E for Effort: 2 things from March
E for Effort is my ongoing review series where I write about recent art, film, and music. This instalment features one album and one movie.
Vultures 1 — Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign
Freedom is a great gift to grant yourself. Kanye West is one of the freest guys I know of.
Only in granting yourself the gift of freedom, the license of doing whatever – truly whatever – you want, that you can come up with great deranged lines like “Beautifulbigtittedbuttnaked women just don’t fall out the sky you know” or (sung with great sincerity and slightly off-key) “I know I got a nice whip, but I hoped that you and me could be of one Accord”. Rap has always been a great medium of freedom – one of the genre’s best preserves is its licenses to say whatever you want and not be persecuted. No other musical genre has taken freedom of speech as far as rap has. To see modern artists castrate each other over expressing things in a politically correct way is miserable to watch. Many of our culture’s foremost castrating-shamans have tried to get Kanye under the knife several times, but each instance of public humiliation has never deterred him for long or stopped him from pursuing new projects. You might say “he’s rich, he’s fine, he doesn’t need to care about what other people think”, but how true is this really? Think about real life: how many wealthy people duck out the picture and retreat into their luxurious shadows after just one public misstep? Most people, rich or poor, wouldn’t have the balls to go through the vitriol and persecution that Kanye has and come out the other side still pursuing their ideas, nor the creative insight and inspiration to channel their experiences into future projects.
Vultures 1 sounds like freedom after yet another long spell of people trying to hold him down — it sounds like someone who’s just glad to be in the studio and messing around, which is to say that it sounds like nothing in particular, it doesn’t have a consolidated vision as past albums have had, it merely sounds free and pure: music-making as an exercise. Messing around and mixing stuff together to see if something will come up. Most of the time, something does. That’s all I really have to say about it; the individual songs don’t warrant much attention beyond the simple pleasure of listening to a competently-produced song with cool features and catchy lyrics. The overall thing is a fun experience, but it’s not significantly different from his previous stuff, which is fine. His greatest stroke of genius on this album was the football chant in “Carnival”.
Dune: Part Two – dir. Denis Villeneuve
It’s an indictment of the barrenness of the culture of our time that the only way our movie-makers can think to interpret a story like Dune is as a grandiose fantasy that is nevertheless rooted in contemporary events — a mirror version of our own times, but grotesquely magnified in scale and grandeur with CGI effects.
I liked Dune: Part One, it was nicely, demurely marvellous without being too showy. It should have won Best Picture at the Oscar in 2022; now it’s too late. At some point, one of the Dune movies will have to win Best Picture, only I feel that this whole franchise is going to get more tedious and less pleasurable from here on out – viewers are only going to get more burdened by its own struggle to outshine its previous parts and it will drag the whole world down into its bitter struggle of oneupmanship with itself. The movies will always have to find marvellous new tricks to try, because the plots themselves essentially just rehash the same old provincial power struggles. (By the way, there is a certain type of movie enjoyer who insists that Dune must be split into infinitesimally smaller and smaller parts, that what David Lynch attempted in trying to fit the whole book into one movie is sacrilege, and that the way the current Dune franchise is developing is the best way to do an adaptation, because now you can really immerse yourself in the world-building, really appreciate the complexity of the novel. Look, if you want to appreciate the complexity of the novel then, uh, go read the novel?) Such provincial power struggles must have seemed pretty psychedelic in Herbert’s time but are now stale and typical in ours. The bad guy is called "Vladimir", how original.
The Fremen are clearly meant to be read as some kind of “third world” freedom fighter, the "intifada", while the Harkonnens are coded as the skinheaded neo-Nazis that are supposedly taking over civilised Europe, and the House of Atreides and the Emperor are meant to represent the liberal democratic order of the West… The visual clues are so clear: the Harkonnens are skinheads, dressed in black, pasty white, brutal, and FAT; meanwhile the Fremen are stylish in loose-fitting linen, gritty, ethnically diverse, and "real". The power struggle happens over the desert just like many of the modern wars between the West and the Middle East. Nothing about the movie conveys an authentic sense of being of another world or time, of being in any way more advanced than our current moment (8 millennia earlier than the events of Dune). The movie is stylistically visionary and sets a new bar for franchise blockbuster movie-making (or at least, has picked up the bar from where it was lying and being kicked around on the floor) but it’s not visionary in soul. Its spirit is small, it cannot begin to imagine a way of life, of mannerisms and values, that could be vastly different from ours; its notions of power and honour are not even drawn from anywhere new, fictional, or fantastical but rather in reference to past movies that have set the template for this sort of thing. The hero falls from his initial grace, joins a band of outsiders that he ‘tames’ or appeals to in some way to obey his lead, they storm the citadel in order to regain the hero’s throne. Material that when supplemented with sci-fi world-building perhaps rewards patient reading in a novel, but that doesn’t necessarily warrant two movies to a book.
There is no true difference between the House of the various planets, unlike in reality, where there are real differences between people of different countries, let alone eras. In our rendition of Dune as seen through the eyes of American filmmakers of the 2020s, the evil people all talk the same way, the good people all talk the same way, everybody arches their brows and lifts their chin up to look dignified and makes bland ironic statements. They all drop to a whisper when they want to say something portentous. There’s always some sassy female character hiding somewhere who’ll just pop out randomly and deliver some unfunny remark; in this case, it’s Chani’s lesbionic Mediterranean BFF who looks exactly like the first thing you think of when you think "Girl in Military".
Dune 2 was a 3-hour long movie that felt like 4 hours, an unsatisfying slog that trudges through the same timeworn themes and templates but simply on a grander scale. I couldn’t even appreciate the visual effects or costumes as much in this one, because of how pressured I felt to do so. Everything that they could have done, they did. There were multiple crowd scenes that showed gigantic ordered Mecca-like crowds in glamorous scale, and made me wonder if they used an AI tool to stretch the image. The costumes were plentiful, but for what purpose beyond novelty? Why was Florence Pugh wearing a Joan of Arc-style get-up? She was not chivalric, she looked like a celebrity attending the Met Gala. Why did Paul’s mother have so many outfit changes as the Reverend Mother, why was she wearing colour even during seemingly unceremonial occasions? Why did the Harkonnens have to brutally and superfluously kill so many of their servants? just to make a point of their cruelty, a point we already understood from the first movie? Why was the architecture of the Sietch Tabr so ornate and grand in parts, but the areas for dining and hanging-out so basic, boring, and longhouse-like, with everyone sitting on the floor? Because it’s more real that way, because it shows how observant and pious the Fremen are in their ancestor worship, the only tradition that grounds their nomadic lifestyles, and then how self-denying they are towards personal comforts? (The Global South-coded communal worship of ancestors and longhouse living arrangements posed as an implicit moral statement against Global North-coded individual identity and prestige.) Desert people can have a super ornate facade and hall of sacred water but not a single piece of elegant desert furniture…?
More things annoy me about our glorious desert freedom fighters. There was zero chemistry between Paul and Chani - theirs was an awkward and stupid romance, with Zendaya being so expressionless that you have to wonder who gave this woman a career. A bad actress must at least have the saving virtue of being a screen beauty, but Zendaya looked so awkwardly bobble-headed and childish in her still suit, with a permanent scowl and a dead look in her eyes. She was also the only Fremen who had a clean face throughout the whole movie, despite engaging in multiple battles and supposedly being a battalion leader. Everyone else got their faces caked with blood and grime except for her. Who is this bitch and why is everyone in Hollywood working so hard to protect her? Add to the tedium was the roll call of A-list actresses making dramatic appearances one after another (Zendaya, Florence Pugh, Lea Seydoux and Anya Taylor-Joy in one movie is really TOO MUCH, only David Lynch can pull off having multiple beautiful women in one movie and that’s because none of them carried the immense baggage of fame that Dune’s brand ambassador A-list actresses do). It’s awful because nothing distinguishes the women from each other; not their acting nor the ways their characters are written, and the longer you think about it, nothing distinguishes their present performances from their roles in previous movies either. All of these people always just play their sly and nondescript selves, they are always just playing the nothing - the emotional chasm - that is modern woman.
Denis Villeneuve, if on the off-chance you’re reading this, here’s some advice for you. Nix the close-ups of the Chanel spokesmodels and lean into the weird desert people mysticism stuff. I haven’t watched David Lynch’s Dune, but people keep saying he tried to pack too much into it, it’s all over the place, it’s weird. Why should something that takes place on an imaginary planet in 10,000 AD be anything close to what we can recognise as normal? Get “The Cowboy” from Mulholland Drive, get the Fremen to start moaning some weird chant whenever they greet the Muad’dib. Get Kanye West to write it. His mysterious desert project in Saudi Arabia seems more interesting and futuristic than Villeneuve’s version.