I have decided not to watch Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming film Dune.
It’s not because I don’t like Villeneuve’s work. Arrival is an amazing movie and one I use in the classroom as an example of masterful storytelling. Bladerunner 2049 was an incredible cinematic experience.
It’s also not because I am a literary traditionalist that eschews all cinematic adaptions. Arrival, for example, is an adaptation of Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life”. Both expressions of the story are excellent.
I am also not arguing for a boycott of the film. I have no moral or ethical qualms with it. In fact, I love that Hollywood is giving attention to a serious science fiction masterpiece. Go watch it!
But.
If you are at all inclined to pick up a book, I beg you to read the book first.
I don’t make this request because I think that “the book is always better”. In fact, I cringe every time I find myself in another version of the “which was better” conversation. These discussions are the equivalent of the classic comparison of apples to oranges. They’re different.
While you may have a personal preference or strong opinions about the filmmaker’s or author’s story decisions, designating one or the other as “better” is a largely meaningless assertion. This is a bit like when my students or colleagues describe something as “interesting” — the intellectual version of an “um”. (Which is why I usually start my classes by making them watch this great little clip from Captain Fantastic.)
Let me back up a little and talk a bit about the process of adaptation.
Adaptation is always a practice of interpretation and translation, and every time someone tells a story, they are also engaged in the practice of interpretation and translation.
When the author sits down to write, they are taking an experience they had or an idea in their head or a historical account, and they are translating it into a particular new assemblage of words. No story springs into existence ex nihilo, out of nothing. There are always little (or big) things that come together to inform the story that finally gets told, whether or not the writer is fully conscious of their ideas’ inspirations or origins.
The process of filmmaking is similar, but here the storyteller must translate the story into a combined language of words, images and sound — with a time limit. Every story must take form within the possibilities and limitations of the particular medium chosen. Every telling is a retelling, an interpretation and translation, a decoding and an encoding anew using new materials.
As a result, I am hesitant to query whether a cinematic adaptation of a literary narrative is “true to the original or not”. Which original? How does one define “trueness” to this ongoing process of interpretation?
Instead I am more intrigued with thinking about adaptation as conversation. How does an adaptation respond to the text that inspired it? What choices does the storyteller make in order to weave their own narrative inspired by the previous? In this way, I can prefer the experience of reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but nevertheless thoroughly enjoy Ridley Scott’s cinematic interpretation and recognize that it is doing something quite different to the book. Scott didn’t try to repeat the book; he allowed himself to be inspired and then to tell a story best suited for his medium and his own creative inclinations.
Nevertheless, I want to also suggest that there is a one-way street embedded in the process of adaptation. This isn’t so much about the process of adaptation itself as it is about the particular media involved and their affordances.
The written word relies on the reader’s imagination as co-creator of the narrative. Even the most precise or poetic blocks of text need the reader to take those words as a sort of recipe that they use to bring the story to life in their minds. This is why reading a book can feel like such an intimate experience.
Audio narratives (such as podcasts, narrated books, or radio stories) have also been described as intimate (Ong, 2002). While they offer a bit more information through the use of soundtrack, voice actors, and sonic-scapes, they still allow the listener to visualise the story for themselves.
However, by their nature, cinematic and televised adaptations communicate stories through rich visuals. This narrative experience is often immersive and transformative for the audience member; some have even likened movies to dreamscapes. Audience members infuse these stories with their own emotions and personal experiences, so there is still a sense of co-creation between producer and spectator but this relationship is significantly different than the relationship between author and reader.
So this leads us back to Dune. In essence, the reason I will not see the film is this: Once I have seen Villeneuve’s interpretation of Dune, I can never un-see it.
Frank Herbert’s book invites readers into a complex and strange world that requires one’s imagination to work hard to envision landscapes, characters, and scenarios that bear minimal semblance to our own world. The strangeness becomes a foundation for the philosophical ideas that he introduces–the ideas that transformed the book from simply a great story to a literary masterpiece. Books like these leave a visceral imprint on the body and mind. I vividly remember my experience of first setting foot on the planet of Arrakis. In a similar fashion, I remember spotting Strider mysteriously obscured in the shadowed interior of The Prancing Pony. That moment was two decades ago, and yet I can easily bring to mind my first reading of Lord of the Rings as if it were last week.
I have strong, fond memories of reading a number of books, but for books that involve extensive world-building, particularly in fantastic or science-fictional contexts, I think the experience of co-creation is especially intimate and unique. I treasure my first encounter with Middle-earth, but once I watched Peter Jackson’s trilogy, something changed. My Strider now found himself in battle with Viggo Mortensen over who got to occupy the visual icon of Aragorn in my mind. Now if anyone was to replace my image of Strider, I’m happy it happened to be Viggo (less happy about Elijah’s usurpation of Frodo). Nevertheless, my imagination suffered a tremendous loss.
Of course, I can’t get away from the film’s PR campaigns, so I do have new images of Dune’s occupants floating in my mind. But my objective is to minimize their power as much as I can. Thus, I choose to not watch the film.
For you, I am excited that you will get to experience Villeneuve & his production crew’s imaginations brought to life. That is a gift. But I encourage you to consider letting your imagination have first dibs on Arrakis. Accept Frank Herbert’s invitation to co-create this world with him. Maybe even read a few of the sequels. Then by all means, turn to Villeneuve and take a peek at how he interprets and has translated Dune onto the screen.
This post’s featured image is by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash
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