Sting is my favorite part of David Lynch’s Dune

polygon.com:

Poor Sting. In 1983, the frontman of The Police was at the height of his popularity. The trio’s fifth album, Synchronicity, topped the Billboard charts for 17 nonconsecutive weeks during the summer of ’83, interrupted only by Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The year prior, Sting landed a breakout acting role in the film adaptation of Brimstone and Treacle, playing a conman-pickpocket-rapist — a role that seemed destined to launch a small but respectable film career.

Then he joined the cast of David Lynch’s Dune, a troubled adaptation that nearly spelled the end of Sting’s acting ambitions.

Sting, real name Gordon Sumner, was recruited by Lynch to play Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, nephew of the Baron Vladimir and the bloodthirsty foil to Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul Atreides. Sting’s Feyd-Rautha appears only briefly in Dune — he has less than 10 minutes of screen time — but his role is a memorable one, mostly for the wrong reasons.

The most notorious bit of Sting’s role in Dune comes about 90 minutes into the film, when he emerges from a steamy bath and directly into the lustful gaze of Baron Harkonnen. Sting’s Feyd struts into frame wearing nothing but a winged leather codpiece and a thin layer of glistening oil, giving him the sweaty sheen that was the cinematic style of the time. Feyd stretches and flexes. Sting’s lithe, cocaine-chiseled figure pops against the all-black background of the shot. He works Baron Harkonnen into a lather in a gratuitous, narratively detached shot.

Sting’s codpiece has since become legend. Half of the Dune promo photos available on Getty Images are of Sting in his little leather pants. In 2020, The Telegraph bashed Feyd’s minimal wardrobe as “the codpiece that killed Dune” and made Sting a “laughing stock.”

The Telegraph’s piece also regales us with a story that Sting and Lynch originally planned to have Feyd emerge from his steamy chamber fully nude, but that producers squashed that plan, fearing an R rating for the $40 million film. Allegedly, the