41 Years Ago, David Lynch’s Most Infamous Sci-Fi Epic Might’ve Changed Movies Forever

If you felt a sudden inexplicable chill Thursday — as if an integral piece of the fabric of the universe was suddenly missing — that’s because filmmaker/fine artist/musician/meditation guru/coffee pitch man/John Ford lookalike/all-around nice guy . One of my interviewees, author Kenneth George Godwin (on set for Dune , about tiny fairy tale creatures that navigate the universe of a carpet (a similar scene inside a carpet appears in the Dune II script). Netflix passed.

Much of Lynch’s fascination with expansive worldbuilding and fantasy realms stemmed from his love of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. From the appearance of Sheryl Lee as the Good Witch in Wild at Heart, to the mere act of hiring the band Toto to score Dune, Lynch was so obsessed with the film that a whole documentary titled Lynch/Oz was made.

“The Wizard of Oz is a film with very great power… and it’s to be expected that it has stayed with us for the past several years and that we find its echoes in our films for such a long time after,” Lynch once said. “The Wizard of Oz is like a dream and it has immense emotional power. There’s a certain amount of fear in that picture, as well as things to dream about. So it seems truthful in some way.”

While Lynch’s contemporaries like Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, and Steven Spielberg got to run wild creating immersive realms within the sci-fi and fantasy genres, we only really have Dune as proof of the places Lynch could have taken us given a little more commercial momentum in his career. His passing brings finality to ever seeing these visions extant. We’ll also never see the true three-hour director’s cut of Dune Lynch wanted to make in the late-‘80s but which Universal — in their infinite wisdom — decided was not worth the investment, and thus slap-dashed the miserable extended TV cut together on their own.

It’s ironic that potentially one of the greatest cinema fantastique filmmakers is now best known for coffee, cherry pie, and old men riding cross-country on lawnmowers. Like Icarus, David Lynch’s wings melted under the Arrakeen sun before he reached the clouds, but hopefully he’s up there in the Emerald City now.

David Lynch’s Dune is streaming on Netflix and Max.