Reworking Empire: Dune 2

Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living

No News or Academia columns this week because basically, I had nothing to say that didn’t feel like I’d already said it too many times. I may try to find a way to talk about how I understand the concept of austerity in higher education in relationship to a talk by Robert Meister that I heard last week, but I need to think on it a bit.

I do have some things to say about Dune 2, however. Spoilers if you haven’t seen it.

The novelist Nisi Shawl has been an especially articulate voice in a growing chorus of writers and readers who’ve explored ways to write speculative fiction that doesn’t unreflectively reproduce colonial or imperial narratives with the protagonists as colonizers, where imperialism is taken to be synonymous with exploration and adventure.

I don’t think that call has to mean that fantasy and science fiction has to avoid empires, conquest, settlement and so on as themes, or to invariably position its characters and stories in sympathy with anti-colonialism or resistance to imperialism. Speculative fiction is a marvelous way to think about what we are and have been in a way that lets us reimagine or rethink it, and that can always include representing political and social systems from the perspective of characters who control or dominate those systems. What I don’t find useful or entertaining is a character or story that is unmistakably drawing on the real history of modern imperialism or colonial settlement without the author seeming to know that’s what they’re doing, and even more than that a work of fiction that is actively propagandizing in favor of imperial conquest, racial domination, genocide and so on.

It is easy to overstate how frequently that has been the case in the history of science fiction and fantasy. Asimov’s Foundation books seem overtly in favor of the Galactic Empire—Hari Seldon doesn’t even bother to explain why he’s keen to reform the empire as quickly as possible rather than simply allow every inhabited planet to just go its own way—but even so, Asimov demonstrates surprising sympathy for planets like Siwenna that have revolted against the Empire’s control. Robert Heinlein’s “juveniles” more or less expand Cold War America into the solar system and his Martians and Venusians sometimes seem as if they’re non-Western societies within that frame, but they’re often portrayed as superior to human beings in technological, intellectual and moral terms, and effectively too powerful to be subjected to human dominion.

Even so, there’s a fairly long list of fan-favorite speculative works that don’t hold up very well in these terms when they’re re-read. That list certainly includes Frank Herbert’s Dune series, albeit not without some mitigating subtextual complexity. Any contemporary adaptation with integrity and vision was always going to have to think hard about that dimension of the novels. In particular, there is no easy way to unravel Dune’s plain genealogical relationship to T.E. Lawrence’s self-mythologizing in Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the David Lean film that cemented that story in the global imagination.

Not because an adaptation would inevitably be a commercial failure if it refused to take on the work of that unravelling. Both of James Cameron’s Avatar films have stripped the complexity out of Lawrence and Lean’s versions of this history and given filmgoers a completely unproblematized “white savior” figure rescuing noble savages from his own imperialist people without that denting the success of either film. The recent Book of Boba Fett series on Disney + was not a particularly notable success critically or with fans, but many viewers praised the early story arc that has Boba Fett adopted by Tusken Raiders on Tatooine without seeming to be aware that it was almost a direct rip-off of Lawrence of Arabia, again without the cynicism about empire and the protagonist’s inner motivations that the Lean film provides.

Earlier film and TV adaptations of Dune did not particularly try to critically reimagine the imperial elements of the novels, either. I think you can trace out some convergent media offspring of Dune that did effective work at recognizing the darker imperial elements of the original novels, as in the case of Warhammer 40K as a setting for gaming and fiction or the film The Chronicles of Riddick.

So why would I say that a contemporary adaptation of Dune would have to creatively unthink or reframe the imperial dimension of the original? I think partly because you really don’t want to expend all that energy and all those resources on just making a film that amounts to being a derivative reskinning of already-derivative works like Avatar. But also because Dune’s pleasures as a book lie partly in its florid philosophical engagement with destiny and fate, in the way it situates imperial formality and palace intrigue against the equal complex plots of the Fremen to remake and reclaim their world, and in the subtextual possibilities that Herbert deliberately worked in the narrative. The potential of Dune is so vastly greater than the infinitely disposable Avatar.

In the original novel, the problem in the end is that Paul Atreides is both a fake messiah and a genuine superhuman. In the novel, Herbert establishes clearly that the Bene Gesserit, scheming across the centuries to solidify their mystico-religious control over human affairs through manipulation rather than sovereign violence, have used their limited foresight to seed the Fremen culture (and by implication, other societies elsewhere) with a messiah story that their representatives could choose to inhabit later on, to easily “go native” by seeming to magically know and conform to the secret details of esoteric prophecies. But Paul is also actually the Kwisatz Haderach, the outcome of many generations of selective breeding of the imperial nobility. He not only has the training of the Bene Gesserit, but an ability to comprehensively see future timelines as well as to comprehensively know the entirety of his ancestral past—specifically, the experiences of male ancestors, which the Bene Gesserit cannot access.

Dune is also extensively engaged in the interiority of its main characters, Paul in particular: we spend a tremendous amount of time in his head. As a result, even if Paul and his mother are aware that the Bene Gesserit have laid the groundwork for them to exploit the Fremen’s beliefs, we are assured that they themselves are sincere in their desire to do the right thing. Paul in particular, the novel tells us, really sees the entire possible future of galactic humanity and that when he sends the Fremen out into the galaxy as his holy warriors, leading to the deaths of many billions of people, this is better than many other outcomes that he can see. (Including allowing himself to die at the hands of Feyd-Rautha in the famous knife fight that happens at the end of the first book in the series. Paul toys with submitting to that fate because it would relieve him of the moral misery of being responsible for all those deaths.)

The problem here is that this is precisely the mindset of modern empire: we have to do these terrible things because in the long run, it’s better than not doing the terrible things. That was already farcically disproven during the lifespan of European empire in the 19th and early 20th Century, and it has never seemed any closer to being true in post-1945 revisionings of imperial hegemony. So when Paul not only is affirmed as possessing omniscience but we are given a ringside seat inside his consciousness to be assured that he is genuinely seeing the best utilitarian pathway through universal suffering, the novel can’t help but be aligned as a confirmation of imperial ideology.

That’s all the more the case because we really don’t get a ringside seat inside the consciousness of Fremen individuals. The book—like Paul and his real-world inspiration, T.E. Lawrence—is immensely sympathetic to them as imperial subjects who have suffered under the harsh rule of the Harkonnens. But that’s a very imperial story too—the better empire that comes to save people from the worse one. For a long time, people in my field of scholarly specialization (modern African history) tried to dodge the incessantly asked questions about whether the Portuguese were worse than the Belgians were worse than the Germans were worse than the French were worse than the best-worst, the British. But it gets asked not just as an apologetic—as I was reminded recently, anti-colonial leaders like Amilcar Cabral were genuinely invested in claiming that the Portuguese were worse than. And Dune has no trouble making us accept that you would much rather have the Atreides as your rulers than the Harkonnens, and affirming that the Fremen might have come to believe that too, if only there had been time.

But the novel only gives us a sense that the Fremen have a variety of views on that point fairly late in the game, and by the time we get that view, Paul has already won over the Fremen leader Stilgar and his lover Chani, so the Fremen skeptics are comprehensively unvoiced and de-legitimatized at every turn, trying to go up against a leader who has “gone native” very thoroughly and who is really, genuinely, the messiah they’ve been manipulated into anticipating.

So this is where Dune 2 comes in and I think Villeneuve has really brilliantly solved the problem of adapting the novel in a way that fixes these issues and turns it into a much more thoughtful exploration of imperial stories. He does that in two ways that are intertwined.

The first is that we don’t see Paul’s interiority. We see that he has superhuman powers, but they’re all externalized: he knows things about the intimate biographies of all the people he meets, he can silence the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam herself with the Voice, he knows what to do in every uncertain situation. But we don’t know if his sight is accurate. We see his visions, hazy and unclear, up to the point that he takes the Water of Life, and then not at all after that point, when in theory they are now completely clear. Combine that with the fact that we also do not see anything of Jessica’s interiority except that she’s talking with her embryonic daughter, in a way that almost invites you to wonder if it’s real, or if she’s doing her own version of “Danny’s not here, Mrs. Torrance”, except that Paul keeps confirming that Alia’s voice is real and then briefly glimpses her in the last vision we’re privileged to share visually with him. The fact that Alia isn’t born during the film’s narrative stretches incredulity in that it requires that Paul becomes trusted and ascends to leadership within seven months, but it also makes Jessica seem much more manipulative and fanatical. (She reminded me really of Alia in Children of Dune, almost.)

The second is that Villeneuve fixes the worst problem with the original novel, and that’s Chani. Chani is entirely passive in the novel, completely trusting of Paul once she gets to know him, and even in the painful final scenes when he makes a royal marriage with Irulan, basically is accepting of whatever Paul chooses to do. Her narrative line fairly close to what we’ve ended up calling “fridging” in more contemporary terms. She exists to make Paul feel good and then to make him feel bad and then to have his children. And then to be a temptation of power, in that he is offered the chance to have a near-clone of her back.

Villeneuve repairs the problem of imperialism in Dune through reimagining Chani, and Zendaya does a remarkable job of making that repair powerful and convincing in her portrayal of the character. Chani in the film is the absent Fremen subjectivity that the novel never represents. She is fully aware that the story of a messiah from “the outer world” is a manipulative lie seeded in her culture many generations ago, and only loves Paul when she comes to believe that he has no desire to be a messiah or a leader, to just be her comrade-in-arms fighting against the Harkonnens. She loves him when he seems like an equal to her, and plainly turns into his enemy once he drinks the Water of Life and embraces messianic leadership. That’s what makes the sudden exclusion from Paul’s visions so powerful: we see him as Chani sees him: terrifyingly powerful and competent, yes, but also as a liar who has embraced dominion over the Fremen. The moment when Paul puts on his father’s ring isn’t triumphant at all in Villeneuve’s version: it’s tragic and chilling. The film manages to make the entire third act of the story into a heel turn. In the novel, Paul’s interiority scans as self-loathing, almost as a super-outsize version of Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”—a man reluctantly performing a violent role that he feels the universe forces him to inhabit. In the film, Paul scans entirely from Chani’s point of view: a betrayer from every imaginable angle.

Which is a much better story, and much more resonant against the inescapable analogies that map Dune’s spice and the Fremen to the Middle East’s oil and its predominantly Muslim societies. It’s even a more interesting version of Lawrence of Arabia—the almost-not-subtextual love between Ali and Lawrence is here more textual if more safely cishet, but the betrayal is also much more direct. (Real-life and fictional Lawrence can hide behind Allenby and the wider British Empire.)

I also think anyone who is really invested in Paul’s heroism can rest easy, because I’m pretty sure that the wrinkle that Villeneuve is planning for the third film is that what looks like a heel turn in this film will turn out to have been an act of grandiose self-sacrifice in the third film—that Paul knew Chani would turn against him and is setting her up to be the true liberator of the Fremen by being his enemy. (Essentially making her the Preacher of the novel Children of Dune, who is Paul in that novel.) So that Paul never lied: he always did want the Fremen to be free and for Dune to be a “green paradise”, he just foresaw that would take Chani becoming his enemy and overthrowing him. (Which also has some lovely complexity in the sense of how anti-colonialism has frequently been something that well-meaning people from imperial societies think they can enable by trying to choose who the best anti-imperialist from colonized societies would be.)

I also wonder if the film isn’t going to embrace a more radical vision of humanity’s secure future than the books, which settle for “security requires an immortal worm-man who rules with an iron fist for centuries”, which is not really very satisfying philosophically. (As the God-Emperor himself frequently whines about in his own novel in the series.) What I wonder is whether Paul’s visions of “people starving” are an indicator that he’s goading Chani into firing off the film’s Chekov-gun and blowing up the spice with a combination of the family atomics and the poisoning of the sandworms that allows Dune to become green again, which would make the galaxy recede into a non-FTL order where every planet lives or dies on its own. Which might make Dune 3 not only a resonantly anti-imperial film, but one with an interesting message about what climate activism might require of us if we take it seriously.