I started without an intro last time and it didn’t look right. There needs to be an intro, otherwise the transition from the title of the Substack to the body of the Substack is too harsh—a glass of ice water to the face, the abrupt blast of an airhorn in an otherwise quiet room. So let this act as an intermediary…collect your thoughts…until the letter begins…….now:
Hello/What’s Up everyone. I’m back. I skipped writing a Substack last week. It was a shocking experience, actually, because at the time I looked up my own Substack using the Substack search function, and underneath the title it said “Launched 20 days ago.” And I was like…TWENTY days??? I assumed I had been doing this for at least several months. I think I burned up a lot of “Substack fuel” by firing off so many letters back to back as soon as I started. Thus began a season of reflection…
Not for the first time, I sat down to ponder existential concerns such as WHY write a Substack at all, especially when that Substack has no real conceit or format or reason for existence other than, like, “I am going to write about some…things…” This is a deeply haunting question for people like me who write this Substack! I wish there were some rock-solid justification I could provide for sitting down every week and typing this up—ideally a justification that would make it seem worthwhile for everyone involved and not at all self indulgent or weird. But there are no clear answers in this life and moreover, there is no certainty! The fact that I have a Substack is just the way things go sometimes! It’s up to all of us to accept it and live with it. One of my goals as time goes on is to spend fewer and fewer words per letter describing my own uncertainty re: the letter itself. I don’t want to come off as hedging, like, “if you hate my Substack, that’s actually fine because even I’m not sure if it’s interesting lol!!,” but rather to get “real” about how I am trying to quit analyzing and meta-analyzing every little decision I make, especially as it relates to writing. As discussed in an earlier letter, if you hate my Substack I actually think that is literally EPIC and AWESOME, and I cannot thank you enough!!!
Okay. That part is done. New paragraph! Right now I am in the public library, which is my new writing/working spot. It’s better than a coffee shop in that you don’t have to buy any coffee, and there are books and Spanish language Cosmo magazines to read if you get bored. The only negative is that I am sitting at a study carrel, which is a furniture item that has strong negative associations for a lot of people who went to college and used the library there. Just the sight of a carrel transports me to a very scary place where it’s 4 a.m. and I have 27 JSTOR tabs open and I’m trying to write a paper called “Technology’s Effect on the Metaphysical and Political Realities of a Globalizing World. That is a real title of a paper I wrote for a real class that was literally just called “Globalization.” I have no idea what department it was even in?? All I remember is that I wrote the paper at a carrel.
Regardless, it is great here. The library is an incredible place. In fact, between writing the last paragraph and this paragraph, I went to the bathroom, and guess what: IT SMELLED AMAZING!!!
Anyway. It is time to get into the real meat of this letter which is that I saw Dune this week. What I talk about next is potentially going to be alienating for anyone who liked Dune or likes movies like Dune, but I hope that there will be others who relate to me.
My problem with Dune is my problem with every single action/adventure/fantasy/superhero movie I have ever seen which is that I CANNOT understand them?? At all? As in: I can’t figure out which character is which, what anyone is doing, why anyone is doing what they’re doing, or the overarching “deal” of the entire film in general. I usually give myself 45 minutes at the start of the movie to focus as hard as I can and try to figure out what’s going on, and if I can’t figure it out I allow myself to space out and think about whatever I want. And I have almost never made it past the 45 minute mark!
To give you a sense of what I mean, I will enumerate below everything I gleaned from the movie Dune. Here is what I got:
Timothee Chalamet’s character is named Paul Atreides and he is the son of the main guy of the House Of Atreides, which is…something…
Paul has the power to use a special voice that can make other people do whatever he wants. Sometimes he tries to do the voice and it doesn’t work, but then if he tries it again it usually does work.
Paul also has the power to use his sword to make himself get outlined in a blue strobe light type thing, which sort of protects him from getting killed by other people’s swords but not 100%
There’s a place called basically Iraq (??) where there is something called spice (??) which is just kind of in the air (?????) and people harvest it. To me, spice evoked either the drug spice or like, spices, like paprika. I am still unclear whether it refers to either or neither of those things. I also don’t think you ever saw anyone harvest or use the spice. Not sure what it had to do with anything.
At some point there is a scene where a big old guy walks around with a parasol and it looks very funny
There is another scene where a different big old guy floats into the air and is wearing a sort of black onesie type outfit with a long mermaid tail and it also looks very funny
Jason Momoa is in it and looks pretty normal and young even though for some reason I thought he was like 60 and insane looking
There are helicopters that are kind of like normal helicopters but brown and the propellers flap instead of spinning. I guess this is supposed to be cool but I really didn’t care
There are huge sand worms in the sand that respond to rhythm
Something about Paul Atreides going to Iraq (the spice…planet?) and taking over it, but not in a bad way—in a way that is nice, unlike the previous people who took it over, who were evil. My understanding is that this is basically the main plot of the movie but there is no way for me to be sure.
Zendaya walks around and looks back over her shoulder a lot
Paul Atreides has dreams that I guess are premonitions. There’s one where Jason Momoa dies? Can’t remember if he really dies after that
People are always saying shit like “The Tereakken people do not fear the sand. For they are masters of the sand.”
Paul Atreides kills someone with his sword towards the end
Paul Atreides’ dad I think dies
Paul Atreides’ mom can also do the magic voice
No idea how it ends but someone told me that Zendaya goes like, “To be continued!”
I am not exaggerating at all: This is me genuinely racking my brain and trying my absolute hardest to remember what happened in Dune. And the same is true for Star Trek, Lord Of The Rings, whatever the fuck the Marvel Universe is, and anything other film of that nature. Is that normal? My understanding is that children like these movies, so the fact that it takes 150% of my mental energy to even try to enjoy them makes me wonder if I have some sort of brain disease. I swear I have perfectly fine intelligence in every other way. I have never in my life tried this hard to comprehend something and not been able to comprehend it.
Part of my issue is that the fantasy “style” in movies like Dune usually reads as ridiculous to me—after only like 15 minutes of context, I have trouble buying into it emotionally when a character is freaking out about the Water Planet getting taken over by some guy named Orli’dorn or whatever. It feels arbitrary. There’s a lot going on in the real world already, and to me, inventing an entire universe whole cloth where everyone wears robes for some reason is not that exciting.
I can actually get into fantasy a little more in book form, because there’s more time and space to immerse yourself in the world. But in a movie where you’re supposed to understand the deal with the sand worms based on one freaky guy going like, “It has been seven thousand years since Igarenth banished the sand worms,” I really can’t do it.
Still, none of that is enough to explain why I not only don’t enjoy but also literally cannot compute Dune-type things. If I had time I would absolutely do a scientific study on this issue using an MRI machine and other tools of that nature but I am busy. Please let me know if you are the type of person who has those resources and I will pitch my study idea to you privately!
In conclusion: have nothing but respect for writers and enjoyers of the fantasy/action/whatever Dune is genre, and I get that these stories are allegorical and have deeply human themes and are part of a long literary tradition etc etc (stop hedging Jewel!!!) but the bottom line is they don’t make sense to ME!!! And that is the final word on Dune from my Substack. Share if you agree.
That is all for today. I will leave you with this Instagram quote I saw that I thought was going to be inspirational but turned out to be about laundry:
Bye bye all!!!
Jewel