![]() ![]() In an early scene, a very sand-adjusted woman (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) explains to Oscar Isaac and Paul that the planet’s sand is basically a death sentence for humans and machinery alike. There are at least three scenes wherein Oscar Isaac, playing Paul’s rich hot dad, stares at the sand and yells, “Desert power!” The oppressed and exploited native population of Arrakis live underneath the sand, having learned to adapt to its cruel madness over generations when they’re outside on top of the sand, they wear special suits and breathe through special tubes and still sometimes get absolutely pummeled to death by sand. At least 90 percent of the movie is about how sand is absolutely wild, conceptually and in practice. I simply refuse to go any further here vis à vis the plot of Dune, which is so famously insane that it has destroyed the lives of people much more intelligent than I, but suffice to say that Paul spends a lot of the movie on a planet named Arrakis that is made up entirely of thick, hot sand. In Dune, Timothée Chalamet plays a young man who lives some millions of years in the future, on an entirely different planet than Earth, but who is nonetheless named Paul. Save for my dead grandfather and Dune and the Wikipedia page for sand, nobody is talking about this. ![]() The most upsetting thing he ever said to me, however, was that I should never play in sandboxes or any kind of sand-accumulation site, because the sand could, without warning, overpower and instantaneously suffocate me. When I was a kid, my grandpa, a kind of rude but good doctor (may he rest in peace), used to warn me about the dangers inherent in doing all sorts of everyday things: walking under an automatic garage door, lest its mechanism fail the moment I was beneath it, instantly decapitating me eating sushi and getting a brain-eating parasite. Unlike most people, I have always stopped and pondered dunes. (On the Wikipedia page for sand, under “composition”: “The exact definition of sand varies.” Excuse me … ?) I started thinking pretty hard about sand last week as I watched Dune (2021), which is a new Denis Villeneuve movie about how crazy dunes are if you really stop to ponder them. And unlike the sea, which is water, nobody can even agree on what sand is. ![]() From Dune (1984) to Dune (2021), sand has long been just as sexy and freaky of an antagonist as the sea, albeit underappreciated. It is the sea’s frenemy and eternal next-door neighbor, the Joan Crawford to its Bette Davis, the Ashley to its Mary-Kate. ![]() I am here to suggest that while the sea has historically gotten more cinematic credit, there is an even scarier and sultrier natural element that has been quietly doing the villain work all along. At best, the sea will drown a protagonist and put them out of their earthly misery, but more likely, it will erotically torment them, providing the stage upon which a suspiciously intelligent shark can flirt with Blake Lively’s mortality and old hubristic white men can barely survive a ton of preventable boat accidents and freakish underwater creatures can try to kill Kristen Stewart and Naomi Watts and Robin Wright can have sex with each other’s sons.īut I am not here today to talk about the sea, which has gotten enough attention as it is. If the sea shows up in a movie, you can be confident that someone will be grievously injured by it and/or have poorly considered sex in it. The sea, Hollywood often suggests, is a net-bad, but in a sort of sensual way. Many movies have been made about the terrifying, lusty power of the sea. Forget the sea, it’s time to recognize sand, and then run away from her, screaming. ![]()
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