Tag: #Magic

Dune’s success and (sort of) failures

March 22nd, 2024

Just watched Dune 2 for the second time and it was a very different movie this time. But this time, I tried a little experiment. I decided to pretend like I believed in magic and see how it came across.

That’s where Dunes 1 & 2 succeeded magnificently. The fact that you can choose to do that or not and the movie still works is ingenious.

I think Villeneuve managed to do something Damien Walter has been calling for in his essays: bring the mythos back to the modern world. He gave us a story that kind of reenchanted the world.

The modern world has improved a lot of people’s lives, but at the same time taken away a lot of meaning. I don’t think people live well without meaning.

The fact that people are discussing and arguing about their interpretations of the Dune movies and books is a very good sign. I look forward to seeing more like it. Hopefully Dune Messiah will get made.

Where it falls short for me

I’m not sure how effective Villeneuve or even Frank Herbert himself have been at spreading these messages: 1) Beware of following charismatic leaders and 2) absolute power will rob you of your humanity.

The problem with the first message is point of view. In Dune, the Fremen chose Luke Skywalker and ended up with Darth Vader. But the main character is not one of the Fremen.

Most people, particularly young men, are going to root for Paul Atreides all the way to the end, no matter how dark he gets.

Hollywood let the hero off the hook in the Star Wars trilogy. In this story, Luke was always going to choose the Dark Side.

To get the point across, I think we needed a main character who believed in Paul and became disillusioned. Something like a first person account of a Bedouin warrior who believed in T.E. Lawrence then saw his people freed from the Ottomans, only to wind up under the thumb of the British.

Villeneuve made Chani a stronger character than she was in the book in an attempt to get Herbert’s main point across. I felt it: Paul had betrayed his lover and the Fremen. What a shame.

But not everyone did (I saw someone say Villeneuve did it to please SJWs). The problem is Chani wasn’t the main character. People were still excited about Paul’s victory. Chani was just an acceptable casualty.

Watching Dune 2 as if I believed in magic made the power more… powerful. It felt like metaphysical cocaine, pouring out of the screen. Intoxicating.

Regarding point number 2, the darkness of power… well, that’s just a hard message for anyone to get across. I’ve never published a book or directed a movie so who am I to judge?

In particular, how are you going to convince young men who feel they have little or no power that absolute power wouldn’t be a bitchin’ great time?

It’s one of the worst addictions you can have, because you need it to survive. It’s like food. Not having it could kill you.

And yet I agree with Herbert’s point. Absolute power will take your humanity. The fact that major powers looking to one-up one another find it acceptable to threaten each other’s populations with nuclear destruction is rather monstrous, isn’t it?

Empires used to just sack each other’s cities and leave it at that.

Herbert makes his point by portraying power-hungry characters as ugly. The Baron Harkonnen is Jabba the Hut. Leto II turns into a worm.

Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings makes the same point: Don’t go for the One Ring or you’ll turn into a gigantic flaming eyeball.

The problem is, I think Herbert and Tolkien underestimated the number of guys who aren’t afraid of turning into a giant worm or a flaming eyeball.
On the transmutation of yard matter and cocoa

May 18th, 2023

Toadstools, berries, dead bugs and cicada shells. Those were some of the many ingredients. I stirred them into a bucket of water and left them next to the fence, as far as I could get from the house. Dad could be a spoil sport.

I wasn’t sure what, but I knew something magical would happen eventually. I’d heard you could put a horse’s hair in water and it would turn into a worm, so I figured anything was possible.

Unfortunately, I never got to find out. Just as my brew was reaching maturity, Dad smelled it from inside the house and said “God what’s that smell?” and tumped it over. I said, “Dad, no! My potion!”

But Dad didn’t believe in magic.

After losing several potions with a lot of potential, I gave up on magic and turned to science.

I mixed household items like Windex, perfume and shampoo and put my “experiments” in the freezer. And in a few days, voila! They disappeared. I never saw it happen, but I was impressed.

Sometimes I got into the medicine cabinet for more scientific looking items. I learned that dropping Dad’s Alka-Seltzer into a sink full of water would make them disappear.

Then I turned to the kitchen. Baking supplies were a goldmine for science.

My biggest discovery: You know how baker’s cocoa floats on top of the milk and refuses to sink? Green food coloring worked like a charm. Add a little sugar and you have green chocolate milk. Red, blue and yellow had no effect. So what if Mom and Dad wouldn’t buy more Hershey’s Quick . We had it covered.

I admit I was unethical. Green chocolate milk looked like it might be poisonous, so I tested it on my little brother. When he liked it and didn’t die, it was Katie bar the door. Green chocolate milk was on the menu.

Mom asked, “What on earth is happening to the green food coloring?” But I never gave up my secret.
Dragging ideas into the material world

April 19th, 2023

Shriekback – Every Force Evolves a Form

If there’s anything science fiction and fantasy have taught me it’s that magic forces are dangerous. Think of what happened in The Sandman when the wrong guy got hold of that ruby.

Last night as I was drifting off, I had the weirdest vision. I was in a dark cavern with a ceiling so high and broad it looked like a sky. A dark red membrane of a sky. Above that ceiling, I knew, was the “real” world.

Down from that ceiling flew a murmuration of blackbirds – or what looked like blackbirds, patterns shifting and disappearing into the dark. “This is where the ideas live before we catch them,” I thought sleepily.

Bjork – All the Modern Things

Where DO the ideas live before they take shape? Do we fill that realm with blackbirds or do we catch them and drag them into this one?

Clarke’s Law is still true in the modern age. It takes mines and factories and communication networks, but ideas involving technology do kind of seem like magic.

If you have the right math, science and materials, you can pluck computers, bombs, particle accelerators out of thin air. If you don’t look at the pollution, the illusion holds.

When a powerful thought comes through that membrane, we always seem to turn it into a way to kill lots of people. The conjurers never seem to worry. “Look what it can do! Let’s give it to the world. Whee!”

Michael Crichton used to annoy me. “There are some things man was never meant to know. Dun dun dunnnnn” seemed to be the theme of all his books. That was no fun. I wanted as many dinosaurs as I could get.

But I’ve been coming around to his point of view. People who haven’t read Destination Void have unleashed technology that comes disturbingly close to passing the Turing Test. I was afraid of nuclear war, but I’m more afraid of this. At least they didn’t put a nuke in everybody’s pocket.

The only thing that’s kept us from blowing up the world so far has been threatening to blow up the world. I don’t know how long that’s gonna hold.

Why do the war monkeys known as humans have to turn every important idea into a way to kill one another? I wish we could put more resources into answering that question.

Edgar Winter Group – Frankenstein

Tag: #Magic

Dune’s success and (sort of) failures

Where it falls short for me

On the transmutation of yard matter and cocoa

Dragging ideas into the material world