You can apparently watch Dune: Part Two at home now, and since that's where Mork watches movies it's been a boon to him. It isn't the case that I'm done with the theaters; literally one of my favorite things to do is go to movies alone, and not just because trying to go with the family would cost three thousand dollars. It's so dark and quiet. And a medium popcorn is plenty.  But going someplace to be impoverished and eat popcorn just doesn't parse for him anymore. Ah, well; Legendary Pictures may have to content themselves with seven hundred million, I guess.

One of my favorite parts of the movies taken together, though the second one is essentially an Extended Club Remix (feat. Ludacris) of the concept, is Stilgar as Paul "The 'Dib" Atreides' ride or die hype man - a kind of Fremen Flavor Flav. It's genuinely hilarious. When I read the book a million years ago, as men reckon time, I read it completely straight - the only book I could possibly compare Dune to was the only other book of that scale and themes, which is to say "The Bible." Tycho Lore: my mom taught me to read using the Bible, also. Hopefully that makes everything clear. Like… everything.

But I came to understand Dune as "a bible for an alien culture," and so everything inside it was draped in a dark, ombre shawl. Looked at from the movie's perspective, it's funny and perfect in its own way. Like Shogun, I would say, Dune: Part Two isn't merely a recitation of the source.  Fucking with things just to fuck with them is dumb, but I don't think that's what happened in these cases.  Deviations here aren't made out of spite or confusion about the adapted material, they're creative choices related to a phase change in the matter that makes it up.  I wonder if the idea that a story should remain utterly stable through time might be a recent one, an inheritor of ideas about property or copyright, or purity. I wonder if it would fully parse to our forebears, who - the record clearly shows - fucked around more or less on the reg.

(CW)TB out.