Changing the world, even when you fail

Alejandro Jodorowsky and the glory of not getting what you want

Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune is a confusing phrase, but the documentary itself does absolutely everything right in terms of a compelling story, an incredibly charismatic protagonist, and a genuinely inspiring and uplifting message. Alejandro Jodorowsky is the bonkers auteur who made surrealist cult films like El Topo and The Holy Mountain with a mentality more akin to a prophet or a cult leader than a film technician, so it’s no surprise that he was drawn to Frank Herbert’s zeitgeisty eco-messianic novel. If Jodorowsky is any kind of prophet then he’s the Anti-Hack. For him it’s all about the passion, the politics and the image. Making perfectly constructed emotion-manipulating and money-making machines is not interesting to him at all. For a while in the 70s there were so many serendipities raining down onto him that it seemed the universe wanted Jodorowsky to make Dune, and it would brook no contradiction. It’s also depressingly inevitable that a dementedly overambitious project by an idiosyncratic and unapologetic genius like Jodorowsky would fail to thrive in Hollywood’s sterile earth.

This film about the abortion of another film reveals what a magnificent thing Dune could have been. Seventies sci-fi painter Chris Foss designed space ships and buildings. French comic artist Moebius designed the characters and costumes. The villainous, genocidal Harkonnens were styled by H.R. Giger, later famous after he was poached by Ridley Scott for production design on Alien. The grossly obese and megalomaniacal Baron Harkonnen would have been played by– who else?– the grossly obese and megalomaniacal Orson Welles. It’s both hilarious, typical and tragic that Jodorowsky failed to tempt Welles with money, but immediately secured a “yes” when he promised food. Salvador Dalí was to be the Emperor of the Galaxy (for about two or three minutes, because he wanted to be paid $100,000 a minute). Mick Jagger was on board, playing an androgynously beautiful version of the role that eventually went to Sting in David Lynch’s version. Imagine that as a casting session: who’s the best actor, Jagger or Sting? It’s like, do you want to eat the rotten wormy apple or the rotten maggoty orange?

Diane, let me tell you how not to tell a story

Or: The good, the bad and the ugly of refusing the audience’s expectations

Coop wants coffee, gets congealed oil. Audience wants bizarre irrational drama, gets poorly written and confusing soap opera.

Twin Peaks is probably one of the best TV shows that totally deserved to be cancelled. Despite hysterical hype, the first series– and parts of the second– was beautiful, bonkers, perfectly plotted, brilliantly cast and played, a one-of-kind triumph of weirdness over rationality, both diegetically and in the harsh real world landscape of American television. It’s taken me nearly a year because I have a life as well, but I recently made it all the way through the DVD set from the pilot to the last episode. It took me nearly a year despite the fact that I skipped and fast forwarded a lot after the hasty, premature and garbled wrapping up of the Laura Palmer murder plotline, i.e. the whole bloody point and raison d’etre of the show, a mystery that creators/producers Mark Frost and David Lynch never wanted to solve but found themselves obliged to wrap up swiftly when they were overruled and edged out by the network.

From then onwards the show mostly wobbles erratically between being an embarrassing but still occasionally entertaining parody of itself and being totally unwatchable because the writing, storylining, acting, direction and random, gratuitous guest actors are all so horrendous. Lara Flynn Boyle goes from a passably plausible senior high school student to dressing like an old lady and behaving like some deranged cougar in a soft porn movie. Her erstwhile boyfriend pretty much does randomly end up with a deranged cougar in a soft porn movie scenario that isn’t even in Twin Peaks, and certainly has nothing to do with anything else that’s going on. Sherilyn Fenn follows an opposite but equally crap trajectory, going from strangely hilarious and disturbingly arousing idiot-savant jailbait…

(UPDATE: Video removed “due to a copyright claim by CBS Media”, the petty twats. Try searching for Audrey Horne, One Eyed Jack’s, cherry… but as always, do so at your own risk and be prepared for some messed up results.)

… to… er, a rather sensible and therefore boring manager of a hotel, where she has absolutely no adventures whatsoever and certainly has no need for the kind of oral dexterity demonstrated above. Joan Chen goes AWOL, becomes a French maid, then turns into a wooden knob, all for no good reason. Meanwhile Piper Laurie seems to get drunker and more slurred every week, though I’d probably self-medicate too if I was forced to act some of the dialogue she’s lumbered with.