Dune Part Two: Hollywood Doesn't Really Want Frank Herbert's "Dune"

What Hollywood wants from Frank Herbert's Sci-Fi epic “Dune” is a blockbuster film, this is its first and primary concern. This is not an insight, nor a damnation in and of itself, but it is a fundamental block in my ongoing issues with this franchise and the repeated tries at making a successful on screen adaptation. If the marriage was more successful, (and by successful I mean balanced) I would love Dune, but this Dune is a diluted, convoluted, distilled Dune, maintaining almost none of its capacity for thought provocation, and only a certain portion of its sense of wonder. Denis Villanueve is a director who deals in ambiguities and the incomplete. Frank Herbert's canonical Sci Fi text is as comprehensive a bit of storytelling-weaving as you can get in the genre. Well-beloved by many not just for it's exhaustive attention to detail in world building, but as a challenging narrative allegory of western power, ecological decimation, and imperialism, but is also as German historian Frank Jacob refers to it “Anti-Colonial Colonialism”. It stands against the idea in theory, but in practice it's still upholds it. The ongoing nature of this conflict of perception is representative of the cohabitative nature of the deconstruction and reconstruction of orientalist themes, symbology, and interpretation in the original text. The ongoing conflict between the original text and it's on-screen adaptations is a product of the cohabitative imbalance of capital and art in the industry, the latter of which is represented in the choice of director and holds an unsuitable amount of influence over the former in which both work to reduce a dense, rich text to pure artifice and almost no edifice.

In Denis Villanueve's two part adaptation of the first Dune, the book’s dense characterizations and cacophony of political machinations are reduced to broad strokes. There is no interest in building the interdependent and volatile nature of these relationships and the characters that represent them. The emperor’s integral role in what happened to the Atriedes being completely absent from the first film, is introduced in the second mostly through scenes that fly by and tell you absolutely the bare minimum about who the Emperor is as a character, much less that of the triumvirate of the noble houses, the navigator’s guild, and the emperor. Much of the political intrigue, tactics, and infighting which reinforces the prescience not only in events, but in incisive portraits of the psychological approach of colonial powers are also gone. Paul's doubts and unease about being a messiah are highlighted and over-represented, his foibles and ego silenced until he drinks “the water of life”, which then makes it seem the water of life caused it, rather than his own deficiencies. Villanueve’s own way into the book is a tell as to what he sees and values as the important thrust and even moreso, what he doesn't by way of silence. On the podcast “Q with Tom Power” Villanueve is asked what drew him to Dune in the first place, he answers; “There's something about the journey of the main character Paul Atreides, the feelings of isolation, the way he was struggling with the burden of his heritage, family heritage, genetic heritage, political heritage, climatic heritage, all this weight on his shoulders, then finally being able to find freedom through the contact with another culture.” Villanueve’s words are indicative and representative of Villanueve's focus on the hero's journey and since our “hero” is Paul, the Fremen are merely a device by which Paul is catapulted to self discovery. The hero’s journey aspect of Herbert’s book has always represented the source of Hollywood’s fervent attraction to this series, as it to them is what defines its potential as an intellectual property. The dollar signs in the eyes of industry executives easily push aside the fact that in some respects the source material is a rejection of that narrative, and the choosing of a director (a very skilled one) who shares the belief, means that by consequence of the machine through which it is produced, any chance for any meaty meaningful reconstruction or deconstruction of the original texts’ obvious themes is jettisoned, and that is a choice in every sense of the word. The spectacle which is what is wanted and desired by most of the execs, and most of the general public is not unimportant, (especially in a era so devoid of any true examples of it) but it is very much standing in the place of the politics and thematic breadth of Herbert's vision.

The spectacle of Villanueve's Dune is as oppressive as the book’s various houses and characters. Alot of thought was put into building this world and it's clear in the design; from costume, to set, to technology, and beyond. Harkonnens float like spacemen in an early Hanna Barbara cartoon above arid dunes and rock formations. A helicopter on fire freefalls in the background as we watch Zendaya and Timothee Chalamet race across the sand under the shade of the Harkonnen version of a John Deere for the desert. Sandworms slide through earth parallel to each other from a birds eye view. A harrowing supremely well choreographed fight occurs more than once, with a finale sure to be on the minds of everyone long after they have left the theater. All of these things are such forceful sights to behold, it's difficult to dismiss Dune part two’s success as spectacle. They take up so much air in the film you can almost forget to take a breath and remember that Dune is essentially a space epic with alot more than spectacle on its mind and far too politically intricate to be reproduced on screen by an entity so dedicated to the reproduction of the very things the book seeks to deconstruct. In essence how are you going to faithfully adapt such an anti-Star Wars book through the funnel of an enterprise that wants exactly Star Wars? The aspects of these films that most align themselves with the aspects most fetishized by both those in the industry and consumer at-large are in rare form. This version has alot more in common with those intitial Star Wars films than the difference in execution and skill might allow one to believe. The delayed introduction of the emperor, the reluctant hero with a family name that rings out, the focus on languages, creatures, clothing, weaponry, world building in essence, these are the parts of Dune that sell it. The parts that make it consumable to a vast mass. It has none of the weighted emotional heft of Spielberg's “Minority Report” or “AI” to deter some audiences. None of the narrative integrity to the challenging themes of its source material that “A Clockwork Orange” maintains to repel them. It does not carry the narrative foreboding present in George Lucas's prequels. Much like the initial Star Wars trilogy, characters having names and titles serve mostly utilitary and perfunctory functions to the script. The characterizations are airy, the politics are broad, there is little to detangle, little to sit with outside pageantry. The oatmeal density of the books themes and politics now water, Dune’s transformation to “popcorn movie” is now complete.

Frank Herbert had much more distinctive and specific desires for his book as it pertains to its themes and its political commentary. The parallels in the relationships between the noble houses, the emperor, and Arakkis (which even phonetically sounds like Iraq) are undeniable and as such unavoidable, thusly anyone who adapts the book must in essence agree with the intricacy, the specificity. You cannot deal in the abstract with a text like this. The source material, (which as it pertains to the fremen, also deals in forms of abstractness) lends itself to orientalism, if you then become even more abstract then what is left? The answer is movies that talk like the book about a man seeking to align himself with and become equal to a people no less than him, while asserting his superiority in nearly every image and piece of text. Movies that imply that merely feeling conflicted over your inarguable “superiority” is the same as deconstructing it. In his landmark book on the subject literary critic and academic Edward Said had this to say about “Orientalism”; “In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.” Knowing this, the question here is not whether or not Paul and the Atriedes are white saviors, (Though there could certainly be an argument they most certainly are as both the literature and screen do not truly deny that Paul is the messiah, but rather the efficacy of the role) the question is; “What are the Fremen?”

For all the time spent around the Fremen as a people, they are largely bystanders in a story that largely concerns them. They bookend the first film, appear in the second (as with most of the characters in this film) as a large collective meant to signify one character, and in no way are in charge of their own destiny. In text and then re-creation of the text, they are reduced to pawns. Their land is occupied, they cannot defeat their occupiers on their own and so the ways to defeat them are given to them by the foreigner - “You’ve been fighting the Harkkonens for decades, we’ve been fighting them for centuries” - their prowess as a fighting force is reduced to the swarm like behavior rather than the elite man to man skill that saw even small numbers of Fremen decimate large numbers of Harkonnen soldiers and the Sardaukar. Even their religion is given to them by way of the Bene Gesserit. Villanueve a man heavily drawn to the image seems completely disinterested in any image that shows the fremen people (his favorite in the book) as a mighty force independent of Paul. The interest is not in them as a people, but in the collection of symbols, signs, and cultural iconography that convey their “otherness”. The romance at the center of the movies suffers not only from the lack of any deep chemistry between Chalamet and Zendaya, but from the lack of any specificity around what exactly draws Chani to Paul despite her natural and very valid fears about him as an interloper. Gone is even the patience to suggest a slowburn as exemplified in something like “The Last Samurai”. Paul's whiteness is taken for granted as inherently attractive in and of itself. It is the draw, it is the pull, and as told on film it is irresistible no matter what place white men occupy and felt almost on sight. So, Said’s words remain; at what point in these films is Paul's relational superiority not clear? What are we to say about a narrative that continually highlights a groups mysticism and the abstract symbols of their culture apart from their humanity? One willing to turn “Jihad” into “holy war” as to not invite controversy, but unwilling to use one’s imagination as to how to present the MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) coded fremen in a complex relationship to a complex man? Why chance that potentially mine ridden path, when they can just have the horde remain mostly nameless and faceless save for those descriptors which most reliably tell us who they are stand-ins for? There is no need for a hypothetical about what would happen if MENA actors were placed in this precarious story of jihad, because there are MENA actors in this precarious story of jihad. Hamza Baissa as “Young fremen patrol”, Hassan Najib as “Young fremen patrol” and Omar Elbooz as “Young fremen patrol and on it goes. In the caves, on the worms, and any time we see the Fremen's collective ethnic makeup it is quite clear they're mostly MENA looking, they just don't need to speak or have much agency. What are we to make of a film that reduces Thufir Hawat - feared and revered master of assassins to glorified guide and head of security in one movie? His vital role to the goings on in the narrative cut completely? To the disappearance of Liet Kynes importance and her (gender reversed) relationship to Chani? To the reduction of Yuen's relationships? To the quick deaths of almost every person of color in the first and the reduction of Stilgar to a form of elevated comic relief in part two, almost pointless to the movie except as a pair of shoulders for Paul to sit on? The presence of the opposite or a challenge to any one, or two, or maybe three of these things would still make for a movie taking positive steps in the right direction, and none of them by themselves or in and of themselves harmful to the movie as an adaptation, it is the collection of them that does that.

Since Europeans, Western powers, America, and Hollywood center themselves as the cultural and political centers of the world so too do their literary and cinematic avatars, and as such it remains in Dune. You cannot free yourself from a narrative by adapting the narrative, no more than you can disband hegemonic structures and ideas from the “inside”. You are not subverting the trope of making the “other” a prop to show white superiority, by making them a prop to show the folly of white superiority. You cannot find yourself or seek the “true self” in another culture, (as Villanueve alluded to later in the same interview) this is nothing more than the guiding force behind the whitewashing of yoga or rastafarianism and many other appropriations, Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” where the burden is his guilt over his capacity to consume. This is the flaw in any overall belief in the Hollywood structure to do something that would inflict even minor damage to its self perpetuated mythology. Dune is undeniably a story about a gigantic and enormous conspiracy to rob a people of a resource that rightfully belongs to them and the prophecy that uphold it's players criminal machinations. That POV is not the only read available, but it is amongst, if not its most apparent. That POV would mean trying to build a blockbuster around a hero that is in essence a villain, and the lack of investment in it forbids something as imaginative as allowing the events of Dune to fold out from a fremen perspective beyond a voiceover from Zendaya’s Chani. That POV would mean following through consistently on the implication made by Chani’s narration in the first, that the Atreides are just the fremen’s latest oppressors. Which would mean a blockbuster that played out superficially at least like “Killers of the Flower Moon”. For all the pomp and gravitas, this latest Dune has failed to acknowledge that aspect to even the degree a bare minimum would decree. It is not some understated study of the power and hegemony and in fact borders on a celebration of it, just ambiguous enough to not fall on that side. That alone would still not be enough for me to hold back my excitement for such detail to world building, had that world not been so aesthetically tied to this one, or so clearly the entire point, as film critic Richard Brody said about Villanueve’s vision in a recent tweet; “Nothing distinctive in his filming of gigantic sets, either—they themselves are the idea”. A decent emotional exploration in this movie mined for effect might've won me over to the film as well, but while certain images brought some sense of wonder there was nothing behind them to make them weighted. What's left is a movie that looks the part but doesn't feel it, a movie that feels like it sold out on the books most apparent themes, (nevermind imagining something beyond them) and couldn't even bother to replace them with something more revelatory or inspiring than ugly toys and sad faced boys.