What the 1984 Film Changed
The 1984 film is a magnificent object and a permanent source of confusion, and the confusion starts with a simple fact: for most people who love these books, the screen came first.
Lynch's version did several things the novel did not do. It invented the aesthetic that most of the world now carries: the dark blue eyes under the stillsuit helmets, the stained-glass interior lighting, the black uniforms, the guild figures with opaque eye lenses. It also invented the worm ride as spectacle, the enormous set pieces, and the way the religion is staged as ritual rather than described as psychology. None of that was in the book. The book had a worm you rode because you had to, and it had religion described from the inside of a mind that could not be certain of anything.
What it dropped is nearly as important. The film cuts the politics down to a whisper: the Council scene survives as a series of half-lit faces making pronouncements at the wrong moment, and the economics of the substance, the Council votes, the Emperor's leverage are all gone. Gone too is most of the ecological argument, most of the interior voice, and nearly the whole sense of the first book as a study of manipulation rather than as a hero's rise.
What it changed is the tone. The novel is dry, funny in places, and relentlessly political. The film is solemn, operatic and religious. The boy in the book is a frightened and brilliant adolescent; the boy on screen is a figure of destiny almost from his first appearance. Every later reader who meets Paul for the first time through the film arrives with a set of expectations the novel spends six hundred pages dismantling, and there is no way to unlearn that.
That is why the images still haunt the book. They are not distortions of something we have forgotten. They are the version most of us learned first, and every time the novel refuses them, we feel the refusal. I still think the screen version is one of the great pieces of science fiction cinema. I also think it is a film about a different book, and that reading the two side by side is the most useful thing a reader can do with it.