David Lynch’s film interpretation of Frank Herbert’s series of Dune novels was released in 1984. I watched it in the Savoy cinema in O’Connell Street in Dublin. The exact day and date I no longer remember. With many of the most important changes in life, they have already happened some time before you realise. The Savoy was one of the two main cinemas in O’Connell Street, the Carlton was across the road. The Savoy 1 was possibly the biggest screen in Dublin at that time. The Savoy 1 or the Adelphi 1 in Middle Abbey Street were the places you wanted to see a movie if you could. Dune is rightly considered, as Chris Rodley observes in faber and faber’s Lynch on Lynch ‘…one of contemporary cinema’s most striking examples of the chaos that can ensue when world’s collide: when personal vision meets mega bucks, small meets large, naivety meets reality and private meets public.’ It was the second of two studio films Lynch would direct including The Elephant Man but this one, Dune, was for the family whose very name meant overblown and giant budgets, Dino and Rafaella De Laurentis. It would be the last film of that kind Lynch would make. He went back to his home of indie film-making after having such a difficult time that it has been suggested as the reason he came up with the wonderful Angriest Dog in the World cartoon during this period. This was a cartoon about a dog who was so angry that it was basically frozen eternally at the end point of its chain’s tension in a perpetual growl. It featured the same terribly frozen four panels every time with only the text changing. I should acknowledge; however, that he denies any causal connection between the two. And maybe you should trust him. I do like the fact that Lynch on Lynch also nods to the possibility that he may have been tired of being a starving artist and be attracted to the money that was on offer. That’s a theme that I believe we will return to throughout this series. I saw Dune with my father as I saw most films back then at the age of twelve. After the movie finished we sat in silence. We waited the twenty minutes for the next screening and sat through it again. It was a wonderful feature of going to the cinema in Dublin back then that they very seldom kicked you out if you wanted to stay and watch the movie twice or even three times. you could see the 2, 4, and 6 o’clock showings if you wanted. Dad and I often watched a film twice, sometimes because we missed the first couple of minutes of the movie due to his dreadful time keeping but that was really just an excuse. So it wasn’t unusual for us to watch the movie again straight away but it was unusual for there to be no discussion about it. My Dad was not much of a talker but we would always share a smile or a grin and a ‘what do you think, will we watch it again, dinner wouldn’t be ready till 6.’ Not this time. This afternoon we sat in stunned silence. I am sure that we stared at the screen until the movie was over for the second time and then left in silence and walked home down the grey quays of the River Liffey without a word. Again, this was unusual even for us. We hardly ever talked but we did talk about the movies we had seen. That was our oasis, whatever was blocking communication between us but we were not ready to talk about this movie. Or perhaps it would be more honest to say I was not ready. I was in such a stunned state I was not capable of seeing if my Dad was equally affected or not. In German it is called ‘unhomlich’ in English ‘uncanny’. I prefer the German word though as it is more descriptive of the feeling. Un-homely, away from the usual. That was the state in which I spent the following days. I had been shaken out of my homely state. I didn’t know it at first, that took time to bubble to the surface of consciousness but Dune had changed pretty much everything. The world was not the same anymore. I had not understood that movies could be this, whatever this was...
