Strange Days

My personal weirdness continues unabated...

This past week, I quoted a friend of mine when he made a great point. He looked at our national condition and properly observed “Americans should not feel this way.”

I, of course, agree completely.

I had a strange realization today, one that isn’t anything major, as a matter of fact, it is excruciatingly minor, but it was revelatory.

I’m not sure how many Dune fans are out there. I liked the book when I read it back in my early college years of the late 70’s. I found Frank Herbert’s treatment of the desert planet Arrakis and his creation of the various civilizations and factions of the empire confronting each other in a struggle for the control of Arrakis and its spice fascinating.

Maybe it is because it paralleled my own political awakening, it stimulated me to really dig deep into what my personal values and philosophies were becoming. Coming out of the disastrous Carter years, the layer cake of interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion in Dune, were eerily similar to the war that was beginning with a terrorist state in Iran and our continuous competition with the Soviet Union.

I didn’t care for the cartoonish 1984 movie and approached the HBO Max 2021 version with a jaundiced eye, having been burned once already.

But I liked it. The casting was spot on and in those actors, I saw the mental image I have carried in my head for Duke Leto of House Atreides (Oscar Issac), Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) , Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) and Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin). The Fremen were much closer to the book than the 1984 version. Stellan Skarsgard and Dave Bautista as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and Beast Rabban Harkonnen was spot on.

I especially thought the casting of Timothée Chalamet as Paul and Zendaya as Chani, worked well.

I did like it. The writing was Herbertesque, to coin a term, and I thought Denis Villeneuve’s direction was superb. I was hooked and was looking forward to the second installment.

Until today.

Today, I read that there was a movie at Cannes that drew a historic standing ovation – eight and a half minutes, as I found out. The movie? It is called “Bones and All”, an adaptation of a so called “Young Adult” novel about two cannibalistic lovers who embark on a coming of age, journey of self-discovery, cross-country trip.

Starring of course, Timothée Chalamet – who showed up in Cannes in a blood red pantsuit that should have covered the assets of an actress. Very gender bending.

I thought OK, a horror flick at Cannes, no biggie – but the glee with which a pretty much standard story seemingly came from the cannibalism angle. The effusive praise coming from the entertainment press and movie pundits was a little disgusting, well it was just strange.

The media then chronicled young Chalamet’s rising star by mentioning his work in 2017’s “Call Me By Your Name” about a 17 year-old upper class French boy entering into a homosexual relationship with a 24 year-old American graduate student. Critics begged us to watch as the two “discover the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will alter their lives forever.”

I know actors act, and the are not the characters they portray, but those two facts about Chalamet made me sad – no, sad isn’t it was more aggressively disinterested. I lost all interest in seeing Chalamet inhabit the skin of Paul Atreides.

Silly, right?

It is hard for me to accept that a product of a culture that celebrates underage gay relationships and cannibalism could do justice to a character that opposes everything wrong with our culture. I began to sort of feel guilty for liking Chalamet’s performance in Dune, as if I had been suckered into a world I was not supposed to enter.

I’ve no idea why my demeanor changed with this news. I wasn’t considering anything remotely connected to any of this. I guess I have been desensitized to the totally crappy downturn of our culture. I thought I had reached a point where nothing was shocking, but this just really struck me.

That’s when I thought about the fact Americans should never feel this way.

You know, like the sand is shifting under your feet because there is a big assed sandworm coming.

Weird, right?

Maybe I’m the one who is messed up.