Friday, July 23, 2010

Thank You, David Lynch

I thank American cinematic auteur David Lynch for inspiring the thoughts below. It's been a while since I have either watched his 1984 film Dune or read Frank Herbert's novel, on which it was based. So forgive me if my memory is faulty, but it seems to me that the following parables owe their verisimilitude more to Lynch's film than to Herbert's book.

To what shall I compare the kingdom of heaven? It is like the cat who owned poor Thufir Hawat (pictured here, as played by Freddie Jones). When the evil Baron Harkonnen captured Thufir, he forced a deadly poison on the not-so-faithful Atreides family retainer. At the same time, the Baron gave Thufir a female cat that had been inoculated with the antidote. The Baron gleefully informed Thufir that he must drink this cat's milk every day for the rest of his life. For without a daily dose of the serum in the cat's milk, Thufir would die a horrible death. Let him who has eyebrows... whatever.

Again, to what shall I compare the kingdom of heaven? It is like the "weirding way" depicted in David Lynch's movie Dune (which, by the way, is totally different in the book). A small group of well-trained resistance fighters, armed with a hand-held device called a "weirding module," managed to overthrow an entire empire. All they had to do to make the module work was speak a certain word, and the device would convert it into enough kinetic energy to kill a man. The resistance fighters' most exciting breakthrough was discovering that their leader's name was a "killing word," a word so powerful that the weirding device could use it to blow up a whole building! Let him who has seen this movie try to avoid being caught saying "Muad'dib!" to the TV remote...

1 comment:

RobbieFish said...

Footnote: The Parable of Thufir's Cat is apropos the daily importance of Word and Sacrament in the Christian's life, including the re-application of Baptism through repentance and absolution. The Parable of the Weirding Way is about the power of the name of Christ, or the Word of God.