Слава Україні Героям слава! Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes!
In the early hours of February 22nd, 2022, the Russian state began an illegal and unprovoked military invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine, heralded by a nationwide blitzkrieg air attack. The country was thrown into instant chaos, as two million people fled their homes to seek refuge in the westernmost city of Lviv and flooded across the borders into Poland and Romania. Families were torn apart by the need to evacuate children and the vulnerable out of harm’s way, while fighting-aged men, required to remain within the country, joined the armed forces of Ukraine and volunteer bands in droves.
Smartphones and laptops became essential devices in both keeping in touch with loved ones, and in the battle for the country. They were used by civilians and military alike to gather intelligence, capture evidence of war crimes and to track down Russian war criminals who were, in a mixture of arrogance and stupidity, prone to moving about leaving useful electronic and social media traces behind them. The film Stay Online (dir: Eva Strelnikova) is a tense and moving exploration of not just the horrors of war and the inevitable fracturing of innocence, but also this peculiarly Ukrainian wartime weaponization of social media.
The story centres on a young woman, Katya, a volunteer currently confined to a claustrophobic existence between her kitchen table and waiting out the frequent air alarms in her bathtub, while occasionally messaging with a dashing foreign friend, Ryan (Anton Skrypets). Ryan is working with a volunteer group doing the grim work of matching IDs to the bodies of civilians cynically slaughtered in their cars, in so-called civilian corridors opened by the Russians to allow them passage away from the fighting. Katya’s brother Vitya (Oleksandr Rudenskyy) and their Uncle Tolik (Oleksandr Yarema) have joined the Territorial Defence Forces and have asked her to install a GPS tracker app on a donated civilian laptop before passing it onto them. It is through Katya’s use of this laptop that we are to witness the Russian occupation of Ukraine, and the subsequent confusion, dangers and quickly multiplying griefs and traumas heaped upon the Ukrainian people.
The desktop, its messaging apps, social media accounts, news headline alerts, video calls and views of Katya through its webcam frame the action throughout and are the sole lens through which the story is told. A risky approach, on the face of it. It does feel gimmicky at first. There’s an awful lot to read, and fast, as Katya moves smoothly between apps keeping up with Vitya and Ryan, engages in a lively video chat-based slanging match with the mother of a Russian soldier, and digs into the life of the laptop’s original owner, a man named Andriy, via his chats, photos, contacts and calendar. It’s dizzying, frantic, and confusing, in a way that probably accurately reflects the fog of war.
But it’s clever, this film, in keeping our focus. The casting of actress Ekaterina Kiston as Katya is key as the emotional core of the film, her face in close-up for a significant proportion of the nearly two-hour running time. All large expressive eyes, baggy sweatshirt and unbrushed hair, she succeeds in a tense naturalism, showing us the fraught emotions of someone stuck in events well beyond their control, attempting to slowly taking back a small measure of power for herself and others.
After the first few chaotic minutes, a clear narrative is established – Katya receives a call from Sava, the young, Spiderman-obsessed son of Andriy, now stuck in the children’s refugee centre in Lviv. Sava is trying to find his father and mother, who after evacuating him to relative safety in Lviv, had stayed on at their home in Bucha, west of Kyiv, but have now gone mysteriously silent and unreachable. Hindsight allows us to be ahead of Katya in understanding the survival stakes have just been raised, Bucha being where something so terrible happened that it ceased to be just a place name and became a global reference to a dreadful event – an orgy of torture, rape and the mass murder of 681 Ukrainian civilians by the occupying 64th Motorized Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces, aided and abetted by Kadyrovite (Chechen) soldiers and brutal mercenary outfit Wagner Group PMC. If Sava’s parents are in Bucha, or were part of convoys in the civilian corridors allowed by the Russians that they subsequently used for civilian target practice, this is very, very concerning.
Katya of course doesn’t know the extent of what the Russians are doing in Bucha as it is yet to be liberated, but she decides to try to help this distressed child in any way she can – initially winning his trust through appropriating a cod-superhero persona (‘SuperKatya’) and persuading him to not run away from the refugee centre clad in his Spiderman mask to try to find his parents, while she engages the services of the highly personable Ryan, Vitya and Uncle Tolik to help to find Sava’s missing family. This eventually plunges the volunteers into a rescue mission in enemy territory, from which Katya’s expert navigation of the internet and GPS tracking proves the only hope of survival.
As more and more dreadful images and worse news filters through to Katya through her apps, the superhero act falls apart, and with it the juvenile and shallow, costumed power fantasies of brute physical strength and inevitable victorious outcomes of Marvel and Hollywood films. We are left to consider what a hero actually is in the reality of a wartime landscape, and why we must hail them. Heroism in this film is mired in blood, heartbreak, the sacrifice of one’s own safety for the greater good and the lives of others – and is often found in strange places and stranger people. It is doubtless still being found in spades in Ukraine, now in the second year of the war against the Russian invaders, every single day.
Stay Online (2023) featured at the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Tigers are among the most loved, admired, commercially exploited, and abused wild animals on earth. They were hunted close to extinction by the mid-20th century in their native lands, are currently farmed in vile facilities in various parts of the world for their bones, their bodies are currently used in superstitious Chinese pseudo-medicine, and they are still kept in zoos worldwide that range from merely inadequate for the species’ true needs to downright abysmal, as well as in abusive commercial cub-handling attractions recently made famous by the egregious tabloid mess that was the 2020 Netflix Tiger King documentary.
Countries such as the USA, China, and South Africa have a criminal captive tiger exploitation problem they are still not close to addressing properly. India, conversely, has tried for decades now to reverse the massive population decline (from 40,000 animals in the early 1900s to a mere 2000 by the early 1960s) and protect their much revered native national animal by turning their remaining habitats into protected forest reserves. These schemes have succeeded in doubling the tiger population to a healthier, although still small, 4000-plus animals by 2022 and have brought in much-needed conservation income through tiger-focused tourism. However, these reserves also border human settlements, and the forests where the tigers live offer resources which these local populations tend to want to use – such as firewood, foraging for their livestock, and in the absence of proper toilet facilities, a place to relieve themselves. This leads to confrontation and conflict between our two species that often ends in poor outcomes for both – occasional lethal tiger attacks on humans, and just as lethal human revenge attacks on tigers, usually via poisonings and arson attempts on their habitat. To try to prevent these types of destructive escalations, forest guards are employed by the state to patrol the reserves, track and keep an eye on the tigers and try to prevent human incursion into the tigers’ homes. They don’t always succeed in this aim.
Tiger 24 is a documentary that follows the human-tiger conflict through the case of one particularly magnificent male Bengal tiger named T-24 – and nicknamed Ustaad (‘The Master’) by locals, in Ranthambhone forest reserve, after he was accused of killing a dedicated forest ranger, Rampal Saini, in 2015. It appeared this was not T-24’s first rodeo regarding attacking humans; with four previous alleged incidents behind him, and a local population ready to wreak destruction on both tigers and forest, he was promptly tranquilized and placed in a zoo where he began a rapid decline in health. Activists and ordinary Indians who simply revere and respect the tiger, arguing he only killed humans who came into his territory, began protests and legal challenges to return him to his wild home and mate. The film then veers into detective format, looking carefully at all the previous four cases of killing men that T-24 is accused of and for any existing evidence to acquit T-24 from the charge of man-eating. Indian tiger expert and author Valmik Thupar appears to deliver an extended, exasperated rant (“We’re a land of babus and bureaucrats!”) about it being impossible to provide forensic evidence to prove tiger guilt or innocence, or hope to fix these issues around tigers due to ongoing structural and political problems in India.
The reverence that Indians have, for the tiger in general and this tiger in particular, shines through this documentary from start to finish. “He is the king of kings. He is not scared of humans, he is a real tiger,” proclaims an entranced local about T-24, even knowing he has killed humans. Others simply boast of glimpsing him the way some would boast of seeing a celebrity in the street. Seeing is believing, and the early part of the film is worth a thousand words, with truly awe-inspiring footage of tiger T-24 in his forest sanctuary, going about his everyday business alongside his mate, Noor, and a pair of male cubs not quite yet at maturity. These scenes show tigers at their shimmering, active best, fully immersed in their natural environment and activities; hunting, mating, and parenting their young with great care, while roaming their 50 square miles of territory. T-24 is shown to be a good father, bringing food for the cubs and tolerating all manner of playful insolence from them. This footage stands in stark contrast to the zoo T-24 was placed in, or any zoo on earth. T-24 as a dominant wild tiger is utterly diminished by his forced captivity – we have nothing to learn or to admire in him as he becomes a passive recipient of food, devoid of opportunity to hunt and move like a wild tiger: therein lies a lesson for us all about conservation, what we think we are conserving, and why. Is a tiger deprived of all opportunities to be a tiger actually a tiger anymore? Is this spectacle of captivity in tiny closed environments actually educational, as many zoos would claim? What are we actually learning from seeing these animals deprived of their normal huge, wild territories and activities, and who is really benefiting from the diminishment of these captive apex predators? When Noor realises T-24 is missing, she appears severely disturbed and goes on a weeks-long hunt across the territory for him, leaving her now older cubs alone and bewildered. The mournful calls she makes as she searches for her missing mate are dreadful, heart-rending things.
Seeing is also believing when we are shown brief glimpses of the mauled corpse of Rampal Saini and others killed by tigers in Ranthambhone after wandering into the tiger’s home, as are the cries of various wives, mothers and widows of the dead men, quite as heartbreaking a sound as Noor’s calls. At the time of writing, T-24 is still stuck in the zoo, and activists are still trying to get him out or moved to a larger, more natural compound away from the stress of being watched by humans. Any attempt to spring him and return him to his old home is moot though, as shortly after his departure, the rains washed away his scent marks on his old territory and as is normal in nature, another male tiger moved in to claim Noor as his mate. Humans may not have moved on, but nature certainly has. Once removed from nature, there’s seemingly no route back for the most dominant and beautiful tiger in the whole forest. Beyond gorgeous-looking wildlife documentary, detective story, socio-political exploration and conservation polemic, Tiger 24 is, ultimately, a tragedy.
Tiger 24 has begun a limited nationwide theatrical release which includes a week’s run at the Laemmle’s Monica Film Center (Los Angeles), opening September 30. Elevation will then release on all transactional VOD platforms in North America on November 15, 2022.
All great old cities are built on the bones of the dead. Paris conceals miles of spooky catacombs beneath its streets. London sits on layers of plague pits, paupers’ graves, Roman-era burials, the forgotten dead from wartime conflagrations, as well as the ashes of its own ancient sacking. Tokyo, the main urban centre of Japan since the time of the shoguns, is no different. It has suffered countless mass casualty events during its 400-year history, due to repeated fires, accidents, earthquakes and finally, in March 1945, as a result of a campaign of firebombing by the US air force in which up to one hundred thousand Japanese civilians are believed to have perished. It now conceals much of its history of death and suffering beneath towering modern concrete buildings, the result of rapid economic development. The past becomes less and less visible and more inclined to slip from the collective memory with each successive phase of development.
This passage of time and loss of memory is what concerns Masakazu Kaneko, the Japanese director of Ring Wandering (2021), a quietly meditative and lyrical time travel adventure. His film, only his second full-length feature after 2016’s The Albino’s Trees, promotes human connection, remembrance of and connection with our ancestors, as well as a deep spiritual reverence for nature lost to a modern era more concerned with its exploitation and commodification.
“Back in the late 19th century, Japan started to modernize itself to catch up with the West and to raise its economic and military power. On the other hand, it made a significant impact on the country’s long-lasting healthy ecosystem. As a result, the alpha predator, the Japanese wolf, became extinct. Now that the next war is being whispered, our society keeps going forward without looking back at the past. I think the past memories are layered underground, lying one upon another, which should not be covered over, neither would they disappear.”
Masakazu Kaneko
Ring Wandering concerns an aspiring young Tokyo manga artist named Sosuke (Sho Kasamatsu) who is experiencing a creative block while trying to tell the story of a hunter’s confrontation with the Japanese wolf, an indigenous animal hunted to extinction by the early 20th century. We first meet Sosuke in a shimmering field of long yellow grass, encountering an odd young boy with a camera who won’t stop asking questions or taking snapshots of him. Sosuke isn’t really interested in the child or being interrogated, though. He’s looking for visual inspiration of his own. He feels he cannot draw the wolf in his story convincingly as he has never seen one, and obviously, never will. Nor does he feel able to develop the story beyond a fierce battle to the death between man and beast, rejecting constructive criticism from a workmate who tells him to try to include some actual emotion and humanity in his work, and to pay more attention to the lone female character’s tragic story. Sosuke, however, is only interested in valorising the obsessive, driven brutality and violence of his male hunter protagonist, and sees his gentle daughter’s life and death as nothing more than a useful fictional device in pursuit of that.
Meanwhile, Sosuke, a sullen and awkward individual who reeks of the emotional numbness and self-isolation that are clearly hindering his artistic expression, works unhappily on a Tokyo construction site to earn his living. While digging deep into the earth for the foundation for another concrete development he comes across what he suspects is actually the long-buried and nicely-preserved skull of the very Japanese wolf he has longed to see. Or is it merely the skull of a long-lost domesticated dog? He eventually returns to the site under cover of darkness to search furtively for more bones. The first hint of temporal dislocation is the announcement along the way that there will be a fireworks event that night. As fireworks are only used in Japan at summer festivals, never winter, it signals the uncanny, perhaps a Japanese version of a clock striking 13.
Then, while rummaging in the dirt at the building site, Sosuke meets a young woman named Midori (Junko Abe) who is plaintively calling for her lost dog, ‘Shiro’. Sosuke’s first instinct is panicked avoidance. He tries to run away from her, but in doing so, he knocks her to the ground, hurts her ankle, ruins her curiously old-fashioned shoe, and thus feel obliged to help her return to her home as well as find Shiro, whom Midori describes as having run off after being frightened by loud noises, which Sosuke interprets as those of the fireworks. A connection is forged as he courteously piggybacks the injured girl homeward. She directs him toward a torii gate – the gate that marks the entrance to Shinto temples in Japan – and instructs him to walk through it. Viewers with a little familiarity with Japanese culture will recognise this as the moment of transformation and transcendence, as the torii functions as liminal space that signifies the end of normal everyday concerns and the beginning of a sacred space, rich with nature spirits and gods.
Once across the threshold, things are both as expected; a flight of rough-hewn stairs with small, shimmering oil lamps lighting the way to a Shinto temple complex, a monumental and adorned sacred tree … and not. The pair disturb a couple of lovers – he in Imperial Japanese Army military uniform, she in traditional kimono. Midori leads Sosuke to her home, a traditional wooden affair, and introduces him to her parents, who invite him to dinner. There are multiple cues that Sosuke has time-travelled back to the wartime era that he in his incredible self-absorption fails to really take in, but which are obvious to the viewer; the brief glimpse of a wartime uniform, Midori’s wooden geta shoes and bare feet, nothing a modern Japanese girl would wear with western-style clothing; the old-fashioned camera equipment in her parents’ studio, their reference about the government taking the lenses for the metal, and another about sending their younger son to the countryside for safety reasons. The parents (Ken Yasuda and Reiko Kataoka) interpret Sosuke’s modern get-up – his trendy ripped jeans and hoodie – as evidence of dire poverty. They also express confusion at the very idea of drawing manga being a real job, unsurprising since the great boom in manga only really started in the fifties. Even the food is unfamiliar – a nabe (stew) of pond loach dug from the winter mud, popular long ago in Tokyo’s history, but something Sosuke himself has never encountered before.
After an awkward start, he gets on famously with the family, breaking the ice by drawing them a picture of Midori’s beloved lost Shiro to much praise and interest in his talent. The familial warmth and acceptance by Midori and her gentle family allows Sosuke to finally emerge from his shell, and seems to promote his creative urge to draw again. Only when he returns back through the torii gate and attempts to revisit Midori’s family’s photo studio the next day to reconnect with her does he start to comprehend that what he experienced was time travel to the era of the firebombing in 1945. He meets Midori’s family all right, but a different generation, who finally provide him with context for the strange meeting in the field at the beginning of the film.
Sosuke starts to experience profound sense of loss and deep emotions concerning both these events and the kind people he both met and lost within an evening. Breaking through his wall of indifference to human relationships, his creative block is resolved, and he finds a way to reinterpret his story in a much more mature, complex manner. He integrates the feminine into his story, allows his hunter a final epiphany about his dubious behaviour and actions, and ties the events of his story into greater trends in Japanese history. Sosuke, in leaving his self-isolation, passing through the looking glass where he allows himself to make deeper human connections and experience suffering, has finally become a true artist.
This might be a good time to point out that Shiro is Japanese for ‘white’, a colour used to denote death and mourning in Japan, possibly giving a hint to the dog’s actual fate. Midori, meanwhile, means ‘green’ – her name reflecting a connection to the natural world, while her parting gift to Sosuke is a twig of evergreen mistletoe taken from the sacred tree for him to forge into a new drawing pen. Kaneko connects the feminine essence to respect for and balance of nature, and the masculine to the urge to brutalize, dominate, and commodify it for self-enrichment. Sosuke’s hunter is despised by the poor villagers who know him – they exhibit visceral disgust with his obsession with killing the sacred alpha predator and with his outrageous financial exploitation of not just animals, but commodification of even his own dead child’s remains. Kaneko traces the shift in the attitude toward the natural world from that of reverence tinged with fear to contempt to the Meiji era’s rapid industrialization and then, its sinister militarization.
It’s in his depiction of the wild Japan, its mountains, fields and forests, that Kaneko’s film really shines and reflects the lost spirituality of a former era. The camera lingers across each landscape and allows its beauty and grandeur to speak for itself. There’s no swelling musical soundtrack to tell us how to feel, only the actual sounds of the natural world itself. He allows us to experience the roaring of a waterfall hitting the rocks below; the dry rustling of long grass; the wind whispering through the leaves of the forest trees; the sounds of birdsong, and the soft sounds of footsteps treading carefully through the deep, pure snow. Human figures are diminished in a greater landscape, shown as mere specks, man put in his place as merely a part of nature, not the centre of it. Although I have no idea of Kaneko’s influences, for me this cinematography was all slightly reminiscent of Terrance Mallick’s films, or maybe Alexandr Sokurov at his shimmering, spiritual height. Meanwhile, the overall delicacy, quiet, probing mysticism and interrogation of modern mores combined with the time travel motif brings to mind something of New Zealand director Vincent Ward and his underrated 1988 Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey. However, these are only minor reference points; the film is truly Kaneko’s own, and a confident, touching and thoughtful piece it is, its outstanding cinematography lingering in the mind’s eye and its depiction of fragility of human existence and its mourning for lost generations remain resonant long after viewing.
Ring Wandering (2021) featured as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Kicking off 2022 in style, we’re absolutely delighted to be running this interview with Heather Bellson – a writer who has worked on an absolute panoply of quality television projects at a time when, in the eyes of many, the television series is king. TV has been on the up and up when it comes to writing, production and at root, fascinating storytelling; Heather has very likely worked on some of your favourite shows, and it’s a real privilege to speak with her. Over to Heather!
Interview by: Helen Creighton
WP: Welcome to Warped Perspective, Heather! We’re really happy you have taken the time to talk with us over here in the cold and rainy old UK!
Firstly, Can you tell us a bit about your background? Did you always want to be a screenwriter? Was there any influence or experience that crystallized or inspired this ambition for you? What route did you take to pursue this career?
HB: I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t really know what that looked like because I didn’t know any actual writers beyond the posed photos on the back of the book jacket, or the brief interviews on a daytime talk show. I grew up working class, so I just assumed writing was something I would do in the middle of the night while I had “real” jobs. It seems like I tried to do everything else for years – I was a locksmith’s apprentice, I worked in cafés and restaurants, admin jobs in biotech firms and law offices, I worked in IT for a while, went to grad school. Little magazines paid me $50 for a short story or an essay, or sometimes nothing at all. Meanwhile I was watching the beginning of TV’s new golden age – Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood, Lost, Mad Men, etc. It dawned on me that I could write for TV and actually make a living if I managed to break through. And because I had fucked around for so long, I was convinced I was no good at anything else. I had nothing to lose so I just went for it. I wrote a bunch of scripts which were terrible. I kept writing bad scripts until I realized they weren’t bad anymore and I actually kinda liked them. At a certain point I felt like I was writing at the level of what I was watching on TV and so in 2007 my now-wife and I picked up and moved to LA to see if I could swing it.
Heather Bellson
When I got to LA I knew nobody in the industry, so I joined a couple of writing groups and workshopped my scripts. Meanwhile I was working as a researcher for a working television writer. It wasn’t a lot of money but it was good to witness what the life of a pro writer is like from inside. It was a far better education than any class or formal degree program. I also met a lot of people he worked with and one of them was another writer who asked to read my samples. He liked an original script I wrote about Jamestown and passed it on to his agents, and they liked it and called me to come in and sign. I got my first paid job on TV a few months later.
It seemed like it all happened really fast, but I spent years getting to the point where I would be ready when the door opened.
WP: Looking at your IMDb, with the exception of the crime show Unforgettable, all your credits are on wonderful cable genre shows ranging from fantasy to horror to science fiction: The Walking Dead, Black Sails, The Exorcist, American Gods, and the recent Raised by Wolves. Was it always a goal of yours to pursue genre-based writing in particular?
HB: Yes. Genre is what I love watching and reading, always has been. In school there was this stink on popular fiction and movies and TV, like it wasn’t real literature or something. I never understood that. Shakespeare wrote pop theater about fairies and wizards – I think he would have written for genre TV if he were alive today. Maybe he’d be running Dr. Who. (I can feel the ivory towers shaking at the thought.)
But to get back to your question, genre to me has always been more challenging and fun to write. You can go anywhere, do anything… and if you want to write about “real” stuff you can do it in a way that lets the audience leave all their political baggage at the door. I remember watching Battlestar Galactica sneak a story about the occupation in Iraq into their third season, which was ostensibly about humans living on a hostile planet while being subject to their robot overlords. It was fantastic… it was maybe the best storytelling that came out on the topic and it was hidden in an allegory and snuck into a science fiction show. People got to relax and just go with the story instead of worrying about whether or not it matched up to the opinions they thought they had on the topic.
But also it’s fucking fun. How can it not be when the subject is pirates or zombies or space robots?
WP: There’s an interesting cultural difference in the writer’s creative process between UK and the US TV industry. I’m referring to the existence of the US phenomenon known as ‘the writer’s room’, where episodic TV is written collaboratively by a group of writers rather than by one person commissioned to produce a script. Have all your shows involved the writer’s room process? Can you walk us through how the writer’s room process actually works? What are the difficulties and conversely, the creative advantages of working this way?
HB: To talk about writing room culture now feels a bit like that metaphor of trying to stand in the same river twice. Things have changed so fast, especially with the pandemic. But until a few years ago, TV rooms here were variations on the same thing: The showrunner is the head writer and the boss of the whole production, and they would work with a staff of other writers to write the story, which would then go to production to be shot, and then come back to the editors for editing and effects before going to air. All of this would happen near simultaneously, and the showrunner would be in charge of it all. The writers in the room would peel off as needed to go write their episodes, do revisions, go to set and help produce, or sometimes even come back and work with the editors on the edit.
Now things are different depending on the show. There are shorter orders and some showrunners are working with a smaller staff or by themselves, finishing up all the scripts before production even starts. The phases of development, production and editing are separated from each other, and therefore they don’t cross pollinate each other. In this way it feels closer to the model feature films have always used.
As someone who came up in writers’ rooms, I have a bias toward them. I’m an introvert and before I got into TV I always wrote by myself, so it was a challenge to adapt to the kind of collaboration a healthy writers room requires. But once I got a taste it was hard to go back. When there are other voices in the room, not too many and not too few, and everyone feels free to talk and nobody is getting talked over, and everyone leaves their ego at the door (in other words, when the conditions are Just Right), so many wonderful things can happen. You can all get into this flow state where you are moving at the speed of light, and you’re all doing it together. You form bonds with each other, learn to trust each other, and all the psychological bullshit that usually gets in the way of the process can fall away. When it works, it’s such a high. However the down side is that when it doesn’t work it can be worse than being alone. We’re human, so playground politics can emerge.
Creatively I think a room is worth it. You get more done, faster. And because everyone plays a part, everyone feels kinship to the whole story, the whole show, instead of just feeling like little bricks in a wall. That enthusiasm is contagious. So I prefer the writing room model.
At some point though, you’re just a writer working alone. After the room has laid out the basic story for the episode on the board – this can be as general as “here are the basic moves” to something pretty granular, including each scene and how you get in and out of the scene – then the writer of that episode leaves the room for a week or so and writes the first outline, while the rest of the room moves on to the next episode. That outline goes to the showrunner, producers and studio and network, and it changes along the way according to their notes. Then that writer writes the first draft, and that goes through the same process, with the writer revising it at each step.
Ultimately every script goes to the showrunner, who does their pass before it heads to set. I’ve had showrunners who rewrite everything very heavily, and some who don’t touch a thing. It really depends on the show and the showrunner’s style.
WP: Are there any episodes of any of the shows you have worked on that you are particularly proud of? What would your personal writing showreel include?
HB: I’m proudest of an episode of American Gods that I wrote. It’s the seventh episode of the second season, called “Treasure of the Sun,” about Mad Sweeney remembering who he used to be. The production was very troubled on that show, and I wrote the script under a lot of stress. It’s a small miracle that it even exists, let alone that it was good. But I had dream collaborators in Neil Gaiman, actor Pablo Schreiber and director Paco Cabezas. And it just… worked. So many times you write a script and it comes out the other end of production bearing no resemblance to what you started with, and it’s often beat up, missing a leg, blind in one eye, etc. But in this case, despite the chaos happening on the show at that point or maybe because of it, we made a really cool episode of television. I wish I could bottle the feeling I had making that one. I wish it could be like that for every episode of TV.
I’m grateful for all the work I’ve had, but some shows were true loves. Working for Black Sails, The Exorcist, and Raised By Wolves were creative high points for me. Not because the end result was better than anything else (though I’m certainly proud of that work), but because the creative process was so good to participate in.
If I made a reel like directors and actors do, I’d include: scenes from the ship story from Black Sails season 1, episode 6; Rick’s speech in the barn in The Walking Dead, season 5, episode 10; Marcus and Tomas’ confessional scene at the end of The Exorcist season one, episode two; Sweeney’s scenes from American Gods, season two, episode seven; Mother’s flashback scenes in Raised By Wolves, season one, episode five.
WP: You are also credited as a co-producer, or co-executive producer on a number of shows you’ve written for, including the absolutely amazing recent HBO Max series Raised by Wolves. How did that career shift occur, or is it more of a natural segue from writing? I admit to knowing very little about what producers really do.
HB: Writers are usually producers on TV. Until the pandemic hit, most of the shows I worked on sent some of the writers to set to produce episodes. We would be there to prep the shoot with the director and cast and all the different departments that come together to make a TV show. Writers on set are there to help guide everyone toward the vision the showrunner has and make sure choices are made that won’t violate an important story point later on. They’re also making revisions to the script based on what’s realistic to produce. For example, we might have to change that epic fight scene from a riverbed to an empty field because that’s all the locations department could get in time. Or maybe an actor had to unexpectedly drop out for a week and we have to rewrite around their absence. Shit happens, and the script has to adapt to it.
As for the producer title and how that happens, the writers’ union here (the WGA) sets pay minimums according to experience and how much responsibility you have on the show. So it’s pretty straightforward if you climb the ladder the usual way. New writers start with the rank of “Staff Writer.” Which is a bit confusing because all writers who aren’t the showrunner are writers on staff, but bear with me… Then, the next year you’re on staff, you usually get promoted to “Story Editor.” The next year, “Executive Story Editor.” These have different titles and slightly different pay structures, but mostly you’re just a writer at that point. You show up every day to the writers’ room, pitch story, write scripts, do revisions, and that’s it. Once you graduate to the next level, “Co-Producer,” things change a bit. You’re paid by episode instead of by time, and you take on more producing responsibilities. Depends on what the showrunner defines for you… you might give notes to junior writers, you might have to rewrite some of their stuff for production needs, you might watch dailies from set and flag things for the showrunner, you might watch casting reels, you might actually go to set to cover your own episode or someone else’s etc. Each year you spend on staff you get a better rank and hopefully a bit more pay… going from “Producer” to “Supervising Producer” to “Co-Executive Producer.” This is where people usually top out unless they become a showrunner. There are “Executive Producers” at the very top, and these can be non-writing producers, or writers such as the showrunner or someone who helped to create the show. Sometimes a lead actor gets this credit too.
The reality though is that these are just job titles. I’ve known low level writers who are writing half the scripts and go to set to produce their episodes. I’ve known co-executive producers who have never been to set to produce an episode. That’s not common, but it just shows that there are no hard rules.
WP: Speaking of Raised By Wolves, what an utterly fantastic series! It’s truly one of the most exciting shows I’ve seen in a long while. Classic science fiction dealing with a grand concept that seems to delve satisfyingly deeply into Ridley Scott’s obsessions from his own science fiction films. All the issues with artificial intelligence, androids and humanity that plague Alien, Blade Runner and Prometheus etc. are there, but in much more depth. Mother is perhaps one of the most terrifying characters in television. Then there’s the matter of Ridley Scott directing and the concept being developed by former Denis Villeneuve collaborator and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (Prisoners). How did you land such an exciting job producing the show and writing an episode? Did you get to travel to South Africa where it was filmed?
HB: I’m so happy you like it! I did get to go to South Africa and it was one of the best experiences of my life. I love that show and the people I got to work with. Ridley Scott has been one of my heroes since I was a kid and my dad let me watch Alien. Aaron Guzikowski is quite possibly the nicest person I’ve ever met in this business, and he has a wild, beautifully strange mind. He and Ridley brought things to TV nobody would think possible a couple years ago. Sergio Mimica-Gezzan directed the episodes that I covered on set, including my own, and he made the the whole production – which is usually physically and mentally gruelling – an actual pleasure. He’s directed a ton of cool TV – look him up – he brought so many cool ideas to set.
I got that job when I wasn’t looking, actually. After American Gods, I’d promised myself I was going to take time off to write my own stuff. I told my agents to forget about me for a few months because I needed to focus. Two weeks into my “sabbatical” they called me anyway, and sent me Aaron’s script for Raised By Wolves. They insisted I read it. Reluctantly I did… and I was blown away. It was so imaginative and different from anything I’d ever seen on TV. I had a meeting with Aaron and we had a great talk, it all felt really sympatico. I could just tell it was going to be a fun job. So I said yes.
WP: The entire world has recently been turned on its head by the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic and social fallout has only just begun. The film studios responded to the closure of cinemas by investing heavily in streaming services with simultaneous theatrical and streaming releases and it remains to be seen whether can be a long-term strategy that will sustain the industry financially. Film sets have been and continue to be affected by all sorts of restrictions. What are your thoughts as someone at the centre of the industry? How did the pandemic affect you as a writer and producer?
HB: It’s a body blow. Everything changed. Writing for TV has always been an unstable way to make a living; you never know when you’ll work again. But I know people who think the pandemic killed their careers. Their shows were killed, projects delayed indefinitely, and a bunch of rooms went virtual and with smaller staffs. I know really good, experienced writers who haven’t been able to get jobs since the whole thing happened. I don’t know if that’s temporary and it will pick up again after things normalize. Or if it’s just part of the changing landscape. I try to be prepared for anything just so it won’t destroy me if my career ends. But I’m worried.
If I had to guess, I would think streaming and cable TV in general is evolving toward a model more like movies. A long development process with fewer writers writing fewer episodes, a highly planned production, and then a long editing process. The more expensive the show, the more pressure there is to do it this way. On one hand, I love big epic productions like Game of Thrones. On the other hand, I think the reason TV has been producing the best stories in any modern medium is because production moves so fast. The slower the process, the more likely it gets noted to death. As a writer, I like shows that are like a mean little pirate sloop, fast and agile.
WP: Do you have any upcoming projects you can share with us?
HB: I was in a mini-room for Sandman which is due to air on Netflix this year. I wrote a script for that one just before the pandemic hit. The Sandman comics were a huge influence on me, I don’t think it would be overstating things to say that they are one of the reasons I became a writer. So it was really meaningful to be a part of that. And I can’t wait to watch when it airs, mostly as a fan.
I’m developing a few other things which haven’t been announced yet. One is another project with Neil Gaiman. Another is a show with Ron Moore. Another is a show with my friend Rolin Jones who ran the Exorcist the first season. I wish I could say more, but if I did someone would hunt me down and kill me. These are all shows where I’d be showrunning, so that’s exciting. And daunting. I have seen enough of the job that I know what it entails if you do it right.
WP: In an ideal world, where funding is not object, is there any book or original concept you’d love to adapt for the screen? Or a particular actor(s) or director you’d love to collaborate with?
I have had so much luck that I’m superstitious about making wishes out loud. I definitely have a list in my head, but it’s a secret! I recite it to myself at night like Arya’s kill list. Just kidding. Sort of.
So, DUNE is finally out, the reviews are in, and the consensus is that critical darling Denis Villeneuve has pulled it off against all the odds. He has presented an adaptation of the once-termed ‘unfilmable’ 1965 novel Dune that has – incredibly – managed to please the full spectrum of viewers – the hard-to-please book fans, the mainstream audience entirely new to the story and the majority of film critics; it’s made enough of a splash at the box office and on HBO’s streaming service to have part two greenlit. It’s an adaptation that steers carefully between the poles of the kind of philosophical, dreamy arthouse flair that Frank Herbert’s intrigue-riddled far-futurescape seemingly demands, and the kind of adventure film that presents the possibly most achingly mainstream thing possible right now – the physical presence of the hugely easy-on-the-eye Jason Momoa swaggering and swashbuckling his way through some terrific, blood-soaked action sequences as Atreides man-at-arms Duncan Idaho.
I fall firmly into the ‘book fan’ camp, as well as, as I’ve presented in excruciating detail before on this site, being a fan of the much-maligned 1984 David Lynch box office failure. So, it was almost impossible to view Villeneuve’s much-awaited work for the first time without both the original text and the Lynch version bubbling up in the mind’s eye in comparison. What was very soon apparent is how carefully and clearly Villeneuve’s script teases out and faithfully delineates the main themes and plotlines of the text – something that Lynch’s otherwise fascinatingly fevered work dropped the ball on at important junctures – and how certain aesthetic and structural choices contribute toward its mainstream accessibility.
Lynch’s film presents a series of cluttered, claustrophobic interiors with brief excursions into a desert that often seems as crowded as the rooms the characters plot in. Villeneuve, by contrast, presents a positively expansive, sun-drenched Dune appropriate for the IMAX format. Long aerial sequences of vast desert landscapes contrast with bare, dimly-lit, minimalist interiors with great, Vermeer-esque beams of light illuminating the scene. Villeneuve has also jettisoned the mannered speech and the endless internal dialogues of the novel that Lynch tried to portray faithfully, substituting more accessible, naturalistic speech, while reserving many of the important phrases of key scenes and famous mantras from the book. Given the way people speak to each other (and simply to themselves – a lot) in this world, it’s a natural way to make things more accessible for the casual viewer who has a lot to take in already, without developing an ear for the often strangely stilted way people express themselves in the book. Toning down the classic Herbert internal dialogues which detail each character’s thought processes and suspicions of each other into more contemporary speech also risks losing some of the classic Dune flavour and some aspects of the world-building, but overall, it works. Each key scene, from Paul’s training sequence knife with Josh Brolin’s gruff Gurney Halleck on Caladan, where he learns mood isn’t a concern, to the infamous gom jabber ‘is he or isn’t he the Kwisatz Haderach’ torture box scene, to the scene where the kidnapped Paul and Jessica work together using the mind-manipulating ‘voice’ to free themselves from certain death at the hands of Harkonnen goons, still retains the essence of the book with key phrases dropped in.
There’s a necessarily huge amount of exposition in Dune that simply cannot be helped, given the cast of thousands and the political structures and players in a complex universe that needs to be rendered comprehensible by the mainstream viewer, if they are to make much sense of what is to come. It’s a problem both directors clearly wrestled with. Lynch opened with a monologue explaining the main players and their issues. Villeneuve gives you a monologue too, but only after setting out his artistic stall with a blank screen, a guttural voice speaking an unknown, alien language and a line of subtitles making some cryptic reference to dreams, as if to remind us that this is Dune and we’re going to have to just roll with a certain amount of weirdness and incomprehensible moments here. Villeneuve, much like Lynch, frontloads the film with exposition done cleverly through dialogue and – as in Lynch’s version – the spectacle of Dune’s informative ‘filmbooks’ which Paul uses to learn about the new planet – a concept that probably seemed still out there in the 1980s but which technology has caught up to now. What was the equivalent of a modern tablet and internet with voice recognition is now a delicate and beautiful holographic surround. There’s a lot of visual information in the film that suggests it will benefit greatly from close and repeat viewing.
Other stylistic choices play heavily into the successful characterization and world-building of Villeneuve’s Dune – specifically that of Lady Jessica, concubine of the doomed Duke Leto, and their sworn enemies, the Harkonnens. What struck me is how heavily Villeneuve has Rebecca Ferguson’s Jessica lean into the Bene Gesserit side of her character rather than – as in the Lynch version – the deeply sensual, seductive and elaborately coiffed and robed courtesan. His Jessica is practically ascetic in appearance; bare-faced, given to plain, functional clothing, with the luxurious aristocratic gowns reserved only for occasions in which she is overtly seeking to impress an audience, rendering them oddly functional costuming rather than an essential extension of her femininity. See the scenes when she and Paul escape into the desert – Lynch’s Jessica draped suggestively in a silk and lace Victorian-type nightdress; Villeneuve’s Jessica clad in what look like IKEA pyjamas. The scenes in which she sternly instructs Paul in his Bene Gesserit voice skills are a joy of showing rather than telling. Villeneuve portrays Jessica as fiercely self-possessed, not suffering fools gladly or at all, but also cowed and almost unhinged by the presence of her own Bene Gesserit mentor, the terrifying Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam – Charotte Rampling giving magnificently pissy and cynical boss vibes from behind a series of veils and tall hats. In Jessica’s fear of Mohiam, as well as her skills, we glimpse the secret power of the all-female Bene Gesserit order in this otherwise heavily patriarchal world. Rampling’s Reverend Mother, while ostensibly a hand of the galactic Emperor, is clearly a major power broker in her own right who even the Harkonnens tread carefully around.
Oh yes, the Harkonnens. In contrast to Lynch’s marvellously intemperate and pustulant ‘floating fat man’ (played with shouty relish by the late Kenneth McMillian), Villeneuve shows us a far more horrifying vision of the notorious Baron Vladimir as a quietly sociopathic narco-lord who is so lost to corruption, his very physicality seems to be veering away from the human and into the bestial. Draped in an absurdly trailing silk kaftan, he rears up from his throne like a giant cobra; he emerges briefly, gurgling, from a bath of oil like some off-putting, bloated sea creature washing up from the deep; he keeps a nightmarish, perhaps fully sentient, spider/human-hybrid-looking thing (perhaps a visual nod to the secretive Tleilaxu, another set of sinister power brokers who will become significant in the Dune universe later) as a ‘pet’, and in perhaps the most visceral image of the entire film, he is found clinging high up a wall like a giant mollusc or horrific human cockroach to survive an impromptu gas chamber experience created by the dying Leto. Villeneuve further nails the portrayal by contrasting the naked, masculine beauty of Oscar Isaacs’ captured Duke Leto with the grossness of the vile, morbidly obese baron in a beautifully-lit tableau that resembles a monumental baroque painting. The Baron, stuffing his face in greedy ecstasy, leering over the Duke in his martyrish repose, laid out like the next course at the Baron’s feast. In that one shot we see nobility only goes so far in this universe, while brutality and cruelty gets you far further.
Perhaps the only places Villeneuve falls down is in his decision to cut short the Atreides internal intrigues on Arrakis before their fall. Doctor Yueh is tragically given such short shrift that his betrayal fails to shock as it should, or demonstrate the sheer heartlessness and cleverness of the Baron in undermining House Atreides through short-circuiting Yueh’s Imperial conditioning by playing on the very human empathy that is supposed to render him incapable of causing harm. Lynch gave Yueh’s fatal decision more weight and sympathy in allowing him screen time and more scenes interacting with the various Atreides as their loyal and trusted Suk doctor. In fact, both directors seem to have had to make a choice to sacrifice some significant character development or vital scenes to keep the film within its allotted screentime. Lynch chose to keep many of the Atreides character building scenes in the first half and truncated or eliminated a lot of the significant action – such as the absolutely pivotal fight with Jamis – after Paul and his mother reach the desert. Villeneuve appears to have filmed several significant scenes that belong in the middle portion on Arakkeen. Several tantalizing photos of Yueh interacting further with both Jessica and Paul have been released, as well as the news that a significant scene set around a banquet was actually filmed and then completely excised in favour of extending the action in the desert and expanding imaginatively on Liet Kynes’s fate. The mentats Thufir Hawat and especially the Baron’s Piter de Vries also seem underserved by Villeneuve’s final cut, especially given Thufir is rather important in the second part of the book. Their skills aren’t really shown or explained much beyond Thufir doing some serious mental arithmetic on Caladan. There is sadly no mention of the ‘juice of saphu’, the plant-based drug that mentats use as a thought-amplifier, another bit of Dune lore that roots its creation in the 60s counter culture. Villeneuve’s Piter (David Dastmalchian) comes off as less the highly intelligent and deeply perverted schemer responsible for turning Yueh traitor in the book and more a scared, bug-eyed aide, who cacks it far too quickly and is forgotten in this cut. Possibly like Chang Chen’s Doctor Yueh, most of his development ended up on the cutting room floor. Stellan Skarsgard is admittedly a hard act to compete with to be fair, although Lynch’s Brad Dourif may have stood a chance.
However, we need to recognise that Lynch was trying to cover the entire book in just over two hours, while Villeneuve had the luxury of only serving half the text in a lengthier film. Still, it shows that Dune is so rich in character and narrative that there’s always something that is going to end up on the cutting room floor for reasons of pace or time, even if it slightly weakens the narrative. Not that you can really fault Villeneuve on pacing – a strength of the film and likely part of its success is that it moves fast, keeps moving, and doesn’t get bogged down at any point. This middle section of the film is the only one that feels somewhat thin and rushed, and vaguely disappointing in retrospect, despite serving up some incredible visuals as the combined forced of the Harkonnens and the Emperor’s terror troops attack the Atreides, precipitating Paul and Jessica’s flight into the desert and their confrontation with the Fremen that ends the film.
The Fremen, the indigenous people of Arrakis – or rather the framing of them in the narrative – is one of the most interesting departures from the book and the Lynch adaptation. While Lynch presents them as the exotic backdrop and eager allies for the ascendant prescient superbeing Paul’s personal revenge quest and successful, uncomplicated prophecy completion, Villeneuve actually centres the Fremen in the story from the beginning. They are the first people we see and the first intelligible voices we hear, speaking to us directly. They are presented as a militantly rebellious desert people whose culture revolves around the kind of harsh decisions that promote survival. Stilgar, their tribal leader, is perfectly embodied by Javier Bardem as charismatic physical presence with a natural contempt for and apparent disinterest in his imperial-appointed overlords. While Lynch’s opening narration and vital expositional scene-setting is done from the viewpoint of the powerful, the Emperor’s daughter Princess Irulan, the novel’s historian, Villeneuve breaks from the text and substitutes the young Fremen girl Chani’s (Zendaya) viewpoint. Chani – who was really little more than a fetching love interest in Lynch’s film – is concerned with her planet’s occupation and colonisation and her people’s ongoing cultural genocide at the hands of what the Fremen view as interchangeable, oppressive foreign occupying powers, concerned only with the mining of the precious spice. Chani’s monologue is eerily and uncomfortably resonant and perhaps prescient itself of the recent American withdrawal from Afghanistan, where, like the Harkonnens, they suddenly and without notice, disappeared in the middle of the night.
So it is that Paul Atreides enters Chani’s world framed as yet another loathed occupier and possible ‘Mahdi’ (messianic figure), and where Villeneuve picks up on a vital plot strand that Lynch ostensibly ignored; that the tribal legends of the messianic ‘Lisan al Gaib’ (The Voice from the Outer World) and his Bene Gesserit mother, whom Paul and Jessica are suspected by the Fremen as fulfilling, did not evolve organically within Fremen culture. These messianic prophecies, their signs and portents, are in fact part of a long-term strategic effort by the Bene Gesserit known as the Missionaria Protectiva. The order seeded superstitions into many worlds, including deep into Arrakis’s Fremen culture, that can be exploited by their order in a time of need. Villeneuve has both Jessica and Mohiam obliquely and directly refer to this plan at various points. So, while Paul is increasingly aware of his powers, aided by the psychotropic nature of the spice that lends him prescience to see into his own and others’ futures, where he begins to progress past his mother’s teachings and beyond her control, he appears slightly less the noble hero and perhaps more the beginning of a cautionary tale on the theme of the inherent dangers of charismatic leaders – or assumed messiahs – Frank Herbert’s central theme in Dune. It’s played out in a fantastic scene where Paul, lapsed into a spice trance, experiences traumatic visions of the carnage inflicted on endless worlds by the insane galactic holy war conducted in his name that he will be unable to stem or control, if he remains on his current course.
Note, in the book it’s specifically a jihad, a word used liberally in the original novel(s) and used by Lynch, but Villeneuve sadly avoids any use of it for what are likely obvious religious and political sensitivities these days, while staying with all the other Arabic loan words in the Fremen lexicon and Dune universe. The world was a little different back in 1984, obviously, but it’s a little disappointing given ‘jihad’ is a foundational concept in the Dune universe, used to explore the warping effects of religion on society, going back to the original ‘Orange Catholic Bible’ proscription against ‘thinking machines’ that resulted in the abolition of all computers and the creation of the mentat schools, the Spacing Guild and the Bene Gesserit themselves. I guess ‘holy war’ will have to suffice. At least Hans Zimmer has given us a cool tune of the same name. Toto and Brian Eno on Lynch’s soundtrack were actually great, as the sheer rock bombast does suit the film’s scope, but Zimmer is a cut above in reflecting the strangeness of the Dune universe in his choice of odd and eerie soundscapes.
Beyond these grim and dark themes, however, Dune presents a highly accessible coming of age story. Paul’s journey from innocent youth into manhood through a series of trials and tribulations is highly relatable stuff. His journey to becoming a superpowered being via thousands of generations of conspiratorial genetic manipulation isn’t too far of a stretch in a modern era of genetic engineering and an audience soaked in ten solid years of superhero tentpoles. Timothy Chalomet is certainly naturally charismatic and wild-eyed enough to sell the idea of the slight aristocratic boy troubled by strange dreams, becoming hardened by experience, the loss of his father and all his male mentors, and further burdened with the knowledge that he has a rather sinister genetic legacy via his remaining parent’s machinations. He is well-matched by Zendaya as the Fremen girl whose face haunts his visions. Villeneuve’s casting decisions seem again designed to appeal to a young general audience, while throwing in enough excellent older character actors to appease those of use to whom the Timothies and Zendayas were never designed to appeal.
It will certainly be fascinating to see Dune Part 2, greenlit a week ago now, in 2023. The first film has hopefully laid enough groundwork and done enough world building to dig deep and with brio into the remaining plotlines from the second half of the book. Beyond that, can one dare dream of a third film, an adaptation of the shorter, more miserabilist sequel Dune Messiah? It could possibly function as the biggest downer sequel ever. Fans of Tim and Zendaya may not enjoy it at all. Then there’s the third book, Children of Dune, which marks the return of more than one character you thought you’d seen the last of in Dune. I’d hesitate to say this could be this generation’s Lord of the Rings in film terms, but given the impossibility of what Villeneuve has already achieved bringing Dune to the screen, who can tell? Stay tuned. Denis may yet pull it off again, and again, and again …
Between 1959 and 1984, thousands of ethnic Koreans born in Japan were offered the chance to resettle in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea under a grand cross-government migration scheme supported by the Red Cross Societies of both countries, and the International Red Cross. A benign-sounding Japan-based organisation, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (‘Chongryon’), promoted the scheme, painting the DPRK as a land of opportunity compared to the post-war shambles of Japan, where descendants of ethnic Koreans were commonly both poor and discriminated against in wider Japanese society. Chongryon, as it turned out, was a Pyongyang-controlled propaganda front. The ironically-named ‘Paradise on Earth’ migration scheme proved to be anything but a chance to build better lives for the thousands of Japanese ethnic Koreans who, lured in by promises of a socialist heaven on earth, instantly encountered a hell in which not only were conditions exponentially more deprived than those they had left behind in Japan, but where every single aspect of their lives was subject to state control and paranoid political scrutiny. Encouraged by two self-interested governments and a large NGO, they had simply walked into a trap it was impossible to free themselves from, as once inside North Korea, they were forbidden to ever leave again.
Eiji Han Shimizu, the creator and writer of True North, a full-length animated film centred around the horrors of the DPRK’s concentration camps, is a descendant of Japanese ethnic Koreans who ignored Chongryon’s call and the Red Cross’s ‘help’ and stayed put on Japanese soil. Shimizu, whose sole previous work comprises a documentary exploring the concept of happiness (2012’s ‘Happy’), based True North’s narrative on the testimonies of 30 defectors, survivors and witnesses to the abuses and depredations of the North Korean regime and its notorious labour camps. The film appears to be inspired by a need to bring survivors’ testimonies to life, and a chilling recognition that had his grandparents or parents made different choices, Shimizu himself could have numbered among the victims.
So. Not exactly a fun night’s viewing, you’d imagine. You’d be right. There’s plenty of viscerally harrowing content here, that even in semi-cutesy 3D animated form, is very hard to take in places. Shimizu’s film minutely depicts the structure and workings of the labour camp which his protagonist, nine-year-old Yo-Han, is despatched without trial alongside his kind-to-the-bone mother and sweet-natured younger sister, after their father is disappeared by the state for plotting to escape the country. The physical conditions they are expected to endure are shocking. Through young Yo-Han’s eyes we see the casual heartlessness and violence of the guards towards both young and elderly, the fatal diseases caused by vitamin deficiency from the slop diet they are fed, the ongoing risk of rape for female inmates (and execution for being ‘a whore’ if one is unlucky enough to become pregnant), and the brutal treatment of dissenters. We also witness the political ‘struggle sessions’, where prisoners are supposed to confess their anti-revolutionary sins and earn punishment, and point the finger at others to earn rewards and extra rations, ensuring an endless succession of betrayals and false accusations, usefully seeding mistrust between inmates. There’s also the fear of even worse things hanging over them at all times – the basement torture centre and the ominous-sounding ‘Total Control Zone’ whose exact nature is obfuscated until the very end of film, but the threat of which is enough to reduce hardened inmates inured to camp life to pleading, terrified messes.
Yo-Han, consigned to the camp’s coal mine, learns the rules and ropes of the place, and as he grows into adolescence and adulthood, rejects the example of his mother who manages to retain her sense of humanity, and starts to operate in an entirely self-interested way concerned only with his own survival. He hoards food and refuses to share with those who desperately need it. He spares no kindness or thought for the suffering of anyone outside his family circle. He snitches when it benefits him. It’s only when one of his casual betrayals starts a sequence of events that ends in family tragedy that he is forced to re-evaluate himself and how life in the camp has dehumanised him. It’s at this point the film takes on a wider theme – that of finding purpose and meaning in life when the conditions one is placed in denies nearly all personal agency and choice. Yo-Han, harkening back to the example of his mother, does find a way, however, and starts along a path of self-sacrifice and redemption combined with his camp survival smarts that in the end will save lives, lighten the load of a few more, and finally reveal the nature of the Total Control Zone.
True North, for all its upsetting content, remains an engaging story that surprisingly offers a few moments of uplift amongst a deluge of torment and darkness. Yo-Han’s psychological journey is compelling. In some ways it’s a coming-of-age story as much as an important depiction of historical and current abuses within the North Korean prison camp system, as Yo-Han and his friends decide what influences and ideals they will allow to shape them and decide their personal course as adults, no matter their surroundings. It’s also yet another portrayal of the banality of evil. There’s a lot to ponder in a wider philosophical sense.
While True North has plenty to tell the world about a particular set of horrendous injustices, it also compels the viewer to consider what makes life personally meaningful in less than ideal circumstances, and what can constitute rebellion when one’s life is controlled so exactingly from above under threat of violence and worse. Is it our friendships, service to others, or the ability to find fleeting moments of joy and beauty in the grimmest surroundings? A refusal to become what our captors would like us to be, and to mentally reject ideological demands and to risk thinking freely? In a world where the walls have been incrementally closing in on us over the past nine months and personal freedoms slowly eroded or corralled, these are questions well worth asking.
David Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel ‘Dune’ emerged in 1984 to a double whammy of both box office failure and a vicious critical drubbing. Not that these are in themselves perfect indications of a film’s inherent lack of value or cultural longevity; 1982’s Blade Runner was also a critical and box office flop, albeit one that attracted almost total critical rehabilitation and mainstream popularity with the release of a director’s cut in 1991. Despite Dune’s failure, and its lack of critical rehabilitation, in part due to its director’s absolute refusal to complete a director’s cut, 1984’s Dune still holds a special place in the landscape of cinematic science fiction, attracting adoration and derision in equal measure, with fan cuts appearing online in the absence of an official directorial one. Lynch himself refers to Dune with regret and in terms that suggest its making nearly broke him. This year heralds the release of a long-awaited Dune adaptation by critical darling Denis Villeneuve, so what better time to take a look at its big screen predecessor?
Lynch’s Dune was made with the expectation that it would be the next Star Wars – a hugely profitable, and eventually multi-part space mythos upon which a thousand even more profitable merchandising deals could be launched. George Lucas’s 1977 blockbuster had saved cinema from a near-fatal financial decline in the 70s and Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic team had developed special effects in a very short period to the point that things once thought impossible to portray believably onscreen now seemed very possible indeed. If Dune were to be made successfully, now seemed the time to do it, with the appropriate technical advances and audiences seemingly hungry for epic space adventures.
It was not to be though, for what in hindsight are fairly obvious reasons.
Although Herbert’s Dune is acknowledged to be a primary influence on the early Lucas saga, Dune is a vastly more complicated and difficult property. While on one level it seems that if a mass general audience can understand an evil vast space empire overseen by a scheming Emperor (Palpatine), a noble set of rebels (the rebel alliance), a mysterious, robed, religious order of monk-like figures with mystical mind tricks, fighting skills and odd weapons (the Jedi) and a young male hero with a destiny (Luke Skywalker), it could just as easily accept an exploitative space empire overseen by a scheming Emperor (Shaddam IV), a fierce set of desert warriors rebelling against them (the Fremen), a young male hero with a destiny (Paul Atreides), and a mysterious, robed, religious order of nun-like figures with mystical voice and fighting powers (the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood), it was not to be. Star Wars keeps things very simple and relatable in terms of story and character, presenting black hats vs white hats; a limited cast of simple heroes and villains with a final redemption arc. Star Wars is a family-friendly, simple and enjoyable space western that doesn’t ask you to think much. Dune’s source material is quite the opposite – adult-oriented, with an extended cast of characters, and dealing with more complex intrigues and grey morality.
Frank Herbert’s Dune
Herbert’s original novel might be best described in layman’s terms as a galactic Game of Thrones meets Lawrence of Arabia. Dune is set in a feudal far-future where royal houses plot and war against each other for control of the imperial throne and the precious commodity on which all interplanetary trade and thus power depends – the mysterious spice ‘Melange’.
Melange is mined on the harsh desert planet Arrakis, nicknamed ‘Dune’, which is occupied by the cruel aristocratic House Harkonnen to mine the spice, and populated by a secretive desert people known as ‘Fremen’. Giant, ferocious sandworms prove the main danger in the bleak desert environment. Consumption of melange allows the development of a kind of clairvoyance, or prescience; the ability to pick up flashes of the future. It is this spice-fuelled prescience that allow the Spacing Guild’s strange, mutated navigators to plot the safest course between planets. The spice is also of great importance to the inscrutable female Bene Gesserit religious order who scheme, plot, and navigate smoothly among the Imperial court and the royal houses in pursuit of power, via their telepathic abilities and the results of their own thousand-year breeding program, with the ultimate long-term goal of producing a genetic superhuman – the Kwisatz Haderach – a solitary male with perfect prescience, and fully developed Bene Gesserit abilities who will advance their political cause rather than his own.
Caught up in the above machinations is one Paul Atreides, sole heir of House Atreides by his Bene Gesserit mother, the Royal Lady Jessica, who was part of the Kwisatz Haderach breeding program but broke ranks to produce a male heir – Paul – for the Duke Atreides. House Atreides is the victim of plotting by the Imperial House; the Harkonnens and the Spacing Guild and Paul and Jessica are dispossessed and forced to flee into the desert of Arrakis, where they join the Fremen. After a series of trials, Paul becomes leader of a local Fremen rebellion against the cruel occupying House Harkonnen and ultimately plots to unseat the Emperor of the Known Universe himself, taking his place. Jessica is aware of the mythology seeded among the tribal peoples on the planet by the Bene Gesserit order, and to ensure their survival among the tribe, exploits it to portray Paul as a long-prophesized Fremen messiah figure. Paul’s becomes an unwilling god-figure, as his spice-fuelled prescience allows him increasing glimpses of the genocidal horrors that his own jihad will unleash across the universe, long after he is dead.
Dune lacks funny aliens, endearing robots, or indeed much obvious humour or heart-warming detail at all. It deals with age-old power struggles and grand human intrigue rather than extra-terrestrials, with guerrilla warfare and ‘desert power’ replacing lasers and epic space battles. It warns of the dangers of following charismatic leaders and how even with the purest of intentions, power inevitably corrupts, with even well-meaning leaders overwhelmed by the apparatus of the cult they build around themselves. It’s a novel where people speak obliquely to each other at best, and are constantly second-guessing each other’s loyalties and intent. The large cast of characters engage in endless internal monologuing, and the hero’s vaunted destiny is actually a rather troubling galactic genocide, albeit one he is desperately trying to avert. The language is often difficult, too, with names and concepts drawn from everything from Scandinavian languages to Arabic to 11th century Talmudic scholars. It’s a novel that even at first glance is highly problematic in terms of turning it into a compact, workable screenplay that remains loyal to the original text.
Development Hell
Lynch’s Dune was the conclusion of a nearly decade and a half of development hell. David Lean was first mooted to direct in the early seventies after Planet of the Apes producer Arthur P. Jacobs acquired the rights. When Jacobs died in 1974, the rights were sold to a French production company with notorious Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky set to direct. It’s hard to imagine more disparate visionaries – the British director of sweeping epics Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai and Doctor Zhivago, and the self-styled ‘psychomage’ and director of lurid, surrealistic, small budget madness destined for an anti-establishment cult audience receptive to extreme depictions of sexual violence, gore and drug use. Given Lean’s credentials and handling of Lawrence of Arabia, a story that itself is one of the great influences on Herbert’s Dune, a David Lean Dune adaptation remains a tantalizing thought.
It is Jodorowsky’s Dune that to this day seems to hold a strange and enduring fascination for many, including some fans of the book who seem to believe – oddly in my view – that he would have conjured up a superior or perhaps definitive adaptation of Herbert’s epic masterwork. Perhaps this is due to his bringing onboard extraordinary visual talents such as legendary French comic artist Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, science fiction special effects supremo Dan O’Bannon, Swiss artist H.R. Giger, and science fiction illustrator Chris Foss, with a soundtrack by fresh-off-the-dark-side-of-the-moon Pink Floyd, rather than any commitment to respecting the integrity of Herbert’s novel, given Jodorowsky’s stated intention to produce a Dune that ‘raped’ Frank Herbert’s book. In the 2013 documentary ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’ he states that his vision would have paid little attention to the facts of the plot, and would be akin to, in his own words, ‘a twelve-hour LSD trip’. I’m not sure in what world a twelve-hour LSD trip with little attention paid to Herbert’s story would have proved in the least bit marketable or reaped the box office and critical success that Lynch’s could not. Nor would it, by all reports, have pleased fans of Herbert’s novel by almost completely discarding its narrative and themes for a Carlos Castaneda-esque, acid-drenched film of a length usually reserved for documentaries about the Holocaust and featuring stunt casting such as Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe, ruling from atop a fancy golden toilet, and mind-bogglingly, Stones’ frontman Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha Harkonnen. Then again, Lynch did eventually lumber us with the similarly ludicrously-cast (and clad) Sting in the same role. Jodorowsky’s Dune may have been great in its own way, a good-looking piece of psychedelia, or a horribly dated and self-indulgent mess that would have attracted a very small cult audience, but perhaps ultimately would be no more and perhaps less remembered and loved/hated than Lynch’s Dune.
Of course, we’ll never know, having only the admittedly splendid Dune concept art produced by H.R. Giger, Giraud and Foss, and Jodorowsky’s proclamations of his own genius to go on. Jodorowsky’s French funding predictably fell through due to his intractability on matters of creative control and his refusal to consider making a film with a remotely marketable length. By 1976 the rights had been sold on again, this time to Dino De Laurentis, the prolific Italian producer of spaghetti westerns, big screen, big budget Hollywood flops such as 1976’s King Kong, and iconic films such as the controversial Death Wish (1974), Barbarella (1968), gritty Pacino-led police drama Serpico (1973), Conan the Barbarian (1983), the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone (1982) and 1980’s camp classic Flash Gordon. Never one to shy away from a challenge, and with a seeming ability to throw cinematic mud at a wall and come up trumps as often as not, De Laurentis set about hiring Frank Herbert to produce a screenplay, and Ridley Scott, a former BBC set designer and commercial advertising director fresh off his second feature film – 1979’s hugely successful Alien – to direct. Alien had benefited hugely from previous Dune cast-offs, O’Bannon (this time on script duties) and Giger’s now iconic creature designs. In fact, Jodorowsky’s commissioned artwork for Dune would seemingly influence production design on mainstream films for decades to come.
Initially, Scott was enthusiastic about the project, but dropped out of the production after the tragic death of his brother and the realisation that making Dune would take up several years of his life. At least, that’s the explanation Scott gives. It has been mooted by multiple sources that a major bone of contention between De Laurentis and Scott was the script which put the hero Paul Atreides and his mother Jessica in an incestuous sexual relationship, not only a completely disrespectful and distasteful deviation from the original text, but certainly a bridge too far by some miles in terms of making a marketable high budget film, and the disagreement on the matter allegedly ended with Scott being fired. Scott was hired to work on another major science fiction film – Blade Runner – and the rest is cinema history. De Laurentis was forced to cast about for another visionary capable of bringing the epic to fruition.
Which brings us to David Lynch.
David Lynch and Dune
“I started selling out on Dune. Looking back, it’s no one’s fault but my own. I probably shouldn’t have done that picture, but I saw tons and tons of possibilities for things I loved, and this was the structure to do them in. There was so much room to create a world.” (David Lynch)
Offers to direct big-budget studio pictures poured in for David Lynch after his second film, 1980’s Academy and BAFTA-nominated The Elephant Man. Raffaella De Laurentis offered Lynch Dune on the strength of this film, which combined Lynch’s strange surrealistic visual touches with a traditionally straightforward historical narrative which connected strongly with audiences and critics. It was perhaps a combination of visual flair, emotional connection and narrative strength De Laurentis hoped Lynch could bring to the futuristic and often bleak, high-handed and alienating world of Dune. Dune was to be Lynch’s big break into big budget, big studio, mainstream filmmaking, having turned down George Lucas’s offer to direct Return of the Jedi. It was a break he was to regret, eventually sending him hurtling back to smaller scale, independent productions. Just as with Jodorowsky and his backers a decade earlier, the major conflict was not over his interpretation of the novel or his visual excesses. De Laurentis gave Lynch his head in every creative aspect apart from the final cut of Dune, which needed, according to the studio, to be of a marketable length, both as not to repel audiences with an overlong picture, but to allow cinemas as many showings as possible during a normal working day in order to recoup its exorbitant costs quickly. It’s a lesson studios had learned the hard way in the 1960s with the notorious, studio-destroying Elizabeth Taylor-led epic Cleopatra: an insanely costly film with a just as insanely long running time simply won’t allow enough showings to recoup its costs even when sold out for months ahead, even when that film takes more money overall than any other that year. Dune was about to become a very costly movie indeed, and despite taking more money than any David Lynch film to date, was fated to be financially scuppered by its initial costs.
Dune was filmed principally on location in Mexico City, for financial reasons (the peso had helpfully just collapsed against the dollar) and for the access to the all-important desert. All sound stages were occupied at Churubusco Studios, and money poured into ornate costuming and sets. No expense was spared. Lynch had sets built with luxury woods and imported marble. He had teams of seamstresses sewing ornate silk dresses and hand-embroidering cloaks that would barely be seen on camera or if filmed, often end up on the cutting room floor. Soldiers from the Mexican army were hired in their thousands as extras to play the Fremen in desert scenes. The shoot was beset with mishaps and traumas; Jurgen Prochnow (Duke Leto), after narrowly escaping a serious injury from an exploding overhead lighting rig, was scarred by a special effect placed on his face. Francesca Annis (Lady Jessica) was badly burned by an exploding gas stove in her accommodation. The veteran actor Aldo Ray, originally cast as Baron Harkonnen, showed up in such a state of alcoholic dissolution and ill-health that he couldn’t work and had to be recast at short notice. The power kept going out. Phone lines were scarce to the point of non-existence. Lack of environmental regulation allowed the burning of tyres to create suitably thick smoke for one battle scene – toxic smoke that choked the cast into uselessness. Extras clad in the extraordinary-looking sculpted latex stillsuit costumes fainted in the brutal desert heat. Both cast and crew were beset with constant food poisoning to the point Virginia Madsen (Princess Irulan) had to be propped up with a barstool under her crinolines during filming one scene, after a bout of persistent vomiting left her too ill to even stand unaided. Lynch and Rafaella De Laurentis slowly but surely fell out, the producer trying to chivvy things along on budget, the director wanting to improvise new scenes and approaches and realise his vision.
Costs naturally spiralled. In the end, Dune ended up costing a then unheard of $42 million to make; by comparison, 1983’s ILM effects-drenched blockbuster Return of the Jedi cost $32 million, and 1982’s seminal Blade Runner $28 million. The classic 1984 release The Terminator cost a pittance by comparison, coming in at under $7 million.
It’s easy to see where the money went. In the final analysis, the greatest strength of the film is in its visual worldbuilding. Sets and costume are richly detailed, and heavily reference Earth’s past in fashions and architecture, to eerie and mesmerizing effect. It’s a stylistic trick used to devastating effect in 1982’s Blade Runner, which used 40s-inspired fashions to signal the essential neo-noir quality of the story, with its hard-boiled detectives and poised femme fatales. Lynch’s Dune similarly portrays a far future visually rooted in Earth antiquity, where space guilds and religious orders wield extraordinary power. Baroque palaces and art deco spaceships sit alongside brutalist industrial landscapes; ritualistic knife duels exist in the same universe as strange sonic weaponry and the ability to fold space.
The opening scene, where a Third-Stage Guild Navigator, accompanied by an odd retinue in various and lesser stages of spice-evolution, rolls his giant, dripping spice-gas tank into the court of the Emperor of the Known Universe is a wonderful example of visual storytelling. While the scene works as a huge, stage-setting info-dump of what’s what and who’s who, the visual storytelling is what remains in the mind – the uneasy and distrustful relationship between three disparate power brokers. The Emperor and his court display all the old-world trappings of earthly wealth and power; golden furniture, jewels, ladies in waiting trailing corseted and crinoline-clad princesses, clusters of lapdogs led about by lackeys. By contrast, the repulsive, sneering navigators appear all function with little regard for human aesthetics, human comforts, or social niceties. Their bodies are unwholesomely medicalized, run through with tubes and oozing with odd liquids. Their costumes, bulky and unwieldy black carapaces, were made from old bodybags, rather fittingly for those engaged in leaving their humanity behind to pursue spice evolution. Gliding between them, distrusted by both, are the Bene Gesserit women, their curious flowing silk chador-like robes and shaven heads signalling a combination of strange monasticism and the soft manipulative power of the courtesan. It’s one of the most strangely compelling and atmospheric scenes in the film. It’s also one that doesn’t occur in the book and was entirely dreamed up by Lynch ; a confrontation between a horrific futuristic freak and a throwback to a 19th century European court, with their meeting complicated by an interfering religious order, it neatly that sets the stage for the power struggles to come.
Meanwhile, the aristocratic Atreides family’s muted earth-toned military uniforms, vast, enveloping fur collars and elegant, Belle Epoque silhouette dresses remind of nothing so much as the doomed Romanov family of Russia, remnants of a gilded age soon to disappear in the maelstrom of assassination, revolution and war. Their fabrics and surroundings are notably harmonious. Their ships reflect their concern with harmonious design inside and out. Their blood enemies the Harkonnens by contrast revel in industrial brutality. Their ships are lumpen, misshapen, threatening and ugly creations. They are clad in industrial webbing and sticky-looking synthetics, their colour palette of sickly institutional carbolic greens and blacks that of a hellish chemical plant, with the Baron at one-point luxuriating in a shower of black filth and oil raining down from an overhead vehicle. House Harkonnen is where Lynch pulls all the stops out to create visual signifiers of their obsession with humiliation and cruelty and their twisted, inhumane nature. The Harkonnens and their subordinates are gifted with shriekingly unnatural chemical-orange hair; random servants’ ears and eyes are sewn shut. A truly nasty Lynchian touch is the Harkonnen heartplug, a crude externalized medical device designed to enable a messy death via exsanguination (“Everyone gets one around here.”). The Baron himself, played with shouty, sweaty aplomb by Kenneth McMillan, is covered in gross, suppurating abscesses, which combined with his by-the-text predatory, sadistic homosexuality (portrayed by Lynch via a scene where he feverishly gropes an adolescent boy while removing his heart-plug, revelling in the blood splatter), some critics of the era viewed as a direct reference to the cancerous skin lesions suffered by end-stage AIDS patients in an era when the disease remained untreatable. Some critics felt this was unconscionable choice and somehow meant as a deliberate and direct insult to the gay community. It’s certainly a memorably and viscerally uncomfortable one that, long after the era of HIV as a death sentence ended, usefully externalizes the rot at the heart of the Harkonnen cause.
Other memorable visual touches include the bizarre resemblance of Freddie Jones’ ‘human computer’ mentat character Thufir Hawat to then recently deceased Soviet premier and late cold war icon Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev’s signature overgrown eyebrows also pop up on mentat Piter de Vries too, suggesting It’s some additional side-effect of their lip-staining thought-accelerant drug of choice. Actor Brad Dourif was given free rein to improvise a litany for the consumption of this ‘juice of Sapho’ which is so perfectly-pitched, so wonderful an addition to the lore of Dune, that is hard to believe didn’t come straight from the original novel:
“It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.”
It’s heart-breaking to wonder what other perfectly Dune moments like this were improvised or scripted then discarded, or filmed and thrown on the cutting room floor for matters of time. Indeed, the main flaws in Lynch’s vision lie almost entirely in the aforementioned issues with running time.
“I was making [Dune] for the producers not for myself. That’s why the right of final cut is crucial. One person has to be a filter for everything. I believe this is a lesson world; we’re supposed to learn stuff. But three and a half years to learn that lesson is too long.” (David Lynch)
Lynch’s preferred original cut was a full 3-hour edit, cut down from 4 hours of filmed material. He was then ordered to cut in down more, resulting in a 2 hour 17 minute theatrical cut. Voiceovers were imposed to try to bridge the narrative gaps left by endlessly cut scenes. In some places, this works rather well; the opening introductory monologue by Virginia Madsen’s Princess Irulan, whose aristocratic head materialises in and out of frame against a background of stars to inform us in cold and patrician tones of various facts regarding the upcoming story, has a singularly peculiar charm and in essence functions no differently from the celebrated opening text-crawl of a Star Wars movie. Anyone who read the book also recognises it as a nice nod to Irulan’s role as Paul Mu’ad Dib’s historian, whose commentaries provide context to various chapters of the novel.
Despite Lynch going all out with the voiceovers and in-film explanations provided by Paul’s ‘filmbooks’, still the studio lacked confidence in the ability of audiences to comprehend what they were about to see, to the point of handing out glossaries of Dune terminology to cinemagoers in North America. How they expected audiences to consult this document in the darkness of the cinema is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was meant to make sense of the film after the event, but what is for sure though is that it signalled a loss of faith in the film to speak for itself. Or perhaps they saw it as Star Wars, but with homework.
Whether the audience had done their homework or not though, the inserted voiceovers couldn’t fully compensate for the missing material. Huge chunks of character and plot-developing scenes disappear to the detriment of the film. Characters such as Duncan Idaho and Liet Kynes appear only to utter a couple of lines then die, their significance lost. The Fremen get little exploration of their customs and culture beyond their sudden allegiance to a boy they are convinced by events is their messiah. While the film takes time to work carefully and lovingly through scenes from the first part of the book; Paul’s testing with the gom jabbar by the Reverend Mother; his defeat of a Harkonnen hunter-seeker; Yueh’s betrayal and the escape into the desert, it starts to race over later events. Important developments were cut out for time – such as Paul’s first kill and the defeat of the Fremen challenger Jamis, which grants him entrance into the Fremen tribe. Jessica’s Bene Gesserit fighting skills i.e. ‘the weirding way’ are left unexplored apart from a woefully underplayed and unconvincing skirmish with Stilgar. Lynch’s active refusal to portray the weirding way as per the novel as a martial art that allows the practitioner lethal speed, strength and inhuman reflexes was probably rooted in contempt for the grindhouse cinema that martial arts movies, generally cheaply-made, badly-dubbed Hong Kong films, were confined to in that period. This fighting style wouldn’t be legitimized in western cinema until the advent of the Matrix films some decade and a half later. Lynch summarily dismissed the idea of the Bene Gesserit fighting art as ‘kung fu in the dunes’ and instead substituted his own obscure Atreides future technology – the ‘weirding modules’ – as the film’s signature weaponry, perhaps designed in the hope of becoming as iconic to his Dune as the lightsabre was to the successful Star Wars franchise. It’s actually an intriguing idea that adds another interesting layer of strangeness to the film – ancient battle cries transformed into lethal weaponry by science.
There is also distracting visual poetry – the repetitive, simple dreamscapes of Paul’s visions, the awesome roaring monstrousness of the sandworms created by Carlo Rambaldi, the birth sequence, the compelling sequence of travel via a mystical folding of space, all overlaid with an eerie Brian Eno synth and the wonderfully bombastic rock score of Toto. It’s all a universe away from the common expectations of science fiction at the time, which had long moved well away from Kubrick’s elegant and meditative 2001 and created expectations for more simplistic, action-packed, and fast-moving adventure. Certainly, nothing in the science fiction of the era prepared anyone for unsettling content such as a militant-looking and not awfully pleasant small child in Islamic-derived dress (Paul’s sister Alia) charged with assassinating an enemy, waving a large knife in ecstasy at the slaughter in the desert, and that was decades before the era of ISIS.
The final nail in the coffin for many is the matter of the ending, which manages to undermine the whole point of the novel – that Paul is a man playing god, not an actual god. One can twist the idea of Paul’s creating the miracle of rain on Arrakis, and killing the source of the spice stone dead, by implication throwing the universe into decay and darkness in one swift movement, as some kind of hamfisted reference to events much further down the path of Herbert’s Dune novels, which see the greening of Arrakis and the destruction of the order of the universe as part of a ‘golden path’; ultimately though, it reads as an infuriating, dumbed-down and plastered on ‘happy ending’ designed to neatly signal that our hero is awesome, and his journey is over; please go home. It’s not clear what Lynch really thought he was achieving here; the fact that he was actually working on the screenplay for Dune Messiah, the second novel in the Dune sequence, when Dune was released into cinemas suggests he was anticipating success and was far happier with the production, its outcome and the studio demands than he would later claim.
Ultimately, David Lynch’s Dune falls between two stools in failing to please either book purists or those looking for a coherent, unchallenging mainstream movie experience; it’s too off-book for the former, and both too earnestly on-book, and too viscerally weird and experimental in nature for the latter. Despite this, Lynch’s Dune still remains an enveloping, dreamlike, and sometimes nightmarish experience of a film quite unlike anything before or since. There’s a claustrophobic, smothering atmosphere created by the darkened interiors, mannered acting, urgent, whispered inner monologuing, and the weird, thrumming soundtrack. The occasional defects in FX are neither here nor there – there is some shoddy greenscreen and the odd off-putting dub, but it’s a unique and tantalising visual and mental ride for all that and unlike any other science fiction film yet made in its ambitious reach. Lynch’s interpretation of the Dune universe remains a compelling and unnerving, brain-churning fever dream of a film that fascinates and provokes strong reactions to this day. It’s one of those notorious failures that continues to compel curiosity well beyond some of the successes of its day. Perhaps it was all a just bit much for audiences in 1984, its tagline, ‘A world beyond your experience, beyond your imagination’ ironically and sadly apt.
This is the question posed by Robert Pattinson’s character ‘Neil’ during Tenet, as he explains the concept of reverse entropy to the David John Washington’s protagonist – who helpfully goes under that name (‘Protagonist’) throughout the film. It could just as easily apply to any of us during the last six months of global chaos, economic shutdown, fluctuating travel restrictions, crushing social isolation, and various other attendant miseries caused by the reaction to a certain nasty little virus.
The release of a Christopher Nolan film has become a cinematic event. The release of Nolan’s Tenet has become a landmark event simply for being the first new film released in theatres after the aforementioned global shutdown that has thrown both film production and film release schedules into total and possibly catastrophic long-term disarray. The future of the traditional primary theatrical release has become a questionable prospect in the face of ongoing clampdowns on personal movement and restrictions on venue capacity that will throttle a film’s financial take. For those of us who value cinema as an artform, part of which is having the opportunity to see a film in its own dedicated temple, on the big screen, with an audience, as part of a communal experience, a collective cultural dreaming of sorts, Nolan’s insistence that Tenet would be a ‘in cinemas only’ for a summer 2020 release was heartening.
Anyway, returning to hurting heads, let it be said that Nolan, with Tenet, continues to bring a demanding intelligence to well-worn cinematic genres and tropes that is often missing in big budget releases nowadays, where there too frequently appears to be an inverse ratio between sky high budgets and respect for the audience’s intelligence (coughDisneyStarWarscough). Whereas 2010’s Interception was perhaps Dreamscape with A Levels, Tenet might be classed as James Bond with a PhD in theoretical physics, or perhaps the old Terminator time travel chestnut, dusted down, and sent back to college. Nolan presents us with a relentlessly action-packed espionage-meets-science-fiction flick which flirts with philosophical questions about reality, time, and perception. Car chases, plane crashes and extended fist fights in various foreign locales are relentlessly complicated by quantum physics and an endlessly layering, inverting narrative structure, with perhaps some metatextual conceits about movie-making sprinkled in; nothing could be more Nolan, really.
The story revolves around an CIA agent known only as Protagonist (David John Washington) who, during a mission to liberate a mysterious object from a Kiev opera house during a terrorist siege, attempts suicide to avoid betraying his colleagues. He wakes up to find himself having passed the recruitment test for entry into a shadowy intelligence-linked organisation named Tenet. Tenet’s purpose is allegedly to stop World War 3. From this point on, things start to get complicated.
Protagonist is taken to a secret laboratory and shown some strange ‘debris from a future war’. This future war is not the result of the current world politic, but a far future one that for reasons best known to itself is using an intellectually confounding future quantum technology – entropy reversal – to destroy parts of the present or rather, its own past. It’s clear nobody is really expected to understand how this tech works (even Protagonist looks bewildered at points), but simply accept that suitably ‘inversed’ objects, bullets, cars, weapons, or even people can move backwards in time, albeit with huge risks to themselves. This can be scaled up to a ‘temporal pincer movement’ for military purposes, using one team moving forwards in time and another backwards, both toward the same goal. Forwards and backwards with the same result. Like the word ‘tenet’ reads. Get it?
Protagonist recruits agent ‘Neil’ (a lively Robert Pattinson) with a convenient background in quantum physics who seems to understand this stuff better than he does, during another mission to track down the source of some mysteriously inverted bullets via an arms dealer in Mumbai. This leads him to the big bad guy of the story, a Russian billionaire and arms dealer named Andrei Sator, played with brutal relish and deliciously heavy accent by none other than Sir Kenneth Branagh. Sator’s personal malignancy, his motivations and the depth and significance of the threat he poses grow incrementally with each passing scene – to the point of actually believably establishing the kind of insane megalomania one associates with Bond villains, but devoid of cartoonishly silly quirks or quips. Protagonist’s initial access to this unpleasant oligarch depends on charming his beautiful, aristocratic, but emotionally and physically brutalised English wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) who quickly establishes herself as the emotional, human and moral centre of the film, grounding the huge world-shaking threat to humanity in interpersonal relationships; between mother and son, and between Protagonist and Kat herself. She’s like an inverse Mal from Inception in this respect.
Epic set pieces action scenes abound as Protagonist, Neil and Kat work together to make sense of Sator’s significance to the mysterious far future to undermine his goals. We move in short order from India to England to Norway and Estonia to Vietnam in the travelogue style of old Bond films, and about again. There’s a scene involving a plane used as a weapon to demolish a freeport in Oslo that is pretty staggering, all the more for the fact that it was not done conventionally using CGI, but as a physical effect with a real, purchased aircraft, as it was apparently cheaper to film it that way. There’s also a by-now standard cred-establishing fight in a restaurant kitchen as the protagonist attempts to flee via the back door a la Besson’s La Femme Nikita – which is kind of overused at this point, but there’s clearly something that appeals to directors about this one, so if you’ve ever wanted to see Russians and an American beat the crap out of each other using cheese graters and meat tenderisers, this is your moment.
The climax involves the ruins of an old Soviet secret city shattered by a nuclear accident. It’s an almost otherworldly landscape made all the more alien by the huge temporal pincer military assault upon it. But it’s the strangeness and complexity of the ideas and the abrupt plot twists and turns and shifts in perspectives they reveal that really compel. The bungeeing, brutal ass-kicking, various aquatic antics and mad car chases are just the fancy action icing on the big brain cake.
Tenet’s challenge is less the mind-boggling future quantum tech or the usual time travel paradoxes, but that it is both fast-paced and deliberately obtuse in narrative structure, leaving little to no breathing room to contemplate what has just been said or has just transpired plot-wise. Blink mentally and you could find yourself missing some vital piece of information. Another small niggle, although not a hugely significant one, is occasionally the soundtrack competes with the dialogue to ear-straining effect. It’s the kind of film where you have to accept everyone around you is probably as confused as you are at certain points and just engage as much as possible with events as they happen. It’s enjoyable even when it occasionally leaves you floored and it’s well worth hanging in there, as everything does pull together in the end in a way that suggests we’ve actually just witnessed the beginning of a possible saga, although one I’m sure we won’t see. It’s definitely the kind of film that will reward repeat viewing – I suspect the point, actually. I was left immediately wanting to rewatch the whole film given the final perspective shift that I will not spoil for you here.
Cinema chains globally have suffered huge losses during the shutdown, and studios have become skittish about when, or even if, to place planned new releases in cinemas, placing the cinema industry in some jeopardy. If you think films deserve to be seen in the environment they were designed and produced for – a proper theatre – now is the time to show your support, unless perhaps you are happy with a future consisting of paying ludicrous sums for VOD releases on top of your usual streaming service fees to watch. It’s as good a time as any to vote for the existence of cinema with your wallet. Tenet is well worth the trek back to the multiplex.
Remember the seventies and eighties, when regular moral panics about popular films, music, television shows and finally, videos were the thing? When the Tipper Gores and Mary Whitehouses of this world would insist, without a scrap of real evidence, that various media were responsible for acts of moral depravity and horrific violence? This argument has emerged regularly, as again with the rise of video games as a convenient scapegoat for the acts of damaged individuals, often wheeled out confidently by the gutter press and politicians as a primary cause of complex crimes before the facts of the case are even in.
In 2019, we find ourselves at another cultural moment where mainstream entertainment is accused of inciting crime and this time it seems to be the media at large, and more shockingly, film critics themselves, who are pushing this narrative. The latest film in the critics’ crosshairs for allegedly promoting violence and masculinity of the (buzzword klaxon!) ‘toxic’ variety is Todd Phillip’s Joker. The run up to the release of the film included warnings based on absolutely no evidence that it may somehow spark the new media bogeymen – the alleged ‘incels’ – to take to the streets with their personal arsenals and wreak havoc, on the grounds that such people really exist in grand droves, are inherently violent and murderous, and all they need is the correct encouragement by a mainstream picture to get busy.
As it is, a few weeks into release, Joker currently has a body count of zero, and a box office take ($600million – a massive success given its $70million budget) that suggests an awful lot of people have seen it, which perhaps should tell us all something about what world critics are currently inhabiting – an entirely separate one to paying audiences, it seems. This also seems reflected by the current vast division of opinion between audience and critics on sites like Rotten Tomatoes – a divisiveness that didn’t begin with Joker and surely will not end with it.
Joker is a very interesting take on the comic book; the film blends the premise of Alan Moore’s acclaimed one-shot Joker origin story The Killing Joke – the Joker as failing stand-up comedian – with a narrative and visual love letter to an era of film with which many younger filmgoers today will be sadly unfamiliar – the seventies to early eighties. This was an age of films mired in the seedy, darker side of American life, often exploring the criminal fringes of society, the put-upon working class and the travails and existential angst of the average man or woman trying to get by in a society awash with crime and corruption. Conventional heroic attributes were thin on the ground. It’s all a hell of a long way away from the colourful, PG-rated, superhero fantasy tentpole popcorn pictures that have dominated the mainstream cinema landscape for the past ten years.
The seventies to early eighties was an era of cinema that reflected the changes in modern society of the time, political upheavals as well as the sexual revolution. It centred on society’s rebels – with or without a cause – and anti-heroes; flawed, morally struggling or simply increasingly unhinged characters, played with relentless intensity and Method-style commitment by rising stars such as Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. They were unrelentingly gritty, often unsettling and dark-natured films, nothing that anybody could ever describe as ‘feelgood’. Think Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Silkwood, Scarface, Midnight Cowboy, The Deer Hunter, Raging Bull, and in particular the relatively little known De Niro vehicle and 1982 box office flop, The King of Comedy, which alongside 1974’s Taxi Driver, 2019’s Joker owes a huge narrative and visual debt. These were and remain films for adults, not for children, and they existed at a time when cinema attendance was at an all-time low whilst cinemas were falling into disrepair alongside ailing economies. This all started to change with the rise of the blockbuster film, the family-friendly, FX laden spectacular that drew in repeat viewers of all ages, beginning with Star Wars in 1977. Combined with clever toy merchandising, this trend financially reinvigorated and eventually came to dominate the business and redefine its target market, but the era is still cinematically defined by the gritty, adult-oriented works of Martin Scorsese and the intense performances of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, among others.
Joker is set in the same era as all this cultural and political fracturing – and veers so far away from the safe, family-friendly, entirely self-referential ‘universe’ now associated with the comic book genre that many critics seem to forget what Joker still is, and what it is not. Despite its adult nature and feints at digging into the social upheaval of the times, Joker is primarily a comic book movie. It is an origin story of one of the most well-known comic book villains in the genre’s history. It is not an instruction manual. It is not a political manifesto. It is also something missing from the comic book genre since Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy – a comic book film as the particular and peculiar vision of a single filmmaker – Todd Phillips – in this case, a vision informed by the work of another singular filmmaker, Martin Scorsese. Indeed, Scorsese was involved with the production in its early stages.
Part of what allowed for such a singular vision is that fact that Joker was conceived and shot as a stand-alone film rather than the beginning of a franchise, freeing it from the pressure of setting up a sequence of films down the line, instead of just getting on with a story and telling it well. The story of the Joker as the victim of random violence, familial neglect and abuse, fatherlessness and grand systemic failures, as well as his own peculiarly odd psychology and poor decision-making, it is emphatically an adult film, just as Moore’s The Killing Joke is an adult comic book. While highly entertaining and well-paced, it asks more of the viewer than simply to sit and let the pretty colours wash all over them. It requires some attention and a little bit of thought. It relies, staggeringly in this day and age, on an emotionally and physically visceral central performance by Joaquin Phoenix rather than large-scale explosions of pixels, and that thing that seems missing from so many high budget properties these days: a strong script. It seems as far away from filmmaking by corporate committee and green screen as the fantasy and clearly-delineated heroes/villains of Lucas’s Star Wars universe were from the mentally-ill veteran Travis Bickle and the mean, dirty streets of 1970s New York in Taxi Driver.
Joker presents an origin story, the all-important part of any comic book character’s mythos. It is not, and this is where we suddenly find ourselves in Gore/Whitehouse territory according to parts of the mainstream media who should know better, a call to arms for the disaffected to don clown masks and commit mass shootings. It is still the story of the creation of the arch villain of the Gotham mythos, the psychological terrorist named Joker – the nemesis of and inverse of Gotham’s Batman. Where both experience massive trauma, filthy rich and well-loved Bruce Wayne turns to a pathological fixation with law and order and the creation of a masked alter-ego to effect this, while Joker posits that poor, neglected from childhood Arthur Fleck becomes the ultimate nihilist whose early experiences and constant physical brutalisation lead him to the conclusion that life itself is a joke, and a black one at that. Clown make-up follows naturally, given his former profession as a party clown. Both seek empowerment as their backgrounds, psychologies and resources shape and allow them, for good or for ill. The suggestion that audiences so lack a moral compass or ability to separate art from reality they will be persuaded the Joker’s way is the best way and from thereon wreak havoc, seems implausible at best.
Phoenix’s performance is incredible throughout, an absolute tour de force ranging from a tragically vulnerable and sympathetic adult, to his final, utterly deranged moments of terror theatre. His physical performance; his tics, twitches, subtle mood shifts and swings, his physical fraility (Phoenix lost a lot of weight for the role), his odd, comical clown-shoed walk, his almost Jame Gumb-esque effeminate affect at various points to his final flowering into violence and self-assured villain with a nothing-to-lose swagger, dominates every scene. The entire film is shot from Arthur Fleck’s highly unreliable point of view, allowing him to mislead us at several points as to what has occured in reality as opposed to his fervent, demented dreamworld. Some scenes are instantly recognisable as fantasy, as when he imagines himself being pulled from the audience and hugged by his chat show hero and what appears to be the father figure of his imagination, Murray Franklin, played by Robert De Niro. Another imagined moment, more believably, pivots on the primal relationship between fighting and sex after the Joker’s first kill.
Philips’s script draws heavily from the narrative of Martin Scorsese’s 1982 film The King of Comedy, a meditation on the obsession with fame and celebrity in American culture which centres on a mentally unstable stand-up comedian (Robert De Niro) obsessed with a TV host (Jerry Lewis) who commits a crime in an attempt to manipulate himself into the television spotlight for just one night, come what may. His rationale for this is ‘Better to live one night as a king than a schmuck for eternity’ and this seems to function as the central motivation that the unstable Arthur Fleck finally seizes upon, after a sequence of unfortunate events lead to him killing in self-defence. Indeed, De Niro takes on the role of a very similar talk show host in Joker that his own character was fixated on in The King of Comedy and the film’s final scenes set in a TV studio echoes some of the final scenes of The King Of Comedy. Other sequences seem to draw on Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, particularly the sequences of Bickle’s breakdown. One may even spot a touch of Sidney Lumet’s classic Network in there at points, swirling around the themes of the power of television, suicide and celebrity. Mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore – the rallying cry of the maddened TV host in 1974’s Network – seems to be the mood in the 70s Gotham Arthur Fleck inhabits; it’s a tinder box of poverty, decay and corruption waiting for the fateful spark to set the whole place aflame. Fleck’s Joker is less a leader than someone whose image and criminal acts the already inflamed mob seizes upon to reflect their own discontent.
Joker is by turns bleakly comical, shockingly violent and oddly touching, and overall is an intoxicating, wild ride of a film that manages the precarious balancing act between psychological reality and comic book excess and between presenting Fleck as both vulnerable and recognisably human, a horrific accident waiting to happen. We know from the start that Fleck falling into permanent alter-ego villainy is the point, so the interesting part is how we get there: this film presents the story in such a new and refreshing way, entirely dependent on abnormal psychology in a way that seems to have struck a chord with contemporary audiences. It is one of the only films in recent times I’ve seen that had the audience stay through the credits, excitedly discussing what they had just seen.
It says a lot about how many modern critics have been trained to think, or at least about the type of copy they are urged to submit for maximum clicks, that they are unable to view a complex and nuanced piece of entertainment as well as a refreshing take on the increasingly safe and stale comic book genre without insulting our intelligence, rushing to moral condemnation over the effects it may have on us – the poor, easily-influenced audience. Mainstream film critics currently seem more and more intent on evaluating all mainstream films as overt or covert political manifestos and issuing a pass/fail not on artistic merit, but depending on which side of the political aisle the manifesto appears to fall. Meanwhile, audiences seem more and more intent on ignoring them and evaluating films on their own terms, or simply for their inherent entertainment value. In which case, long live the audience, and the film critics may be writing themselves into the history books as, well, clowns.
1974’s Il Portiere di Notte, aka The Night Porter, is a film that uneasily straddles the line between art house movie and outright Nazisploitation flick. It deals with the post-war meeting and subsequent doomed relationship between a young female concentration camp survivor, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) and the oddball, sadistic SS officer Max (Dirk Bogarde) who both sexually abused and protected her there. Post-war, Bogarde’s character hides in the shadows of Vienna as a night-shift hotel clerk, consumed by shame and consorting with a motley crew of ex-Nazis and collaborators who hold regular mock trials where they cynically rehearse their contrition and defence, whilst colluding in the destruction of evidence and the murder of any witnesses to their wartime atrocities. Lucia, haunted by her past to the point she reignites her twisted sexual relationship with Max after a chance meeting, is just such a witness. On release in 1974, the film met with almost universal critical distaste and to this day has the ability to trouble and perturb both critics and audience with its refusal to refer to straightforward Holocaust victim narratives, its incongruous display of eroticism within the confines of a death camp and its exploration of complicity as a component of survival under extreme circumstances. Too slow and serious for a standard exploitation film audience, too explicit and shocking a subject matter for the arthouse crew, it seems likely to forever remain a cult film.
Italian director and screenwriter Liliana Cavani cites a chance meeting with a female survivor of the Nazi death camps as the inspiration for the film. She noted a woman laying flowers at the site of an infamous camp. She spoke with her and learned she was a survivor of the camp, assuming the flowers were for a murdered family member or comrade. Not so. The woman spoke of her lover, a German officer. Cavani’s shock and subsequent curiosity concerning the occurrence of such seemingly bizarre relationships (that did indeed occur – in cases such as Katya Singer, who parleyed her own notorious beauty into a book-keeping position in Auschwitz-Birkenau, an SS officer lover and the ability to save many lives) informed her writing of the screenplay. The film is clearly also informed by the complex European political situation post-war, where Cold War concerns reigned supreme, but the spectre of fascism was still alive and well and living quietly in society’s closets. Italy had just suffered what are referred to as the ‘Years of Lead’, characterized by far-right terrorist activity rumoured to be sponsored by anti-communist, Nato-led Operation Gladio. Not only had many Nazi war criminals simply disappeared into the night (and over to South America and the Middle East etc.) in 1945 and beyond, remaining forever unaccountable for their crimes against humanity, many more had been officially ‘denazified’ and remained in the top tiers of society, politics and business. Hidden in plain sight, rich and successful, their pasts unspoken of, such circumstances eventually inspired far-left German terror group Red Army Faction to explode in a orgy of violence and murder of their own. The Night Porter’s gang of Nazi reprobates living in the shadows in Vienna, secretly rehearsing their own self-defenses and clearing their consciences doesn’t seem that far-fetched, in light of this.
However, beyond the endlessly discomfiting narrative, beyond the politics, beyond the ambiguities of sado-masochistic relationships, beyond Rampling’s fierce, blue-eyed, outraged gaze, Bogarde’s perfectly-pitched, fury-laced descent into obsession and and their characters’ disturbing, joint regression into their pasts, it is Cavani’s startling, iconic visuals that remain in the mind’s eye and which have subsequently infiltrated the mainstream and informed many a subculture. Lucia’s semi-nudity combined with her deconstructed SS uniform and cap remains a standard erotic fashion reference from catwalk couture to your average S&M club. Any single frame of the sequence set in the louche Nazi officers’ mess, replete with accordion-playing,Venetian-masked SS officers, where young Lucia sings for her life may as well function as a precise snapshot of influential and controversial neofolk band Death in June’s entire aesthetic. I’ve seen that outfit referenced in everything from random episodes of the 90s TV espionage series La Femme Nikita to the covers of mainstream women’s magazines. Lady Gaga’s video for the song ‘Alejandro’ owes a great unspoken debt to The Night Porter’s aesthetic sensibilities and themes, while Lucia’s eroticized SS gear pops up as one of many casual outfit changes in her video for her hit ‘Love Game’. As recently as 2011, designer Louis Vuitton’s collection clearly referenced the film. For a film which posits that the present is forever haunted and indeed deformed by the unacknowledged spectres of the past, this seems a fitting legacy.
