"A giraffe comes into frame"
- storyboard for Alejandro Jodorowsky's misconceived and thankfully stillborn 1970s ... "adaptation" of Frank Herbert's Dune
(In the event anyone reading this is unfamiliar with Dune, no, there is no giraffe involved at any point, nor any artiodactyls of any stripe. I dare say not even ungulates as a whole played a role in Dune's plot, or for that matter non-human mammals in general. It's not a "Noah's Ark" sort of story.)
Dune is, undeniably, one of the most memorable classics of Science Fiction, both for its grandiloquent characters, complexity and moral weight and for nailing the SF niche market's extremophilia. And, like almost every such work, it has never been adapted well to film, good futurism being almost by definition transgressive of contemporary expectations. More recent attempts tend toward the bland, cheap, timid and amateurish. The version which truly stuck in everyone's memory was David Lynch's 1984 acid trip, remembered by fans for a few memorable scenes and a lot more random batshit insane filler devoid of meaning or substance. And, watching the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune I find myself thankful for Lynch's version because things could've been much, much worse if the original director had gotten his way:
"In my version Duke Leto is castrated. And then how he will do a son? And then his wife, a marvelous woman, a wise woman. And the guy have a love, a cosmic love when he see this woman. And how he will make a child? And she take a drop of his blood and she change the blood into semen. And then we see the drop of blood going inside the vagina, the uterus, and we will follow the blood, the blood coming and go inside the ovum and explodes there. She gets pregnant with a drop of blood. That's what I did."
Why?!? WHYYYYY would you do that? What was your chain of reasoning? Where is the narrative causality in any of that? What in the everloving name of fuck does randomly castrating a pivotal character and reverse-menstruating to a TNT-loaded conception have to do with adapting a book about intellectual capacity, exofauna, strategic resource monopolies and the role of leadership in human societies?
And look, I won't contest the potential of such scenes in some other context. But if you're gifted with such unstoppable inspiration, then make a movie about that other context! Write your own original work with all the space-spice-pirate giraffes, castrations and exploding ova you want. (In fact, if you want to make a movie about going up the vagina, there is an entire industry dedicated to that very imagery.) I am, myself, mildly curious about La Caste des Méta-Barons, Jodorovsky's Dune-inspired comic book creation. Inspiration from previous works is inevitable. Acknowledge it and build upon it what you will. But it's a whole different matter to willfully misrepresent someone else's work, to work under the umbrella of another's fame - and that, unfortunately, seems to have been Jodorowsky's true talent in the 1970s: networking. By some staggering animal magnetism (and lavish budget-draining gifts) he had lined up a cast including Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, Gloria Swanson and Salvador Dali, and was going to have Pink Floyd in his soundtrack at the height of their popularity. That his artistic team later went on to do the movie Alien under Ridley Scott says much about Jodorowsky's ability to spot, engage and exploit others' talent. His respect for such talent on the other hand might better be expressed in his own words on directorial fiat vis-a-vis adapting someone else's work:
"Is different. It was my Dune. When you make a picture, you must not respect the novel. It's like you get married, no? You go with the wife, white, the woman is white, you take the woman, if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to... to rape the bride. And then you will have your picture. I was raping Frank Herbert, you know, raping, like this! But with love, with love."
Ok... just waiting for the incredulous laughter to die down... because his attitude waxes even more farcical when the topic flips to the impact of studios and producers on a director's artistic vision:
"The picture need to be exactly as I am dreaming the picture. Is a dream. Don't change my dream."
Hah!
Awwww, honey-schnookums, don't worry your pretty little head. They didn't change your dream, merely raped you. You're just jealous they're capable of so much more "love" than you are.
In the 20th century, you could toss a coin as to whether a SF book's cover actually reflected anything in the text. Publishers instead seemed to commission stock portfolios of images involving rocketships, ringed planets, little green men, square-jawed macho men hefting bulbous zap guns, clanking giant-antennaed robots or just random surrealist imagery, and slapped them on whatever novel they released more or less as they came. It stemmed partly from the publishing industry's... frugality, let's call it, and partly from an ingrained disdain for imaginative stories as child's play. Sadly, after the brief golden age of Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, this misinterpretation of imagination as shallow gibberish impermeable to reason meshed perfectly with postmodernism. You can see the shift in the "adapted" version of Paul Atreides. Where Herbert was socially aware enough to reference mythopoiesis as a cynical tool for manipulating the masses, Jodorowsky took the character's messianic qualities at face value, with all the uncritical ardor of a star-struck apostle, imbuing the young Atreides (like so many other half-assed heroes of the past three millennia) with both a virgin birth and an ascension to omniscience beyond mere prescience.
If you pull up a few creations by the postmodernism generator, you might notice a trend toward name-dropping famous writers to make you swallow its algorithm-extruded bullshit. The same method was also employed in the famous Sokal hoax, because it's fundamental to the pseudointellectual rot which has called itself post-modern. Try reading any paper from the past few decades' social "sciences" and see how few don't resolve to a circle-jerk of citations of "theorists" with no evidence or even a coherent conceptual framework for their assertions. This seems to have been Jodorowsky's approach as well. Half his crew seems to have had only the vaguest idea of what Dune was about, but it didn't matter. He was globetrotting in search of even more great names to append to his work, and how could anything turn out bad if it included Orson Welles and Mick Jagger? Who cares that the script itself may as well have been laid out by a random number generator? When you bind your book in such flashy covers, who judges what's between them?
It's hardly surprising to see his old circle of sycophants sport the punctiliously rebellious hipster look of skintight turtlenecks and ponchos. Jodorowsky himself in the documentary hardly ever mouths a phrase not befitting a showboating idiot child, overacting a gross caricature of the artistic spirit, drunk on the undeserved attention he receives from others who really should know better. As I listened to his incoherent rambling about spirit warriors, bodily fluids and universal consciousness, my mood gradually shifted from outrage at his vandalism to amusement at hearing him complain about film studios' profit motive.
See, as we've garnered a better understanding of our neural infrastructure's evolutionary underpinnings, we're learning that the distasteful practice of money-grubbing shows only one facet of our runaway adaptation of social dominance. A chimp may gain breeding rights by either beating up his opponents to become chief chimp or by banging tin cans to scare them into submission. The beatings and banging mask the underlying drive. Humans seek status, outwardly expressed as monetary profit or military rank, or your number of friends on facebook, or the people you don't invite to your parties, or hits on your blog, or your ranking on a leaderboard, or your name, Leo Bloom, in lights. So of course good old "Jodo" was perfectly comfortable raping others' dreams even as he upheld the sanctity of his own virgo morphica intacta. Thrust and parry to victory. As an auteur of a major project he positioned himself for a chance to both snub other powerful, moneyed individuals like studio executives (elevating his status above them) and to buy Orson Welles a personal chef and a giraffe for Salvador Dali. That, my friends, would be some highly conspicuous consumption!
In himself, I doubt Jodorowsky is as terrible as he seems to me as an outraged SciFi fanboy who dreams of running my own sandworm farm. Like I said, I'm honestly curious about The Metabarons and he boasted a true flair for dramatic imagery. The fact that he's such a neatly recognizable "type" however reminds me just how easily we naked apes are taken in by charismatic, energetic personalities. Even with certifiable creators we need to get better at spotting when they're acting from a true creative drive and when they're facetiously inflating their self-image.
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P.S.:
No, seriously, why a giraffe? Why? I just... I need to know!
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