David Lynch's Dune Defined the Filmmaker He Could Have Been
The director's most infamous movie could have also been his most revealing.
If you felt a sudden inexplicable chill Thursday — as if an integral piece of the fabric of the universe was suddenly missing — that's because filmmaker/fine artist/musician/meditation guru/coffee pitch man/John Ford lookalike/all-around nice guy David Lynch had passed away.
The mastermind behind such surreal classics as Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive left this mortal coil shortly after announcing he was suffering from emphysema in August of last year. He left behind a god-level filmography of 10 feature films, which all act as gateways into one of the most unique minds to ever toil in mainstream cinema. Somewhere along the way he redefined what serial television could be amid the sprawling mythology of TV's Twin Peaks. He'll be forever revered by audiences and filmmakers alike as the rare creator given leeway to do his own thing (and then some), but there is one entry in that filmography which many fans — and Lynch himself — perceived like the foulest four-letter word… Dune.
Released almost exactly four decades ago in December 1984, the first film adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi saga was a bomb. It was such a bomb that it was referred to in some circles as "the Heaven's Gate of sci-fi." Besides being considered a box office loser, Dune managed to alienate both fans of the novel as well as filmgoers who looked to Lynch as the next messiah after the success of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. Even though it has since been reappraised, the young director himself saw it as a mistake, a "sell-out," a capitulation to the market where all his creative instincts were compromised by myriad forces, including a mandated PG-rating, 2hr 17min length, and merchandisable designs. Nowadays it's hard to imagine a David Lynch film with its own action figure line, but here we were. The merch hit the bargain bin while the film itself was remanded to the island of misfit toys where ambitious movies that fell wide of the mark go to wither.
The commercial failure of Dune sent Lynch permanently down the path of modest neo-noir filmmaking like Lost Highway, Inland Empire, and the Twin Peaks world. He seemed perfectly happy to stay in his severed-ear-lined sandbox… but there's an alternate timeline where Dune succeeded. What kind of filmmaker would have been unleashed if the studios who dared give this avant-garde savant a $40 million dollar budget had their faith rewarded?
David Lynch on the set of Dune.
That was a question foremost on this author's mind while crafting the 2023 book A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch's Dune – An Oral History. One of my interviewees, author Kenneth George Godwin (on set for Dune as a documentarian), agreed that a successful sci-fi film at that point in his career might have put Lynch on a similar artistically constricted blockbuster trajectory as George Lucas and Peter Jackson.
"Both of those guys were somewhat destroyed as filmmakers because of the success of what they did," Godwin told me. "I think Lynch came to the realization that, 'No, I don't fit into this industry studio model.' When Dune was a box office failure, Dino De Laurentiis gave him Blue Velvet as a consolation prize because originally there was going to be a trilogy of Dune's."
Last year I got to write up for Wired the partially-written script for Dune II that Lynch wrote, and it is to the first Dune what James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein was to the first Frankenstein. That is to say, full of surreal dreamscapes and bizarre flights of fancy, veering into nightmarish camp in the way only Lynch (and Whale) could pull off. The filmmaker was looking to Dune Messiah as a vehicle to explore his own burgeoning cinematic interests such as identity shifting (via the face dancer Scytale) or murder mysteries (Hayt and Alia investigating Lichna's demise), while scenes on the Tleilaxu planet are like Eraserhead cubed. Lynch always talks about how compromised he was on Dune, but the previously lost sequel script proves how deeply suited he was to Herbert's material.
Dexter Fletcher, who was once set to star in Lynch’s never-made Ronnie Rocket, in Elephant Man.
While he planned to continue building out the cinematic Dune-iverse, he also hoped to cash in his blank check to make a dream project called Ronnie Rocket. Penned directly following production on Eraserhead, this script concerned a dimension-crossing detective (shades of Dale Cooper) as well as a three-foot-tall teen whose dependence on electricity surging through his body transforms him into an industrial rock star. Unlike his first two black-and-white movies, this urban fantasy would be shot in color with surreal visuals (a 200-foot wall of fire, anyone?) inspired by the films of Jacques Tati. While working on Dune he had planned for that blockbuster's concept designer Ron Miller and visual effects producer Barry Nolan to explore Ronnie. Sandworm creator Carlo Rambaldi was to develop the prosthetic version of the title little person, while The Elephant Man co-star Dexter Fletcher would play Ronnie. Decades later, Fletcher became a director in his own right (Rocketman), and harbors a desire to see Ronnie Rocket hit the screen someday.
"I have the script for 'Ronnie Rocket'!" Fletcher exclaimed for my book. "It's an incredible script… I wonder if he’d let me make it? That would be a real full circle, that would be. Let’s put it out there! I want to make 'Ronnie Rocket'!"
Despite iterations for producers Francis Coppola, Dino De Laurentiis, and Ciby 2000, Ronnie never got to light up cinemas. Requiring some scale and visual effects to create its unique worlds, the film was clearly too big a gamble for bean counters before and after Dune. The expansive, surreal, and often supernatural world of Twin Peaks would be the closest he would come to realizing that level of worldbuilding again, although he briefly flirted with adapting Katsuhiro Otomo's sci-fi manga Domu in the early ‘90s. A proposed cinematic rendering of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis would have also required a level of magical realism similar to David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. Even recently, Lynch was exploring an animated movie titled Snootworld, about tiny fairy tale creatures that navigate the universe of a carpet (a similar scene inside a carpet appears in the Dune II script). Netflix passed.
Lynch’s planned Dune trilogy would’ve gotten even weirder and more surreal.
Much of Lynch's fascination with expansive worldbuilding and fantasy realms stemmed from his love of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. From the appearance of Sheryl Lee as the Good Witch in Wild at Heart, to the mere act of hiring the band Toto to score Dune, Lynch was so obsessed with the film that a whole documentary titled Lynch/Oz was made.
"The Wizard of Oz is a film with very great power… and it’s to be expected that it has stayed with us for the past several years and that we find its echoes in our films for such a long time after," Lynch once said. "The Wizard of Oz is like a dream and it has immense emotional power. There’s a certain amount of fear in that picture, as well as things to dream about. So it seems truthful in some way."
While Lynch's contemporaries like Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, and Steven Spielberg got to run wild creating immersive realms within the sci-fi and fantasy genres, we only really have Dune as proof of the places Lynch could have taken us given a little more commercial momentum in his career. His passing brings finality to ever seeing these visions extant. We'll also never see the true three-hour director's cut of Dune Lynch wanted to make in the late-‘80s but which Universal — in their infinite wisdom — decided was not worth the investment, and thus slap-dashed the miserable extended TV cut together on their own.
It's ironic that potentially one of the greatest cinema fantastique filmmakers is now best known for coffee, cherry pie, and old men riding cross-country on lawnmowers. Like Icarus, David Lynch's wings melted under the Arrakeen sun before he reached the clouds, but hopefully he's up there in the Emerald City now.
