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Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Newham

London

E20 2ST

22nd February 2024

Dune: Part Two

Cineworld

Cardinal Park

11 Grafton Way

Ipswich, IP1 1AX

5th March 2024

There’s no future

And England’s dreaming

The Sex Pistols

Step into a hot bath and stand still for a moment. Where does it feel hottest/most tingly? It seems obvious that it should be your feet on the bath bottom, but - if you focus - you’ll almost certainly find that it isn’t. Don’t believe me? OK – go run a bath and have a go and then come back.

Are you back? Was that nice? Right, where did you feel the greatest stimulus intensity? Hopefully, it wasn’t on your foot but on your leg at the precise interface between the hot water and the room air of your bathroom. Why? Because of the way in which sensory nerve cells (neurones) act to amplify differences in sensation to produce clear, sharp demarcations, or contrast. This is achieved through the ability of a sensory neurone, when activated, to inhibit its neighbouring neurones, through lateral inhibition – a process critical for spatial discrimination. This is particularly well documented in photoreceptors in the retina, where it helps us detect the edges of the things we see (where contrast is greatest) but is also a phenomenon displayed by many other sensory fibres including tactile/ touch receptors, temperature receptors and possibly even pain receptors.

For skin sensation, the receptive fields of sensory neurones each cover a certain patch of skin and, importantly, overlap each other. This overlapping arrangement helps to ensure complete coverage of the body surface but, on the face of it, should come at the price of reduced spatial discrimination. However, each receptive field has two parts - a central part that is excited by the stimulus and an outer, peripheral, surround that inhibits those neighbouring cells with overlapping receptive fields. In the face of such inhibition, only the neurons that are most stimulated and least inhibited will fire, so the firing pattern tends to concentrate at stimulus peaks. In this way, the perceived edge of a stimulus is sharpened, and the contrast amplified as the single-point localization now equals or exceeds that predicted by the receptive field organization. Those receptive field centres at either side of the interface, i.e. wholly within water or air, don’t get this sharpening effect as there is no edge for them to detect and so they simply report a constant, easily unnoticed, ‘average’ sensation to the brain. Thus, lateral inhibition helps by ‘shaping’ the sensory information we receive to maximise spatial contrast between stimuli and so helps us to separate out things. In essence, lateral inhibition acts to make neurones (i.e. us!), particularly sensitive to spatially varying rather than spatially uniform stimuli. The density of the receptors and the size of their receptive fields are also important to the precise localisation (which is why dipping your finger into a hot cup of tea will accentuate the leg stepping into a bath effect, as well as, usually, being more socially acceptable to demonstrate. (Sorry, I should perhaps have started with that?).

For any interested photographers still reading to this point, lateral inhibition is a form of signal processing that uses an ‘unsharp mask’; essentially a linear or nonlinear filter, to amplify the high-frequency components of a signal. The unsharp masking tool used by digital imaging software compares an original image to a software-generated, Gaussian-blurred, copy of the image (the unsharp bit) and if the difference is greater than a user-specified threshold setting (the masking bit), the two images are subtracted to sharpen the original. If the unsharp masking effect is exaggerated, contrasty edges in the image become overly sharpened and more conspicuous (think halo outlines around mountains or branches of trees). Similarly, if skin sensory receptor density is increased and receptive field size decreased, contrasty edges in our environment become more noticeable. Compare, for example, the sensation of running your finger gently along the surface of a wooden table with how it feels if you run your forearm along its surface. Thus, sensory systems allow us to interact with the external world, gathering and integrating information from different spatial and temporal domains. The unification and preservation of resolution (acuity) and the amplification brought about through contrast enables accurate processing of physical stimuli e.g. light, sound, touch, smell, and taste into conscious perception – the ‘picture in our head’. Improving separation of subject from background would have been critically important for our evolution.

But, of course, contrast is much more than just physiology and edge detection. As commonly defined, it’s the state of being strikingly different from something else in close association. But an objective difference can easily be amplified - subjectively - by our first impressions, as we tend to ‘anchor’ the first item we encounter (whether that’s an object, an idea, or a decision) as a reference point for future items to set and even manage our expectations. Thus, our perception (e.g. of colour intensity, sound), cognition (e.g. of attractiveness) or performance (e.g. work rate) can all be enhanced or diminished by simultaneous (or at least immediately previous) exposure to a similar stimulus of lesser or greater value. In which case, if your finger is still in a cup of hot tea, taking it out now and sticking it in a glass of cold water will make that water feel much colder than it actually is.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

And so to Friday 27 July 2012 and the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games at the Olympic Stadium, London. In the lead up to 9pm that evening, we were all thinking the same thing. How could anything follow the stunningly choreographed and meticulously planned 2008 opening ceremony in Beijing? As The Times put it, 'Heaven knows what it was like to watch this if you were one of the people charged with designing the follow-up for London in 2012.' So, switching on the tele that evening in July 2012 was a bit like watching a David Attenborough clip where a rattlesnake is slowly creeping up on a very cute little desert rodent. You fear the worst but are compelled to watch – only for the little mouse to escape at the end with the snake looking as puzzled as you probably did after just a few minutes of watching Danny Boyle’s extravaganza unfold before your eyes. Following an eclectic mix of footage that included music from Fuck Buttons, Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols, images of Ratty, Mole and Toad, the doof doofs of the Eastenders end credits, Bradley Wiggins rang the Olympic Bell and Kenneth Branagh, as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, came into the stadium on a bus and quoted Caliban: “The clouds methought would open, and show riches. Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked, I cried to dream again!” And that was just the first 9 minutes. The following four-hour tour de force, entitled ‘Isles of Wonder’ was hailed as ‘a love letter to Britain’, and watched by a global audience of 900 million. Memories of the precision, scale and awe of the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony were swept away on a wave of nostalgia and hope as puzzlement changed to a strange new feeling; Pride.

As Steve Rose wrote in The Guardian, ten years after that night in 2012: This was Britain as a rich, diverse, multicultural, imaginative, inventive nation comfortable with its identity and capable of reconciling its contradictions. We were traditional yet modern. We were powerful yet caring. We were orderly yet anarchic.We had a vast back catalogue of world-changing culture from which to draw. We knew how to put on a good show. And we had a sense of humour.

But was this just an(other) example of the contrast effect delivering a cognitive bias to distort our perception? Britain in 2012 was not that ‘… idea of Jerusalem – of the better world, the world of real freedom and true equality, a world that can be built through the prosperity of industry, through the caring nation that built the welfare state, through the joyous energy of popular culture, through the dream of universal communication’ that Boyle alluded to in his opening ceremony programme notes. Savage cuts were being made to the welfare state and to public services by a Conservative-led coalition party, in the name of austerity, following the recession brought about by the global financial crisis of 4 years earlier. There had been riots in London and across Britain, leading to 5 deaths only a year before and even just two months prior to the Opening Ceremony, the Home Secretary, Teresa May, had proudly declared her immigration policies to have successfully made the UK a ‘hostile environment’. The following years would see the country vote to leave Europe through a racist-led, Brexit strategy, be shamed by a Windrush scandal, see a Government fail repeatedly to protect its citizens, or show remorse for its unforgivable actions, during the Covid pandemic, take us into a cost of living crisis putting those most vulnerable in our society at risk and even look to flout International Law by sending refugees to Rwanda. It’s that one night in July that Steve Rose contrasts when he says: “For many, it has effectively become shorthand for Britain, before it all turned to shit.”

Zeus did not wish man, however much he might be tormented by the other evils, to fling away his life, but to go on letting himself be tormented again and again. Therefore he gives Man hope,—in reality it is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of Man.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

In The Life of Brian, sorry, Dune: Part Two, a young man, Brian of Nazareth, sorry, Paul Atreides, played by Graham Chapman, sorry, Timothée Chalamet, tries to convince everyone that he is not the Messiah, but in so trying just convinces the believers even more. Where the two films differ (if at all: think lots of sand, lots of religion), is that Paul’s mother, Lady Jessica, played by Terry Jones, sorry, Rebecca Ferguson, would never say “Now, you listen here! He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy!” about her son, Brian, sorry, Paul, as she indeed wishes him to be the new Messiah, or Mahdi, to the Fremen of Arrakis. Sadly, it turns out, after he takes power from Emperor Saddam IV, played superbly as Christopher Walken by Christopher Walken, that Paul’s no Messiah after all, and he is just a naughty boy, albeit one with immense power that we should see unleashed in the film of the second book ‘Dune: Messiah’ sometime in 2027. In the meantime, we are very happy to make do with Dune: Part Two, the 2024 film based on the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert and directed by Denis Villeneuve. Herbert wrote Dune midway through a period of enormous upheaval for the USA; his homeland. The civil rights movement was on the rise, the war in Vietnam had begun, and JFK had pledged to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade before being brutally assassinated in front of the American people. All around the globe, an ecological movement was developing as people began to realise the critical importance of protecting our home planet, people began to revolt against colonial oppression and a ‘Cold War’ sought not to capture new territories, but to maintain influence and control access to valuable resources. It’s within that backdrop with its interweaving themes that Dune so poetically captures that sense of transition. And it’s certainly a novel of contrasts; fear and courage, fascism and communism, light and shade, trust and betrayal, good and bad, metal and cloth, wet and dry, love and hate. Substitute the indigenous Fremen of Arrakis for the Arabs of the Middle East and the mystical ‘spice’ for oil and the book is a reflection of its time - albeit with a timeless message.

“your hand

touching mine.

this is how

galaxies

collide.”

― Sanober Khan

Its greatest contrast, however, is perhaps with David Lynch’s 1984 version of the novel, starring (amongst others) Sting from The Police, which bombed at the Box Office, as audiences only got to see a jumbled mishmash of the studio’s streamlined and mainstreamed final cut that removed 45 minutes and most of Lynch’s vision for the film. As such it seems like the only person who hated 1984’s Dune more than die-hard Frank Herbert fans was Lynch himself. Consequently, the book was labelled ‘unfilmable’ and so ignored by filmmakers for almost 40 years. However, it did get Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan (his Paul Atreides) working together for the first time for which we should be grateful as it gave us their weird and wonderful future collaborations on Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. But we should be indebted to Villneuve simply for his version with its clarity of purpose, its epic scenes, and its focus on the elements of the story that make science fiction so good as a reflection of ourselves. One to see at an IMAX cinema, if possible, not just for the scale of the imagery but for the immense sound effects. At its best, (and Dune is that), science fiction can provide us with a vision for a future, amongst countless possibilities, based upon a foundation of realism. As an aside, that’s what makes science fiction better than fantasy (sorry JRR, it just is).

But what makes Dune so remarkable, is that, at its heart, lies not simply a compelling, singular vision of a possible future (see e.g. Bladerunner, Mad Max, Alien), but a consideration of how we might choose and then craft a single, best vision of our future from all the countless possibilities. That there might be one vision that is better than all others, is the premise of Frank Herbert’s “Golden Path”; an optimal channel through of all the possible and various cause and effect futures for humanity that would lead to its eventual salvation through enlightenment; but one that could only be seen and manipulated, albeit at great intervening cost, by the prescient and omniscient abilities of Paul Atreides and, subsequently, his son, Leto II. Failure to follow the Path would lead towards either of the two extremes of humanity’s worst tendencies: stagnation or total chaos. Although a little chaos was valued by Leto II as it could foster innovation, he realised that would only be possible if humanity learnt to overcome its inherent jingoistic tendencies. Good luck with that, Leto!

Where you see sand here, imagine water.

Paul Atreides

But we must keep asking, keep hoping. Danny Boyle closed his programme notes in 2012 with these words, “But we hope, too, that through all the noise and excitement you’ll glimpse a single golden thread of purpose”. Boyle’s golden thread is no more, or less, than Herbert’s Golden Path – both offering hope of a single vision of a future where everything works out for the best for all of us. It is, however, to our enduring shame that presently we seem unable to break the cycle that sees the rich and powerful enacting violent occupations and genocides upon those communities they intentionally frame as lesser. As Paul Atreides replies, when his mother claims that by positioning him as a Messiah it would give the Fremen something to hope for; “That is not hope”.

Swapping the cold and wet outdoors for the warm and dry confines of the Olympic Stadium (now The London Stadium and adopted home of West Ham United F.C.) I’m reminded, as I look out to a view of Canary Wharf, of how the regeneration of this part of London, following closure of the Port of London's East End docks in 1980, gave rise to this area now being home to both the highest mean salaries and some of the worst poverty in the UK. Could that have been foreseen? Was it intentional? Sometimes it’s just very hard to see the Golden Thread.

"So I've been hearing this phrase y'all got over here that I ain't too crazy about. 'It's the hope that kills you.' Y'all know that? I disagree, you know? I think it's the lack of hope that comes and gets you."