March 8, 2024

Does Dune Part 2 Have a Post Credit Scene? (Or, how you can't capitalism your way out of a situation you weren't willingly capitalismed into)

I'm part of the problem.

I know that I am one of billions who find themselves idly scrolling during moments of boredom and restlessness, when I can't just become still and revel in the sense of being alive, even when the sky is a grayish white splodge of sun denial. Still, there is a link between legions of flicking thumbs and the labour that goes into making the stuff that reels upwards from the bottom of a smartphone screen in response. The content itself is a kind of sludge, but with a light sprinkling of context and urgency that might compel you to stop flicking your thumb against the glass for a moment and instead jab that same digit against it. I know that we still use the dead metaphor of "click", but most of us aren't gripping a mouse or gliding fingers across a trackpad when we're navigating the sludge.

It's a jab.

There might be sense of agency, a very slight one, similar to the sense of agency that accompanies all those coordinated fine motor responses that make up the iterated routines of our days. But this sense of agency is as faint and insubstantial as the pages and videos that the upwards reeling thumbnails are hawking. Every now and again, one particular thumbnail is so outlandish that it draws attention to itself in a way that reminds me of sci fi movie scenes where an android removes its face to show the wires and LEDs in the place you were fooled into thinking its soul was.

The thumbnail that brought out this response from me was an article entitled, "Does Dune: Part Two have a post-credit scene?"

I haven't seen Dune: Part Two yet. Me and Mrs O'Sullivan are going to see it next week, but when the film ends I'm probably going to sit there for a few moments and collect my thoughts and then turn to Mrs O'Sullivan and share a little gesture to signify our initial impressions. We will rise from our seats, pick up our bags and coats and check to make sure we've left nothing behind.

I have many expectations from Dune: Part Two but none of them involve a post-credits scene.

I do not expect the sudden jolt of a well-lit scene that finds Paul Atreides, Chani, Princess Irulan and Lady Jessica sitting around a table eating shawarma before a voice beyond the camera says, "Is there room for one more?" and everyone looks round to see Duke Leto Atreides is still alive and still played by Oscar Isaac.

"Dad! You're still alive!! But how?"

"I'll tell you on the way son"

"On the way where Dad?"

Duke Leto turns and looks into the camera, "Tatooine."

Fade to black.

If the scene existed, I would probably be happy to miss it rather than remain in my seat and give the attendants even less time to clear up the popcorn spills and the drink cups that have been filled to the rim with pee before the early arrivals for the next screening saunter in.

With all that stated, I must now confess that I jabbed my thumb on the thumbnail and my phone loaded the article. I didn't jab because I needed to find out about the existence of the post credits-scene, I jabbed the thumbnail because it had become the focus of a grim fascination.

You may be surprised to hear that the article didn't begin with a simple yes or no. That's because it would be a disservice to all the readers who didn't know what a "Dune: Part Two"  was and needed to have it explained to them. So, being sensitive to this important subset of the readership, the article begins with a substantial paragraph explaining what a "Dune: Part Two" is.

You might then assume that the article would hit you with that "yes or no" answer. If you did, shame on you. How could you so easily forget about all those people that clicked on the article who didn't know what a "post-credits scene" was? Luckily, the writer of the article was not as insensitive as you are and, through this laudable sense of empathy, delivers another substantial paragraph about what a "post-credits scene" is and why filmmakers use them.

Finally, after making sure that everybody is well informed enough to understand the ramifications of the answer to this question, the writer tells us that "unsurprisingly", there is no post credits scene for Dune: Part Two. The "unsurprisingly" is important because it serves as an indication that the article was written by a human and not an AI. Not only that, but the "unsurprisingly" seems to have an extra layer of meaning –⁠ like the blinked SOS that an American Rear Admiral POW used in Vietnam. Or, it might be saying something akin to "I'm so sorry for making you read all of this" or "I make no apologies for writing this if you were stupid, or bored, enough to click it." 

As I said, a good amount of the internet is sludge. There might be a couple of sweet sprinkles mixed in, but it's still sludge. The sludge of "is there a post-credits scene" articles started off as a genuinely useful thing for people that wanted to know if they would miss out on something if they chose to pick up their things and go for a wee in the appropriate facilities rather than in an empty drink cup while the credits rolled.

These prospective audience members Google whether the film they plan to watch has a post-credits scene and Google serves them a list of articles without the answer to the question in the description, therefore necessitating a good, hearty thumb jab. These articles turn up in the Google feed because of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Google looks for things that signify if the article is useful and informative and these articles are written in a way that ticks all those boxes while remaining relatively useless and uninformative for most of their word counts.

The article itself will consist of a number of verbose paragraphs that encourage the reader to scroll downwards past a number of adverts until they get to the answer to the question that makes up its title. As you have no doubt guessed, the purpose of these articles is not to bring you information, but to use the promise of information to present you with adverts. This isn't anything new, Noam Chomsky said the same thing about newspapers decades ago.

That said, the presence of "Dune: Part Two post-credit scene articles" (yes that is a plural) points to them going beyond that preconceived need. There are no longer any sugar sprinkles of useful information within the sludge, it's just pure, sloppy sludge. It is like the undead shell of something that was once vaguely useful, shambling about the internet with no aim or use at all, picking up a few misguided jabs from all the bored thumbs whose feed it happens to limp into. It is an object of derision and annoyance that is at the same time blameless and innocent. 

In many ways it is just a response to the inherent sludginess of the cultural monolith that spawned it –⁠ the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Oh yes, you bet this was where I was headed all along. But before we delve into Marvel sludge, let's look at a brief history of the post-credits scene.

From my own memories, there were post-credit scenes at the end of films during the 80s that revealed the villain might still be alive and teased the possibility of a sequel that never arrived. So, if you stayed til the end of Flash Gordon you'd see a hand that almost certainly was not that of Max Von Sydow picking up his powerful ring while the actor's laughter echoed in the background. A few years later, at the end of Masters of the Universe, we would see poor Frank Langella's head, in full Skeletor make-up, emerging from some lurid pink water before he proclaimed "I'll be back". Those of us that saw these films in the cinema as kids didn't know about the existence of these post-credit stings until they were broadcast on television many years later.

There were other post-credit scenes at the time but, like the two previous examples, they were just Easter Eggs –⁠ curious little extras placed where most people never expected to find them. I'm willing to believe that this was the case when Iron Man arrived at the cinema with its post-credit reveal of Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury. But, unlike previous iterations, as buzz for the film built, viewers had social media and discussion boards to spread the word and pixelated videos of the scene found their way onto YouTube.

I enjoyed that first batch of Marvel films. The scripts were full of funny moments as well as the odd emotional crescendo and action highlight. The post-credit scenes continued and still felt novel and fun. But from the first Avengers film onwards, I would find myself becoming less engaged in the last twenty-thirty minutes –⁠ with things building to an inevitable final battle full of rushed CGI and the odd glimpse of actors projecting their own idea of what the film might be onto a green screen. That period of detachment seemed to get longer and longer with every film that followed. 

Then, possibly with my first viewing of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, I noticed that the Marvel movies had become their own kind of sludge. A sludge that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, a sludge with a few lorry loads of sweet sprinkles dumped into it, but sludge nonetheless. I don't know when it turned out that way but I suspect it was around the time that the post-credit scene became the expectation rather than a little unexpected extra. The sludge had become so pervasive that cinema itself was suddenly in thrall to its whims and dogmas to the degree that real humans wrote real articles about whether Dune: Part Two had a post-credits scene.

I remember a screen grab doing the rounds that showed the listing for a multiplex where Dr Strange 2 was playing on every screen, with a showing every hour. I remember people defending this in terms of the market and individual choice, as if choice was a kind of battle royale that led to the logical end point of there being no choice at all. Others got behind Robert Egger's The Northman, preaching the imperative that if you valued cinema, you had to find a screen showing the most expensive art movie to date and buy a ticket to show the multiplexes and studios that there was a market for it. But the market is not a democracy where you can vote with your wallet –⁠ where plucky independent film directors can set up their stalls next to the Disney emporium. Or, as the alternative title of this essay states –⁠ you can't capitalism your way out of a situation that you weren't willingly capitalismed into.

The Northman, which I liked but didn't love, didn't do well. Dr Strange 2 continued to bring in the big bucks (how could it not?). I watched it on Disney Plus, (see the opening sentence of this essay about me being a part of the problem) and lost interest about twenty minutes in, around the same time that my wife fell asleep. Occasionally my torpor would lift when I found the odd sweet sprinkle that reminded me that Sam Raimi, the director of what is still perhaps the best superhero movie ever, was occasionally dipping his ladle into this sad vat of slop. 

The following Marvel movies didn't fare as well, with The Marvels perhaps being an undeserving casualty of its predecessors' missteps. While the Northman sank, Everything Everywhere All At Once popped up a few weeks later, punched way above its weight at the box office and cleaned up at the Oscars.

It wasn't because the film was promoted as a last-gasp rear action against Disney. It started its run on ten screens before audience buzz and word of mouth helped it to open at more screens week after week. This eventually led to the multiplexes wanting a piece of it in the post-Marvel lull.

A film with wider appeal than first perceived managed to build itself up within the perfect storm of its own inherent quality, perfect timing and luck. Would this have happened if it was pitted against a Marvel film like The Northman and pitched as the last chance to vote with our wallets for "real cinema"? Who knows?

Incidentally, even though The Northman was pitched as the art-house alternative to Marvel sludge, I still found an article about whether it has a post-credit scene.

Which brings me back to Dune: Part Two, which I haven't seen though I know it doesn't have a post-credit scene. In many ways, Denis Villeneuve's first Dune movie could also lay claim to being the most expensive art movie ever made. I wouldn't go as far as to say that nothing about the film was made for profit, but it wasn't sludge.

Dune was made because Frank Herbert had a vision when he wrote the novel and then the cinematic adaptation became its own challenge, one that at least one cinematic icon had failed to realise. This was just as much because of the studio system at the time as well as the technical options that existed when David Lynch had a go. Villeneuve's Dune exists because Villeneuve and many other directors really wanted to make it. 

Whereas sludge, be it a web article or the latest installment in a multi-billion dollar cultural franchise, exists to fill some perceived gap in the cultural landscape that money can be extracted from. It is produced in response to a perceived demand rather than because the creator wanted to bring it into the world. I guess the latter has always been known as "art" whereas the thing I've been referring to all this time has already gone by another name: content. Art is something that bursts into the world from within whereas content is quite literally something that fills an otherwise empty container. If not a container, then it fills an existential void and momentarily stops the thumb from scrolling a feed for eternity.

None of us asked to be born and so we find ourselves in moments where we have no immediate answer to the question of why we are here. It is these intense, unasked for stretches of nothing that we seek to fill up with sludge. It's not so much that sludge has a purpose, more that it parasitises that purpose.

Most art doesn't meet a need or fill a gap in a market. The artist feels the urge to make something and it arrives in a world that has no immediate need for it. It might not be great art, it might not be beloved art, but it's still art. Its purpose is not to fill a void. Unlike the sludge, the wonderful thing about art is that it has no inherent purpose at all. 

Thanks for reading this

I'm having a real blast writing essays and making videos lately. When I get this feeling I often feel like it's only a matter of time before my neurochemistry shifts and I'm back to being blocked again. Have you seen the videos yet? They're basically talky versions of these essays. They're not readings of the essays, they're talks about the same things that sometimes go in very different directions. You can find them here:

https://youtube.com/@niallosullivan

I'm also very proud of myself for writing 2,500 words about Marvel sludge without mentioning Madam Web once. Madam Web is sludge, sludge that exists for the sole purpose of Sony holding onto the Spiderman I.P., but it's too easy a target. Even I have standards.

I already know what I'll be posting next week, in one sense it's a follow up to my Inside Llewyn Davis essay in the sense that it's about another film on the subject of art and creativity that came out around the same time. It'll also continue in the same art vs content vein that this one goes into.

Incidentally, while there's plenty of "art vs content" stuff out there (I nearly called it content), I have a feeling I was influenced by this recent video from Venus Theory and this Thread from the poet Arjunan Manuelpillai. 

@arjimanuelpillai • I just hate the word ‘content’ as it deems the idea of creation as solely for other people’... • Threads

I just hate the word ‘content’ as it deems the idea of creation as solely for other people’s consumption. Now I hear it in arts projects constantly.

Have a good one.

Niall

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