Hello friends.
This time, I’m going to be giving my thoughts on some things I’ve watched and read recently. I hope you’ll indulge me in this.
I’ll start with the big hitters: I went to see Dune: Part Two last Saturday. This was on something of a whim as I had had a relatively unsatisfactory morning and decided that Villeneuve’s newest film might take me out of the slump. From memory, the morning had been set up to be one of those awfully productive ones, but things became a bit much and nothing got done. It was up to fiction to salve the disappointment, therefore. And it did.
I reviewed Dune: Part One on my university newspaper’s website. The extracted quote used for the thumbnail of that piece was “looks astonishing and feels duly epic”. I am not proud of those words exactly, but they do ring true for both parts of Dune, now. I preferred this second part to the first (as was the case when I read the book back in 2018). I don’t want to get into plot details for the uninitiated, but I will try to highlight succinctly some things the film gave to me. Suffice it to say that Dune is a sci-fi film set long into the future on a desert planet, Arrakis, and at the centre of the drama is a group of families.
The first thing to say is – and I’m not really on Twitter, but – the discourse around the film has been fairly “buck wild”. One of the things the book does a good job of is evaluating and questioning the messianic. To be brief, the protagonist of both parts of Dune comes to be viewed by groups of people as a quasi-divine being sent to fulfil a prophecy. But whilst many stories have used prophecies to draw plotlines to satisfying conclusions, Dune would rather critique the notion of prophecies altogether. Will the central figure, Paul, lead these people to a resounding victory and a brighter future? Or is his messiah status a well-constructed façade that will spell desolation for millions? (I should say at this point, I actually don’t fully know the answer to this question, having only read Dune and not its sequels, though I can guess…)
I have seen relatively little of audiences’ griping against Paul’s character, but it’s definitely out there. I don’t think it’s that the idea of an anti-hero is one we’re still always shocked by, I think it’s to do with the context in which we find Paul. We’ve been led to expect that a film touted as a blockbuster will usually and necessarily play things safe on a story front. So, what does it mean for a film releasing in 2024 to have a character whose victory is toxic? What does it mean to allow for moral greyness in a film to be consumed by the masses?
Well, perhaps we shouldn’t be too excited, for, after all, we have to thank the source material for so much of this ambiguity. And yet, the casting of Timothée Chalamet remains a clever choice. It’s not that Chalamet always plays overtly likeable characters – not always the Theodore Laurences of this world – but his stardom and taking of the lead role comes with a set of expectations. Even the romance Paul has with Chani (Zendaya) is far from straightforward and contains one of the more shocking moments I’ve seen on screen for a long time. Indeed, the film heightened this late surprise from the book where the necessity of character’s thoughts and lengthy description seemed to slightly soften the impact (from memory).
Final thoughts about Dune, now. I think the film used sound (and especially a lack thereof) in brave and format-pushing ways. The extremes were there: deafening gun fights featuring “ornithopters” (futuristic aircraft that blend helicopter and dragonfly quite seamlessly) and there were also quiet moments which allowed space to breathe. I think my favourite sequence in the film came during a dream in which Paul walked over a sand dune and stumbled upon the sea. In a film set almost entirely in the desert, this was a revelation and a relief. It actually made me think a bit more deeply about binaries: wet/dry, land/sea etc. which films so often take somewhat for granted.
For characters and settings can sometimes seem, if not devoid of intention, at least cobbled together. In a world where our attention is arguably our most sought-after asset, we can sometimes lose – amongst the entailing maximalist style in which we jump between locations like so many foodstuffs at a buffet – the essence of what it means to be firmly in a place. This phenomenon of unwieldiness pertains especially to the recent Star Wars trilogy. And yet it was sci-fi (and another planet altogether) which brought back for me a feeling of awe at geographic verisimilitude. It reminded me that there are stories in which absences (here of water) are just as important as that which is included. Arrakis isn’t just another planet in a series of forgettable places, it is the home of these people whom Paul, a planetary migrant, is trying to unite.
So much for Dune: Part Two, I want to turn now to a few things I’ve been reading. For the first of these I choose, at random, George Saunders’s 2021 book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain in which (according to its subtitle) “Four Russians give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life”.
The book is Saunder’s analysis of seven short stories by, variously, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Turgenev and I had been recommended it, or rather informed of its existence (which I take to be the same thing in this instance), by a fellow volunteer in Oxfam Bookshop. I came to the book for the literary analysis, but I stayed for the details on the craft of writing. It has genuinely (and this will excite me more than it will excite you) spurred me to a more concerted effort in my own fiction. I realised that, at least for Saunders, not knowing everything about a story before you start writing is part of the point. Here he is describing the ways creating without a guide can be empowering:
the thing we would have planned would have been less. The best it could have been was exactly what we intended it to be. But a work of art has to do more than that; it has to surprise its audience, which it can only do if it has legitimately surprised its creator.
Along with this inspiring bit of advice about writing what surprises you, I am grateful to George Saunders for making my fast-approaching (though still distant) return to third year at university a little bit less daunting. I was told early on in my first year, in my first supervision, in fact, that our task was to take on with a seriousness the role – nay, the job – of being literary critics. This involved, apparently, pointing to crises in texts and expounding them in provocative ways. I found all this thrilling and scary; evidently, as it has lodged itself so firmly in my memory. However, Saunders managed to boil it down to the essentials for me when he wrote that:
Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response.
Isn’t that so exciting? Pretty well anyone can do that! We can read and watch and listen and interpret whilst simultaneously watching ourselves closely as we do so. I was excited about my return to uni, but when I read that sentence, I felt a sudden pang of nostalgia and hope that maybe, just maybe, “everything will be alright in the end”.
I think that A Swim really merits reading apart from the seven stories of the Russian masters. It’s not that Saunders is a master himself per se, but more that he is able to greatly elevate and elucidate the reader’s perception of what the masters are doing. I found reading the book to be quite a heady experience at times, notably at the titular sequence from a Chekhov story where, indeed, somebody does swim in a pond/river in the rain. Saunders also chooses to break down the first of the stories page-by-page during the readthrough, and this stop-start approach led to an increase in my excitement over what I was learning, both about this story in particular and narrative in general.
Recently, I have also read John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed which describes itself as a book of essays on a “human centred planet”. The “Anthropocene” is the proposed age we are now living in, one in which humans have had such a vast impact on the planet that a geological age should be named after us. In each essay, John rates a thing which has emerged in or been affected by the Anthropocene. These things – concepts, objects, songs, diseases etc. – are as sprawling-ly random as to include “Diet Dr Pepper”, “Our Capacity for Wonder”, “Canada Geese”, and the Liverpool Football song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” to name a few.
The essays were well-crafted bits of exploratory writing that forced you into quite a kinship with the writer. I felt by turns his delights and worries in the face of what we have done to our planet. We are simultaneously the most interesting thing to have happened here, and something of an ecological disaster, for Green. The most valuable things I got from the book were arguably not Green’s words however, but his judicious quotation from other writers. He uses these quotes so cannily that you always feel they contain a small piece of gold that you have been lacking heretofore. I have had the book since it was published in 2021 but am actually glad to have put off reading it until now, three years later. It seems a good time to read it since the worst moments of covid seem to hopefully be behind us and Green writes quite extensively about his fear of pandemics and his covid anxiety throughout.
Last but not least, I have also started reading Don Quixote again (in preparation for my third-year dissertation) and Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes. Don Quixote has been, as ever, enjoyable, and I am starting on the Rutherford translation which I am finding to be my favourite of all those which I have read. Meanwhile, the de Waal has so far proven perhaps the most intensely pleasurable reading experience I have ever had. I think and hope it will merit its own piece, so I won’t say any more here.
- Angus