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When it comes to pretension, Dune isn’t exactly left wanting. In print, the books are a progressively abstract and deranged space opera about a young man and his son, the 3,500-year-old god worm. Onscreen the films are long and portentous screensavers that seem to really hate bald people, or bafflingly bad HBO prequel shows. But two media where Dune has yet to hit full pretension are photography and poetry – until now.
Because next week, Dune cinematographer Greig Fraser and Dune actor Josh Brolin will present an exhibition of photography and poetry from Dune: Exposures. You may have heard of Dune: Exposures. It’s a £50 coffee table book of behind the scenes photography that came out in February. Not that you will necessarily know it as that, because the book bills itself as an “exploratory artistic memoir”.
So, for example, one page has a nice picture of Timothée Chalamet, but on the opposite page is this poetic description: “Your cheekbones jump toward what are youth-laden eyes that slide down a prominent nose and onto lips of a certain poetry.” It is less a traditional poem and more the sort of thing ChatGPT would blurt out if you asked it to describe a crayon drawing of a melting Cabbage Patch Kid. There’s also a photo of Florence Pugh sticking her tongue out, which inspired Brolin to write: “You can feel her cells preparing for a thinner air, a higher ground.” And you can’t, really, because it’s just a photo of a woman in her 20s killing time by arsing about a bit.
In fairness to Pugh, that’s probably what she thought she was doing too. People are always taking pictures on film sets. Sometimes they’re for personal archives, or social media, or maybe an electronic press kit. Very, very rarely do they end up printed on high-grade paper and published in expensive poetry books. The effect of this – the combination between candid photography and self-consciously important poetry – is a bit like letting all your Instagram captions be written by someone who really, really wants to have sex with you.
As a book for sale on Amazon, Dune: Exposures has already run the gauntlet of meaningless reviews like “Good product. As advertised” and “I use for collection and reading”. But to move away from the page towards a bricks and mortar exhibition space is something else entirely. Because it’s one thing to read this stuff, but quite another to stand in a roomful of it, surrounded by people who are desperate for you to know that they are capable of understanding it on a profoundly deep level.
Of course, this might not be the case. The gallery might be full of people who have turned up just because there’s a chance that Josh Brolin might be there, and they could get to do a selfie with him wearing a Thanos glove. Although, either way, it does sound borderline intolerable.
I should point out now that I’m aware I’m being far too mean about this whole endeavour. The photographs in Dune: Exposures are nicely evocative, regardless of what poems they’re presented with. And if you’re going to do this sort of thing for any film, it should probably be Dune. Everything about Dune is such a big swing that it invites ridicule, from its bombastic, relentlessly self-serious tone to its aggressive refusal to admit that a film about a desert full of giant willies with anuses for mouths might actually be a bit silly.
But Dune works because of this laser focus on being big and grand and self-important. And, because of this, Dune: Exposures – full of the kind of poetry you should really hear whispered by a bored actor in a bad perfume advert – works too. It is all part of the same universe. Had the exhibition been a bunch of photos of cats dressed as Reverend Mother, or if Josh Brolin had penned a bunch of high-minded tone poems for, say, Deadpool 2, this whole thing would have fallen flat on its face. But this is Dune, so there is no upper limit to the pretension it can adopt. Frankly, long may it continue.
