Video

I was ice fishing one dark night in March. My ice house filled with reams of twisting electric green. Outside was the most intense aurora borealis I have ever seen. That's when I realized my ice House and I were somehow adrift into the thawed middle of the lake. No sooner did I cry out in anguish when Maggie's hair emerged from my hole in the ice, like a fetal abyssal squid, wet and mop-like. It saved my life that day. How did it get me back to shore, and where did it go? Well, I really can't remember. But, I'll never forget the night Maggie's hair saved my life.

It is very funny how, due to licensing malarkey, this movie had a huge effect on how Dune games looked for more than a decade. The rights to make games based on this movie got traded around so Westwood made three different RTS games based on this movie sort of but they are also massive AU with a very different conflict on Arrakis and an extra House thrown into the mix.

Another reason for the shield that I can't remember if it's mentioned in the Lynch film: if a laser hits the shield, there's a weird reaction where both the shield and the laser gun explode with the same energy as a nuclear weapon. Which discourages people from using lasers. Which is a complication from the book which results in some silly plot holes. Like, they make a big deal about the "family atomics", but why are the family atomics special when you can achieve the same result by duct-taping a laser gun to a shield generator and making it fire on a timer?

1:26:00 that is literally exactly what the first installment of the new series is.

"It's weird, and bad, and a big epic picture, and it feels like it could've been made fifty years ago." I mean, the start of its development WAS fifty years ago, more or less.

You say Dune is a "bad movie," but I say "battle pug"

Not what I would call a fan of David Lynch, but I am a fan of Dune and it has been a pleasure seeing you guys try to figure it out just from DL's movie.

Adam would Rock that shirt

Ah I see you guys also had a friend into Dune willing to translate !

This movie is one of my guilty pleasures. It is peak 80s and I love the soundtrack.

Regarding the space guild, their existence makes more sense when you understand that in universe not everyone can bend time and space just by ingesting melange. The guild navigators (the ones floating in the big tanks) are the only ones that can safely bend space and time but they had to ingest massive amounts of melange to do so. So the guild is less oil company analoge and more like the monopoly that controls all space travel. And yeah, the film does a really poor job of communicating a lot of details of how the universe of Dune works.

I love that a podcast about demystifying Lynch cannot wrap their heads around his Dune 😁

Big Dune fan, you two did great! Too much lore for one movie, it's a REALLY dense novel. Don't worry about the lore.

Bad!?! I mean, in comparison to his other work it's probably his least likeable, but I wouldn't personally call it bad. I was not a Dune person when I watched it, many times, when I was younger, but it certainly helped garner my interest in eventually reading the books. It was likely also my first introduction to David Lynch. I certainly didn't watch Eraserhead until much later, and I'm sure I would've watched Dune before The Elephant Man. I found it grotesquely fascinating and hypnotic when compared to other popular sci-fi films and TV shows of that era. Yes, it's a bit of a mess, largely thanks to the then near impossible task of bringing Dune to the big screen, and the meddling of the studio certainly did not help. But I think Lynch managed to make a truly fantastical sci-fi film that's still quite like no other. Whether that's a good or bad thing is up to you to decide, I guess.

@23:20 hey! Not trying to be one of those obnoxious Dune lore people, but I did want to give some context for there being no internet: Dune is very philosophical and the fact that it’s like 8k years in the future is MEANT to feel ridiculous. Also, there’s no internet because of something called the “Butlerian Jihad,” where humanity decided we should think for ourselves and destroyed all thinking machines. Once again, not criticizing, I just think the lore is fun

I remember how I used to get that Real Cost ad as practically the only ad I would ever get on CZcams. I’d get it multiple times a video. It has been forever seared into my subconscious. It almost made me want to vape just to spite those people for forcing me to watch their PSA so freaking much.

It's still so bizarre watching Albert Fish's granddaughter analyzing David Lynch's work

Dean Stockwell is criminally underrated as Yueh, but I think the greatest crime is that the film didn't have more of the bulk of the book that takes place before the betrayal/attack happens. The buildup of emotion and the dinner scene with all of Dune/Arrakis' ruling class would have suited Lynch's predilections a lot more than focusing on the moments of action in the novel. I loved most of the costumes and sets, especially the rococo imperial aethetics, and if he'd have had two films and no pressure to pour in Star-Warsy action scenes, I think he could have made a science fiction film he wouldn't feel so badly about and would probably be as much of a 'cult classic' today.

Okay, so the shield thing gets worse! There's a kind of weapon called a "lasgun" in Dune, even though it's some kind of beam of the same type of energy as the shields, not a real laser. But it's taboo (and suicidal) to use them in war, because if a lasgun is fired at a shield, from any distance, both of them *explode with the force of a small nuclear weapon.* I wish I was making this up. See, weirding modules don't exist in the book. In fact, Frank Herbert is trying super hard to justify why, in the far future when guns, nukes, ornithopters, spaceships, energy shields and beam weapons all exist, wars are still fought entirely in ground engagements between troops with swords and martial arts techniques. So guns are too fast for the shield (there are little spring-loaded dagger launchers called maula pistols that sometimes work though), rayguns explode if you use them on a shield, and so basically all ranged weapons except those weird slow poison darts are useless. And there's a treaty that says that if you use nukes, everyone else has to come and nuke your entire planet out of existence, so everybody keeps the nukes in reserve. Thankfully the Villeneuve movies ignore almost *all of this*, and just don't try to justify the sword-play at all, which bothers me a lot less.

Important note that makes things make a lot more sense. Computers and AI are illegal in Dune galaxy because of a robot rebellion. That's what makes Spice important. It allows the navigators and Mentats (face paint guys) to do ehat machines used to do. I don't think either movie makes this clear.

dave linch renowned woman fan

I saw this Dune in the Theater as a teenager before I know who Lynch was. Blue Velvet was my first Lynch movie I saw because it was Lynch.

i know doing podcasts is easier than scripting, costumes, make-up, editing, but people react better to production value than to "2 people in chairs talking about stuff". we can get that by smoking a doobie with the neighbourhood weirdo. these talking points are all great, when integrated and adapted into a visual representation for this particular medium. BTW - Nebula: just ditch them and get a ko-fi or patreon/ect to get more revenue.. doing a podcast is just telling your viewers "ive given up on what you subscribed to, which is - video content". nothing wrong with diversifying - maybe open a 2nd channel for that and see whether the metrics make it feasible. best of luck!

IN THIS HOUSE LYNCH'S DUNE IS A MASTERPIECE, END OF STORY But no seriously I love this movie. I saw it in the mid 80's, whenever it first appeared on HBO or whatever. I was astounded by how weird it was and how fearless. I immediately devoured the books, which I probably never would've read if it hadn't been for this movie. It means a lot to me, warts and all. It's not my favorite Lynch film, that's probably Blue Velvet, but Dune will always have a special place in my heart. Fucking haters. <3

Dean Stockwell ftw

I'm not sure that I understand the confusion about the opening scene. One of the guys is the head of state and the guy in the fish tank is the power behind the throne who really pulls the strings. The Emperor's plan was to prevent the head of the house Atreides from committing a coup against him. By giving house Atreides dominion over Dune he invokes the wrath of their biggest rivals, the Harkonnens, upon them - deliberately creating a war that will thin out their military forces and either consign them to oblivion, or leave them with too much power for anyone else to join in on their plot. The Emperor has to allow someone else to control the spice because it would grant the state far too much power, so nobody is going to participate in a coup against the state that will lead to a greater consolidation of power than the existing status quo that they're plotting against. The mistake was ultimately in thinking that the coup they had planned was between Atreides the other noble houses and not the indigenous people of the planet who were completely disregarded. I get that the film doesn't give you the specifics of what specific titles everyone holds, but it's not really that important. The film is very general with this stuff in a way that I feel is fairly deliberate because it's really trying to serve as a relatively direct metaphor for capitalist imperialism and the oil industry, not a complex political thriller. I know that it looks like it's trying to be that at points, but it's really more of a parody of old Hollywood biblical epics that reimagines them in a similar way to how the Adam West version of Batman took inspiration from old serials that would play between screenings of films people wanted to see alongside the news.

well, it definitely is a setup for a lack of pay off, i haven't seen the second villeneuve dune film yet but i really felt it in the first one that ppl who did not read the books (plural) can't have any idea what is going on and that it will lead to the same thing the first book itself is a setup for a bait and switch in the next books basically, what can you do with that if you want to make it a film?

It bums me out that you start the episode by stating flatly that the film is bad. I think that does such a disservice to this movie. It's so much more than bad, it's what I like to call a "fascinating failure", a film that is bad in such particular ways that it becomes incredibly watchable. And honestly for all the praise the new Dune movies have garnered, I will take Lynch's completely out there, reach for the stars and fall so short attempt because there are single frames in Lynch's Dune that are more memorable than the entire runtime of both new Dune films. And this has nothing to do with accuracy as adaptations, both films fail significantly in that regard. But the opening alone with the Guild Navigator meeting with the Emperor is seared into my brain in a way few films can match. The heart plug the Baron uses on his flower slave is one of the darkest images I've seen in a movie. As a satisfying narrative experience, Dune fails. As a kaleidoscopic wonderland of the some of the most out there decisions in Lynch's entire career, it's a resounding success, and I come back to it over and over.

Gotta go Dune Person here, but also keeping perspective as a Lynch person. It boggles my mind that David Lynch, of all people, told this story as a straightforward hero’s journey tale. The book is a criticism of those things: Paul spends the whole book trying to control the destructive nature of the path in front of him, but due to a combination of factors including his breeding, his training, the religious manipulation of the Fremen by his mother’s faction, and most damning for Paul his own desire for revenge and the instinctive urge to seek a position of power for one’s own self preservation, he is almost totally unable to contain or control the destruction unleashed on the Galaxy in the form of the Fremen jihad in his name. If Lost Highway era David Lynch had made Dune, we would’ve gotten a Paul more unsettling and terrifying than we got even in the Villeneuve movies (where they very much were going for that). I don’t know how much of the characterization is because David Lynch just didn’t sit with the book long enough to get that aspect (it is… a slog, if you’re not down with the style of writing) or if it was a studio mandate to keep the morality a little more Hollywood, but it’s the biggest drain on the movie and accounts for many of the things the book fans complain about.

Anyone who says Soderbergh doesn't take risks hasn't seen Schizopolis

omg he is NOT the head of the spice navigator guild, he is "A third-stage guild navigator", they even say it in the movie, You can't explain this one away.

One of the best anti-smoking ads I've ever seen is the one with the Cats musical, where all the cats basically say "humans are fucking stupid why would they do this?" It communicates the message of how bad it is while not traumatizing people.

You haven't read a Frank Herbert book? I'm aghast. PS: I've read Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune but not the first book. PPS: John de Lancie rocks, Q was the best.

Aghhhh, it was kinda painful to watch y'all wondering why princess princess Irulan was narrating when it was so prominent and meaningful in the books. But sure, yeah,.. as a movie in isolation it is wonky. The new Dune movies seem to be notably diverging from the books which was unexpected but they may stand on their own better.

I do enjoy how Adam pronounces "Villeneuve" differently every time he says it.

I really liked the Baron’s performance more than the new. More theatric. Comparatively, the new one is on another level (better).

Let me run them “if you vape your a loser, I mean look at these people” *show photos of extremely tacky people vaping* “if you want to be cool play sports hang out with friends” *show texts of people canceling just to vape*

I loved that giant fish at the beginning. I had no horse in this race, because I read the book and didn't like it, but I knew that this thng wasn't in it, so when I first saw it I loved it: "we're gonna have a giant sapient fish thing in a tank communicate with the emperor of the universe because I'm David fucking Lynch, damn it!"

SWITCH CHAIRS

If ever you decide you'd like to revisit this work, Danika from ComicBookGirl19 and/or Quin from QuinsIdeas would be an interesting round-table. Cross collaboration is fun and there's way more to talk about... like, way more 🤣

For how mangled your understanding of the plot is, it just makes the adaptation even more frustrating. It so badly conveys important information necessary to understand what its doing. Consider: The book doesn't introduce the full guild navigators till the second book, and no where in the series do we see space being folded. Those scenes are purely invented for the movie. They could have looked like _anything_ and yet... If Lord of the Rings was an excuse for Tolkien to play with his conlangs, Dune was an excuse for Herbert to play with his alien ecosystem. Both are, of course, more than that, but the Dune adaptations in particular have failed to capture that.

title: how "anti-vaping" ads manipulate you me, someone who has never had any interest in vaping: i can't believe they would do that ;_;

1:06:43 i’m with maggie on this one, the hunger games does the political stuff and the ways trauma impacts people in a way that i haven’t really seen in the books that were inspired by it. Jennifer Lawrence did a great job in that last movie but there is so much going on in katniss’s head that leads her to make the decision of which leader she kills. I read the series in middle school and because of the new stuff coming out i’ve reflected alot on the series and I think it holds up pretty well.

really good pitch to get me to watch Swordfish

The new Dune movies might be the better adaptation of the source material, but I just do not like Denis Villeneuve as a director; he is clearly not incompetent, but his style of directing - or lack of - is just so bland and non-descript, especially compared to David Lynch.

Intimidated by David Lynch? Never. I still hum the theme. Ruff ruff ruff 🐶

I think the biggest issue with this movie is that Dune has, like two or three extremely important, foundational elements to the universe that make so much of the confusing stuff make sense, but the movie just didn't have time/a filmable way to communicate them. It also just decided to fucking blast through everything with the Fremen, which is pretty much the actual story.

Maggie Uhhhhh Fish

Holy shit. The trade federation comparison was so spot on. Love this show guys thank you for uploading it

No; the oil company are the -Harkonen- the Spacer Guild is like the financial sector (kinda? the CHOAM is more the financial sector? Because melange is oil but also it is time, life extension tech.