Is RED communist or republican?
Sickening rewriting of Little Red Riding Hood by the Donald
MARGARET ATWOOD’S RED RIDING PROPHET
A FEMINIST CRY IN THE DENSEST COLD WAR SITUATION
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Margaret Atwood committed a major crime against male-dominated society as well as female-descending society. She imagined a society in which women are entirely marginalized and rejected except a small elite minority but since they are sterile they have to find a way to get children they cannot conceive children or carry them to anything looking like birth.
So Margaret Atwood imagines a society in which a class of surrogate mother will have to be ritualistically impregnated by the Commanders, the elite men of the elite families, in public and following clear rules. This solution is absolutely obscene. No medical assistance and no checking if the Commanders, the elite men in these elite families are fertile or not.
That’s absolute absurdity.
This book has been adapted to the silver screen in 1990 and was still valid in that Cold War period in which it appeared, targeting, of course, a possible communistic evolution of the USA towards such a society. But today we are no longer in this simple-minded situation: The Cold War has been out for more than 25 years. But the West cannot survive if they do not have a scapegoat, an enemy and the West is the best manipulator in history and they can always manage to produce an enemy out of nothing, thus negating all natural laws of chemistry.
They were told it was not good to target Islam, so now they target Shia Islam. Is it better? Of course not. And then they target women in Islamic society . . . Unluckily women in Iran are an essential class of workers at all levels, though women cannot be imams or the masters/mistresses of ceremonies in public executions. Shucks! Nothing is that simple.
And North Korea or China are not even easier. There might not be many women in the political elite but women are vastly present at all levels of the economy, including at the executive level. Shucks! Again. Nothing is simple. Then they try Russia. Same remark and the rich males we know in the west are executives who want to move out of Russia, with all their assets and money, hence who want to emigrate and steal, loot, pillage Russian capital at the same time. Shucks! A third time! Nothing is simple.
So American television insists as much as possible on the existence of a Russian mafia, of an Armenian mafia who bring drugs to the US and cheap women for prostitution. In an older period, it was the Georgian mafia and Schwarzenegger was the main Soviet bully that brought them down in the USA. Things have changed then and yet are always the same: these rotten Russians not only are good at hacking and computing, but they can even hack American missiles and compute their trajectory into the sea. Shucks! One more time! The missiles were not Russian but American. So who pretends to be the cop of the world?
There was the same tendency in Great Britain in the late 1980s under Thatcher and the Conservatives: the country was invaded by Russian, Armenian and why not Polish mafia. That will produce Brexit eventually. But I just wonder how they would have been able to build the equipment for the Olympic Games if they had not had Polish workers to cast the concrete and move the stones.
We can maybe consider Atwood was good in 1985, still not bad in 1990. But in 2017 what can it produce when the authoritarian trend is in the USA itself and in the White House first of all. The authoritarians were elected, not with a popular vote though, but that proves nothing since Mussolini was elected, Salazar was elected, Hitler was elected. The only one who was not elected was Franco.
This book shows very clearly that democracy is not a protection against such trends because it is in New England that the evolution takes place. A little bit of white supremacist magic potion and magic powder and the best and most democratic American society can easily fall down into the chasm of H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and definitely many more including here Margaret Atwood.
MARGARET ATWOOD — THE HANDMAID’S TALE — 1985
I read the book after I watched a couple of times the old film with Faye Dunaway of 1990. And I do think it was a wise choice. The book is a lot more powerful because of the treatment of time. The book is often considered as a dystopia and that could be right if we considered the shift from modern time USA to that world a possibility. It is based on the idea that one day, because of all the manipulation of sexuality essentially by women’s liberation movements the country does not produce children anymore, women have become sterile and this very assumption is absurd because fertility is a dual carriageway. This sounds a lot like a society deciding to victimize women because some genetic accident prevents the production of children, and in the book, only the elite is considered.
The book is a constant movement from the past before the transformation (and the main character was married to a certain Luke and had a daughter, which does not sound like sterility); the time after this period when the society slowly and radically changed from what it used to be to a strict totalitarian state that aimed and still aims at getting women out of the public space, out of all professions, out of banks and financial dealings: everything has to be covered up by the authority of a man. At the same time, women are seen as the only way to survive as a species, to survive as a state, to survive as a society and as such their power is enormous.
Women are divided into several groups identified by the color they wear. At the top, you have the Wives and their Daughters (who are daughters produced by the Handmaids from the sperm of the Commanders) who dress in blue. Then the Aunts who are responsible for the training of the next group, the Handmaids. The Aunts are dressed in some kind of brown. Then the Handmaids who are the women who give birth to children for the only sake of the elite couples, here reduced to a Wife and a Commander, though we do not know what he commands. These Handmaids are dressed in red and their only task is to get pregnant and deliver a healthy child, normally from the Commander, but with wide possibilities to compensate for the probable sterility of these Commanders. Commanders and most other security people who are only men are dressed in black. Then you have the Marthas who are the servants of this elite, dressed in grey. Then you have the Econowives who are poor women who are married and may have children: they do not work and they are the wives of all the men who work. They are dressed in rather nondescript colors and worn out dresses. Note there is also a clandestine group of women who are kept underground for the sole entertainment of the elite Commanders and foreign businessmen. Their fate is short lived most of the time since their function is to be “beautiful” and satisfy the fancies of the males that come to their special hotel. The mass of all other women are sent to the colonies where they are worked and contaminated to death within two or three years. Altogether then seven classes of women.
The corresponding hierarchy of men is not given. We only meet doctors, some shopkeepers, one driver (of a commander of course) and then security men called Guardians of the Faith and there is an allusion to spies named Eyes. Though political power is entirely in the hands of men, we hardly see it and the only power we know is that of the Wives and their Daughters. Note we here have the same pattern as in a Jewish society where women are transmitting Jewishness to the children (here reduced to daughters). They do quote the Old Testament and only the Old Testament, though they have modified a few verses. They are absolutely not of Christian inspiration as for this position of women.
To go back to the constant shifting of time, after the first two older layers we have the layer when the main character is captured when trying to escape from this country to go picnic on the other side of the border with her husband and their daughter. The daughter is of course immediately given to a Mother and becomes a Daughter. The mother, the main character, since she is fertile is turned into a handmaid. So we have the time of this long transition in some kind of center under the sole authority of Aunts.
Then the main character will be appointed — for the first time — to a Commander and his Wife and that’s where the timeline becomes blurred. The main character loses the perfect consciousness of the timeline that is hers. At the end she speaks as if she had been in that position for more than four months, which is the normal time allotted to a Handmaid to become pregnant, otherwise, she is moved to another Wife and Commander, or to the colonies. In other words, the vast majority of women are expendable and this fact is in total contradiction with the idea that women transmit life and guarantee the survival of the species.
The most interesting aspect of this book is the fact that it is all told by the main character and from her point of view. The flashbacks of varying depth and all description of events and people are captured through her eyes and at times she wonders if she is telling the truth. Her liaison with Nick, the driver, arranged by the Wife she is supposed to obey, is thus at times described from different points of view, though always by the main character who says the first version is not correct, then the second version is not correct either, and we can doubt the third version is correct. This succession of three versions shows that this main character has lost all sense of identity and she is rediscovering some personal dimension within this liaison that will make her pregnant. If she can tell this episode in three different modes, it’s because it has little to do with the standard daily exploitation she is the victim of. Here she is entering a field of emotions that cannot be reduced to a cold inhumanity and has to be endowed with some richness.
The end has only a vague connection with the end in the 1990 film and I won’t tell you what it is. We just have to wonder what the main dimension of this story is. We could make it a dystopian metaphor of the real world. This metaphor could be seen as feasible in 1985 at the ‘end of the USSR, but it was no longer valid in 1990 since the Berlin Wall had fallen and the USSR was going to dissolve. Nowadays it is just plainly difficult to consider it as a metaphor for what is happening in some countries that are heavily under military control and operations, including from foreign powers, or of countries that the USA wants to classify as dictatorship, like Iran and North Korea, though as for women Saudi Arabia is a lot more backward than any other country in the world.
Then we can wonder if it is a parable. But the tale does not lead to any positive ending for the society at large. It is a lot more the description of segregation, racism, slavery, concentration camps, exclusion and exploitation, supremacy in, one word, white of course: there is NOT ONE BLACK person in the whole book. The only minority that is actually present is the Quakers who are seen as dangerous because they help people to evade from this prison. There is a mention of Jews but they have been forced to emigrate with a choice between emigration or genocide.
It is definitely a supremacist society but after all, non-whites have been eliminated. Then it is the supremacy of an elite shared between women on one hand and men on the other. All along all those — here women — who want to step out of this society only have one option: suicide by killing themselves or suicide by having themselves executed in a way or another. That’s a really dehumanizing, devitalizing and decerebralizing society with no escape, no future, no salvation. And as such, it is an extraordinarily fascinating book in the present trump times of ours.
MARGARET ATWOOD — HAROLD PINTER — FAYE DUNAWAY — THE HANDMAID’S TALE — 1990
I will only consider here the 1990 film with Faye Dunaway, not the novel beyond, nor of course the recent adaptation as a TV series that is not available on the DVD market.
We are in the United States of America after it became the Republic of Gilead. I will not enter the Biblical meaning of this word that can be used to designate some regions of the old Biblical Israel and three characters in the Old Testament, among them the father of Jephthah, that crazy general who swore to have the first person coming to him after the battle if it is a victory sacrificed to God. He thus has to put his daughter to death.
But that gives you the flavor of the story. In this Republic of Gilead, men are absolutely dominant and they have reinstalled or reinstated the standard total submission of women to go against the total dissolution of society before due to sexual promiscuity, abortion, family planning, contraception, artificial insemination, gender orientation, etc. Women have to go back to their main and only function in that male-dominated society: to give birth to babies conceived in the normal natural good old intercourse between a man and a woman. And that’s where the story becomes bizarre or even squalid.
Women are, like for men in Brave New World, divided into clearly defined groups that have to dress in a particular color. Grey is for the plain servants. Then, red is for the handmaids, those whose sole function is to procreate babies with the master of the household they are attached to. White is for some kind of religious characters who participate in various rites. Maroon is for the women who are controlling the handmaids, assigning them wherever they are needed, and of course, punishing them when “necessary.” Blue is for the ladies of the various households whose babies are produced by the handmaids attached to them and their husbands. All men are in black. There is a last category of women: those who cannot be integrated into any category, particularly as handmaids and are the “girls” of some parties for the masculine elite. In other words, they are the escorts or working girls of the elite men of the society.
The disease that is the cause of this situation is purely surreal, causing the sterility of most women and those who are not sterile are used as reproductive human chattel. The film though seems to hint that the man, Fred, Kate, the handmaid the story is centered on, should provide with a child, is sterile, and his sterile wife, Serena, suggests Kate should use the services of her husband’s chauffeur, Nick. All that is of course sordid. During that time Fred, the Commander, is systematically hunting down the resistance with the clear objective of exterminating them. Today we call that genocide. Apart from Blacks and gays, the concept of resisting people is rather vague and we can wonder how this elite can live if there is no proletariat, even lumpen-proletariat to work for them.
Fred falls in love with Kate, but that brings no pregnancy. Nick, on the other hand, falls in love with her too and she with him and that brings a pregnancy as if without equally shared love there is no pregnancy possible. When Serena learned that Fred had taken Kate to one of the elite’s parties and that she had worn her own black clothing instead of her red dress, she becomes furious and wants a vengeance. On the other hand, Nick and Kate want to escape Gilead with their future baby.
That’s the dramatic knot in the thread of that story, a Gordian knot actually and it will have to be cut, but how and for what future?
The fact that this old novel and this here old film have been remembered for a TV series has, of course, to do with the election of the present President of the USA. The rise of bigotry and populism in the USA today is seen as dangerous. Just the same way The Man in the High Castle, an old novel stating the same type of dystopia centered on men essentially has been brought back to life by Amazon Prime, this Handmaid’s Tale, centered as it is on women, had to be brought back to life too. The present period in our globalized world is bringing up the question of refusing change and even dreaming of a full U-turn and going back to what the world was in the past, the Old Testament, in this case, A victory of Japan and Germany in 1945 in The Man in the High Castle. The pessimists are going to say that will lead to the Third World War. The optimist will say that God or man’s rational wisdom will prevail and the Singularity of Intelligent Machines will bring humanity eternal life and absolute peace with no work what so ever to do. The dream of a permanent siesta or farniente. Though it may very well be a Matrix that leads to eternal slavery and war.
POUL RUDERS — TJENERINDENS FORTAELLING — THE HANDMAID’S TALE — MICHAEL SCHONWANDT — ROYAL DANISH THEATER — 2000
This recording of this opera is rather frustrating since the visual part of it which are important and autonomous as for the whole musical production are not provided of course. There is no full recording of the opera available on the market, or YouTube. We are thus reduced to this audio version which is luckily attached to an important booklet that provides descriptions of all the visual episodes, most of them without music at all. I must say though that the newly produced TV series adapted from the novel has motivated Norman Frizzle to release a short section a later production of the opera, in an English version, on YouTube, published on Sep 30, 2017, (2006) The start of a complete performance preservation from the English National Opera’s first production in English of the powerful opera version by Poul Ruders (music) and Paul Bentley (libretto) of the Margaret Atwood novel. The camcorder was a first-generation digital Canon, the primitive video processed and bumped up to HD (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlixRXz17ME).
Another musical adaptation of the novel was produced in January 2013 by Chris Garrard who put on YouTube on March 28, 2013, three highlights of the three parts of his chamber opera. It is interesting to see that more modern version of the story, even if we cannot have the whole opera. The three highlights are available as follows. The Handmaid’s Tale — Highlights (Part 1) Part 1 of the edited highlight of The Handmaid’s Tale. Based on the novel by Margaret Atwood. Composed by Chris Garrard. Dramaturgy by Lore Lixenberg with the cast and crew. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACY8BKATx0I&t=91s. The Handmaid’s Tale — Highlights (Part 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtwDRwRHhzk. The Handmaid’s Tale — Highlights (Part 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvnrJESvsjM&t=8s. The composer gave an interview on January 15 to The Oxford Culture Review, https://theoxfordculturereview.com/2013/01/15/the-handmaids-tale-an-interview-with-chris-garrard/.
To add another adaptation in October 2013 I will choose the Royal Winnipeg Ballet production of The Handmaid’s Tale, Choreographer Lila York, Composer James Macmillan, main dancer Amanda Green (as Offred). You can see a short presentation of a rehearsal at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVQOzKGFE0c. There are also a few excerpts published at the time in the press of by the RWB.
But it remains a fact that the first musical adaptation is Poul Ruders and it is worth a lot in the way it deals and processes the problem of women’s sexual exploitation, if not enslavement. It all starts with a Biblical quotation from Genesis, the story of Jacob. The opera only quotes Genesis 30:1–5 but the reference is, of course, clear to every listener and they have a wide excerpt in mind. Let me quote Genesis 30:1–13:
“30 When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister; and she said to Jacob, ‘Give me children, or I shall die!’ 2 Jacob became very angry with Rachel and said, ‘Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?’ 3 Then she said, ‘Here is my maid Bilhah; go into her, that she may bear upon my knees and that I too may have children through her.’ 4 So she gave him her maid Bilhah as a wife; and Jacob went into her. 5 And Bilhah conceived and bore Jacob a son. 6 Then Rachel said, ‘God has judged me, and has also heard my voice and given me a son’; therefore, she named him Dan. 7 Rachel’s maid Bilhah conceived again and bore Jacob a second son. 8 Then Rachel said, ‘With mighty wrestlings, I have wrestled with my sister, and have prevailed’; so she named him Naphtali.
9 When Leah saw that she had ceased bearing children, she took her maid Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife. 10 Then Leah’s maid Zilpah bore Jacob a son. 11 And Leah said, ‘Good fortune!’ so she named him Gad. 12 Leah’s maid Zilpah bore Jacob a second son. 13 And Leah said, ‘Happy am I! For the women will call me happy’; so she named him Asher.”
I quote this longer passage because of the repetition of the situation: using a handmaid, in those days a servant was closer to a slave than to a salaried worker, and these handmaids, servants or slaves were not Jewish. They were “Arabs” or “Egyptians” as they are called in the Old Testament. Jacob uses his wife’s maid twice and gets two sons. Then he uses his wife’s sister’s maid to produce two more sons. This double duality is extremely heavy in the Old Testament. We must also keep in mind that Abraham will do the same thing with his wife’s maid to get his first son, Ishmael and that then his wife will give birth to Isaac. This wife will request the expulsion of Ishmael and his mother to the desert, clearly to die there, but they were saved by God and Ishmael became the ancestor of all Muslims later on. This reference to the Old Testament is of course discussed and criticized by many, though it is difficult to really ignore that the Old Testament considered this situation as rather banal and Solomon will also have some kind of a love affair with a certain Queen of Sheba who was not a Jew and this love affair is referred to with reverence in Jewish, Islamic and Ethiopian traditions. Strangely enough, the Christians are more or less minimizing these stories.
The end of the story is more ambiguous than in the novel and in the 1990 film. Offred is arrested but the Commander has not been assassinated by her and Nick does not play a big role. She is more or less arrested for her “fornication” though it was imposed on her by the Commander. So we don’t know where she is going and what is going to happen. She says herself: “Whether this is my end or a new beginning >I have no way of knowing. I have given myself over in the hands of strangers. And so I step into the darkness or else the light.” Strangely enough, she seems to be the only one who believes there is maybe some light. The society that had been described here is absolute as the fate of failed Handmaids. Either the colonies to die under toxic and excessive work, or the Jezebel’s, the entertaining shady house where the male elite and male foreign visitors can relax in forbidden goods, comfort and pleasures. There is no light in that.
Apart from that, the opera follows rather well the story, though closer to the novel than to the older film. This enables the composer of keeping many flashbacks to the “time before” when Offred was a woman married to Luke and having a daughter. These flashbacks also portray the transformation of the old society into an absolute puritan and fundamentalist regime governed by males, excluding blacks, homosexuals, welfare people, and women. This transformation is visually ^provided by the opera (we only have descriptions of this visual presentation) but the words are particularly clear and Offred is Offred in the time of the story and a (body)-double plays her role in the flashbacks. This splitting of Offred into two characters is also very pregnant about the total uprooting of handmaids who are supposed to forget their past.
At this level, we have to consider the production and the music. The production runs into a problem without the visual show in front of our eyes. Female characters are by far dominant in numbers and they are apparently all of them very close in range with five mezzo-sopranos and four sopranos. That makes it difficult for us to follow most of the scenes. Since this version is the original in Danish it is also slightly difficult to follow what is being said, if you are not used to Danish. But apart from this difficulty (due to the fact it is a live recording and not a studio recording that could have slightly differentiated the various voices), we must say the music is often surprising and even disturbing. It uses in many transition moments noise as well as music. These noises could correspond to something projected onto the screen used on the stage, but it also creates a universe of metallic strong powerful at times discordant noises that wrap us up into a very frustrating sound universe. On the other hand, the music is quite modern in its lack of harmony and often softness. It is hard just like the suffering of these women. It is distant and cold just like the fate of these women. It can even be erratic and disturbing just like the split of these women between their remembered past and their submission to a life that has no past and no future. The system would like them to become nonchalant in this doom, but it is impossible and the music reminds us of this impossibility in its very shrill and often broken discordance.
This remark of mine has to be applied to the flashbacks in which the music or the noise is not becoming in any way softer or sweeter. The flashbacks are not sweet memories and soft recollections. They are dramatic nightmarish haunting visions that cannot in any way either be tamed into virtual souvenirs of a happy time, or eradicated and uprooted and expelled from the handmaids’ memory. It is in no way the memory you could cherish. It is a read-only repetitively-random haunting memory that can never be stopped, curbed or pushed aside. The music is perfect for that purpose. And when we watch the small section uploaded online by Norman Frizzle we really think the whole video should be edited and provided to the public. The sound recording of the opera makes us think it should be a priority.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
THE HANDMAID’S TALE — SEASON 1–2017
The first season of this series starts with the failed escape and ends with the arrest under the “plotting maneuvering” of Nick, the driver, the lover of the Handmaid and the father of her unborn child. That’s the beginning and practically the end of the original novel. But so many things have been changed.
First of all, special insistence is used to show this Gilead Republic as particularly brutal against any opponents who refuse their reading of the Christian Scriptures, but also against the handmaids themselves who are constantly suffering punishments and sanctions and hostility from everyone or nearly. The book was clear and at the same time more discreet about physical violence. Nowhere there was the allusion to one handmaid being stoned to death by the assembled handmaids under the authority of the aunts, this Kapos of this concentration republic. What’s new is also the fact that anyone among the elite can be submitted to some harsh treatment like the amputation of a forearm for some lustful “mistake.” Pleasure is of course banned. Sex is only performed as a public ceremony, note the servants are not present in this series, to impregnate the handmaid with a child that will be the child of the commander and his wife, after weaning.
That’s another change. The outing to the clandestine brothel for the elite and foreign visitors was a unique occasion in the book. It is performed twice in this adaptation because the Handmaid’s friend from her previous life is not only met here but she escapes and has a pack of letters from handmaids collected over time delivered to our Handmaid, Offred (note the ambiguity between “of-Fred” and “offered”) and that is essential to explain and set up some resistance among them, resistance that leads our Handmaid to refuse to cast the first stone on the handmaid that is supposed to be stoned to death, and all the handmaids present do exactly the same.
Here is a twist in the story. The commander’s wife became jealous in the book when she discovered her husband had borrowed her own discarded clothing from her previous time to “disguise the Handmaid for the outing to the brothel. Little of that here since the wife who could have gotten violent is pacified by the discovery the Handmaid is pregnant.
No real contact with some organized resistance like in the book and no attempt of a request for the handmaid to assassinate her commander who is the head of the military operations against this organized resistance. Yet, Nick, the driver, is ambiguous since he organizes the arrest of the Handmaid and let her know she has to submit because that’s the only way out for her. We come to the end of the season with the Handmaid in the Black Maria.
So far it looks more like an enriched storyline rather than a completely changed storyline.
The real change is in the fact that the handmaid’s husband is alive and managed to escape when he was left alone behind to confront the police. In the book, it is clearly indicated he was killed. In the series, it is clearly indicated he is alive and living in some Little America colony in Canada with all sorts of survivors from the Gilead Republic. That’s a change because it is the framework of a lot of science fiction films on such an apocalyptic end of the world: some survivors rebuild the USA in order to reconquer their lost fatherland. We can think of Matrix, Stephen King’s The Stand, and first of all the never-ending saga of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. That’s a great change from the novel.
The novel was a direct reflection of the Cold War. This series is a direct reflection or anticipation of what is happening under Trump, the transformation of the USA into an international bully, an irrational whimsical dealmaker who is getting no deals at all. Think just five minutes. Tariffs against China. China responds with blocking their purchasing soya beans, corn, and pork, just at the time when the crops are harvested and when the pigs are entering the fattening period. A catastrophe for the people who have borrowed money from their banks to pay for the harvests of soya beans and corn and the raising of pigs. And these people voted for Trump. One-third of the production of soya beans had been reserved by China. The order is canceled or blocked with tariffs. On the other hand, China has tripled their soya bean order to Russia and will pay hard currency for that crop, providing Russia with a good outlet for their own agriculture that will prosper on that — and there will be no return to the USA — and providing Russia with good hard currency cash flow. Bye, Bye, Sanctions! That’s only one example and this series is reflecting this new reality: what will the USA become when they start feeling the harshness of the situation they have created themselves?
And the latest news is about unemployment. In spite of a high level of job creations (213,000) unemployment went up from 3.8% to 4%. That’s the proof people who had abandoned the idea of ever getting a job are coming back onto the labor market that is not able to provide the necessary jobs. And wait one more month and you’ll see inflation. Like in this series they will have to introduce rationing tickets. Maybe not but yet…!
We are waiting for the second season since then it will be beyond the book. The descent into total destruction or the renascence of freedom? In Stephen King’s terms: Las Vegas or Boulder? Randall Flagg, the white evil man in black, or Abagail Freemantle, the old black lady playing the guitar and calling upon God’s grace? A nuclear warhead and the sacrifice of four, Glen Bateman, Stu Redman, Ralph Brentner, and Larry Underwood, reduced to three when Stu Redman breaks his leg en-route to Las Vegas. Three crucified men will die in Las Vegas when the nuclear warhead gets off.
I just hope the next season or seasons is or are not some liquefying and dissolving of a good story into follow-up peripeteias that break the tenseness and the density of the original tale. It takes a Frank Herbert to produce several volumes after the original Dune, and yet the density of the message was lost and David Lynch had the wisdom not to go beyond the original novel with his film adaptation.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
