Why The DUNE PART II Trailer Made Me Cry

The new trailer for Dune Part II is pretty incredible, and it makes me amazed that we are getting this movie at all. The fact that there was a Dune Part I was wild, but I didn’t hold out much hope for the rest of the novel to ever be adapted; it was a very serious, very heavy adaptation of the first half of the book - ie, it ended just when stuff got good. What’s the thing people know about Dune and that gives you the biggest marketing hook? It’s dudes riding sandworms into battle, and that doesn’t happen in Part I. Hell, Part I doesn’t even end on a particularly compelling cliffhanger. It seemed to me that we were going to have Lynch’s failed adaptation and we would have one half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation.

Yet somehow the second one got made, and it’s coming out this year. The trailer gives us peeks at what is in store for us, and the scope and the majesty of the thing is astonishing. The first film’s scope and majesty was astonishing, and that didn’t have the big battle or the awesome sandworms. This one… just wow. The trailer gave me goosebumps. I can’t wait to see it.

In another world I’ve already seen it, and the story of how I almost did and then ultimately didn’t is a good summation of the tension between art and commerce in 21st century Hollywood.

My wife Brittany was a Dune fan. She had read all the original novels, and as a Millennial she loved the Lynch movie, and she even had a Dune burlesque act. She would come out as a sandworm and strip down to reveal Paul Atreides, who would strip down further. It was clever and dorky and sexy, which is everything she was.

We saw Dune Part I together. I have a permanent reminder of that night - we were seeing it at the AMC in Burbank, but the parking garage was full. It was getting close to showtime, and so I dropped her off and frantically went looking for parking anywhere in Burbank. At one point I considered telling her to just see the movie and I would pick her up afterwards; this was all my fault for getting tickets on a Friday night and arriving to the theater ten minutes before showtime.

Most of the parking in Burbank near the theater is in these hilariously cramped garages, just these dark and tight spaces that do not seem at all designed to allow two cars to pass one another. That night, while being super not mindful, I scraped the car along a pillar in the garage, creating an incredible scratch and dent. The car still has it; every now and again a dude will pull up alongside me in traffic and offer to hammer it out but I always refuse. I refused in the past because I just didn’t want to deal with it, but I’ll refuse from now on because the dent and scratch will always be a reminder of a specific night I spent with her. I did, by the way, eventually get a spot, and I did make it into the theater in time. We loved, loved, loved the movie.

In May Brittany was admitted to the hospital for the last time. 2023 had been a rolling series of hospitalizations and desperate treatment attempts, but everything had failed. The tumors inside of her were growing and they were impacting her internal systems. She became almost totally physically disabled.

She and I could not be more different; her approach to this was one of hope. She believed the doctors would pull something out of their asses in the end, that some new option would appear. I was more cynical. It was my idea to get married in the hospital the week after she was admitted, because I wanted her to be my wife. I didn’t want to say my girlfriend had died, it sounded too diminishing of the relationship we had.

So she’s in the hospital and I’m trying to stay positive but at the same time I know we’re running out of time. It’s weird watching TV with someone who is dying; a movie trailer comes on and there’s silence in the room because neither of you are sure they’ll be around to see the film. Even cliffhangers at the ends of TV episodes carry an incredible existential weight. She stayed positive and mostly ignored the reality around her, but at these moments you could feel the wall she built around her situation crumble.

At some point it occurred to me that Dune Part II was coming out months from now, and that there was a very, very good chance she would not be around to see it. It became important to me that she see it, and I still have some good contacts in the world of Hollywood, decent people who are willing to help out, and so I began trying to get in touch with Denis Villeneuve.

It happened immediately. Like, in a day or two. And the response from him could not have been better. He said he had already spoken to Legendary, the people making the film, and they were on board. He would show her the movie and he would show it to her wherever she was. He wanted to wait a little bit because he was in a stage of the post-production process where things weren’t really all in place, but he was willing to do it.

I decided to keep this a secret from Brittany, but I was so heartened that I blabbed to the chaplain who had been there for us, who had presided over our wedding (and who would, in the end, preside over Brittany’s funeral). Remember that detail.

Villeneuve’s people could not have been better. We were in contact often, and they were willing to do whatever it took, including bringing better AV equipment to the hospital so that she could watch the movie on something other than the hospital TV - the sound for which came through a little hand-held device, like the thing you hung on your car window at the drive-in. Except this thing also had a call button for the nurse.

I was excited. The timeline that Villeneuve wanted made me nervous - he wanted to wait until the sound mix was complete, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to hear the dialogue very well - because I just had no sense of how much time she had. After our wedding she became very weak and I was worried the end was coming. The irony is that she would be getting stronger and stronger after that and then suddenly, without warning, she crashed and died. But in that week after the wedding I just didn’t know that she could wait for the sound mix.

Meanwhile someone at Disney reached out to me. I had tweeted that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 would be the first Marvel film I never saw in theaters, and they saw this. They saw the whole situation, but what they didn’t know is that Brittany and I had plans to see Guardians. See, we went to the hospital on a Wednesday, and we knew we were going to the hospital because some of her symptoms had gotten worse. But we thought she might spend a couple of nights in there, and we figured once she was discharged we could put her in the wheelchair and take her to see Guardians, just as we had done with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves a few weeks earlier. We didn’t know that she was not going to get out of the hospital for more than a month, and even then she would be discharged just a day before she would die. Our plan would never work out.

But Disney and Marvel made it happen; they brought Guardians to the hospital room and they brought incredible swag - crew jackets, hats, a poster. Most of this stuff has been given away now  (the smaller of the jackets is being reserved for Brittany’s three year old nephew, a present for him from his Aunt B one day when he’s big enough), but it wasn’t the swag that touched us. It was the human effort behind it. Marvel does these “angel screenings” all the time, and when I was talking to the wonderful woman who brought the film (on a laptop!) she told me that they were split 50/50 between adults and kids. There was another angel screening set in another state just a few days after ours.

As the Guardians screening came together I couldn’t hold the secret about Dune any longer. Besides, there was a lot of organizational effort that was going into setting up this Dune Part II screening. There would need to be serious security, and we would have to clear a block of time for the movie to play. One of the things I learned about hospitals is that they’re a mixture of a low-quality hotel and a prison, and like in a prison your time is never your own. People would just come in and out of the room at all hours of the day and night, whether you wanted them to or not. I wanted her in on planning this.

So I told her and she was elated. Overjoyed. She couldn’t believe it was happening. And then, after a little bit of discussion she let it slip - the chaplain had accidentally told her. She had told Brittany hours after I had blabbed about it, which at this point was like two weeks prior. Brittany had kept her knowledge a secret and she had been beautifully surprised when I told her.

She said she was surprised, because the chaplain had said maybe the screening would happen and so the confirmation was a surprise, but mostly she was surprised because she wanted me to have the moment of telling her. That’s who she was, a person who wanted to make sure that I felt good about this thing I was trying to do for her. Maybe nothing sums up her love and kindness and care for others more than this little silly moment.

But not long after I spilled the beans that had already been spilled it became clear things were not running smoothly behind the scenes. Villeneuve’s people told me they needed to run this up the flagpole at Warner Bros and then communication slowed down. Eventually I realized what was happening - they had hit an executive-shaped brick wall. The director had been enthusiastic, Legendary had immediately signed off, but there was some business school graduate in Burbank who was holding the whole thing up.

Eventually I had to tell Brittany that it wasn’t happening. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll just see it when it comes out.” I didn’t know how to hold on to my cynicism in the face of such blinding optimism, and maybe that’s why her death - which came weeks and weeks after we became aware it was coming - felt like such a surprise. She couldn’t imagine herself dying, and so neither could I.

Brittany deserved to see Dune Part II. In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t that big of an ask; the hospital was like a half hour outside of LA, where the film was in post. She deserved more than that - she deserved to live - but at the very least she deserved to see Dune Part II. The director, an artist, understood that. He understood that he makes movies to connect with people, and that if his movie could be a positive thing for a person in a tough place… well, that would be meaningful. He knew this without doubt, and it’s why he jumped so immediately to get the ball rolling on allowing Brittany to see Dune Part II.

This is a function of art, and a function of the art of cinema in particular, and Denis Villeneuve wanted to use his art to make the final days of a dying woman better. Will Dune Part II get Oscars? Be a blockbuster? Maybe, but I truly believe none of those things would ever be as meaningful as making the final days of a dying woman better.

I said this was about the tension between art and commerce in 21st century Hollywood, and it is. Because as much as Villeneuve understood that showing this work to a dying woman would be one of the works’ higher callings, the suits at Warner Bros couldn’t understand that because they couldn’t see it on a balance sheet. They couldn’t plug it into an Excel document and figure out how it would impact grosses. They could see a bottom line, and it had nothing to do with a human connection, with an act of kindness.

The impulse of the artist and the impulse of the businessman are polar opposites. The artist works to create in order to connect. The businessman creates nothing but wants to collect. In Hollywood they’re trapped in a horrible tango, each needing the other. The artist needs the businessman because the cost of making movies is generally beyond the average person’s ability to finance. The businessman needs the artist because there have to be movies to release and profit from. Of course the current WGA strike and looming SAG strike show us that the businessman doesn’t have a clear sense of how much he needs the artist. There’s nothing the businessman would like more than being free of the artist, of finding a way to collect money without the human element getting in the way.

You deserve the truth: I cried watching the new Dune Part II trailer. I got goosebumps from the images, but I cried because there’s a pain attached to the very idea of this movie. I’m still going to see it; what Villeneuve tried to do makes him someone I will love and respect my whole life. Brittany was perhaps disappointed that we didn’t get the movie - she would never say as much if she had been - but she was moved by the response from the director. She felt seen by him, and let me tell you, when your whole world is reduced to the tiny space of a hospital room to be seen by people on the outside is monumental. To be seen by someone like this, someone she respected and whose work had been meaningful to her, was enormous for her.

Maybe it’ll be hard to sit in the theater knowing that she should be sitting next to me; at the very least I will spend the entire runtime of the movie imagining her reactions, her gasps or laughs, the conversation we would have on the way home, the amazing insight she would have that I would subconsciously steal and work into some piece of writing about the movie. Already my anticipation for the film is mixed with a sense of dread, a curiosity about how I will feel in November and what wounds this film will reopen for me.

But to skip the movie would be silly. While I say with all humility and grace “Fuck Warner Bros,” I will put money in David Zaslav’s pocket anyway because to deny myself this work would be nothing but self-sabotage. I’m no fool - I know the dance of the artist and the businessman, and I often have to grit my teeth and pay the businessman in order to support the artist. This will be no different. Beyond that the reason Brittany and I were excited to see the film was because it looks so damn good, because the first was so damn good, because the director is so damn good.

Most of all I’ll see it because she wanted to see it, and maybe I’ll buy the seat next to me and keep it open, just in case. Just in case.