Symbolism in David Lynch's "Dune."

Cafe Society
1

I noticed upon a repeat viewing of David Lynch’s Dune that there are some intense erotic undertones in the scene where the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Helen Gaius Mohiam as portrayed by Sian Phillips is testing Paul with the pain box thing and the “Gom Jabbar” is pretty overtly sexual. As she describes the burning sensation of the hand, she closes her eyes and begins to speak in an erotic tone of voice; then when Paul finally yells “the pain!”, she appears quite blatantly to have an orgasm. It’s one of the most erotic scenes in the movie, actually.

Now, there is a dimension which I previously overlooked out of ignorance. During this pain testing scene, Paul repeats the phrase “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.” Well, according to my girlfriend, who I showed this scene to, the phrase “the little death” is actually a French term for an orgasm - La petite mort.

In the scene with the “Gom Jabbar,” both Paul and the Reverend Mother appear to have an orgasm together right as he withdraws his hand from the box. Furthermore, the “Gom Jabbar” is shown in close-up, on the end of the Reverend Mother’s finger, with its needle retracted - as if retreating after (failed) sexual penetration. In this case is is the woman doing the “penetrating” and it is the woman who uses the fear, aka “little death” aka orgasm as a form of control over Paul.

Did anyone else take this away from that scene?

2

Dune… is that the one where guys ride giant penises across the desert?

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Well, AT… I never saw those scenes in quite that way, but now that you have explained it, it *does *makes perfect sense. I bow to your superior sense of sexual symbolism…TRM

4

Dune is full of sexual symbolism. The worms are giant penises and when they open they mouths they become giant vaginas. With teeth! Look at the original covers of the books, particularly the later ones written by Frank Herbert, and the artwork is barely disguised genitalia.

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And their shit is the sperm of immortality.

6

Yet, curiously, Lynch left out the Sietch tau orgy, leaving it to the Wachowski brothers to attempt to recreate it in Matrix Reloaded.

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People getting all orgasmic while doing sadistic things to others is pretty standard fare for showing how scary they are. That’s not to say that Lynch didn’t think it was specifically some sort of sex symbolism and all artsy and edgy, but it’s really not all the great a leap.

And I would want to verify that “the little death” isn’t in the original novel before ascribing it to Lynch.

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The Litany Against Fear does indeed exist in the book, “little death” included.

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I never thought about it sexually, but I will from now on – thanks Argent. I saw it as she was feeling, telepathically, the same pain he was. It was how she gauged the test. Which was, from book and the movie, a little obscure for me – endless pain, and if he pulls away, she’ll poison him on the neck – why not just rig the box to kill if you don’t wait for the end? I know, I know, jihad, no thinking machines, yadda yadda. But really, what is she testing, if as she says, anyone can resist any pain? “Crisis and observation” yeah sure, but what did she observe? That funny missing needle, I always thought, “Did she stick him anyway?” I never thought of it retracting, I thought of it as a prop error, if anything. But yeah, Lynch went pretty far with how he designed scenes from the book for the film.

Not to thread jack, but I’d read online years ago an original draft of the script, which contains a deleted scene which shows you where Lynch was going with telepathy in the book. When Reverend Mother is underneath the Emperor and the Guild Navigator, listening on the conversation, just when he goes, “one small point …” and she thinks, “here it comes …” Lynch wanted an image of the Navigator to appear to the Reverend Mother and say to her directly, “here’s something just for you to use…”

So he knew, that she knew, and she knew that he knew, and … um, wait.

The Emperor thinks he’s all being bad-ass, pretending to send her away, while having her spy on the conversation secretly. But they, the telepathic ones, were really working together. Even though they hate each other, they’re driven by the presience, not by the world of normal sensations and communications, which the Emperor is stuck in.

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Not in the least, sorry.

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I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed this. Neo wasn’t Jesus, he was the Kwisatz Haderach.

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I always took that scene as implicitly sexual, but more as Lynch having some fun with the kind of cliches that Sage Rat mentions. It wasn’t the first time: there’s a scene in *Eraserhead *where the main character’s girlfriend says she’s leaving him. While he lies on the bed, bewildered, she goes to the foot of the bed, kind of bends over, and begins a kind of humping motion. The bed rocks in an explicitly sexual rhythm for long enough for it to appear that she’s doing this out of some kind of bizarre pleasure. Then suddenly the suitcase pops free that she’d been trying to free from under the bed. Voila: seemingly non-sexual situation portrayed in a ridiculously sexual manner, mostly for Lynch to giggle at I think.

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No, not at all. I mean, except for the fact that an old woman was telling a young man to stick his hand in her box.

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Anyone CAN resist any pain. Not everyone WILL or believes they can. The Bene Gesserit were testing for what they termed as “humans”, as opposed to remnants of the machine-ruled humanity of the pre-Butlerian days. Anyone whose will was weakened enough for computers to rule them would not have the presence of mind to react with reserve instead of instinct.

Of course, at the point when Mohiam tested Paul, it had been well over 10,000 years since the Butlerian Jihad, but the Imperium was a vast graveyard of tradition, and the Bene Gesserit were even more locked into it, having the memories and personalities of all that came before them inside their heads.

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Amongst other things, I suspected this was also Herbert’s way fo saying “These Gesserit are simultaneously wise and really crazy bi-atches, and they are not necessarily rational.”

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Seconded. Seems like a strained interpretation to me, but then, I haven’t seen the movie in awhile.

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Well, to be fair, to a certain extent it’s not really open to interpretation: “The little death” is a pretty well known euphemism for orgasm, and there’s really no way Herbert used it–or Lynch emphasized it–without knowing that.

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That’s both illogical and plan wrong. “White Elephant” is also a very common term. And it it has two wildly varying meanings.

“Fear is the little-death” is a pretty obvious and practical statement in Dune: it’s simply saying that those who give in to fear have effectively died already: their minds are useless.

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Sorry, I have to disagree. “Little death” as a euphemism for orgasm is too well known for either Herbert or Lynch–both of whom I assume are better read than me–to have meant anything else. Anyone who’s aware of that euphemism would not use that phrase to mean anything else. Well, I mean, to mean anything totally different; he’d use is for its layered meaning, but he’d be aware of its idiomatic meaning and would intend that to be implicit. The only way you could possibly suggest otherwise is to suggest that neither artist was familiar the idiom, and believe me if I’ve known it as a piece of cultural flotsam for most of my life, then surely Frank Herbert and David Lynch have known it too.

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French speakers, shouldn’t it be “mort petit”?