wonderful if Lynch would revisit the thing.
	Do a definitive cut and get some CGI people in there to clean up some of those dreadful process shots.
	Really gloomy color schemes and things like that because it could look so much better.
	Oh, I hope he doesn't bring CGI.
	I just imagine these prequels to Star Wars.
	I don't even recognize that they exist.
	They're non-canonical.
	I think you should do an ultimate cut.
	I like that idea of utilizing some things and not being confined by the two-hour limit, doing a two-and-a-half hour but making it better.
	But I think in some ways some of that 80s quality, I don't know, I don't want to take that away.
	That kind of makes it enduring.
	I want to get rid of some of the bad process shots and the weird wobbly spaceships moving around and things like that.
	That can go.
	The CGI people not only added some unfortunate things to, say, the Empire Strikes Back, but they also got rid of the matte lines and things that you could clearly see.
	And that kind of stuff had to go.
	So I'm glad they cleaned up some of the special effects.
	Gentlemen, why don't we just put a bookmark in this conversation, and I think we should just revisit all of this stuff later on, and I think we probably should do a Star Wars podcast.
	I think that would be a lot of fun.
	It would be a little bit of nostalgia, but a little bit of philosophy, too, thrown in there.
	So let's definitely do that in the future.
	But first off, John and Greg, thank you both for adding your perspectives and insights, and I hope to do this again soon.
	Well, I really appreciate it.
	And one little note, when we do the Star Wars podcast, there's a great sound effect you can use.
	It sounds just like a lightsaber.
	If you take an electric toothbrush and turn it on near the microphone of your telephone, it sounds just like the lightsaber activating.
	So we'll have to work that in somehow, I hope.
	Or I could use my own lightsaber.
	You could use your lightsaber, exactly.
	I try not to bring it out.
	Try not to advertise that.
	Right.
	Unless I'm fighting someone to the death.
	Your gravitas is crashing right now, Richard.
	Anyway.
	All right.
	Thanks, guys.

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