The movie "Dune" is in my chocolate-y drink!*

I think a guilty pleasure is defined as something that you like even though you know you shouldn't. I don't have a lot of guilty pleasures, but as far as they go, I think David Lynch's Dune ranks pretty high. By that, I mean both that I feel really guilty about liking it and I like it a lot. Of course on the other hand, I don't really like it sincerely. And if you like something ironically, can it actually be a guilty pleasure? And can something directed by someone as esteemed as David Lynch be considered a guilty pleasure?

Theoretical analysis of what constitutes a guilty pleasure aside, we watched Dune in my film studies class earlier this semester and it just reaffirmed that it's a great bad movie. Like I said before, I don't like it in a sincere way. I've never read the book and I don't really understand the whole storyline. I mean, I understand it on a basic level enough to enjoy the movie, but... actually... no. There's something about a messiah/savior (which, isn't that present in every sci-fi movie EVER?), and there's spice which, I think is a drug, and there's a duke and a barron and a queen and Virginia Madsen who shows up at the beginning and the end and that's it and to be honest, it's very confusing and I don't understand the movie AT ALL. And it's not the good I-just-watched-a-David-Lynch-movie type of confusion, like you get after you watch Mulholland Drive. It's the I-just-spent-three-hours-watching-what? type. But I don't really care. The movie's very pretty (Lynch paid such painstaking attention to every visual aspect of the movie, and it really shows), and I like it in a sort of Ed Wood so-bad-it's-good kind of way.

Let me explain why:

1. Kyle MacLachlan

I find Kyle MacLachlan very attractive. I don't really know that I can explain why but... I just do. I even watched that piece of shit show In Justice to see him - and for the record, he looked like Peter Gallagher sans crazy eyebrows. And speaking of MacLachlan's hair, it verged on mullet for the entire film and I'm not going to lie, I found that kind of awesome (again in a sort of I can't believe how bad this is way). For some reason, I found his internal monologue voiceovers funnier than the others. Probably because they were the most prevalent. He kept saying "There must be a connection between the worm and the spice" or something like that.

2. The awesome music by... Toto.

Perhaps one of the best parts of the whole film was when Paul conquerors the worm by, well, mounting it. And what could be better to accompany this rather homoerotic feat? A swelling musical score with a great big 80s guitar riff (you know exactly what I'm talking about) that, 22 years later, induces giggles in the entire class. It's strangely out of place in the oeuvre of David Lynch, who keeps his films very ambiguous with regard to time.

3. Patrick Stewart

Patrick Stewart's appearance was yet another part of the movie that made us all laugh. Because randomly he appeared and we all thought "Is that...?" It was.

4. Sting

Sting has little to no dialog in this movie. But that doesn't matter. He just makes lots of funny faces. And at one point he wears what looks like a winged diaper. Like the overall plot of the movie, it doesn't make much sense. But that makes it all the more awesome.

5. "Walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm"

Paul says this line when he and his mother get left for dead in the middle of the desert. And it resonated with me for some strange reason. I kept repeating it to myself because I knew I had heard it somewhere. It finally hit me later: Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" (aka the video with Christopher Walken). It seems like such an odd line to quote in a song.

When I flipped through this week's Best Buy flier, I noticed that Dune was on sale for $5.99. I almost picked it up, but I realized that it was the recent TV miniseries, not the David Lynch extravaganza. That's too bad, because $5.99 seems like quite the appropriate price for this ultimate guilty pleasure.



*If the movie Dune was actually in Dane Cook's chocolate-y drink, then I would imagine that his chocolate-y drink would be very pretty to look at but would not actually taste very good.