I tried to read Dune when I was younger. Like my failed attempt to read LotR in elementary school (I had read The Hobbit and it was short and sweet, surely more books from the same author would be! How wrong I was.), it was too much too soon.

Due to weird familial industry ties (my deceased maternal aunt was VP at Warner Bros. and later VP at Paramount before she passed away) I saw a LOT of movies as a kid, including a family outing to Dune (for all I know, it may have been a premier? Given the context of surrounding events at the time, it seems likely). I thought the movie was OK?

On repeated viewings, I think that was probably mostly thanks to David Lynch's touch.

I later watched the Dune SciFi channel series and even bought it on DVD (I don't know why, I didn't think it was good). Meh.

Eventually I read the first book. It was OK, mostly self contained, drugs and scifi? I can understand why it was popular in the 1960s.

The second book? Was awful. It felt very. "Zoinks, caught something! Time to reel them in and milk them for all they're worth!"

I started to read the third book and gave up, it was godawful. I remembered conversations with a friend in high school who had read all the books and told me snippets, each one sounding dumber than the last and decided to cut my losses.

There is a meme somewhere, almost impossible to find online the last time I went looking for it, documenting each book in the franchise and it getting worse and worse and the audience lapping it up like slop. It's a hilarious meme for a very limited audience and contains some humor that would make Dave Chappelle look like a saint in this day and age, hence why it is probably nearly obliterated from online existence.

These days? Jodorowsky's Dune? For me? Is the only thing worth my time investing in consuming it.

Spoilers: Realize, I am referring to the documentary called Jodorowsky's Dune, not the film he was going to make, but didn't.

Still, it's fantastic! Perhaps his idea to give an audience the (paraphrasin) "experience of an LSD trip, without taking LSD" made manifest. Realized, perhaps fittingly, by another director entirely.

That may be a very personal take on that movie though insomuch as it revisited long since forgotten memories of conversations with extended family members decades earlier about what I can only presume was the Dune movie Jodorowsky was planning to make, but didn't.

Similarly, that aforementioned deceased maternal aunt working at executive levels within Hollywood? I swear I saw a copy of the tome (glimpsed at in the documentary) which Jodorowsky sent copies of to major movie studios maybe in her apartment or something and have memories of flipping through the pages, admiring the artwork (mostly drawn Mœbius but apparently HR Giger also contributed to designs? Maybe there was some of that there too? Those memories for me are so distant as to be slightly less than liminal to my adult self.).

Even the tale of Salvador Dali being part of the professed performers and agreeing only after his demands to be the most highly paid actor in history? Something clicked into place.

Moreover, like the masterful use of the power of suggestion by Alfred Hitchcock (e.g. Psycho never shows anyone being stabbed on screen, the audience only sees a shadow of a silhouette), the documentary triggers the audiences' imagination, of a movie bigger than anything that can be captured on camera. A movie, too big for a silver screen. A movie where millions were spent, the best talent of the era was tasked to work on it, and not a single still frame of its production survives to be witnessed second hand.

The more recent Dune movies and cable TV shows and whatnot? Meh. Totally not my cup of tea. Sure they're big budget and have sound design that makes speakers make noises I rarely hear, but it doesn't stir the imagination.

Even David Lynch's Dune, flawed as it was, hinted at a lost cut, since David Lynch wasn't given final editorial privileges. It stoked the imagination, caused fans to make edits, import LaserDiscs from Japan, refer to SLP television broadcast VHS recordings of slightly different edits and "footage" (mostly shots of artwork with voice overs) omitted from the film prints that were circulating.

The contemporary Dune? The SciFi channel Dune? Offer none of that.

Oh yeah, Jodorowsky's Dune? Also talks about how he never read the book. He wanted to make his Dune!

Which was a rare bit of honesty from a director.

How many movies are made from books and fail to be "true" to the source material?

Much like how apples don't grow "true" from seed. Or to highlight marijuana, also grafted (both of those nuances and more are mentioned in Michael Pollan's book, Botany of Desire), hearing a director, in his own words, talk about his own interpretive lenses? To me? Marvelous! Especially, again, because someone else directed the movie known as Jodorowsky's Dune. Intrinsically, it is not what it seems on the surface. It remains? To me at least:

So much deeper than any of the rest of the franchise.