The planet is Arrakis.
Also known as Dune.
And y’all, it’s a mess.
December of this year, we were supposed to see the arrival of director Denis Villeneuve’s
interpretation of the 1965 novel Dune, which had been previously (and rather infamously)
brought to life by David Lynch in 1984, and again in a three part miniseries on the SyFy
channel in the early 2000s.
Now many sci-fi nerds (including myself) were both excited and nervous about the new adaptation
directed by Villeneuve, but owing to the ongoing plague of eternity, the release has been pushed
back to next year.
So in lieu of that, y’all have to use this video to tide you over.
What is Dune?
Why must the spice flow?
And what is with all the sand?
(I hate sand, it’s coarse and it gets everywhere)
Dune is a 1965 science-fiction novel by American author Frank Herbert, and is the first installment
of the Dune Saga, which is made up of five sequels written by Herbert himself and several
subsequent books made under the collaboration of Brian Herbert (Frank Herbert’s son) and
writer Kevin J. Anderson.
They are … controversial.
While not an instant bestseller, it was a massive critical success, with winning both
the Hugo and the Nebula awards in 1966.
Dune itself would eventually be called the “best selling science fiction book of all
time” in 2003.
Taking place in humanity’s distant future, the universe is now a feudal interstellar
society in which various noble houses control planetary fiefs, with the most important being
the desert planet Arrakis.
Ya see, Arrakis is the source of the spice melange which extends your life, gives you
cool mental abilities, and is essential for space navigation.
And it absolutely must flow.
You’d think with a planet that important it would just belong to everyone … but … I
guess they're going for realism
The current galactic ruler, the Emperor Shaddam IV (4th) is what we would call, an insecure
hater.
He sees how popular this one guy, Duke Leto Atreides, has gotten and takes advantage of
a blood feud between House Atreides and their rivals, House Harkonnen, to destroy the Atreides
family.
And so Arrakis, which previously belonged to the Harkonnens, is given to Duke Leto---with
the intention that he and his family have move to this sandy, mostly inhospitable planet
in order to protect the spice melange.
What could go wrong!?!
Enter Paul.
Paul is the heir of House Atreides and at the ripe age of 15 he is ready to be the protagonist
of a science fiction series.
Paul is like the chosen one over 9000.
Prophetic visions?
Yup.
Super rich?
Yes.
Heir of a tragic family?
Yes.
Superpowered child as the result of a centuries long breeding program and positioned to be
a prophet to a group of very specifically coded sand-people?
Specific, but yes.
Spoilers from this point on by the way.
There is an ambush and Paul’s dad is captured, but he kills himself using a cyanide capsule.
Paul and his mother, Jessica, meet up with the Fremean, the native population of Dune.
They see Paul as a prophet, and he takes on the Fremean name Paul Muad'Dib.
After training, getting a new stabby younger sister, a girlfriend named Chani and taming
the sandworms (massive nightmare snakes that live in the wild and from whose poop spice
is made), Paul ends up getting revenge for the death of his father.
After he defeats the Baron Harkonnen (who is also his surprise grandfather), Paul requests
an audience with Shaddam IV and threatens to destroy the spice melange, unless he gets
to marry the Emperor's daughter, Princess Irulan and the Emperor abdicates in favor
of Paul, who is, I reiterate, is a teenager.
Yay?
And that is like the super spark notes summary.
What makes the first book in the saga so compelling is how it sets up all these themes that Frank
Herbert later deconstructs.
Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr., noted Libra, had been a pulp writer, photographer, and
journalist before he started doing research for Dune in 1959.
The endeavor took him six years and more than 400 pages of writing to complete---making
Dune much longer than most science fiction at the time.
Kevin Mulcahy in “The Prince on Arrakis: Frank Herbert's dialogue with Machiavelli”
explains that
“Herbert was writing at the height of the Cold War.
From the conception of Dune to its publication, a presidential campaign centered around fears
of a "missile gap"; [...] Read in their historical context, Dune and (to a lesser extent) its
sequels are subversive texts.[...].
Herbert dramatizes in Dune an unpleasant political truth: people cannot free themselves of Machiavellian
leaders until they first free themselves of their desire to be led.”
Jennifer Simkins, an English teacher in New South Wales, Australia, also points out that
the Dune novels “suggest that blind acceptance of social structures, and the mythic patterns
that inform them, leads to the intellectual stagnation of humankind.
[...] For Herbert, SF is a mode that “helps us understand what it means to be human”
by examining established myths.”
The Dune saga highlights Herbert’s evergoing concern with leadership.
He had always expressed that the first book and the character of Paul was meant to examine
human tendency to follow charismatic leaders.
Except you don’t particularly get that element until the second book Dune Messiah, which
puts the D in deconstruction.
You see, in the first book, Paul hijacks the Fremen’s religion in order to get power
and revenge, which is like yay white boy power fantasy pew pew.
However, it soon becomes a power that Paul cannot control.
As a result, when we open Dune Messiah, we are told that the Fremen started a jihad in
Paul's name across the galaxy that kills (flips book open) sixty billion people across the
known universe.
Colonization is bad, m’kay.
One of Paul’s visions that he gets from being special, is that the future of humanity
could go down a path where it will stagnate and destroy itself.
Thus, Paul thinks that the only way to prevent this future of eventual human extinction is
to engender such oppressive horrible leadership that humanity will never follow a leader again.
Sounds legit.
His not official wife, Chani, dies leaving behind a pair of chosen one TWINS named Luke
and Leia … ahem, I mean Leto II and Ghanima.
And when this happens, he goes into a state of despair and pretty much abdicates his power
because he can’t be full Vader.
Also, that is shade for Star Wars not Dune just so we're clear.
Children of Dune, the third book in what we could call the first Dune trilogy, sets up
the next phase of the series with a new “protagonist” in Paul’s son, Leto II.
Both of his children have similar powers to him, but it is Leto who is destined to become
the God Emperor and he does so by being as evil as he needs to be in order to ensure
the survival of the world.
So let's talk about Paul, the “hero” of our story, at least at first.
One of the things that is often debated is if Paul would fall under what you’d call
a “white savior” character.
In many genres, including science fiction, there is this trope of a white (or white adjacent
person) coming into Black or iindigenous communities (or in this case, black and indigenous coded),
and becoming their leader by doing what they already do, but better.
Paul is both.
A “white savior” played straight in the original Dune, but a deconstruction in the
later books.
In Dune Messiah he compares himself to Hilter at one point saying: “He killed more than
six million.
Pretty good for those days...
Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety
planets, completely demoralized five hundred others.
I've wiped out the followers of forty religions…”
Everything about his character is set up to be this noble hero who wants to do good, but
his visions are a trap.
Paul does not want to subject the world to living under a human god and that is criticized
by some in text as being weak, but often, as is the case with Dune especially, just
because the text says one thing doesn’t mean we are meant to take it as such.
Especially considering that his son ends up turning into a giant human/sandworm hybrid
with only a human face and two t-rex arms.
This physical transformation highlights a point brought up again in Mulcahy’s, piece
“Herbert's Dune novels demonstrate the inevitable consequences of political manipulation [...[ One
cannot use others without being tainted; people cannot accede to their own exploitation without
surrendering some of their humanity.”
Paul’s fate is ultimately to be killed by one of his own acolytes who doesn’t recognize
him--a kind of poetic irony.
Simkins later explains that:
“The depiction of Paul in Dune as a stereotypical hero activates the reader’s awareness of
the hero schema before the dangers of absolute rule are illuminated in the sequels.
Herbert explains: “Dune was set up to imprint on you the reader, a superhero.
I wanted you…
totally involved with that superhero…
And then I wanted to show what happens”
Herbert is both addressing this imperialistic mindset, but also using it as the basis of
a plan that is supposed to lead the world into “salvation”, all the while asking
if any of this maneuvering is worth it.
Would things have ended differently if Paul had just gotten revenge for his father’s
death and left it there?
In my opinion, I think that Herbert is using Paul’s story to show how these ideas are
toxic and corrosive, with Leto’s transformation being a physical manifestation of that.
I mean Leto’s plan is to repress humanity for thousands of years, so that when he dies,
they yeet into the stars and beyond.
Which is basically the same plan as a parent in a fairytale who puts their child in a tower
rather than just say “hey don’t touch spinning wheels.”
Or it's like how, after WWII ended, everyone looked at each other and all agreed, "let's
never have an authoritarian again."
Yeah.
There are also still issues with the way that the Fremen are used and they become weapons.
Because, despite the text being critical of that—it doesn’t give them any more humanity.
They remain cyphers.
I think David M. Higgins, Speculative Fiction Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books,
put it best, although a tad bit harsher than me, when he said:
“...Herbert essentially offers a critique of territorial imperialism while upholding
the axioms of capitalist accumulation that motivate modern imperial exploits in the first
place[…] Herbert offers a Western audience a way to have their cake and eat it too: readers
are invited to distance themselves from identification with imperial oppressors and to identify with
decolonizing nationalists overcoming the tyranny of imperialism.
Tea.
Dune is hard to adapt because it is just the beginning of a much larger story.
We have only touched on the first three books in this video and it still has encompassed
enough for a whole semester of Philosophy 101.
A filmmaker who sees Paul as a savior can’t really comprehend the fullness of the story.
In some ways that is the trap of Dune.
Only seeing the surface level entertainment that is meant to deliver these intense messages:
As Herbert himself once said: “If you want to get anything across, you have to be entertaining
first.
If you start standing on a street corner, people will tune you out.
[...]But analogues give you a marvelous device for getting past that screening system, because
people can be caught up in the drama of the story, be deep into the problems of it.
Then later on, much later on, they say, Oh, my God, he was talking about this!"
And they come out of it with a brand new view of what's happening in their world.”
At least you hope so anyway.
Dune is an iconic work of science-fiction and while we should be critical of it and
discuss the ways in which it is dated, there is no denying that it has a huge cultural
impact on the genre and asked some really compelling questions, even if it didn’t
always deliver on the answers.
The spice … must flow.