‘Dune,’ Its Discontents, and Fear As the Mind Killer
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After years of anticipation, director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune finally arrived and it immediately and easily can be considered among the greatest science fiction films of all time. It is also the best adaptation of the 1965 novel and hews closely to the message in a bottle that Herbert wove into its narrative.
There have been two other live action iterations of the novel: Director David Lynch’s 1982 pop-art masterpiece (or disaster; your milage may vary) and SyFy’s 2000 critically acclaimed and highly rated three part mini-series Frank Herbert’s Dune.
Warner Bros. tag line attached to its media campaign selling it as this year’s Lord of the Rings/Avatar/Star Wars sucks though. Because Dune was all those things long before they existed. One can make a strong argument in fact, that especially in the case of Star Wars, it would not exist without it.
Nerdist: It’d be impossible to name every bit of art influenced by the galaxy far, far away since the release of Star Wars: A New Hope in 1977. But George Lucas’s space fantasy series wore its own influences pretty boldly on its sleeve. From science-fiction serials like Flash Gordon to the films of Akira Kurosawa, Star Wars is essentially an amalgamation of many things that came before. One of the biggest pieces of media to impact Star Wars was Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune. The two share an enormous amount of similarities, from their galactic setting to their character journeys and more. In fact, the two share so much DNA that Herbert complained that Lucas stole from him. “I’m going to try very hard not to sue,” Herbert told an Oregon newspaper back in the ‘70s, before adding that he found the first Star Wars film “boring.”
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And the similarities are legion: Tatooine / Arrakis, Moisture farmers / dew collector, and Sarlacc / Sandworm barely scratch the surface.
Dune, as a story faces headwinds in 21st century America. Chief among them: Dune has been so influential and has dictated the look, feel, and themes of so many science-fiction movies that it just appears derivative and unoriginal to younger uninformed eyes.
The New York Times: On June 4, 1963, less than a year after the controversial environmental classic was published, its author, Rachel Carson, testified before a Senate subcommittee on pesticides. She was 56 and dying of breast cancer. She told almost no one. She’d already survived a radical mastectomy. Her pelvis was so riddled with fractures that it was nearly impossible for her to walk to her seat at the wooden table before the Congressional panel. To hide her baldness, she wore a dark brown wig.
“Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history,” Senator Ernest Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska, told Carson at the time.
Silent Spring begins with a myth, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” in which Carson describes “a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” Cognizant of connecting her ideal world to one that readers knew, Carson presents not a pristine wilderness but a town where people, roads and gutters coexist with nature — until a mysterious blight befalls this perfect place. “No witchcraft,” Carson writes, “no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”
Carson knew that her target audience of popular readers included scores of housewives. She relied upon this ready army of concerned citizens both as sources who discovered robins and squirrels poisoned by pesticides outside their back doors and as readers to whom she had to appeal. Consider this indelible image of a squirrel: “The head and neck were outstretched, and the mouth often contained dirt, suggesting that the dying animal had been biting at the ground.” Carson then asks her readers, “By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?”
Spring was more than a study of the effects of synthetic pesticides; it was an indictment of the late 1950s. Humans, Carson argued, should not seek to dominate nature through chemistry, in the name of progress. In Carson’s view, technological innovation could easily and irrevocably disrupt the natural system. “She was the very first person to knock some of the shine off modernity,” McKibben says. “She was the first to tap into an idea that other people were starting to feel.”
So too was Dune.
One of the central tropes that distinguishes Dune from most sci fi is that it eschews artificial intelligence, computers, and robots. In the novel, which takes place 18,000 years in the future, we learn that there was a time when humanity nearly perished in a great war for survival with A.I. (here there are echos of what is currently happening at Facebook).
RELATED: No Computers, No A.I., and No Androids: Why the Future SciFi of Dune Is So LoFi
Salon: Given the growing popularity of mainstream and science fiction concerned with climate change and other ecological issues, maybe it’s time the epic space adventure novel received a renewed measure of respect.now that there is a renewed interest in literature – science fiction and otherwise – that explores the effects of a changing global climate.
[Many books] and eras bring a new set of doomsday scenarios. And dystopian/apocalyptic fiction has never been so plentiful. Much of it depends on familiar landscapes being ravaged by drought, rising seas, and other environmental disasters, and Dune stands as an important early example of a novel that explored ecology and environmentalism and brought those ideas to a young and influential new audience.
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Dune chronicles the coming-of-age of 15-year-old Paul Atreides, son of Duke Leto, who has been sent by the Emperor of the universe to rule over the desert planet Arrakis.
Above: The banner of House Atreides (Ἀτρείδης). A noble family that originated in Greece on Earth, they rose to prominence during the Butlerian Jihad (the war against the A.I.). House Atreides specifically claimed descent from King Agamemnon, a son of Atreus, in Greek mythology. This Royal House included many significant figures in Greek myth. Up until the latter days of Duke Leto Atreides I, House Atreides maintained the planetary fief of Caladan and had their center of operation on the planet, which they had also ruled for twenty generations. House Atreides had perfected a form of government that resulted in a well-organized society and a spiritually satisfied people. Furthermore, House Atreides kept Caladan a lush, prosperous paradise with relatively low industrial levels, in stark contrast to House Harkonnen’s capital, Giedi Prime. Proficient in war, House Atreides maintained Swordmasters, Warmasters, and Mentats to train and lead their army, and had even developed its own Battle Language.
Arrakis is the only source of melange, the priceless spice/drug that not only prolongs life and expands human consciousness, but makes interstellar travel possible. It’s the ultimate precious natural resource, a substance on which an entire empire depends.
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Lady Jessica, Leto’s concubine and Paul’s mother, is a member of the Bene Gesserit, an ancient order of female psychics who seek to influence history through eugenics [here there are myriad similarities to the ‘Jedi order.’]
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Over the course of the book, it becomes clear that Paul is the “Kwisatz Haderach,” a male offspring able to manipulate time and space with the powers of his mind (a messiah). Betrayed by a close associate and left at the mercy of the Harkonnens, a rival family determined to rule Arrakis, Paul and Jessica flee to the desert, home to gigantic sandworms, where the tenacious Fremen eke out a hardscrabble existence among the dunes by worshiping water while wearing “stillsuits” that recycle all of their bodies’ moisture. Paul, rechristened as Muad’Dib, seems fated to become a messianic figure, who may eventually lead the Fremen on a disastrous jihad.
What sets Dune apart from the space adventures of the time is the amount of meticulous detail Herbert brought to the task of world building, and how he managed to layer his saga with well-chosen elements of religion, politics, mythology and ecology. A reporter for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the San Francisco Examiner and other West Coast papers, Herbert was inspired by a visit he made to Florence, Oregon, where sand dunes were creating havoc by drifting across roads and into buildings. The United States Department of Agriculture began planting European grasses on the dunes to stabilize them, and Herbert, planning to write an article titled, “They Stopped the Moving Sand,” charted a plane to observe the projects progress. His research led him to consider why deserts were so often home to messianic figures.
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Gerry Canavan, assistant professor of English at Marquette University and co-author of Green Planets: Science Fiction and Ecology, sums up the novel’s legacy well when he writes in an email interview, Dune is really a turning point for science fiction that takes ecology seriously as a concept.”
“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.” Frank Herbert, Dune.
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Frank Herbert’s son would be among the first to agree with that assessment. In Dreamer of Dune, his 2003 biography of his father, Brian Herbert recounted many instances that demonstrated his father’s interest in environmental issues, including his backyard experiments with solar and wind power. In a telephone interview from his home near Seattle, the younger Herbert said, “In 1970, on the First Earth Day, Frank Herbert spoke to 30,000 people in Philadelphia and he told them, ‘I don’t want to be in the position of telling my grandchildren, ‘I’m sorry, there’s no more Earth left for you. We’ve used it all up.'”
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But even if we get past all that, says director Dekker Dreyer, “Dune, in my interpretation of it, is a cautionary tale about how power and charismatic leaders will exploit any means to maintain the status quo. So, for example, Paul isn’t fulfilling a prophecy as much as he is exploiting the myths planted by the Bene Gesserit. It is to his advantage to raise an army to maintain his power despite what he knows it will lead to. By the filmmakers ignoring this crucial aspect of the text instead of using it as an opportunity to develop something that feels relevant ironically makes it feel derivative.”
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Herbert was student of contemporary fiction, and at the time he was writing Dune, Joseph Campbell’s theories about the archetypal hero’s journey were certainly in vogue and Herbert was aware of them. Dune, in my estimation, was Herbert’s attempt to deconstruct that trope.
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Dreyer ultimately feels that “we’re in a time when reinterpretation of Dune based on our current world would’ve been a brave move, but I don’t think they had the balls to make it happen.”
Jody Wheeler, who is Assistant Adjunct Professor for The John Wells Division of Writing for Screen and Television at USC, told me: “I loved Villeneuve’s Dune. Epic and sweeping. Really transports you into the far future. The irony though is that Paul is both a passive and reactive character until the last 10 minutes of the movie. He doesn’t drive this story, though it is all about him.”
For a film to be more than pretty pictures and great performances, narratively a film must be about the choices a protagonist makes. It’s what they push for and what pushes back against them that gives the narrative life and motion. It doesn’t have to be epic in scale. It just has to be there. That’s not really the case here. Everything happens -to- Paul. He’s reacting to this big world around him. The narrative doesn’t put him in the driver’s seat of the story until the very end. It’s a life changing moment for Paul when it happens. It’s where Paul comes alive.
It’s also where the movie ends.
None of the above should be read as a criticism, though.
It’s an artifact of how the novel was adapted.
Dune part one dwells in the first third or so of the novel. It’s the set up portion of the full story, not the story itself.
Villeneuve tries to inject some narrative choice for Paul into it. That just makes the film feel even more of a set-up, a prelude to the real choices Paul is destined to make.
For the book — and even in David Lynch’s earlier theatrical adaptation — we see Paul make those choices. Here, it’s left for a second film. Villeneuve needs to be allowed to make the second film. Aside from this narrative weakness — something I wonder if most viewers will really notice — this is just an incredible piece of movie magic. A “serious” piece of SciFi that is exciting, captivating, and compelling.
It’s worth your time to see.
Dune is in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.
