#using first names as superhero names is the new trendy thing anyway
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BnHA Chapter 096: Home Visits
Previously on BnHA: The police worried over the fall of All Might and the growing threat of Tomura and his League of Villains. All Might left the matter of Tomura to Gran Torino and Naomasa, and resolved to focus on his teaching duties. Rescue Squad Jr. delivered Kacchan to the police and disbanded. Shouto went home to find Endeavor throwing a little baby fit over the way his whole “surpass All Might” master plan worked out (good riddance). Izuku went home and his mom was amazing, and then like ten seconds after getting home he ran out on her again. Thankfully All Might punched him in the face afterward. And then he hugged him. And told him he was no longer able to be the Symbol of Peace, but that he was going to dedicate himself to Izuku’s education, and that they’d both do their best together. It was incredibly moving, and probably the highlight of the series for me up to this point.
Today on BnHA: All Might officially retires. Rat Principal announces his plan to move the students into dorms on campus. Aizawa changes up his hair for the thrill of it and heads out with All Might to meet with the students’ families. Jirou’s parents are super cool and I love them. Katsuki’s family is everything you would have ever expected, and I love them also. Katsuki follows All Might outside after the visit and asks about All Might’s relationship with Deku. But All Might remains tight-lipped, so Katsuki backs off (and then quietly thanks him for saving his life, no big). All Might then splits off from Aizawa to go visit the Midoriya household, only to find that Deku’s mom isn’t exactly brimming with confidence in U.A. Which is to say that she’s refusing to let Deku go back there. This could put a damper on that whole “he’s the main character of this manga about a superhero school” thing, so stay tuned.
(As always, all comments not marked with an ETA are my unspoiled reactions from my first readthrough of this chapter. I’ve read up through chapter 145 now, so any ETAs will reflect that.)
father and son color page!
now that All Might is more or less permanently stuck in his true form, I wonder if he’ll consider buying some clothes that actually fit him. that’s my dream. fucking do it, Toshinori
okay so we’re opening with a broadcast from the people who actually come up with these hero rankings. interesting!
the rankings are apparently based on (1) number of cases resolved, (2) level of contribution to society, and (3) popularity ratings, “among many other things”
no wonder no one was able to beat All Might. he has all three of those locked down. or did, at any rate
anyway, since he’s suddenly announced his retirement, things have obviously been shaken up
-- NOOOOOOOOOOOOO
BEST JEANIST. YOU BRAVE, BEAUTIFUL BASTARD. GET WELL SOON. DOES YOUR OFFICE FUCKING SAY “GENIUS” ON THE FRONT OF THE BUILDING. AS EXPECTED FROM SOMEONE WHO STRAIGHT UP PUT THE WORD “BEST” IN HIS SUPERHERO NAME
Ragdoll was apparently the #32 hero!? I can’t believe she got sacrificed to the plot like this. fucking shameful
fffklsdhflk she’s crying and traumatized and the other pussycats are rallying around her omg
I didn’t order these feels. what is this
apparently they’re now calling this incident the “nightmare at Kamino”
okay so now that we’ve caught up with basically everyone else who was involved in the incident, and had our All Might and Deku passing-of-the-torch feels in the last chapter, I really want to know how the boy whose abduction sparked all this to begin with is doing
and we’re cutting back to U.A., so dare I hope? it’s probably still summer break, though
the Rat Principal is thanking All Might for his sacrifice
and then immediately giving him a hard time afterwards about all the criticism they’ve gotten about All Might continuing to work at U.A.
wow, really? people are the fucking worst
so apparently it’s another safety concern thing. because he can no longer fight, and these kids get attacked by villains every Tuesday
like, I get that. but he’s not the only one on staff?? they have at least a dozen other pros working there for god’s sake
omg omg omg he’s talking about moving ahead with a strategy that he’s been thinking about for a while
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE OMG
YESSSSSSSSS
FAREWELL, FANFIC LODGE. HELLO, FANFIC DORMS
omgggg
we’re immediately cutting to All Might and Aizawa
they’re visiting with Jirou’s parents first, and they’re fucking rock star stereotypes omg, but more importantly Aizawa has done something different with his hair
I’VE GOTTEN COMPLETELY DISTRACTED. WHAT WAS HAPPENING
OH RIGHT JIROU AND HER FAM WERE BEING AMAZING
HOLY SHIT I WANT THEM TO ADOPT ME?!
AND NOW WE’RE BACK IN THE CAR, AND AIZAWA AND ALL MIGHT ARE MOVING ALONG ON THEIR EPIC ROADTRIP OF MEETING EVERYONE’S PARENTS
FUCKING LOOK AT AIZAWA HERE THOUGH??!?
YES PLEASE OH MY GOD. YOU KNOW WHAT, I’LL BUY YOU ONE
AHHHHHH
RED ALERT ALL MIGHT AND AIZAWA ARE VISITING BAKUGOU’S PARENTS. ALL MIGHT AND AIZAWA ARE VISITING BAKUGOU’S FUCKING PARENTS. BAKUGOU HAS PARENTS!!! WE’RE GONNA MEET ‘EM!! AIZAWA’S HAIR GAME IS ON FUCKING POINT AND THEY’RE VISITING BAKUGOU’S HOME, BAKUGOU WHO WAS SAVED BY ALL MIGHT AND THEN IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARD ALL MIGHT USED UP THE LAST OF HIS POWER
THE HYPE IS FUCKING UNREAL YOU GUYS I’M ABOUT TO FUCKING LOSE MY MIND I SHOULD PROBABLY JUST SCROLL DOWN ALREA --
OHHH MY GODDDDDDDD
LOLLLLL. “HERE GO AHEAD HE’S ALL YOURS.” FINE I FUCKING WILL!!!!
(ETA: by the way guys, I know some people in the fandom view Mitsuki as being abusive, and while I respect everyone’s opinion, I don’t interpret their relationship that way at all and don’t really have the time or mental energy to get into any discourse about it right now, so hopefully we’re cool here)
FDSLAHK KACCHAN’S DAD!?!?
OH MY GOD MISTER BAKUGOU I LOVE YOU INSTANTLY
WHAT IS THIS I CAN’T KEEP STANNING EVERYONE’S FAMILIES GODDAMMIT
THE ONLY ONE WHO’S ACTUALLY GOING TO GIVE THEM A HARD TIME IS PROBABLY GOING TO BE SHOUTO’S DAD ISN’T IT. OR MAYBE DEKU’S MOM
-- OH MY GOD. I JUST REALIZED THAT ALL MIGHT IS FINALLY GOING TO MEET DEKU’S MOM. THEY CAN’T STOP IT THIS TIME. HAHAHAHAA I FEEL SO ALIVE ALL OF A SUDDEN!!
oh my god you guys Bakugou’s mom is seriously the best though?? now she’s metaing about her son. I am taking notes
[nodding] yep. yep. it all checks out. thank you ma’am we will take good care of him. this time. for sure
and then the hair ruffle in the end because she really does love him a lot of course
I am so envious of this woman right now. but mostly just on cloud nine that someone is actually hair-ruffling Bakugou. AND HE JUST HAS TO SIT THERE AND ACCEPT IT BECAUSE IT’S HIS MOM HAHAHA. SHE LOVES YOU. YOU PUNK
now All Might wants a drink lmaooo
this chapter is amazing
Aizawa says Deku’s next because they live close by! omg. omg. it’s happening
-- HOLD UP SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING FIRST?!?!?!
oh my god
oh my god
Kacchan, I could write a whole damn essay on the topic. but that’s not really what you’re asking though, is it
All Might’s staring at him and it’s quiet for a sec
“...a student.” lol you fucking liar
I mean, not that I expected him to actually tell him. as far as he’s concerned, the secret is for Deku’s sake
and plus Aizawa is standing right there too. watching. probably curious. probably doing the math his own self, just like every other fucking person apparently does in this series smh
now Bakugou’s mom is yelling at him that the cops told him not to go outside
oh MY GOD
TWO THINGS JUST FUCKING HAPPENED THAT I’VE BEEN PRAYING FOR, HOLY SHIT?!
HE KNOWS (and he understands that it’s a secret and that All Might can’t say and that there’s probably a very good reason for that)
HE THANKED HIM. FOR SAVING HIM. I WANTED A SCENE LIKE THIS SO FUCKING BAD YOU GUYS, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. EVER SINCE HE MADE THAT FACE IN CHAPTER 87 AFTER ALL MIGHT BUSTED THROUGH THE WALL AND SAVED HIM FROM TOMURA’S GROUP. AND THEN HE WENT AND SAVED HIM AGAIN FROM ALL FOR ONE, AND HE SACRIFICED EVERYTHING IN THAT BATTLE, AND KACCHAN UNDERSTANDS THAT, AND HE’S PROBABLY BEEN FEELING THE WEIGHT OF IT THIS ENTIRE TIME. WONDERING IF IT WAS HIS FAULT IN THE END. THAT’S WHY HE WAS SO QUIET AFTERWARD
(ETA: hey past me. you’re gonna love what’s coming up. here, I’ll give you a special preview of my liveblog of chapter 118: “oh my god. angst baby. angst for days angst for weeks lifetime supply yessss”)
anyways, we already knew that All Might had his admiration, but now it’s clear that he has his respect and gratitude too and I’m so fucking over the moon omgggg
Kacchan I know you already have a dad, and he seems fucking great, but please can All Might be your dad too oh my god
fanfic dorms and Aizawa changing up the hair and Kacchan being smart and respectful and grateful. can this chapter fucking get any better
yes it fucking can because NOW ALL MIGHT IS FINALLY AT DEKU’S HOUSE
and he’s DITCHED AIZAWA TOO, which ignites the flame of hope in me that maybe Izuku’s mom will finally get some version of the truth about what’s really going on with her son, which she fucking deserves to know and has a right to know
wow, could Deku be any more nervous
kid, just yesterday you were getting soft dad hugs from this man on the beach. relax
aww Toshinori is looking at all of Deku’s All Might memorabilia hanging fucking everywhere, and he’s smiling
-- oooooooh I had a feeling this was gonna happen. ever since that phone call at the hospital
I don’t even blame her. based on everything that’s happened since Deku first started attending U.A., she’d have to be out of her fucking mind to just agree to it right off the bat. he’s nearly died like 700 times, and he’s gotten all secretive and weird and never talks to her anymore. and really, if I were her, by this point I would have been ready to pull him out of the school and maybe slap a damn ankle monitor on him for good measure
so now All Might has to somehow convince her that he has her son’s best interests at heart. not an easy task
I’m just going to post this entire page because finally she’s getting to say her piece and I’m so glad, because she’s been having to put up with this for what feels like ages
yep yep yep. yep to all of it. she’s not stupid, she can see where this is leading at this rate. and All Might may be Deku’s dad but she is still the actual parent
-- oop and then she slipped up at the very last second though
ahhhhh Izumama you left an opening. a weak spot in your argument has been exposed...!
(because he wasn’t happier. obviously)
now Deku’s standing up and protesting, but she’s shooting him down
she says she told him that she’d be cheering him on, but also worrying about him
and now he’s finally realizing that he hasn’t taken her feelings into account this entire time
and it’s being dragged out, but clearly she’s about to say that she’s pulling Izuku out of the school
yep here we go
well, All Might. you faced down the Noumu at USJ and beat it even when you were at your limit. you faced down All for One, twice, and survived a bowels-strewing injury, and then later on sacrificed every last ounce of power you had left to take him down. but you did that too. but now you face your greatest challenge: the wrath of a mom
and not just any mom, but Midoriya “where the fuck do you think he gets that crazed determination from anyway” Izuku’s motherfucking mom
good luck, man. you’re gonna need it
BONUS:
IT’S THE BAKUFAM YESSSS REVEAL YOUR SECRETS
Kacchan’s dad is only 5 foot 8. does that mean Kacchan (who is 5’7”) has almost reached his full adult height. or is he aiming to be taller than his pop. AIMING TO BE THE BEST
(ETA: it was pointed out to me that Masaru is actually 5’10”. good news, Katsuki! you’re not out of the game yet!)
he likes classical music omfg. I bet he played music for Kacchan when he was still in the womb. and that’s why he grew up to be so damn smart. too bad it didn’t help him to chill the fuck out though
and info about their quirks omg
so apparently Kacchan is one of those cases where the child is actually a combination of the parents’ quirks, and the end result is a way, way better quirk! his parents basically pulled an Endeavor, but naturally and without all of the fucked up forced marriage bullshit omfg
but yeah, so basically from this it sounds like Kacchan inherited his father’s explosive sweat with his mother’s ability to control the sweat. also I wonder if her sweat has any special properties of its own that might also be present in his
this is kind of a gross thing to be talking about when I think about it for too long, but eh
I fucking love that Mitsuki was the one who hit on Masaru (VERY AGGRESSIVELY) and not the other way around lol
it’s super fucking cute that Katsuki’s name is a combination of their names
(ETA: speaking of Katsuki’s name, since this kid still doesn’t have an official hero name, I’ve been wondering if that 勝 kanji from his given name might come into play, since it means “victory”, and to me represents one of the more noble aspects of his character. his original rejected hero name was based off of his quirk and was a pun on his last name, so I kind of like the idea of his final hero name being related to that “win no matter what” determination, and being based off his first name
this is, of course, assuming that Horikoshi doesn’t ultimately go with “Ground Zero”, which was apparently mentioned in some concept art or something. but I’ve been looking at some of the character book stuff recently, and it’s clear that a lot of stuff has changed since Horikoshi came up with his original concepts, so I don’t exactly consider that set in stone lol)
#bnha#boku no hero academia#all might#aizawa shouta#jirou kyouka#bakugou katsuki#bakugou mitsuki#bakugou masaru#midoriya inko#midoriya izuku#makeste reads bnha#using first names as superhero names is the new trendy thing anyway#shouto's doing it#deku's using a nickname which is close enough#tenya almost did it but then changed his mind but he still did it for a little while#so come on kacchan#let's get in on this
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MANHATTAN MADNESS by Chili Peeler
Chapter 1
Jim Andrews stared through the window of the plane as it came in for a landing at LaGuardia. He had never seen anything as impressive as the island of Manhattan; it looked like every square inch of the island was filled with a skyscraper. At 17 years of age, the biggest city he had ever been to had been Des Moines. When his sister, Elizabeth, had written to him and asked him if he wanted to come visit her, he'd jumped at the chance. He felt the same urge as Elizabeth had; to get out of the backwater burg his family lived in back in eastern Nebraska. He admired the way Elizabeth had just tore out one night, leaving a note for their parents that she was going to travel and see what else was out there in the world. That had been 3 years ago and no one in the family had seen her since. Occasionally a postcard would come, addressed to him, from different cities around the country. Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas......but never with a return address. Then, a few weeks ago, a letter. And then a week later, a round trip ticket from Topeka.
The plane was coming in low now over the Long Island Sound. He'd studied a map in the family Encyclopedia Britannia; probably outdated but he doubted they had changed the name of the Sound. He looked over again at Manhattan, still not believing his sister had made it this far from home. Jim came out of the airplane entrance ramp, walking in the midst of other passengers. He moved forward, swinging his head from side to side, looking for Beth. He tried to keep in mind, as he scanned the faces around the gate, that his sister was sure to have changed in the three years she'd been gone. The crowd began to thin away, people meeting their families and heading for the baggage claim. Jim was beginning to feel dumb, standing there with his head swiveling around. "Jim?!" He looked around and there she was - his big sister, Elizabeth. Man, had she ever changed! When she's left, she'd had short brown hair and the fashion sense of any other teenaged girl from eastern Nebraska, namely jeans and T-shirts. But now there was a wild looking girl....no, woman...in tight black Lycra pants, a bright red half-shirt that let her stomach bare and a tan suede jacket with lots of tassels swinging everywhere. Her hair was now blondish, long, over her shoulders with a tight curl. "Look at my baby brother - all grown up!" Beth said as she ran up to him and gave him a big hug which he returned with equal affection. "Beth, man, I've missed you..look at you!" He let her go and motioned to her attire. "You look like a fashion model or something." "What, these old things!" Beth laughed. "When in New York, do as the Yorkers do. Come on, let's go get your bags. I'm sorry I was late...it was hell getting a taxi today." "You don't have a car?" Jim said. "No one in New York has a car. There's barely enough room for the people. You'll see. This the most remarkable city in the world..... Tomorrow I can show you around, do the tourist thing." "Sounds good to me." Jim said as they headed down the concourse. In the cab on the way to Elizabeth's place, they caught up a little on the three intervening years. Elizabeth asked about the old town, the high school, if he knew anything about any of her old friends. Jim pumped her for the things she had seen on her travels, how she liked New York, etc. Beth seemed to want to steer away from the topic of why she hadn't kept in touch with the family more; she would just say that it was probably best for everyone, then added she hadn't wanted to worry them. "So, tell me, little brother, do you have a girlfriend back there?" "Well, I've had my share but I'm free at the moment. Why? You got someone you want to set me up with while I'm here?" "No, I was just wondering. When I left, you were still in the 'girl's are yucky' stage." Elizabeth laughed. "Yeah, well, I came to my senses." Jim smiled as the taxi slowed and pulled to the curb in front of tall brick building. "This is it." Beth said as she opened her door. A few minutes later, Beth was opening the door to her fifth story apartment loft. She walked in and hit the lights as her brother carried his case in. "Holy shit! This place is great." Jim complimented her as he looked around. The apartment had real high ceiling, wood floors, cool furniture. "Glad you like it. You can put your bag in here," Beth walked over to a door and turned on the light. He went into the bedroom and dumped his bag on the bed. The room was modern looking and clean. Overhead there was a skylight that was sure to let all the light in in the morning; sleeping in was going to be tough. "You'll be staying in here. This is my room usually. I'll be sharing my roommate's bedroom." "Roommate?" "Yeah, did you think I could afford this place by myself?" "I don't know. What kind of a job do you have?" Jim asked. "I'm a hostess at a club here in town. A really trendy place. It's private, in fact." "And what, you are on a salary?" "Yeah, but most
of the money comes from tips. The member's are loaded....it's really easy work. Just a lot of smiling. Anyway, I hope you're hungry, I'm going to make us some dinner." "I'm starving...all I got was some peanuts on the flight." "Good. Go ahead and unpack and I'll get things going." Beth left him, pulling off her suede coat as she went into the living area. Jim watched her leave and for the first time thought of how attractive Beth had become. She had to know that the clothes she wore left little to the imagination. The tight pants showed off her fine legs and cute bottom. Jim bet she played on her good looks at that club of hers, flashing a smile at the old codgers who'd give her a big tip just for the illusion of her maybe being attainable. Being blessed with good looks was a pretty easy way to get by in life but he couldn't hold that against Beth. It had gotten her away from Shitville, Nebraska. Jim put his clothes in some empty drawers and took his toiletries into the bathroom. Being a neat person by habit, he opened the medicine cabinet to see if there was enough room for his deodorant and shaver. And was surprised to find the cabinet totally empty. Not a bottle of pills, not a pair of tweezers, not a jar of nail polish - nothing. He opened the drawers by the sink and found them empty as well. The absence of any girlie items anywhere in the bathroom struck him as curious. He didn't think Beth had emptied everything out and taken it into her roommate's bathroom; no reason to go to all that trouble, just take the essentials over. The bathroom looked like it wasn't even being used. Jim stowed his stuff in the drawer, kicked off his shoes and went out to see what his sister was making for dinner. "Whoa! Who is this?" Jim said as he looked at a picture of his sister and another woman near the entrance to the kitchen. "Oh, that's Julie, my roommate....well, don't walk on your tongue!" Beth said as she took a bowl out of the cupboard. Julie looked like every man's ideal woman. In the picture, she was standing next to Beth with her arm around her shoulders. Beth was probably 5' 7". Unless Beth was standing in a hole, Julie must be at least 6' 2". Brunette, almost black hair, worn to mid-back with lots of body. Her face was attractive - not great, sorta tough looking but it certainly could be overlooked. But it was Julie's body from the neck down that probably stopped men in their tracks. Julie was stacked. Big round tits with a lot of cleavage showing. 'No way those are real,' Jim thought to himself. Hips that flared nicely, plenty of meat to grab onto there. Legs that looked like she had worn out a Stairmaster. 'She looks like a fuckin' superhero,' Jim thought. Finally he moved on into the kitchen where Beth was smiling at him knowingly. "Yeah, she gets that reaction a lot," Beth said as he leaned against the counter. "I bet she does. Is that all her?" Jim said as he motioned with his hand over his chest. "No.....but she says it was the best $5000 she ever spent." "$5000?! What kind of work does she do? That's a lot of money." "Well...she's an agent, I guess. She hooks people up." Beth said. "Like how?" Jim was intrigued. "Well, she sorta acts like a headhunter." Beth continued after Jim gave her a quizzical look. "She's like a talent agent, finding people for jobs." "Oh, I see." "Don't let her looks fool you," Beth said as she opened the refrigerator and handed him a beer, "Julie's a smart cookie, too." "So how did you two meet?" "At a gym. I was living with this guy for awhile, a real jerk as it turns out, but anyway, I could use his pass fro his health club. Julie and I just got talking and we hit it off. She's probably the best friend I've ever had. She pay's for the lionshare of the expenses for this place." "Well, you've really fallen in it here......penthouse apartment, good job...it sure beats milking the cows at 5 A.M." "Oh God, don't remind
me!" Beth said as she opened a beer for herself. Jim heard the front door open. Beth did too. "That must be Julie," she said to Jim. "JUUULLLEEESS!" "YEEAHH!" "Well, come and meet her," Beth said as she took her brother's hand. They exited the kitchen walking into the dining area and there she was - Julie and the picture didn't do her justice. She was looking through a stack of mail, wearing a form fitting short dress. She looked up then and jerked her head to the side, sending her hair over her shoulder. It was quick natural movement but Jim got the feeling she had waited until they could see her before she did it. "Julie, this is Jim." "So this is your little brother." Julie said as she walked over to them, the emphasis on the word 'little'. "I'd hate to see your 'big' brother." Jim liked the fact that Julie was complimenting him on his physique. He was 5' 11" with muscle from working long hours around the family farm. Julie extended her hand and Jim shook it. "Nice to meet you, Julie." he said and meant it, willing himself not to look at her fantastic chest. Julie could be fodder for many a night of masturbation. "You got a nice strong grip, Jim. You work out?" "Nah. Just work around the farm." he said. "Baling hay, other exciting stuff." "Yeah, Lizzie's told me all about the farm life." Julie said with a wry smirk. Julie bend slightly and gave Elizabeth a peck on her cheek. Elizabeth looked at Jim after it happened but then Julie continued, "So what do you kids have planned for tonight." Jim guessed Julie was maybe 30; certainly older than he at 17 and Elizabeth at 21. Being called a 'kid' made Jim twinge but he got the feeling that was just the way Julie was. Like she wanted to get a reaction. "Nothing tonight." Beth said. "I'm whipping up some dinner and I thought we'd just relax." "I just stopped by to get another pair of shoes," Julie said. "I've got a meeting later, so I'll have to pass on dinner. I'll be back around 11. You'll still be up, right?" "Oh sure, you know me." Beth replied. "All right then, I'll see you guys later." Julie walked off toward the door to the other bedroom on the other side of the apartment. Jim watched her bottom all the way. Beth punched him in the arm to bring him out of it. "You men are all alike!" she said giggling as she went back into the kitchen. Jim followed her. "So shoot me. There's nothing like that back on the farm....Lizzie." "Don't you start with the Lizzie, too. Julie started calling me that but I don't want it to catch on. Beth is just fine." Jim heard the front door open and close again as Julie headed back out into the city for her meeting. Beth was rooting around in the cupboard, pulling out spice bottles. "Dammit!" she said exasperated. "We're out of basil....I'm gonna run down to the market and get some. Without the basil, this dish just doesn't make it." "Hey, don't go to any trouble....." Jim said as he followed her out into the living area. "The market's just around the corner. I'll only be a few minutes." She grabbed her jacket and headed for the door. Left alone, Jim wandered around. He went outside on the patio that was off the dining area and looked at the surrounding buildings in the fading dusk. He went into the kitchen and lifted the lid on what Beth was preparing; it looked like an Italian sausage dish. He roamed into the livingroom and studied the prints on the walls; they were all of women, paintings by a guy named Nagel. They reminded him of some of the artwork in the front of Playboy magazines, mildly erotic. He was walking near the door to Julie's room and the door was open, so he poked his head in. The bedroom was larger than the one he was staying in; obviously this was the master bedroom of the apartment. Same skylight, a king-size bed with black and white bedding, same sliding door for the closet and the bathroom door in the same place as in the other
bedroom. Jim was going to move back out into the apartment when he noticed something very interesting sitting on the far bedside table. He couldn't be absolutely sure it was what he thought it was; a magazine was covering part of it. He was going to walk over and check it out but he heard a key being inserted in the front door. Quickly he moved a few feet to the nearby entertainment center and made like he was looking at their music selections as Elizabeth came through the door. "Told you that wouldn't take too long," she said as she pulled off her coat. "Come on and help me set the table." "Sure," Jim said as he followed her toward the kitchen. His thoughts, however, were on what he thought he had seen in Julie's bedroom. It had sure looked like there was a pair of handcuffs under that magazine.
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HYPEBEAST - GIRIBOY SF ALBUM INTERVIEW [eng]
HYPEBEAST GIRIBOY INTERVIEW 180924
There’s so much that Giriboy wants to do. Various activities with the crew WYBH and SMTM777 producing, and his clothing brand I4P which was launch recently, Giriboy has been busy however, he says he wants to do more than the present, tougher than now. Science fiction album which was released last weekend and acrnm MV are just one of the many things he wants to do. Giriboy who wants to jump into the world of a sci-fi movie immediately. We met Giriboy who lives his day imagining himself using superhero powers everyday. Before he departs to a different space, a zero-dimensional space.
You seems busy with SMTM and lots of producing. How are you these days?
I’ve been releasing albums and making music. I’ve been making many music for SMTM and making clothes. Doing this and that really makes me flustered. During my promotions, there’s lots of times where I had to go out only after sleeping for 2 hours, or only 30 minutes.
Where did you get the inspiration for the acrnm MV?
Acrnm was made because I wanted to maximise the cool things I want to do. I used to buy a lot of branded clothings meaninglessly, and when I settled my accounts at the end of the year, I realised 80% of my money was spent on clothes. I don’t even drink or go out to play so I felt like it was a waste. I was sick of it so I stopped buying them. I was looking for clothes that I can wear for a long time and Park Sung-jin hyung came in to Just Music at the time. When I saw that hyung wearing a full set of acronym clothes, I started looking at overseas sites, ebay or grailed and bought acronym clothes whenever they release something new up on the sites. That’s why the featuring of this song was by Goretexx. Right when I made the song, I thought that the featuring has to be this hyung.
How about the inspiration for the title song Keyboard and Skyblue?
I wanted to do love songs with SF movie vibes like <Her> & <About Time>. I wrote lyrics like “After we bid farewell, I can only see you in the digital world. I want to see you in real life.” I wanted to do something unique to match the album concept.
The songs that you produced yourself seems so different. Do you have any songs you are more affectionate to?
I really like acrnm the most among all the songs made from my beats. I wanted to add some grandiosity to trap which is very trendy lately. Be why does that a lot in Korea. I sent the song to bewhy for feedbacks, and he said the song is right up his alley so I thought “okay it’s done. Let’s release it.” (laughs)
Describe the featurings in your album including bewhy with one sentence.
Yumdda: A tough hyung
The quiett: A cute hyung
Bewhy: Thumb
Goretexx: A wall. He’s really so cool he’s like a wall
Justhis: Just justhis.
Swings: Let’s skip this question. What should I say? A love hate relationship. It’s a love hate relationship.
In the last Hypebeast interview, swings said he is making a new label with Giriboy. So how is it going?
We took all the profile pictures and made album plans as well. It should be announced soon but we are all still waiting. It might even be announced tomorrow. People who already knew about it will know. There are lots of spoilers on instagram. We will announce it soon.
You have many songs about the space, and your crew is also named Space Flying (WYBH), is it because you want to escape from earth?
Yes, I totally want to get away from earth. I want to get away from this world even for just a second. I want to live in a world like <Lord Of the Rings> <Star Wars> <Alien> for just a month. I like zombies world too. I would like to have something special everyday. Like maybe I have a superpower or something. I want to go to a different world. A zero dimensional world.
Since when have you been interested in science fiction?
I liked dramas, movies, comics with unique plots when I was in high school. I love magic genres and fantasy genres. These days my favourite drama is Black Mirror. There are people who hate it because the story makes you feel bad afterwards but I really love it, I keep checking when the next season will be up. I also really really love <Her>.
Surprisingly it’s not action but it’s a romance genre. Doesn’t science fiction equals to action?
Romance can end with romance, however, in <Her> they didn’t use any special devices. In Star Wars, I even memorised the entire family tree. That’s how much I love it. (laughs)
What is WYBH crew to Giriboy?
My best friend. My closest friends in the entire world, my younger brothers. I don’t really talk much usually and I’m afraid of meeting people but even when I’m having a hard time, WYBH crew are my real friends who I can call and we can go out to have fun comfortably.
What is SMTM to Giriboy?
It’s very difficult. I didn’t have any opportunity to show myself as a producer, but this was an opportunity. I think of it as an opportunity to make someone cooler and a place I can prove myself.
What is the criteria to a good rapper, a good producer?
What’s important to a good musician is that one has to be able to get drunk in his own music. Being able to have fun while making music thinking “wow I can’t believe I made this”. And also being able to get what’s inside of you out and possessing the tools to express something same differently in your own way, that’s a good rapper.
Let’s go back to talking about fashion. When and how did you get interested in fashion?
I think it was in middle school when I saw the hyungs wearing Jordan shoes. It was when Big Bang was really popular and if Big Bang wore bape hoodies, I wanted to buy it. If you go to Apgujeong there’s lots of cool hyungs there. I didn’t have money so I only did eye shopping thinking “if I wear this with this it’ll be so cool” “I shall buy this next time”. I started doing part time jobs and earning money, so I bought Jordan and supreme once in a while. Lots of people misunderstood me when I said things about the fashion brands, but I like Gucci, Balenciaga and other brands. I just wrote it for laughs. I really wanted to own every season of vetements and raf simons, it gave me such a hard time. So badly. I am trying my best to be to be frugal. But I am in a dilemma, if I should buy two more pairs of acronym shoes. (laughs)
The brand that you launched last spring, and the first track of the album “I4P”, what does it mean?
It can be read as 148 or I four P, they are numbers appeared in my dream. The comic book #148 dropped and I woke up trying to pick it up. After that there was another incident which involves these numbers as well. I talked about this so much so if you just try to search it on internet you’ll find it. I thought of using the numbers which appeared in my dreams somewhere and when I decided to make a brand, it matched well. The slogan ‘Don’t save on sehtolc eht!’ is read as ‘don’t save on the clothes’. I wrote it spelling backwards like that so it looks cooler. (laughs) It was another phrase initially but it overlapped with Kid Milli’s Nondisclothes which was released earlier, so it was spelled backwards. It means “don’t save on the clothes”. Just wear it. There are people who wear their shoes really carefully. It makes me wonder if it is necessary to go to that extent. I want to show a culture, a movement where you can wear clothes comfortably.
What made you start this brand?
I wanted to make clothes that I can wear on a daily basis. When I made up my mind not to buy expensive brands, I thought it will be cool if I make clothes to wear myself. Also I don’t have any hobbies so I started making things. Making music and watching movies was my everything, but it was boring living life like that.
What do you think of Kid Milli’s Nondisclothes?
It’s really cool. It gives me motivation. Initially I wanted to make a brand with Milli early last year, but the middle person who was going to help us became really busy so we couldn’t proceed with it. Now we send each other clothes. The pros of doing it separately is that when we collaborate the next time, the synergy will be stronger. It will be nicer if we do well at our own things and then collaborate. And since our styles are different.
Which star did Giriboy come from?
I came from Earth’s Do Bonggu district Wang Shimri. But I want to go to a different place, a different star. To a zero dimensional space.
Is there anything else you want to say?
What I want to say to my fans is I’m really grateful to you all for liking me. I thought of quitting few years ago when it became boring to me. But because of you all who listen to my music, I gained confidence and I’m going to continue working, more consistently and even tougher than now. I think it’s only right to to show as much as how thankful I am to you all. Anyway I’m going to continue moving forward consistently so I hope you guys continue to watch over me too.
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Controlling the Spice, Part 1: Dune on Page and Screen
Frank Herbert in 1982.
In 1965, two works changed the face of genre publishing forever. Ace Books that year came out with an unauthorized paperback edition of an obscure decade-old fantasy trilogy called The Lord of the Rings, written by a pipe-smoking old Oxford don named J.R.R. Tolkien, and promptly sold hundreds of thousands of copies of it. And the very same year, Chilton Books, a house better known for its line of auto-repair manuals than for its fiction, became the publisher of last resort for Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel Dune. While Dune‘s raw sales weren’t initially quite so impressive as those of The Lord of the Rings, it was recognized immediately by science-fiction connoisseurs as the major work it was, winning its year’s Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel (the latter award alongside Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal).
It may be that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can to a large extent judge the importance of The Lord of the Rings and Dune by their thickness. Genre novels had traditionally been slim things, coming in at well under 300 pocket-sized mass-market-paperback pages. These two novels, by contrast, were big, sprawling works. The writing on their pages as well was heavier than the typical pulpy tale of adventure. Tolkien’s and Herbert’s novels felt utterly disconnected from trends or commercial considerations, redolent of myth and legend — sometimes, as plenty of critics haven’t hesitated to point out over the years, rather ponderously so. At a stroke, they changed readers’ and publishers’ perception of what a fantasy or science-fiction novel could be, and the world of genre publishing has never looked back.
In the years since 1965, almost as much has been written of Dune as The Lord of the Rings. Still, it’s new to us. And so, given that it suddenly became a very important name in computer games circa 1992, we should take the time now to look at what it is and where it came from.
At the time of Dune‘s publication, Frank Herbert was a 45-year-old newspaperman who had been dabbling in science fiction — his previous output had included one short novel and a couple of dozen short stories — since the early 1950s. He had first been inspired to write Dune by, appropriately enough, sand dunes. Eight years before the novel’s eventual publication, the San Francisco Examiner, the newspaper for which he wrote, sent him to Florence, Oregon, to write about government efforts to control the troublesomely shifting sand dunes just outside of town. It didn’t sound like the most exciting topic in the world, and, indeed, he never managed to turn it into an acceptable article. Yet he found the dunes themselves weirdly fascinating:
I had far too much for an article and far too much for a short story. So I didn’t know really what I had—but I had an enormous amount of data and avenues shooting off at all angles to get more… I finally saw that I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts, and it was, for a science-fiction writer anyway, an easy step from that to think: what if I had an entire planet that was desert?
The other great spark that led to Dune wasn’t a physical environment, nor for that matter a physical anything. It was a fascination with the messiah complex that has been with us through all of human history, even though it has seldom, Herbert believed, led us to much good. Somehow this theme just seemed to fit with a desert landscape; think of the Biblical Moses and the Exodus.
I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals. What better way to destroy a civilization, society, or race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?
Herbert worked on the novel off and on for years. Much of his time was spent in pure world-building — or, perhaps better said in this case, galaxy-building — creating a whole far-future history of humanity among the stars that would inform and enrich any specific stories he chose to set there; in this sense once again, his work is comparable to that of J.R.R. Tolkien, that most legendary of all builders of fantastic worlds. But his actual story mostly took place on the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, the source of an invaluable “spice” known as melange, which confers upon humans improved health, longer life, and even paranormal prescience, while also allowing some of them to “fold space,” thus becoming the key to interstellar travel. As the novel’s most popular and apt marketing tagline would put it, “He who controls the spice controls the universe!” The spice has made this inhospitable world, where water is so scarce that people kill one another over the merest trickle of the stuff, whose deserts are roamed by gigantic carnivorous sandworms, the most valuable piece of real estate in the galaxy.
The novel centers on a war between two great trading houses, House Atreides and House Harkonnen, for control of the planet. The politics involved, not to mention the many military and espionage stratagems they employ against one another, are far too complex to describe here, but suffice to say that Herbert’s messiah figure emerges in the form of the young Paul Atreides, who wins over the nomadic Fremen who have long lived on Arrakis and leads them to victory against the ruthless Harkonnen.
Dune draws heavily from any number of terrestrial sources — from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, from the more mystical end of Zen Buddhism, from the history of the Ottoman Empire and the myths and cultures of the Arab world. Nevertheless, the whole novel has an almost aggressively off-putting otherness about it. Herbert writes like a native of his novel’s time and place would, throwing strange jargon around with abandon and doing little to clarify the big-picture politics of the galaxy. And he shows no interest whatsoever in explaining that foremost obsession of so many other science-fiction writers, the technology and hardware that underpin his story. Like helicopters and diving suits to a writer of novels set in our own time and place, “ornithopters” and “stillsuits,” not to mention interstellar space travel, simply are to Dune‘s narrator. Meanwhile some of the bedrock philosophical concepts that presumably — hopefully! — unite most of Dune‘s readership — such ideas as fundamental human rights and democracy — don’t seem to exist at all in Herbert’s universe.
This wind of Otherness blowing through its pages makes Dune a famously difficult book to get started with. Those first 50 or 60 pages seem determined to slough off as many readers as possible. Unless you’re much smarter than I am, you’ll need to read Dune at least twice to come to anything like a full understanding of it. All of this has made it an extremely polarizing novel. Some readers love it with a passion; some, like yours truly here, find it easier to admire than to love; some, probably the majority, wind up shrugging their shoulders and walking away.
In light of this, and in light of the way that it broke every contemporary convention of genre fiction, beginning but by no means ending with its length, it’s not surprising that Frank Herbert found Dune to be a hard sell to publishers. The tropes were familiar enough in the abstract — a galaxy-spanning empire, interstellar war, a plucky young hero — but the novel, what with its lofty, affectedly formal prose, just didn’t read like science fiction was supposed to. Whilst allowing what amounted to a rough draft of the novel to appear in the magazine Analog Science Fiction in intermittent installments between December 1963 and May 1965, Herbert struggled to find an outlet for it in book form. The manuscript was finally accepted by Chilton only after being rejected by over twenty other publishers.
Dune in the first Chilton edition.
Those other publishers would all come to regret their decision. Dune took some time to gain traction with readers outside science fiction’s intelligentsia; Herbert didn’t make enough money from his fiction to quit his day job until 1969. But the oil embargoes of the 1970s gave this novel that was marked by such Otherness an odd sort of social immediacy, winning it many readers outside the still fairly insular community of written science fiction, making it a trendy book to have read or at least to say you had read. For many, it now read almost like a parable; it wasn’t hard to draw parallels between Arrakis’s spice and our own planet’s oil, nor between the Fremen of Arrakis and the cultures native to our own planet’s great oil-rich deserts. As critic Gwyneth Jones puts it, Dune is, among other things, a depiction of “scarcity, and the kind of human culture that scarcity produces.” It was embraced by many in the environmentalist movement, who read it it as a cautionary tale perfect for an era in which we earthbound humans were being forced to confront the reality that our planet’s resources are not infinite.
So, Dune eventually sold a staggering 12 million copies, becoming by most accounts the best-selling work of genre science fiction in history. And so we arrive at one final parallel to The Lord of the Rings: that of a book that was anything but an easy read in the conventional sense nevertheless selling in quantities to rival any beach-and-airport time-waster ever written. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was famously described at the height of its 1980s popularity as a book that everyone owned and almost no one had ever managed to get all the way through. Dune may very well be the closest equivalent in genre fiction.
Herbert wrote five sequels to Dune, none of which are as commonly read or as highly regarded among critics as the first novel.1 One might say, however, that the second and third novels at least — Dune Messiah (1969) and Children of Dune (1976) — are actually necessary to appreciate Herbert’s original conception of the work in its entirety. He had always conceived of Dune as an epic tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, but reading the first book alone can obscure this fact. That book is, as the science-fiction scholar Damien Broderick puts it, typical pulp science fiction in at least one sense: it satisfies “an adolescent craving for an imaginary world in which heroes triumph by a preternatural blend of bravery, genius, and sci.” It’s only in the second and third books that Paul Atreides, the messiah figure, begins to fail, thus illustrating how a messiah can, as Herbert says, “destroy a civilization, society, or race.” That said, it would be the first novel alone with which almost all media adaptations would concern themselves, so it will also monopolize our attention in these articles.
Dune‘s success was such that it inevitably attracted the interest of the film industry. In 1972, the British producer Arthur P. Jacobs, the man behind the hugely successful Planet of the Apes films, acquired the rights to the series, but he had the misfortune to die the following year, before his plans had gotten beyond the storyboarding phase.
Yet Dune‘s trendiness only continued to grow, and interest in turning it into a film remained high among people who wouldn’t have been caught dead with any other science-fiction novel. In 1974, the rights passed from Jacob’s estate to Alejandro Jodorowsky, a transgressive Chilean director who claimed to once have raped one of his actresses in the name his Art. Manifesting an alarming obsession with the act, he now planned to do the same to Frank Herbert:
It was my Dune. When you make a picture, you must not respect the novel. It’s like you get married, no? You go with the wife, white, the woman is white. You take the woman, if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to… to rape the bride. And then you will have your picture. I was raping Frank Herbert, raping, like this! But with love, with love.
The would-be rape victim could only look on in disbelief: “He had so many personal, emotional axes to grind. I used to kid him, ‘Well, I know what your problem is, Alejandro. There is no way to horsewhip the pope in this story.’”
Jodorowsky planned to fill the cast and crew of the film, which would bear an estimated price tag of no less than $15 million, with flotsam washed up from the more dissipated end of the celebrity pool: Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, Charlotte Rampling, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Alain Delon. But, even in this heyday of Porno Chic, no one was willing to entrust such an erratic personality with such a budget, and the project fizzled out after Jodorwsky had blown through $2 million on scripts, concept art, and the drugs that were needed to fuel it all.
In the meantime, the possibilities for cinematic science fiction were being remade by a little film called Star Wars. Indeed, said film bears the clear stamp of Dune, especially in its first act, which takes place on a desert planet where water is the most precious commodity of all. And certainly the general dirty, lived-in look of Star Wars, so distinct from the antiseptic futures of most science fiction, owes much to Dune.
In the wake of Star Wars, Dino De Laurentiis, one of the great impresarios of post-war Italian cinema, acquired the rights to Dune from Jodorowsky’s would-be backers. He secured a tentative agreement with Ridley Scott, who was just finishing his breakthrough film Alien, to direct the picture. Rudy Wurlitzer, screenwriter of the classic western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, wrote three drafts of a script, but the financing necessary to begin production proved hard to secure. Thus in 1981 the cinematic rights to Dune, which Herbert had sold away for a span of nine years to Arthur P. Jacobs back in 1972, finally reverted to the author after their extended but fruitless world tour.
Yet De Laurentiis remained passionate about his Dune film — so much so that he immediately entered into negotiation with Herbert to reacquire the rights. Having watched various filmmakers come close to doing unspeakable things to his creation over the previous decade — even Wurlitzer’s recent script reportedly added an incest plot line involving Paul Atreides and his mother — Herbert insisted that he must at least be given the role of “advisor” to any future film. De Laurentiis agreed to this.
He was so eager to make a deal because Dune had suddenly looked to be back on, for real this time, just as the rights were expiring. His daughter, Raffealla De Laurentiis, had taken on the Dune film as something of a passion project of her own. She was riding high with a brand of blockbuster-oriented, action-heavy fare that was quite different from the films of her father’s generation. She was already in the midst of producing Conan the Barbarian, starring a buff if nearly inarticulate former bodybuilding champion named Arnold Schwarzenegger; it would become a major hit, launching Schwarzenegger’s career as Hollywood’s go-to action hero over the next couple of decades. But the Dune project would be a different sort of beast, a sort of synthesis of father and daughter’s priorities: a big-budget film with an art-film sensibility. For Ridley Scott had by this time moved on to other projects, and Dino and Raffealla De Laurentiis had a surprising new candidate in mind to direct their Dune.
David Lynch and Frank Herbert. Interviewers were constantly surprised at how normal Lynch looked and acted in person, in contrast to his bizarre films. Starlog magazine, for example, wrote of his “sculptured hair [and] jutting boyish features,” saying he was “extremely polite and well-mannered, the antithesis of enigma. Not a hint of phobic neurosis or deep-seated sexual maladjustment.”
David Lynch was already a beloved director of the art-film circuit, although his output to date had consisted of just two low-budget black-and-white movies: Eraserhead (1977), a surrealistic riot of a horror film, and The Elephant Man (1980), a mournful tragedy of prejudice and isolation. He would seem to stand about as far removed from the family-friendly fare of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s new Hollywood as it was possible to get. And yet that mainstream of filmmakers saw something — something having to do with his talent for striking, kinetic visuals — in the 36-year-old director. In fact, Lucas actually asked him whether he would be interested in directing the third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, whereupon Lynch rather peremptorily turned the offer down, saying he wasn’t interested in making sequels to other people’s films. But when Dino De Laurentiis approached him about Dune he was more receptive. Lynch:
Dino’s office called me and asked if I had ever read Dune. I thought they said “June.” I never read either one of ’em! But once I got the book, it’s like when you hear a new word. And I started hearing it more often. Then, I began finding out that friends of mine had already read it and freaked out over it. It took me a long time to read. Actually, my wife forced me to read it. I wasn’t that keen on it at first, especially the first 60 pages. But the more I read, the more I liked. Because Dune has so many things that I like, I said, “This is a book that can be made into a film.”
Lynch joined screenwriters Eric Bergen and Christopher De Vore for a week at Frank Herbert’s country farmhouse, where they hammered out a script which ran to a hopelessly overlong 200 pages. As the locale would indicate, Herbert was involved in the creative process, but kept a certain distance from the details: “This is a translation job. I wouldn’t presume to be the person who should translate Dune from English to French; my French is execrable. It’s the same with a movie; you go to the person who speaks ‘movie.’”
The script was rewritten again and again in the months that followed, the later drafts by Lynch alone. (He would be given sole credit as the screenwriter of the finished film.) In the process, it slimmed down to a still-ambitious 135 pages. And with that, and with the De Laurentiis father and daughter having lined up a positively astronomical amount of financing from Universal Pictures, who were desperate for a big science-fiction franchise of their own to rival 20th Century Fox’s Star Wars and Paramount’s Star Trek, a real Dune film finally got well and truly underway.
Raffealla De Laurentiis and Frank Herbert with the actors Kyle MacLachlan and Francesca Annis on the set of Dune, 1983.
Rehearsals and pre-production began in the Sonora Desert outside of Mexico City in October of 1982; actual shooting started the following March, and dragged on over many more months. In the lead role of Paul Atreides, Lynch had cast a 25-year-old Shakespearean-trained stage actor named Kyle MacLachlan, who had never acted before a camera in his life. Nor, at six feet tall and 155 pounds, was he built much like an action hero. But he was trained in martial arts, and he gave it his all over a long and difficult shoot.
Joining him were a number of recognizable character actors, such as the intimidating Swede Max von Sydow, cast in the role of the Fremen leader Kynes, and the villain specialist Kenneth McMillan, all but buried under 200 pounds of fake silicon flesh as the disgustingly evil — or evilly disgusting — Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Patrick Stewart, later to become famous in the role of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played Paul’s martial mentor Gurney Halleck. In a bit of stunt casting, Sting of the rock band the Police, deemed “biggest band in the world” by any number of contemporary critics, took the role of one of the supporting cast of villains — a role which would, naturally, be blown out of all proportion by the movie’s promoters. To a person, everyone involved with the shoot remembers it as being uncomfortable at best. “I was taxed on almost every level as a human being,” says MacLachlan. “Mexico City is not one of the most pleasant spots in the world to be.” The one thing they all mention is the food poisoning; almost everyone among cast and crew got it at one time or another, and some lived with it for the entirety of the months on end they spent in Mexico.
Universal Pictures had given David Lynch, this young director who was used to shooting on a shoestring budget, an effective blank check in the hope that it would yield the next George Lucas and/or the next Star Wars. Lynch didn’t hesitate to spend their money, building some eighty separate sets and shooting hundreds of hours of footage. Even in Mexico, where the peso was cheap, it added up. Universal would later claim an official budget of $40 million, but rumblings inside Hollywood had it that the real total was more like $50 million. Either figure was more than immense enough to secure Dune the title of most expensive Universal film ever. (For comparison’s sake, consider that the contemporary big-budget blockbusters Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom cost approximately $40 million and $30 million respectively.)
The shoot had been difficult enough in itself, but the film first began to show the telltale signs of a doomed production only in the editing phase, as Lynch tried to corral his reams of footage into a finished product. He clashed repeatedly with Raffealla De Laurentiis and Universal, both of whom made it clear that they expected a relatively “clean,” PG-rated film with a coherent narrative through line for their money. Such qualities weren’t, of course, what David Lynch was known for. But the director had failed to secure final-cut rights to the film, and he was repeatedly overridden. Finally, he all but removed himself from the process altogether, and Raffealla De Laurentiis herself cobbled together much of the finished film, going so far as to shoot her own last-minute bridging scenes whilst layering clumsy voice-overs and internal monologues over the top, all in a (failed) effort to make the labyrinthine plot comprehensible to a casual audience. Meanwhile Universal continued to spew forth a fountain of hype about “Star Wars for adults” and “the end of the pulp era of science-fiction movies,” whilst continuing to plaster Sting, looking fetching in his black leather, across their “Coming Attractions” posters and trailers as if he was the star. Dune was set for a fall.
And, indeed, the finished product, which arrived in theaters in December of 1984, provided a rare opportunity for every corner of movie fandom and criticism to unite in hatred. The professional critics, most of whom had never read the book, found the film, even with all the additional expository voice-overs, as incomprehensible as Raffealla De Laurentiis had always feared they would. Fans of the novel had the opposite problem, bemoaning the plot simplification and the liberties taken with the story, complaining about the way that all of the thematic texture had been lost in favor of Lynchian weirdness for weirdness’s sake. And the all-important general audience, for their part, stayed away in droves, making Dune one of the more notorious flops in cinematic history. Just like that, Universal Pictures’s dream of a Star Wars franchise of their own went up in smoke.
Whatever else you can say about it, David Lynch’s Dune is often visually striking.
Seen today, free of the hype and the resultant backlash, the film isn’t as bad as many remember it; many of its scenes are striking in that inimitable Lynchian way. But it doesn’t hang together at all as a holistic experience, and its best parts are often those that have the least to do with its source material. Many over the years have suspected that there’s a good film hidden somewhere in all that footage Lynch shot, if it could only be freed from the strictures of the two-hour running time demanded by Universal; Lynch’s own first rough cut, they point out, was reportedly at least twice that long. Yet various attempts to rejigger the material — including a 1988 version for television that ballooned the running time to more than three hours — haven’t yielded results that feel all that much more holistically satisfying than the original theatrical cut. The film remains what it was from the first, a strange hybrid stranded in a no-man’s land between an art film and a conventional blockbuster, not really working as either. At bottom, the film reflects a hopeless mismatch between its director and its source material. What happens when you ask a brilliant director with very little interest in plot to film a novel famous for its intricate plot? You get a movie like David Lynch’s Dune. Perhaps the kindest thing one can say about it is that it is, unlike so many of Hollywood’s other more misbegotten projects, an interesting failure.
Lynch disowned the film almost immediately. He’s generally refused to talk about it at all in interviews since 1984, beyond dismissing it as a “sell-out” on his part. The one positive aspect of the film which even he will admit to is that it brought Kyle MacLachlan to his attention. The latter starred in Lynch’s next film as well, the low-budget psychological-horror picture Blue Velvet (1986), which rehabilitated its director’s critical reputation at a stroke at the same time that it marked the definitive end of his brief flirtation with mainstream sensibilities. MacLachlan would go on to find his most iconic role as the weirdly impassive FBI agent Dale Cooper in Lynch’s supremely weird television series Twin Peaks.
The Dino de Laurentiis Corporation had invested everything they had and then some in their Dune film. They went bankrupt in the aftermath of its failure — but, in typical corporate fashion, a phoenix known as the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group soon emerged from the ashes. Just to show there were no hard feelings, one of the reincarnated production company’s first films was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
Surprisingly in light of the many readers who complained so vociferously about the liberties the Dune film took with his novel, Frank Herbert himself never disowned it, speaking of it quite warmly right up until his death. But sadly, that event came much earlier than anyone had reckoned it would: he died in 1986 at age 65, the victim of a sudden blood clot in his lung that struck just after he had undergone surgery for prostrate cancer.
Dune did come to television screens in 2000, in a rather workmanlike miniseries adaptation that was more comprehensible and far more faithful to the novel than Lynch’s film, but which lacked the budget, the acting talent, or the directorial flare to rival its predecessor as an artistic statement. Today, almost half a century after Arthur P. Jacobs first began to inquire about the film rights, the definitive cinematic Dune has yet to be made.
There is, however, one other sort of screen on which Dune has undeniably left a profound mark: not the movie or even the television screen, but the monitor screen. It’s in that direction that we’ll turn our attention next time.
(Sources: the books The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn and Frank Herbert by Timothy O’Reilly; Starlog of January 1983, May 1984, October 1984, November 1984, December 1984, February 1985, and June 1986; Enter of December 1984; the online articles “Jodorowsky’s Dune Didn’t Get Made for a Reason… and We Should All Be Grateful For That” and “David Lynch’s Dune is What You Get When You Build a Science Fictional World With No Interest in Science Fiction” by Emily Asher-Perrin.)
As for the flood of more recent Dune novels, written by Frank Herbert’s son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, previously a prolific author of X-Files and Star Wars novels and other low-hanging fruit of the literary landscape: stay far, far away. ↩
source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/controlling-the-spice-part-1-dune-on-page-and-screen/
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