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Notes -
Lynch's Dune is like a first girlfriend for me, so I judge it by different standards. It was one of the fist science fiction films I saw as a young child, along with Star Wars and bits of the original Star Trek films (I was too scared by those to watch them all the way through until later). Lynch's Dune didn't make a lot of sense to me, but no grown-up films made 100% sense to me at that point, and what I could understand was exciting, inspiring, and mentally stimulating. The weirdness probably helped to make me a sci-fi fan; in particular, of that sort of "alternative societies" and "mythology in SPAAACE" sci-fi. Were it not for the queering of sci-fi, I suspect I'd still be a fan of new sci-fi books; as it is, there is a wealth of stuff from when sci-fi offered ideas that I couldn't find in a SLAC.
I actually wrote entire novellas (30+ pages) in notebooks when I was about 10, which were basically ripoffs of Lynch's Dune ("except mine is on COLD planets... And there are these shadow-aliens from a parallel universe...") which in retrospect is less embarassing when I consider that this was before I knew about fan fiction and that telling your own stories in other people's fictional universes/stories is a perfectly natural, very old way for imagination and fiction writing skills to develop.
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