XXI. Interview with… Kwasu Tembo, on Dune

Lady Jesssica, Dune (2021)

The below interview between Kwasu Tembo and Krystal Conley has been published with permission from the journal Studies in the Fantastic, in which the original interview and review of Dune can be accessed here.

What inspired you to write this piece?

The aporia of apathetic hyperbole. Like many people I know, if a film or show I’m looking forward to is released, or even announced, I find that I’m always-already braced, angry and sad in anticipation of the deluge of apathetic hyperbole that will inevitably inundate the text. I feel that this fatigued nihilism, this excessively vapid weltschmerz, impels as much as it impedes our accelerated creation, consumption, and discourse of pop culture. I don’t like that feeling. Things are more than Damoclean enough. This Phaedrean pharmakon -  being braced, angry, and sad -  is a bad tonic. This type of attritionaly enervating but inexhaustive participation is heavy in the gut. And whether or not one might argue that to be located in the Commons of contemporary popular culture is necessarily to be braced, angry and sad, still — it doesn’t forestall scanning trades and blogs and comments sections and aggregators for a favourable consensus pursuant to, in a very real sense, the accreditation (but not necessarily acceptance) of the weight of your hope, interest, and enjoyment of intellectual properties.

I’m not talking about success in terms of box office returns, an infinite present-to-hand escapism, or focussed locus of hatred guaranteed by voided Content qua reciprocal processes of (re)production in the form of renewals, reboots, or repetitions. I’m talking about how increasingly heavy it has become for me to want something I’m anticipating to be good. Dune was no different.

The entire ritual was the same. Read a bulletin concerning WB giving Denis a shot at adapting the ‘unadaptable’, the inchoate, the seminal, the beloved, the impenetrable, the mysterious opus of Frank Herbert. You read about casting. This inevitably circumscribes an oftentimes snide, puerile, or (over)reactive stampede of terrified and terrifying fanaticism and zealotry commodified as backlash. Then you cycle through the precessional doubts, criticisms which, like Baudrillard’s Ecclesiastical assemblage - often feels like a pallid extravagance convened and conventional in its self-aggrandizing controversy.

We’re used to shouldering such a dense agglomeration of imaginings about something that doesn’t (yet) exist. In the simulation, what’s presented precedes presentation. Yes, some of it is performative, trolling. Most of it is couched in this prohibitive, exclusive withholding purism whose defining attributes are nostalgic vitriol and vehemence. Excitement dies, easier and easier per annum, in this din. Nothing for a while. Then production stills, some shaky BTS bystander footage, a teaser for a teaser, a first-look, production stills, a word from a writer, producer, talent, the Studio. Then the whole process starts again and steadily increases in intensity; elliptically ongoing until an official trailer, a second trailer, an international trailer, press, premiere, and finally release. And you find yourself handing over your 200 Cedis and you’re braced, angry and sad in the dark before the opening titles have come up.

I find save utter ignorance, this half of the ritual of contemporary pop culture consumption is, for me, as inevitable as it is unenviable. The second half is, if even only ever so, different. Now the text exists. You’ve consumed it, for me often several times when it’s something like Dune. Now, You can study it, compare it, read it, parse it through, with, and against what came before it (in the sense of the precessional discourse as well as, in the case of Dune the film qua adaptation and adaptations).

Now you can attach whatever feelings or experiences you had going in and coming out to something. Now the oftentimes hyperbolic apathy preceding the text’s arrival can be tempered with reflection. Now analysis is possible. Opinion can be measured, comparisons made. Proofs can be provided, arguments fashioned. A defense prosecuted. In a bid to countermand what often feels like an adrenalised and metastatic but also sophistic apathetic hyperbole - the Menoean paradox in accelerated, digital form - I attempted to exorcise this braced anger and sadness in my pop culture experience, to (even if temporarily) redeem what can feel like my burdensome sense of enjoyment and appreciation. This took the form of  writing what rightly feels to me to be an encomium of Denis’ adaptation.

For this attempt to be possible, worthwhile, or successful for me or anyone else, I had to set a self-imposed condition to prevent the tenacity of apathetic hyperbole from undifferentiating the encomium from the charge, from letting love elide with and slide into snobbery, as a friend put it. That condition was as deceptively simple and singular as it was severe: be honest.

Jodorowsky’s Dune

You mentioned in your piece that there were many areas you could have delved into but refrained from doing so. How difficult was it to pick what to analyse regarding Dune?

Kenophilia. It’s an inversion of kenophobia or horror vacui, a fear of empty spaces. I think this inversion outlines how I went about choosing what to analyse. This is because I suspected, as far back as the first-look images released by WB showing ornithopter and Atreides armor designs, that the approach Denis seemed to have decided to take was one I described as military minimalism or space warrior chic. Immediately, this aesthetic made me think of Jodorowsky, the Gesamtkunstwerk blueprint of his storyboard bible, Lynch’s adaptation and his conventional idiosynclassic distorted automatism. Surreal or no, both seem to be marked by an antipodal aesthetic which I describe in my essay as a type of high baroque, something quintessentially space operatic.

There are, as I tried to even cursorily intimate, a range of concepts, images, aspects of performance, photography, and transliteration that could occupy an analysis far lengthier than mine more than comfortably. However, I felt that all of these are inextricable from the triadic adaptational tension between Jodorowsky, Lynch, and Villneuve which seemed to me to be predicated on a binary opposition: kenophobia contra kenophilia.

While Jodorowsky and Lynch seem to, like inveterate kenophobics, be desperately intent on treating their adaptation as a vehicle of and for excess and suprasaturation, Villneuve seems to relish the empty space. While the former two fill the indistinct impressionistic lineaments of story and world alluded to by Herbert with a maximal expression of auterueal idiosyncrasy, Villneuve treats the text like an aesthetic (not narrative, as the narrative plot set down in the first Dune book is to me pretty clear) empty set, to borrow from Badiou’s reading of Cantor. Figuratively and literally, Denis seems to approach - with reverence, passion, and wonder - this powerful impressionistic vagueness of the Dune text that is an inextricable, recessed, non-represented part of any and all adaptations, but also, paradoxically, constitutes them.

It is from and because of Herbert’s rich void that the excrescences of Lynchian surreality and Jodorowskian bombast can emerge. What fascinated me about Villeneuve’s effort is the feeling that he attempted to do the opposite, to represent the strangely wyrd and haunting immersive vagueness that I feel is at the core of the text. I admire his navigation of empty space, and the risk of the attempt, the creative and commonsensical means of achieving something definitionally self-contradictory - to represent what/from which presents, to let a desert be a desert. I decided to set aside perhaps more concrete areas of discussion to try and analyze this strange effect of evacuated grandiosity Villneuve seems to achieve in his adaptation.

Shai-Hulud, Dune (2021)

What was the most difficult part of writing this piece?

Kenophilia. Based on everything I’ve been reading in the past two or so years — Harman and Badiou, in particular — it’s a fitting paradox to encounter the problem of being naturally prolix about nothingness, void, emptiness. The irony here was that expressing kenophilia can manifest as kenophobia. In trying to not only describe but defend Denis’ Dune as an example of why nothing is something, so to speak, talking and thinking about and through emptiness can result in something very full.

In short, it was difficult to conform to the two-odd minute read-time of a typical film review. In simply typing up my notes, going through my WhatsApp chats about the film with friends in South Africa, Canada, and the U.K, rewatching Lynch’s version and Jodorowsky’s documentary, it was clear that I was well beyond that bourn. Trying to be Appolinian - meticulous albeit restrained - about my passion for the Dune diegesis was a challenge.

What are other aspects of the topic that you hope future scholars will investigate?

Multum, non multa. In other words, this tension between saturation of content — whether in a single piece or an entire media ecology — and an evacuation of Content as content. How contemporary audiences, who as a default are conditioned to not so much consume but rather endure the inundation of circuits and canopies of Content that I think defines contemporary media. How can a text, franchise, or auteur succeed in this milieu without relapsing into apathetic hyperbole which, in a world whose absurdity seems increasingly hypertrophic, is the only option where satire and parody are no longer available. So, regardless of whether one accepts the position I take up in my piece, either in part or entire, I hope that the question of whether less can ever be more in the supersensorium is considered both worthwhile and pursued.

The original review can be accessed here.