The heart of film is visual style, and Wes Anderson is one of the most stylized directors working today. He is certainly the most popular of the great formalists. And I haven’t given much analysis of his films before - their class commentary is usually too obvious. But the Venetian scheme is a good starting place. As always spoilers below the cut.
Of course you should watch Season 2 of Andor. I'm not even going to waste text trying to convince you. There are none so blind as those that refuse to see.
Tuesday night's set of three episodes - 2.7 thru 2.9 - were bonus amazing and in many ways the climax of what this season and all of Andor had been moving towards. They have ignited a huge explosion of praise online, especially from the sort of left-wing popular-culture obsessives we know so well.
I find that... confusing, or maybe willfully blind. Spoilers below the cut.
There, I said it. I enjoy the Apple streaming mammoth "Severance" for its individual episodes. It has a strong directorial style, extremely fitting actors for their characters, and very thought out set design. Any 45 minutes of it is worth watching.
But the metaplot is an extremely cliche "mystery box" with "the large corporation has a conspiracy that is *even more evil than you thought* and for extremely vague and unrealistic motives." I don't care what is going to happen to Lumon in the end. I'm sad that seems to be the only sort of analysis I can find on reddit or any other place discussing the shows.
... but I'm even more frustrated that everyone analyzing the plot is missing the central point. Spoilers for the finale below.
Jun Jong-Seo is a Korean actress whose star is rising very rapidly, and I think her three most American movies make an excellent, impromptu trilogy.
Yes, you should go see Dune 2 and form your own reading of it. It's a magnificent film that during its entire 2 hour 45 minute run I did not want to miss a single scene. So I am going to write this post as if you are fully spoiled, if spoilers mean anything with an adaptation. If that's an issue for you, please go see it.
Additionally, this quality creates a dearth of discourse. If the movie is simply objectively "very good" and it's 9 months till Oscar contention, what hot takes can we have?
The immediate answer to fill that vacuum was "compare this Dune movie to other forms", especially the novel and the 1984 movie by auteur David Lynch (with only a few geeks bringing up the Sci-Fi channel series or Jodorowsky's ill fated project.) Which is difficult because comparison invites judgment, and this movie is both a) obviously good and b) extremely different than those two versions at some fundamental levels.
Instead, I think we are discussing history.
For me, though, I have learned to relax and let it go. I remember the turning point moment. I was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my roommates, and it went into a backstory flashback set in high medieval Germany. “Why are you sighing?” one asked, noticing that I’d laid back and deflated rather gloomily. I answered: “She’s not of sufficiently high social status to have domesticated rabbits in Northern Europe in that century. But I guess it’s not fair to press a point since the research on that hasn’t been published yet.” It made me laugh, also made me think about how much I don’t know, since I hadn’t known that a week before. For all the visible mistakes in these shows, there are even more invisible mistakes that I make myself because of infinite details historians haven’t figured out yet, and possibly never will.
...
Now, historians aren’t certain of Cesare’s birth date. He may be the eldest of his full siblings, or second.
The difference between Cesare as elder brother and Cesare as younger brother in the shows is fascinating. Showtime’s Big Brother Cesare is grim, disillusioned, making hard decisions to further the family’s interests even if the rest of the family isn’t yet ready to embrace such means. B:F&F‘s Little Brother Cesare is starved for affection, uncertain about his path, torn about his religion, and slowly growing up in a baby-snake-that-hasn’t-yet-found-its-venom kind of way.
Both are fascinating, utterly unrelated characters, and all the subsequent character dynamics are completely different too. Giovanni/Juan is utterly different in each, since Big Brother Cesare requires a playful and endearing younger brother, whose death is already being foreshadowed in episode 1 with lines like “It’s the elder brother’s duty to protect the younger,” while Little Brother Cesare requires a conceited, bullying Giovanni/Juan undeserving of the affection which Rodrigo ought to be giving to smarter, better Cesare. Elder Brother Cesare also requires different close friends, giving him natural close relationships with figures like the Borgias’ famous family assassin Michelotto Corella, who can empathize with him about using dark means in a world that isn’t quite OK with it.
Dune is a story so big, so poured over by analysts already, that these movies don't feel like artistic adaptations so much as differing historical interpretations. Both 1984 and the 2020's movies feel like they are actually trying to be about the same events, but have very different understanding and evidence. They're groping in the dark for monocausal patterns when the real truth was probably messy, contradictory, and inexplicable.
What is Dune 21/24 about?
Sometimes on Twitter people argue about whether Dune is appropriationist and centers a white savior, and other people say "no the entire point is that this is exploitative and a disaster waiting to that happens." Well if anyone has missed that nuance, Villeneuve hammers it home relentlessly.
For the first time we are introduced to political splits among the Fremen, with the Northerners being more worldly, civilized, and practical and the Southerners - who live in an uninhabitable sandstorm - being backwards and more fundamentalist. And this split is mirrored in the characters - Chani, her friends, Gurney Halleck, and Paul-before-he-drinks-Water-of-Life are all very firm on messiah-hood being a bad ending, and would only be the result of manipulation by the Bene Gesserit. Whereas Jessica, Alia, and Stilgar are arguing for messiah-hood against others, and not above using manipulation to achieve this.
Paul, in the most recent movie, is doing everything he can to stay secular, but feels historical currents pushing him towards taking the religious mantel. Until his hand is forced - he can either "go to the South" and follow his mother, or he can stay behind to be slaughtered (the inclusion of the scene where Feyd-Rutha kills one lone last-standing Freman is meant to show "what would have happened to Paul if he stayed.")
We get this same theme with the quotidian shots of the Emperor and his daughter in their garden, discussing politics. The currents of the great houses and the Bene Gesserit are forcing their hand, so they must play into Paul's hand even though they know it will spell the end of their imperial dynasty. Fate is cold and relentless, and about large forces not magic powers.
Paul most of all does not want to become messiah, and most of his point of view is speaking against it. But then he's maneuvered into drinking the Water of Life and... at that point he basically disappears as a viewpoint character. We don't have access to his internality anymore, he's just a machine for holy war. It was a very disturbing transition.
Lady Jessica is a villain almost as much as any Harkonnen, who tells herself she is doing all this just to keep her son safe, but by the end is just trying to spite the Bene Gesserit.
The biggest change from the novel is where Lynch's Dune swerves into all the "weird fantasy shit", this Dune avoids it as much as possible. That's right: there's no CHOAM representatives, no voice cannons, no special powers for the Fremen troops at all, Alia isn't even born during this movie (no "my brother is coming" creeper 4 year old harbinger), no mentats, no ghoula, no rain, no weirding way. Both Paul and Feyd come across as normal ass knife fighters who can defeat one other normal human in 1-on-1 combat, but not much better than that.
And... I still love the 1984 Dune. I suspect its memes will even surpass the Villeneuve version. It's not just cheesy but it buys fully into the cheese. Paul's messiah-hood is fully righteous and victorious! He's got a creepy blue-eyed 2 year old sister with sorceress powers! He summons the rain and the storms! And he's fighting not just against other humans, but monsters-in-fish-tanks controlling the throne.
To Lynch, the world of Dune is one where individuals matter - because they've got super weird powers, or just the sheer complexity of entities. But in the recent movie, there is merely a cold hand of history, more Marx than Tolkien.
And neither really makes sense alone. Even though the 2024 Dune "feels" more realistic, it simplifies the forces involved (no CHOAM presence, nor the other small organizations), and is so smooth in its progression there's no time skip. Which means less than 9 months of lower Spice production has toppled the imperial throne, instead of the 4 or so years in the book. Weak ass emperor.
And entire people have been removed from the Villeneuve narrative - like Leto, Paul and Chani's first son - because they would complicate the Paul/Chani antagonistic narrative that Villeneuve wanted to end with.
***
If you like this reading, I'd suggest you read the (much smaller) book "Elder Race", telling the same historical events from different ontologies.
Not a long post today. I wanted to write about the Starship Troopers discourse on Twitter, but only after the heat had died down. Someone very foolish wrote a long thread about why ST wasn't satire, including such shallow examples as "the fascist characters are good looking." The level of conversation went down hill from there.
But the sticking point that does have many people convinced of the rightness of the heroes in that movie is they are actually fighting bugs. Fascism is about starting wars of aggression, and genociding human beings or aliens that look cuddly, right? You can't be fascist if you are defending against an actual inhuman, implacable menace, right? It's one thing to call Jews bugs, but what about actual bugs?
Which reminded me of SMG paraphrasing Lacan back in the Gamergate days.
It doesn't matter if there is a conspiracy in reality or not. Paranoia is in how you yourself think.
In the classic example: a man can be paranoid that his wife is cheating on him, even if the wife actually is cheating. He might start obsessively documenting her activities, going on about a conspiracy by wives to cheat on their husbands, etc.
(As he contemplates his stolen suicide vest.) I have found a new form of prayer.
