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This chapter focuses on David Lynch's 1984 film version of Dune. It analyses Dune's narrative structure, characterisations, its approach to science fiction, and audiovisual language that are all highly idiosyncratic. It also illustrates Dune as an audacious science-fiction film that refuses to be futuristic, as a political narrative that is undone by the power of prophecy and dream, and as an adventure story structured like a poem. The chapter talks about the feeling of watching Dune, which is described as being unmoored from cinema itself and free-floating in the form's infinite, unexplored possibilities. It explores the core elements of Frank Herbert's novel version of Dune, which is heavily reliant on its own internal logic.

This chapter examines the unexpected longevity of David Lynch's Dune, a film that was for many deemed dead on arrival. It assesses Dune's lasting legacy from absurd tie-in merchandise to incredible comic translations to the videogames that changed game history in significant ways. It also emphasizes how Lynch's Dune demands the attention like no other film as it unfolds ceremonially into a dream already in motion. The chapter discusses how Dune remains a focused, singular vision that startles and delights in its difference in the history of science-fiction cinema. It reviews every dashed hope and upraised hand of anguish that believed Dune's literary universe could be adapted if given the right conditions. It talks about how Dune represents so much to so many in search of parables of failure, promise, corrupt systems and ineffable creative possibility.

This chapter examines technical legality through looking in detail at how modernity allowed law as technology. This is undertaken through a jurisprudential reading of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune cycle’. The Dune cycle has been read as involving an affirmation of chaos over rationality in public activities — religion, politics and ecology — concluding with the message of self-care and Zen-like calm in coping with an uncertain universe. But these accounts sell Herbert’s imagining short. This chapter re-examines the Dune cycle as a story of tyrants and leviathan sandworms. In this re-reading, Dune can be seen as an account of the metaphysics of law as technology. The themes of the secondary literature on Dune can be rewoven into a critical elaboration of Hobbes’ ‘mortal God’ which exposes the essential commitments of sovereignty and its technical law. These commitments are death and time. Located within the bloody alchemy of modernity, the monstrousness of the law as technology is revealed – the consumption of bare life in time. This brutal realisation seems to end with Schmitt’s representative sovereign deciding to make the world.

This chapter maps the science fiction milieu, which includes David Lynch's Dune. It explains how science-fiction cinema had been bursting into new life throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. It also mentions the influence of Frank Herbert's original novel of Dune on stories of interstellar science fiction, such as the first Star Wars trilogy. The chapter discusses Herbert's approach to fiction and personal biography that provide some of the seeds of what the film version of Dune would become. Since Dune occurs in the shadow of Star Wars, it also provides context for the production and consumption of science-fiction film in the years between the releases of the two movies.

This chapter talks about the production of David Lynch's Dune through the lens of the film's reputation, histories, and key players. It discusses the collaboration with El Topo director Alejandro Jodorowsky and famed French comic artist Jean 'Moebius' Giraud for the filming of Dune. It also recounts how the project for Dune sparked to life with the arrival of Lynch, who was fresh off the success of the Academy Award-nominated film The Elephant Man. The chapter mentions Lynch's reputation before and since Dune, which became part of its story, especially how the film sits both inside and outside a canonical view of his work. It outlines the events of the energetic phase that brought the Dune project to fruition.

The central grassland region of North America (Fig. 1.1) is the largest contiguous grassland environment on earth. Prior to European settlement, it was a vast, treeless area characterized by dense head-high grasses in the wet eastern portion, and very short sparse grasses in the dry west. As settlers swept across the area, they replaced native grasslands with croplands, most intensively in the east, and less so in the west (Fig. 1.2). The most drought-prone and least productive areas have survived as native grasslands, and the shortgrass steppe occupies the warmest, driest, least productive locations. James Michener (1974) provided an apt description of the harshness of the shortgrass region in his book Centennial:… It is not a hospitable land, like that farther east in Kansas or back near the Appalachians. It is mean and gravelly and hard to work. It lacks an adequate topsoil for plowing. It is devoid of trees or easy shelter. A family could wander for weeks and never 4 nd enough wood to build a house. (p. 64)… The objective of this chapter is to introduce the shortgrass steppe (Fig. 1.3) and its record of ecological research. First we present an ecological history of the shortgrass steppe since the Tertiary, and provide the geographic and climatic context for the region. Second we describe the major research sites, and the history of the three major entities or programs that have shaped much of the science done in the shortgrass steppe: the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)–Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the International Biological Programme (IBP), and the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program. Grasses have been an important component of the shortgrass steppe of North America since the Miocene (5–24 million years ago) (Axelrod, 1985; Stebbins, 1981). Before that, during the Paleocene and Eocene (34–65 million years ago), the vegetation was a mixture of temperate and tropical mesophytic forests. Two causes have been proposed as explanations for this ancient change from forest to grassland. First, global temperatures decreased rapidly during the Oligocene (24–34 million years ago), creating conditions for a drier climate. These drier conditions, combined with a renewal of the uplift of the Rocky Mountains that had begun during the Paleocene, left the Great Plains in a rain shadow.

This chapter examines how the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me fits within David Lynch's wider filmography. It analyses connections and commonalities between Fire Walk With Me and Lynch's other films, highlighting recurring themes and stylistic elements. It also mentions Lynch's film Wild At Heart from 1990, which was made during Twin Peak's second season that had won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The chapter recounts Lynch's initial flirtation with the mainstream, such as a big budget adaption of Frank Herbert's science-fiction novel titled Dune in 1984 that had been a commercial, critical and artistic disaster. It talks about how Fire Walk With Me had been a product of Lynch's own making that expresses his own particular vision and continued to believe in, despite the critical drubbing.

This chapter explores David Lynch's Dune as one of science fiction's strangest outliers. It examines Dune's impressive cast, the lurid set designs, and the spiralling dialogue exchanges. It also charts the film's internal logic through key shots and scenes with reference to Frank Herbert's notes, Lynch's scripts, and the much discussed and controversial 'Alan Smithee' television edit of the film. The chapter describes Dune's final form that is acute with montages, voice-overs, interludes, inter-cuts, and fades in. It provides a close analysis of the film's unusual structure, summarizing how the material is loosely arranged and paying strict attention where the film demands it.

This chapter explores the cultural impact of David Lynch's Dune. It considers the actual box office numbers to assess the damage of the so-called bomb. It also revisits some of the strange collection of the merchandise and examine the series of videogames which significantly contributed to the film's enduring cultural legacy, but which all too often fall under the radar of screen media scholars. The chapter reviews Dune with the benefit of hindsight and considers its legacy and meaning for contemporary audiences. It mentions Dr. Dean Brandum, a film historian and film exhibition scholar, who analyzed the conditions by which Dune failed with audiences that seemed obscure and abstract.

Ridley Scott decides to adapt Tristan and Isolde for his next film, with producer David Puttnam on board and a completed screenplay. In 1977 it is placed in development at Paramount. Scott sees Star Wars and is devastated to learn that the movie incorporated many of the ideas he had had for his project. 20th Century Fox puts Scott on a list of possible directors for Alien. Scott is selected and signs onto the dark science fiction/horror film. The movie concerns a beast aboard a spaceship that devours the crew members one by one. The remaining member, a strong and capable woman, manages to eliminate the monster. The visuals are complex, believable, and very scary. The film is a success and puts Ridley Scott on the Hollywood map. Scott next says yes to Dune, a major science fiction project, but his brother Frank dies of cancer at forty-five and Ridley Scott is emotionally unable to continue with the project. In 1975 he marries Sandy Watson, with whom he has a daughter, Jordan. Watson and Scott divorced in 1989.