Object #12 - Heart-Plugs - Dune (1984)

Dir. David Lynch

Ah Dune, what a fascinating train-wreck of a film. Directed by one of my all-time favourite directors, David Lynch, of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man fame at the time of the film's creation. These days Lynch looks back at Dune as little more than a bad memory, filled with studio interference, a lack of final cut, and a constriction on his vision, a death-note for an auteur such as Lynch. He's since proven himself even more substantially with Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, both on TV and the pre-sequel film Fire Walk With Me, and of course the out-of-place, yet no less great The Straight Story. (And Lost Highway, a personal favourite. I won't go on, I could speak about Lynch's films for days!) As a film, Dune is a mess, almost impossible to understand without reading the classic sci-fi novel it was adapted from, full of non-explained jargon, lazy voice-overs, and a half-baked script. Not a good film do these ingredients make. 

Yet, out of the mess, there are fascinating aspects to analyse. One of these is the heart-plugs. Not present in the original novel, these medical intrusions act as an instant-death pull-switch for the Harkonnen family, and more importantly, their slaves. They are implemented by the command of the  revolting Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan). There is a scene early in the film which acts as the introduction to the Baron, and uses the heart-plugs to tell us quite a bit. This abysmal-quality edit of the scene has all the main points I wanted, so see it here.

The Baron [right] and Doctor (Leonardo Cimino) [left]

In the scene, the Baron receives word of his ongoing plot to kill the leader of his opposing house, Duke Leto of the Atreides house. As he rants, raves, and schemes, a young, handsome teenaged slave-boy is ushered in, carrying metal flowers to place in the room, and he's outfitted with a heart-plug. The Baron, who floats across the room with the aid of suspensors on his body, carrying his massive weight, spots the boy, and his eyes fill with lust. On his way to the boy, he floats under a pipe, which turns out to be full of what seems to be either oil, some other liquid, or blood, presumably his enemies'. He reaches for the boy, pushing him back, then pulls the plug on the boy's heart-plug. Like the pin of a grenade, the plug halts the blood flow of the boy from escaping, and now pulled, it flows freely, killing the boy. The Baron, rubs his hand into the blood, and essentially molests the boy in his dying moments, rubbing the boy's blood into his own face. Lynch (or some studio-exec, it's hard to say with Dune) cuts to the reactions of the Baron's staff and family, who remain indifferent to the entire process, clearly disillusioned to the Baron's actions over-time. What this does is allow the sound of the molestation to continue, before we cut to a smiling Baron, blood-splattered. The Baron's nephew, Feyd-Rautha (Sting), grins maniacally, and we hear the Baron's voice-over "This is what I'll do to the Duke and his family".

The heart-plugs aren't in the original novel, and so are clearly an invention of Lynch's. What they do is personify the cruelty of the Baron. He has an instant means of death for every servant and slave under his rule and employment, and in fact, has outfitted them onto his extended family as well. It tells us a lot, the Baron is ruthless in his trust of others, or rather, his lack of trust. He can kill them at any point, and they know this. What the actions with the young boy tell us is that the Baron is cruelly sadistic, killing the boy with the swipe of a plug for his own sexual gratification. He enjoys not only the young boy, which shows he's gay, a bold statement in the 60's when the book was written, and still pretty bold in the 80's (we'll get to that), but also that he gets off on the death of the boy, and the control he has over life and death. It works. I think it's an interesting implementation by Lynch that acts well in this scene to inform us much of the Baron's character, despite the obvious lack of practicality in the design. Seriously what if a slave nabs it in something? Bam, one dead slave.

The Baron, whose face is covered in pustules and boils, appears sickly, ill, infected. His doctor injects and sucks at the pustules, all the while saying this:

 You are SO beautiful, my Baron. Your skin, love to me. Your diseases lovingly cared for, for all eternity. 

This film was written and shot in 1982/3, with the AIDS crisis emerging in the US, where predominantly gay men were transferring the deadly AIDS virus to each other through unprotected sex, and dying by the thousands. A tragedy of the 80's, as it passed through the infected needles of drug-users, through blood-transfusions, and through bisexual sex to the straight community. If these sentences make you feel uncomfortable like they do me, then that's normal, because the entire situation is wrong, it feels wrong, and sickening. Viruses, needles, infections, all horrible concepts to most people. So what Dune does is make the Baron infected, with, let's be honest here, an AIDS parallel, The doctor's words court the gay-perceived origin of the AIDS virus to make us feel revolted to the Harkonnens. It's cheap, but it works to this day.

The Baron, as I mentioned earlier, is gay, or at the very least interested sexually in men. Unfortunately, his appetite for young boys goes even further than the teenagers in the original novel if you catch my drift. In the 60's this would be a man to be hated, and it goes to show how powerful the idea is, that in this day and age, it still revolts us, as pedophilia does to most. The film retains the youth of the Baron's conquests, but avoids the pedophilic elements (ish), by making them teenaged, around 19/20 years of age. But everything surrounding the Baron is meant to make us feel sick, his obesity, so dire that he needs technology to help him move, his infection, and of course, the heart-plugs, which tell us of the Baron's sadistic sexual tendencies.

The heart-plugs, and in particular the scenes surrounding them, work. As a product of the 80's they enhance and modernise the characterization of the Baron. Lynch wrote the script, and 'directed' the film, so I'll hand it to him, this was a touch of genius. Genius for rather out-dated and off-putting reasons to us as a modern audience, hell probably even to the contemporary audience, but it works none-the-less.