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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Dune Part 2 was great (warning: spoilers) and thoughts on Dune universe

HBD nerds can be overly obsessed with SNPs and IQ distributions, blank slatists are blind to primordial truths of material reality, but the Dune universe properly understands Civilization as the volatile interaction between the gene pool and meme pool. I am happy to report that Dune Part II does justice to the book and is the best movie I've seen in theaters for as long as I can remember.

There is not much to complain about in terms of Wokeism. There was some bad casting in the first movie for characters that don't appear in this installment. Right Wing Twitter is complaining about the the love interest, Chani, being unattractive and the transition of her character to being a warrior who is skeptical of the cult percolating around Paul. This is probably the biggest change from the book, arguably necessary because Paul's internal conflict would be difficult to depict so it was written as an external conflict with his love interest.

The other complaint from the Christian nationalist side is that the movie and Dune universe are a critique of religiosity, which is only partially true. But in this case, the antagonists are godless heathens, and it's the victorious protagonist who is associated with religiosity, which is inverted from the traditional Hollywood critique of Christianity.

What Paul, the Fremen, the Empire, the Harkonens, etc. represent in terms of pattern-matching to reality or history is open to interpretation. I saw one right-winger on Twitter complain about the Dune universe as a celebration of the Islamic conquest of Western civilization. It's true the Fremen are aesthetically coded as Arabic, and Herbert actually does use the word "Jihad" in the book to denote the cults and its conquests across the universe, for example Paul "thought then of the Jihad, of the gene mingling across parsecs..."

But Paul is an avatar of all Abrahamic religion: he's the synthesis of Moses who leads his people through the desert to salvation, the dying-and-rising Jesus, and Mohammed the conqueror. And of course Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet who is half-Jewish, is named after the Jew Paul of Tarsus, "a Pharisee, born of Pharisees", who became the Christian apostle to the Gentiles. Which must bring us to the Bene Gesserit, the order in the Dune universe which manipulates imperial politics by consciously crossing bloodlines and planting the seeds of religious myth.

Of course Christians accept the revelation of Paul of Tarsus on the Road to Damascus. But if we assume that this did not happen, the alternate story of Paul's conversion and ministry is going to be closer to the Bene Gesserit of Dune than the Road to Damascus. The surface-level reading of the Bene Gesserit is that they are just a caricature of the adage that religion is a mechanism for controlling people. But the deeper reading is that the Bene Gesserit are a depiction of the mechanism by which religion creates people and directs the gene people through the use of memes (in the story, their "voice" alone can literally command someone to unconsciously obey their will).

This also leads into my broader interpretation of Religion, which has unfairly become synonymous with Abrahamic religion. In my mind, Religions are memes that direct the gene pool. So something like "Diversity is Our Strength" is a Religion not because "I'm an edgy atheist and I don't like 'Diversity is Our Strength' so I'm going to call it a religion to insult people who agree with it." It's a religion because there are people consciously directing the population to internalize this value, and this value subsequently leads to planned, massive overhauls in the gene pool of civilization.

I am fundamentally sympathetic to the Bene Gersserit. Which memes would direct civilization on a better trajectory? How would we counter memes that are hostile to our mission? You might be able to wander out of the cave, but its neither possible nor desirable to force that onto everyone else. Consciously directing the memes is the solution, not trying to make people impervious to their influence (an impossible task- postmodernism only created its own Religious grand-narrative).

Paul is squarely a representation of Abrahamic religion, but the meaning of House Atreides and House Harkonnen is less clear. I interpret the conflict between those houses as the European or Aryan duality embodied in the Apollonian and Dionysian motif in Greek tragedy with, of course, House Atreides embodying the Apollonian: "...rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity and stands for reason" and House Harkonnen the Dionysian: "... wine, dance and pleasure, of irrationality and chaos, representing passion, emotions and instincts".

The relation of this conflict to Greek myth is directly alluded to in the Lore, according to which House Atreides is descended from King Agamemnon of House Atreus. Furthermore, the patriarch is named Duke Leto Atreides, and Apollo is the son of Leto, who is consort to Zeus. It is revealed in the story that Paul is related to the Harkonnens, which harkens to this duality in Aryan myth, a duality which was "often entwined by nature" according to the ancient Greeks.

The Roman Empire is likewise the best historical representation of this duality between the Apollonian and Dionysian, with the Imperial throne becoming increasingly symbolic of the Dionysian aspect as the Roman Empire declined until.... the conversion to Christianity.

On the one hand, the Dionysian excess is pruned by an ascetic desert cult. But does that actually make way for the resurgence of the Apollonian? Paul tries to keep a foot in both camps, proclaiming himself both Duke of House Atreides as well as the Fremen Messiah. I won't spoil how that turns out.

The movie was really great, it hit on all the big points which I interpreted from the books. The visual and sound design was stellar, it's a must-see in theaters.

There was some bad casting in the first movie for characters that don't appear in this installment.

Their switch-over of Liet-Kynes to a random black woman for diversity points alone shows how badly the Director's understanding of the Dune universe works; a very wide but shallow puddle that completely misses the mark.

I didn't see the first one, won't see the second one. Don't even get me started on them showing off the Sardaukar homeworld.

Fun aside; None of the movies ever get the Padishah Emperor right. In the books he's described as a youthful, thirty-something redhead. Yet they always have him as an old man past his prime. Pity.

I'm pretty sure they cast the character as an African woman because the actress playing Chani (Zendaya) is biracial, and if her father is going to played by European Javier Bardem, one African parent is necessary for her ethnicity to make sense.

Although frankly I'd have preferred if they'd recast all the Fremen with Arab actors. It may not be canon, but in my head the Fremen are Bedouin, damnit!

The Fremen canonically originally roughly from the Nile area. While there should have been more Arabic Fremen (i wonder if they're saving Rami Malek for Part 3?), having black Fremen is in no way against the canon, and there's nothing wrong as such with casting Zendaya as Chani.

The Fremen canonically originally roughly from the Nile area

I know the Fremen have a lot of Islamic imagery, but I'd thought this in particular was a Jewish reference? They came out of Egypt, they were slaves on Salusa Secundus, they were persecuted and chased from planet to planet, all the while preserving their ancient beliefs (or at least, they think they did, but getting actual Reverend Mothers on Arrakis probably helped). And look, they're waiting for a Messiah!

There are explicit Jews in the sequels, so they are separate.

Well, yes, but the themes can be reused repeatedly? This is literature (or about as close as sci-fi gets), there doesn't have to be a one-to-one mapping to the real world. The Fremen are clearly a mashup of a lot of things, most especially Arabs and Islam, but why not toss in certain elements of Jewish history, too? (As distinct from "Judaism", which I don't think the Fremen borrow much from. They've got various private rituals, and hold themselves apart from other people, but that may be as far as it goes?)

As I understand it, the Fremen were once pilgrims of the Zensunni religion fleeing persecution (there is a vision/flashback in the book mentioning how the Empire denied them the Hajj), so there's definitely a lot of Islamic coding there.

Stilgar planted the staff in the sand beside Paul, dropped his hands to his sides. The blue-within-blue eyes remained level and intent. And Paul thought how his own eyes already were assuming this mask of color from the spice.

‘They denied us the Hajj,’ Stilgar said with ritual solemnity.

As Chani had taught him, Paul responded ‘Who can deny a Fremen the right to walk or ride where he wills?’

‘I am a Naib,’ Stilgar said, ‘never to be taken alive. I am a leg of the death tripod that will destroy our foes.’

Silence settled over them.

Paul glanced at the other Fremen scattered over the sand beyond Stilgar, the way they stood without moving for this moment of personal prayer. And he thought of how the Fremen were a people whose living consisted of killing, an entire people who had lived with rage and grief all of their days, never once considering what might take the place of either – except for a dream with which Liet-Kynes had infused them before his death.

‘Where is the Lord who led us through the land of desert and of pits?’ Stilgar asked.

‘He is ever with us,’ the Fremen chanted.

And the Glossary:

Hajj: holy journey.

Hajr: desert journey, migration.

Hajra: journey of seeking.

What I find interesting about that "They denied us the Hajj" phrase, is that it's clarified to mean that it was denying them the freedom to go wherever they want. It seems to have lost the significance of a pilgrimage to a specific place (although Muad'dib's religion recreates that in the next book), and instead means something more like what a nomad or one of the traveling people might hold important, as one of the fundamentals of life.

Oh, that makes sense, so there is still some plausible deniability in the "literal Space Arabs" department.

That being said, the idea of people still making the journey to Mecca many centuries in the future (edit: and across many lightyears!) did fascinate me.

That still boils down to diversity, hence my critique and criticism of the movie as a whole.

And yes, the Fremen should have been Arabic.

I really don't think Zendaya was mere diversity casting. She's a popular actress and her character is described in the books as being 'skinny, with an elfin face' and having 'darkly elfin features'. When I heard she was being cast as Chani, I immediately thought she was the perfect choice. And if we're in agreement that the Fremen should have been Bedouins, well, here's what a real Bedouin girl looks like. You can hardly claim Zendaya is too dark to play the sci-fi version of her.

popular actress

Doubt. While my experience with most modern movies is fairly limited, everything I've seen of her is the metaphorical equivalent of a cudgel - an ambiguously brown women/girl they can shoe-horn and pretend everyone finds attractive, and if you point out the obvious race-switching, they make the typical noises about racism.

She's not even that good an actress, from everything I've seen.

I don't suppose anyone in this thread is going to consider the idea that attractiveness is largely subjective? This discussion feels like reading "Bananas are delicious, if you disagree get your head checked!" "What are you saying? Bananas taste vile, you idiot".

You can slide Zendaya into the Taylor Swift bucket of "let's have meaningless barbershop conversations about how hot/overrated she really is" if you'd like. We can do the same for her talent. I love those discussions as much as anyone.

She's undoubtedly "hot" in the sense of being a prominent, respected young actress.

Clout-wise she fits with the rest of the cast. (Except maybe Chalamet who's pulling away from the pack. Pugh is very talented but she hasn't anchored a big one and, well, the current state of Marvel doesn't augur well for her first go)

I've only seen Zendaya in the Spiderman movies and Dune, so I can't speak to her acting chops, but I can't disagree more on the idea that people are pretending that she's attractive. IMHO she's easily the most attractive prominent Hollywood actress right now. Maybe Rebecca Ferguson and Gal Gadot might come close? In any case, purely based on looks and ignoring any acting skills, her apparent popularity seems entirely justified to me.

I can't even think of there being any particular hubbub about her race in casting decisions. Even in the super hero movies she was in - a genre notorious for filmmakers accusing fans of bigotry in recent years - her casting as the character-equivalent to the traditionally red-headed white woman Mary-Jane was basically a non-issue, similar to Sam Jackson being Nick Fury.

IMHO she's easily the most attractive prominent Hollywood actress right now.

This is a dispatch from an alternate reality. The multiverse is leaking and those of us in our reality are staring at conclusive proof of the exist of other timelines where up is down, backwards is forwards, and Zendaya is gorgeous.

She's a would for me, but yes, she's fairly mid by Hollywood standards. Decent face (even stunning sometimes) when fully dolled-up, but often looks frumpy otherwise and has training bra-level tits. At least she's slim, but in a rare case for modern women, I'd say she's too slim.

Her role in movies is to serve as an everygirl, and a marketing item for progressives promoting a mulatto America.

If she weren't a famous actress, she'd be far from the first pick from a top tertile sorority or a decent nightclub. If we want to restrict to mulatas only, nor would she be from a non-barrio nightclub in Santiago or Santo Domingo, DR.

If you think Zendaya is hotter than Gal Gadot you need to get your eyes checked. She's not unattractive, but she has a very underdeveloped body for an adult woman. She's mid-pubescent for a healthy, on track to be very attractive, woman.

Gal Gadot has a very similar body, i.e. very flat, no?. She also has a very similarly 'needs proper angle to be attractive' face. Gadot's side profile is awful, for instance. I was under the impression she was only considered so attractive because she expresses a lot of jewish phenotypic traits very attractively. Unlike someone like Natalie Portman who is very attractive but in a very gentile way.

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IMHO she's easily the most attractive prominent Hollywood actress right now. Maybe Rebecca Ferguson and Gal Gadot might come close?

Maybe that's true, I'm not much for the movies or Hollywood. But I'd then say that there is a dire lack of actually attractive 'prominent Hollywood actresses' right now.

I can't even think of there being any particular hubbub about her race in casting decisions.

Hollywood has been ethnically cleansing its movies of redheads for a while now. A quick Google search will reveal that there is plenty of discussion on the topic. If there hasn't been any hubub in 'recent years' then it would only be because it's an old culture war that was has been completely lost by 'team red'. More and more of those.

Over time one would expect the red headed population of the United States to decline (excepting further mass immigration from Scotland and Ireland), surely?

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The ginger genocide (aside: this phenomenon + the anagram is probably the strongest evidence for the simulation hypothesis I've encountered) is a fair point, but my perception of this is that even the very phenomenon is little known outside of fairly niche circles of people who pay attention to this kind of thing, and even those who know don't often realize that this is endemic in the industry, with Zendaya's MJ being just one example. It's not nothing, but I don't recall it rising to even the level of Tilda Swinton's Ancient One in Doctor Strange (aside: any sort of race/sex swapping is justified if it's to get Tilda Swinton to play the character), much less, say, Ariel from The Little Mermaid (another example of the ginger genocide! And generally talked about on its own instead of part of the larger trend). Maybe MJ's case is due to the complete victory by one side, but honestly I thought it was more like Nick Fury where people just didn't care much since it's a supporting character whose race isn't much of a factor in the story.

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I don't think people are pretending, but I don't understand how anyone can say she's attractive either. I actually think she's mildly ugly. But there's no accounting for taste, I suppose.

Also I definitely disagree that her casting in Spider Man was a non-issue. Basically everyone I know thinks it was complete bullshit to cast her as Mary Jane, and a clear example of hamfisted diversity.

She had red hair, I think. I can only remember three fremen hair colours, liet was 'sandy', chani was red and stilgar had a black beard. No one reacts to liet or chani as being atypical. I vaguely remember some mention of darker and lighter skin colours too. The fremen definitely seem to be culturally inspired by the bedouin, but generically, perhaps more diverse.

Paul has a vision of brown skinned fremen girls roasting coffee. In Dune Messiah one fremen has sandy blonde hair. They are a mix of various slave populations moved from planet to planet before being left on Dune. I suppose they are a rather racially diverse group.

As someone who has not read the books but certainly enjoyed the first film (never seen Lynch's take either, though the memes from that have percolated into my brain), and also enjoy Villineuve's brand of filmmaking (Blade Runner 2049 was a triumph, I don't think Scott himself could have made such a sequel) it hit all the buttons I'd want but also left me somewhat dissatisfied.

Mainly:

A) Minimal additional worldbuilding. The tiny bits and hints of 'how things work', some of which were directly stated and some which were merely hinted made the first film engaging and rewards a second watch. Second one seemed to throw certain concepts at us without giving out the information needed to understand what it means. Lack of mentats and guild navigators has me wondering WHY a shortage of spice was such a critical issue for anyone but the Harkonnens who had to make a lot of money fast.

B) Christopher Walken can monologue with the best of them and always delivers. Even when the movie is shit. Feels like a huge waste to not give him his minute or so to shine, EVEN IF the minute was used to purposefully show the emperor's desperation and decline.

C) Similarly, the motivation and stakes of the emperor arriving on Arrakis seemed unclear. Might have been helpful to know just how much his attempted show of power on Arrakis 'cost' him to pull off, given how we're informed that the earlier anti-Atreides battalions mostly bankrupt the Harkonnens, bringing the full army to bear must have been prohibitive. How much did it deplete the emperor's wealth to show up? Was there anything particularly special about his ship?

D) This is going to sound 'heretical' (heh) but SO MUCH of the movie was set in the desert environment that it made the universe really feel smallish. Yes, I get that Arrakis is literally the most important planet there is, and the entire universe hinges on who controls it. It's the damn title of the series. But it's worth noting that the scenes on Gaedi-Prime this time around were the most memorable overall for me, so I kind of wanted to see the 'diversity' of environments present in the imperium. Being honest, though, this was probably compensated for by peeling back the layers on Fremen culture (which also counts as worldbuilding, so partially obviating my first complaint up there).

That said, hard to be truly critical of such a well-crafted experience. Feyd-Rautha. I have no notes, honestly. The brilliant move of having him sound like Baron Harkonnen immediately makes you disdain him by association, while explaining said Baron's affection for the guy and why he's the preferred heir. He's established as clear danger/threat but also very much NOT invincible, which is to say actually tactical and intelligent and not just handed everything he needs to threaten the protagonist by plot fiat.

All-in-all, the one who honestly carried the films for me was Lady Jessica. As an effective personification of the Bene Gesserit's influence, virtually every scene she's in you can see her nudging outcomes but you're never certain where. There was no point when she seemed irrelevant and even the slightly more ridiculous concept of her chatting it up with her unborn child was done with gravitas. Hats off.

You comment on the lack of reference to the Butleran Jihad, but I think part of the brilliance of the two films is managing to DEFY straitforward analogy to 'present day' political, economic, or cultural issues. The movie manages to be meaty and yet escapist at the same time, I was more than happy to immerse myself in the world (despite craving more detail) that they had crafted and forget real world issues for 3 hours. Reminded me of when movies were consistently able to present epic, mindblowing entertainment that carried you out of your own world for the duration.

I agree on all these points. My main concern with the first film was how bland things tended to be in terms of aesthetics, acting, and culture. This film improved:

(1) Somewhat on aesthetics. I liked the Harkonnen stuff. I liked the biomorphic technology: a recurring theme in Herbert's work is the idea of making a plausible future by implementing or magnifying tropes inspired by recurring patterns in human history (aristocracy, verbal manipulation, women attaining power through manipulation and intrigue rather than brute force etc.) and biomorphic technology is all around us without us noticing, e.g. velcro.

(2) Acting. The actor playing Feyd was weird in a good way, Paul's mother was suitably insane and menacing, Javier Berdem is a god of acting, and even Zendaya was less flat (acting-wise).

(3) Culture. Lots of time with the Fremen and the Harkonnens. I wanted more Islamo-futurism and I got it. My main complaint would be that the Harkonnens should have had more Spartan themes. While that doesn't fit the books, I think it (a) helps audiences to understand how the Harkonnens represent a dehumanized future with an alien culture, where humanity is ceasing to be recognisable to us, and (b) gives more explanation of the Harkonnen appeal, given that the wild sex, drugs, and rock n roll weren't going to be represented on screen. Dune One showed how the Harkonnens rule by fear, but no empire survives on fear alone; Dune Two gave more hints of what Harkonnen culture and legitimation might be like, but I wanted more, especially if it satirises modern Spartan cults. Ideally, I would have liked more discipline, more survival of the fittest, more homeroticism, to extents that offend gymbros and wokists alike.

Any Dune film is going to be full of missed opportunities. This film missed somewhat fewer than the first.

Yep. Granting that the director is going to pick and choose what gets emphasized and also what makes it in at all so one should really only judge how well he used what he included and not on HOW MUCH they managed to squeeze in, this was an amazing job.

Have to agree on making the Harkonnens a Sparta analogue. While I loved how it was used, I think making the Harkonnen uniforms be basically black space leather with minimal adornment was a... tame choice? Made it easy to pick them out on screen, but I had also understood that Harkonnens prefer a certain amount of ostentatious gaudiness.

The visual cue "WE ARE THE BAD GUYS" every time one of them is on screen was mostly unneeded.

I agree on the black space leather. In the Dune video games (Dune II and IIRC Emperor of Dune) the Harkonnens are mostly in red, which is cool because it's a colour associated both with allure (red fruit, roses, red lips etc.) and violence (blood). The Sci-Fi miniseries goes with similar aesthetics and generally portrays the Harkonnens as cool/sexy, which helps explain how e.g. Feyd could plausibly have sufficient popularity among the Great Houses to become Emperor. I thought Dune Part Two did a good damage mitigation job on this point, by making Feyd more honourable than he is in the books; I don't know if that was deliberate, but it helped.

Incorporating red into their color themes would have undoubtedly improved the design in my eyes.

Do white nationalists particularly care about an interracial relationship between a Jewish man and a black woman? Neither Chalamet nor Zendaya are white on his terms.

Couple of thoughts:

I am more interested in the characters and the significance of their relationships in interpreting the artistic or symbolic motivation. It's entirely appropriate to the story for the Fremen to take on a brown/semitic racial character while the Harkonnens are unambiguously white. The Germanic tribes that pillaged Rome and exterminated the decayed remnants of the Atreides-like Patrician house were lily-white.

So Paul choosing a mulatto as his mate is entirely appropriate within the symbolic meaning of these characters and tribes. It fits the story, unlike say a mulatto love interest within the Harkonnen house.

Lastly, I do have a question:

You seem constantly offended that White nationalists claim an identity that is exclusory of Jews. But don't you realize Jews themselves develop their own identity that is exclusory of non-Jews? I am a non-Jew, a gentile, a goy. Those are the words Jews use to identify their tribe and identify myself as outside that tribe.

Are you really so stereotypical that you accept Jews explicitly identify themselves racially as separate from European non-Jews, on a deeply spiritual level, but then when European non-Jews also try to form an exclusory identity, but not in the terms created by Jews themselves (i.e. gentiles or goy), then you seem to have a big problem with that?

If a Jew says "I'm a Jew and you are a gentile" then you don't have a problem with that, but if I say "I am Aryan and you are not, you are a Jew" then you all of a sudden are offended?

Hard disagree.

The first movie was tolerable, and visually well-crafted. The second movie kept up with the visuals, but tipped over the edge for me in several ways.

  • St. Alia of the Knife got, essentially, cut. This is the most utterly unforgivable bullshit, especially given the promise of a third movie. There are fewer more iconic moments than the abominable child ending her treacherous grandfather with the Gom Jabbar. In fact, it's the only unequivocally great thing she ever gets to do, making her ultimate end all the more tragic.

  • The casting for Irulan seemed like a deliberate slight against the the idea of multigenerational eugenics. Her portrayal of Tatlock in Oppenheimer was grating, but Tatlock was presumably herself quite grating. Irulan is a regal character, if not indeed a somewhat ethereal one. They couldn't even pluck her eyebrows for this?

  • The casting for Shaddam IV was similarly perplexing. Christopher Walken played the emperor as a doddering has-been in the early stages of dementia.

  • In general the perversion and brutality of the Harkonnens was understated--to the point of being a fumble. This seems to have been simple cowardice on the director's part. Understandable cowardice, perhaps, but cowardice all the same.

  • Failure to address the Butlerian Jihad seems like a particularly egregious miss given the present level of public interest in artificial intelligence.

  • Chani was an interesting character in the books, albeit a minor one. She becomes a more important figure in the movie, at the cost of changing her into a boring (and fickle) Mary Sue.

  • Stilgar is rendered as an oaf and a dupe, the better to mock the "fundamentalists."

In its 6 book entirety, despite failing to reach the final showdown with the machines (Kevin Anderson sucks), is still a magnificent meditation on the difference between humans and human animals, on the fact that evolution continues to operate on us, and on the ways in which that poses a threat to our continued survival as a species. Paul is ultimately a failure as a messiah because he refuses to embrace his bloody destiny, instead leaving the task to his children (SUBTLE METAPHOR WARNING), who then step up and do the bloody business of putting an end to the hedonistic but stultifying preening of the human race. Here instead we get Chani asserting her agency--she won't abide a political marriage for her man--in a story that was fundamentally supposed to be about the lack of agency that is the problem Paul is supposed to solve for humanity.

Other than the wokism of casting the Fremen--but not the Harkonnens--as multiracial, I didn't see anything to complain about along that axis. The unrelenting girl-bossing of certain characters was weird, but only weirder for how badly the writing and acting neutered Lady Jessica. Dune is absolutely stacked with "strong female characters" so I guess the director had to dial that back, to better highlight his distorted vision of Chani as something less interesting than the Mother of God.

Ugh. Anyway. Just once I'd like to see a filmmaker actually deliver on the promise of Dune. It would be challenging, and consequently it would probably be unpopular. A clear portrayal of the truth of the Axlotl Tanks might well be sufficient to send the zeitgeist into total meltdown.

In its 6 book entirety, despite failing to reach the final showdown with the machines

This is a debate that we could probably have for years, but I like the idea that the Honored Matres were not running from machines and that the Butlerian Jihad wasn't even about Skynet-style enemies. Rather, the Jihad was about maintaining human significance and freedom in a future with AI (how speculative!) and the Honored Matres were running from MANY powerful factions in the Scattering, of which they were a relatively minor one. The latter would exemplify the success of the Golden Path: no power, not even the Honored Matres (who sweep the Old Empire in short order) can gain supremacy over all humanity after what Leto II did. The Scattering is the end of such threats. This wouldn't be the only way for the Golden Path to succeed, but it would be the most dramatic, as well as dizzying the reader with the thought that the Honored Matres are just a minor faction in what humanity has become.

This does raise the question of an antagonist for Dune 7. I like the idea of something like the advanced Face Dancers, who present more of a philosophical threat to humanity - a species that can adopt countless personalities, but is never truly any of them, like the difference between hearing a recording of your dead parent's voice and hearing them speak new words. AI as an enemy was already explored by lots of people by the time Herbert was writing the later Dune novels; I think he'd want something weirder and more original as an antagonist, just like the Spacing Guild, Bene Tleilax, Bene Gesserit, Honored Matres, and of course Paul Atredis.

It's strange. Villeneuve clearly gets the story on some level. The cuts seem reasonable to me (even Alia), and a number of the changes, as someone pointed out, externalize the internal conflict. But at the same time, it's all wrong.

It's as though everything is a symbol for itself, to be displayed with maximum impressiveness no matter how little sense it makes. There's no subtlety, it's just beating the audience over the head. And the dialog is horrible, lacking gravitas and the nuances found in the book, with no distinction between formality and familiarity. And the delivery, especially by the two leads, makes them sound like whiny American children, sulky and pouting. But Chalamet breaks out of that at the end of the 2nd film, after he gets his vision, so it doesn't seem to be the actors' fault, and some of the other actors do give good performances. Frankly, I wonder about Villeneuve's command of the English language. And then the music is, well, dramatic, if not actually what I'd call "music". More like creaking bed springs turned up to 11, or an old house settling. And the architecture was as though someone thought "big" was a sufficient description.

On the other hand, the anisopters were cool. Shields were cool. The hunter-seeker was cool. I'm glad they gave the Fremen some sand-colored cloaks (although IIRC, in the books the sand on Arrakis was grey, but that's not important). The worms were great, especially the riding. (Although I still wonder at the dimensions of the worm described in the book: "a small specimen, only one hundred and ten meters long and twenty-two meters in diameter".) I like the military use of portable suspensors. I thought Ferguson did a great job as Jessica, and I thought Duncan-Brewster did a fine job as Liet-Kynes in the first one.

Irulan was just wrong, with again no gravitas and no sense of grace. She seemed practically autistic, very intently focused on some aspects of what was going on, while speaking in a quasi-monotone that made it clear that her history recordings were performance. I actually laughed out loud in the theater when the Reverend Mother described her as one of her best students (or whatever it was she said to that effect), since her portrayal in the books is quite the opposite (or at least, everyone likes to put her down by telling her that).

I get why it was convenient to externalize some of Paul's decisions by making the south be full of people who will follow him without question. But the repeated use of the term "fundamentalists" was jarring. What fundamentals, exactly? Obviously everyone in the audience gets what he means, but again I think it symptomatic of the problems with the dialog. It's not timeless, it's dated. "True believers" would be a more appropriate term. Same with Chani's argument about how the Fremen don't need an outsider to save them; it's trying to use current politics to inform our understanding of characters, but it sounds like a rant that came out of nowhere.

And the slow motion. And the endless scenes of people descending ramps. Or people arrayed in grids. Or slow motion people descending ramps in front of grids of other people. I came out of the first one thinking that if they'd just kept everything normal speed, they could have shaved half an hour off of the movie, and saved everyone in the audience half an hour of life. And the combat, ugh: I blame "300".

And the slow motion. And the endless scenes of people descending ramps

Agreed with everything except this. Many such scenes in the first movie were jaw dropping and deeply mysterious. In the second movie it was just rushed and lacked the visual effort.

I just re-watched the first half of "Blade Runner 2049", and I found a lot of the same visual tics in there, but for some reason they didn't bug me as much. I still recall ranting a bit, whenever it was that I first saw it, about how the original "Blade Runner" had a packed, bustling, "lived-in future" on the ground level, but we don't see much of that in 2049; it's mostly a series of trips to scenic vistas, interspersed with K's apartment or the police office, like a video game where you explore a new level and then hang out in the vehicle/lobby in between levels. (Also Hans Zimmer's bedsprings sounded like an acceptable substitute for Vangelis.)

Possibly I've gotten more jaded over time. I never saw the TV show "Lost", but from what I've heard, it was infamous for there being no "there" there. The mystery never led to anything, because it was purely there to create an effect in the audience. In "Dune 2", I'd contrast this with the sandworm riding, which I think was great, and which gave me that sense of awe while being an integral part of the story.

Have not yet seen the new film, but would you say that the Lynch film and the Westwood games did a better job showing how fucked-up the Harkonnens were?

Some of these criticisms are pretty odd. The Harkonnens absolutely were shown as perverse and brutal, a lot of that was just dumped on Feyd-Rautha here, and I liked what Villeneuve did with Feyd-Rautha very much. "Feyd-Rautha as a psychosexual Darth Maul" turned out lot better than the usual "Feyd-Rautha as a somewhat more competent Joffrey Baratheon" thing and Austin Butler was great with microexpressions. The worst thing about the casting of the Emperor Shaddam IV (not a particularly major character anyway) is that it's impossible to see Christopher Walken as something other than Christopher Walken, but other than that, casting him as intergalactic Joe Biden showcases that we're seeing a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down. I don't understand the point about Irulan.

I understand the Alia criticism - I had been quite averse to early rumors on how Alia would be handled but ended up being OK with it, I guess that the murder toddler would have been something that might have become ridiculous too easily - and share the Chani criticism, though that might have also worked better if Zendaya was a better actor outside of the love scenes, which she handled well.

Personally I thought that the part with Paul taking the worm juice could have been handled (a lot) better and Dave Bautista was kind of wasted in this movie.

The Harkonnens absolutely were shown as perverse and brutal

They really weren't, though. Pointlessly killing underlings is Darth Vader level "brutality." Gladiatorial combat is merely Roman. There was a hint at cannibalism, a hint at sadism, but "these are outrageously wealthy people who get high while they rape and torture slave children with impunity" was presumably soft-pedaled due to there being too many recent real-life analogies for Hollywood's (or the general public's) comfort. Most importantly, though, they are depicted as being out of control, rather than frighteningly in control. The Harkonnens of Villeneuve's Dune barely rate as comic book villains, to the point that viewers have to be told, rather than shown, that Feyd-Rautha is a "psychopath"--a word that never appears in the original book at all.

I liked what Villeneuve did with Feyd-Rautha very much. "Feyd-Rautha as a psychosexual Darth Maul" turned out lot better than the usual "Feyd-Rautha as a somewhat more competent Joffrey Baratheon"

My memory from the books is that Feyd-Rautha was, while certainly Harkonnen, actually both competent and powerful, in contrast to Rabban. It was his reliance on underhanded fighting tactics that made him an otherwise-comparable foil to Paul (who decides to not use the Voice during their battle, though he could easily have done so). I don't mind his portrayal overmuch, but portraying him as a skilled and even potentially noble fighter ("you fought well") is a definite and unnecessary departure from the text.

casting him as intergalactic Joe Biden showcases that we're seeing a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down

Yes, but it fails to cast him as a formidable enemy. He was practically sleepwalking. I mean--this scene would have been much better, where Fenring declines to serve as the Emperor's champion:

Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern -- a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he'd ever experienced.

Fenring, reading Paul's emotion, said, "Majesty, I must refuse."

Rage overcame Shaddam IV. He took two short steps through the entourage, cuffed Fenring viciously across the jaw.

A dark flush spread up and over the Count's face. He looked directly at the Emperor, spoke with deliberate lack of emphasis: "We have been friends, Majesty. What I do now is out of friendship. I shall forget that you struck me."

Paul cleared his throat, said: "We were speaking of the throne, Majesty."

The Emperor whirled, glared at Paul. "I sit on the throne!" he barked.

An emperor of a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down does not sleepwalk through the confrontation with Paul. He desperately claws at every possible escape, even as the walls close in around him.

I don't understand the point about Irulan.

Irulan is described thusly:

Paul's attention came at last to a tall blonde woman, green-eyed, a face of patrician beauty, classic in its hauteur, untouched by tears, completely undefeated.

I would describe Florence Pugh as a bit sturdy for the role, her features too dark, and her hair was atrocious--it looked like she just never washed it. Her tracheomalacia makes her voice earthy rather than haughty. Ten years ago I'd have said Emily Blunt or Natalie Dormer. Today, maybe Anna Taylor-Joy? Pugh, I honestly don't know how she keeps getting jobs, she's by far the least-interesting player on the screen in everything I've ever seen her in.

Personally I thought that the part with Paul taking the worm juice could have been handled (a lot) better and Dave Bautista was kind of wasted in this movie.

I feel like most of the "Other Memory"-related plot points are included grudgingly, like Villeneuve knows he can't just abandon those entirely but kind of wishes he could. There are throwaway lines about knowing the past and predicting the future but unless you've read the books, I can't imagine getting much out of those. And if you haven't read the books, I can imagine being really confused about everything touching on the Water of Life. And they never address the "sandtrout" at all.

My memory from the books is that Feyd-Rautha was, while certainly Harkonnen, actually both competent and powerful, in contrast to Rabban. It was his reliance on underhanded fighting tactics that made him an otherwise-comparable foil to Paul (who decides to not use the Voice during their battle, though he could easily have done so). I don't mind his portrayal overmuch, but portraying him as a skilled and even potentially noble fighter ("you fought well") is a definite and unnecessary departure from the text.

I just reread the book fight scene: underhanded Feyd and Paul are at such a level,with so many plans within plans, that it'd honestly be hard to show visually. Making Feyd honorable and having a more straightforward fight seems like an easy fix.

Since they cut out Hawat and a lot of the Feyd and Duke maneuvering around each other (here I simply give them a pass due to time), it's easy to also just "fix" the Coliseum scene by having Feyd show he's formidable but capable of being honorable. Otherwise you have to get into BG control words and Paul's inner struggle to try to play into the finale and...

I feel like most of the "Other Memory"-related plot points are included grudgingly, like Villeneuve knows he can't just abandon those entirely but kind of wishes he could. There are throwaway lines about knowing the past and predicting the future but unless you've read the books, I can't imagine getting much out of those. And if you haven't read the books, I can imagine being really confused about everything touching on the Water of Life. And they never address the "sandtrout" at all.

This is kind of my problem: it's hard to tell how all of this comes across to a totally virgin audience since I've known about some of the plot points so long. It seems that Vileneuve gave people enough to essentially grok what was going on (even putting aside Jamis' words and Jessica's own initiation, the Harkonnen reveal shows there's some ancestral memory shit going on - and how else could Alia be sentient?). But it feels a bit hollow from my perspective.

Making Feyd honorable and having a more straightforward fight seems like an easy fix.

The problem is the Harkkonnens are supposed to be utter monsters. The movie fails to show that, especially with Feyd. He's brutal, sure, but he lacks the terror-inducing psychotic insanity he's supposed to have. Worse, the movie likens him to Paul rather than contrasts him -- not only does Paul openly declare he's going to act like the Harkonnens, he treats Shaddam IV much the way Feyd treats Rabban.

he's going to act like the Harkonnens

I mean... if you've read the books, there's a very good reason for this.

It's probably common for fans of books with new movie/TV adaptations be overtly worried about new audiences understanding the plot without the (often frankly not all that necessary) context the books provide. I remember that when GoT TV series was announced a lot of posters on westeros.org were convinced that it's going to be pared down and dumbed down a lot since the "normie viewer" would never understand ASoIaF plots and so on, and then the first four seasons were pretty much straight adaptation from the books and the normies mostly understood it just fine.

Point taken. But, in our defense, iirc part of it was the worry that the writers would feel that way.

I remember watching the Harry Potter movies before reading the books, and was totally confused by parts of movies 3, 4, and 5. (These are some of the longest books, but don't have correspondingly larger movies than the first two.) Lots of other people I know IRL feel similarly.

GOT is different because they got a whole season to explain a book instead of just a movie.

For what it's worth, I don't consider the Harry Potter movies to be "stories" as such, but rather an "illustration" of the books. I'm not an art snob, and I'm not using that term derogatorily. They're very very good illustrations. But I don't think they stand alone the way Game of Thrones did. They were like "Passion of the Christ", but with wizards.

I find book five meandering and confusing. I know a lot of people love it, but I think Order of the Phoenix was the point where Rowling desperately needed an editor to tell her to cut it down, but she was too big at that point to be reined in.

Pugh, I honestly don't know how she keeps getting jobs, she's by far the least-interesting player on the screen in everything I've ever seen her in.

The first thing I saw her in was Midsommar and she was great, made me want to give her a big hug in every scene she was in.

Maybe I'll check it out. I think the first thing I saw her in was that Black Widow movie, where she came across as Disney's "we have Scarlett Johannson at home."

If you do, I recommend the director's cut.

Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern -- a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he'd ever experienced.

Fenring, reading Paul's emotion, said, "Majesty, I must refuse."

Okay, but this is unfilmable without dubbing in everyone's thought balloons, and everyone craps on the Lynch movie for resorting to that. Visually it's just two guys looking at each other and maybe making a face.

So I have to ask, which do you think was better, David Lynch's Dune or the new ones?

I know Lynch's Dune wasn't perfect. It's profoundly 80's. He's on record at various points in his life saying he hated it, softening to the point where he regrets he didn't have final cut, and softening some more saying he's glad it has some fans.

I think I love how much it leans into the weirdness of Dune, and how utterly alien it all is. I don't even mind that it goes all tell instead of show by just having characters inner monologues going all the damned time. I don't even hate the "creative liberties" that were taken with the weirding way. At least not as much as I used to, since I've seen how much worse current year nonsense can make things than merely goofy.

Admittedly, I'm probably a more casual Dune fan. I think I only read the original 6 books 2 or 3 times, and maybe I'm just dense, but I can honestly say I never picked up on the themes than Paul is a villain or a cautionary tale at all. That's all anyone seems to talk about now on the youtubes.

Lynch's Dune is like a first girlfriend for me, so I judge it by different standards. It was one of the fist science fiction films I saw as a young child, along with Star Wars and bits of the original Star Trek films (I was too scared by those to watch them all the way through until later). Lynch's Dune didn't make a lot of sense to me, but no grown-up films made 100% sense to me at that point, and what I could understand was exciting, inspiring, and mentally stimulating. The weirdness probably helped to make me a sci-fi fan; in particular, of that sort of "alternative societies" and "mythology in SPAAACE" sci-fi. Were it not for the queering of sci-fi, I suspect I'd still be a fan of new sci-fi books; as it is, there is a wealth of stuff from when sci-fi offered ideas that I couldn't find in a SLAC.

I actually wrote entire novellas (30+ pages) in notebooks when I was about 10, which were basically ripoffs of Lynch's Dune ("except mine is on COLD planets... And there are these shadow-aliens from a parallel universe...") which in retrospect is less embarassing when I consider that this was before I knew about fan fiction and that telling your own stories in other people's fictional universes/stories is a perfectly natural, very old way for imagination and fiction writing skills to develop.

So I have to ask, which do you think was better, David Lynch's Dune or the new ones?

Lynch's Dune was totally whack most of the time and some of the effects haven't aged well (riding the worm??) but there are some really great moments that i feel are missing from the new movies. For me Piter's introduction really sticks in my mind, sampled to great effect in some classic dnb. The bizarreness of it all (the eyebrows, the giant mouth) is really unmatched.

And the aesthetics. Maybe Lynch is responsible for my instinct on this issue (I saw his film before I read the books) but I have always thought of the Dune universe as vivid. Giedi Prime is black and putrid green. The women are beautiful. The Baron is disgusting. The worms are huge and alien. Paul is expressive and vibrant (ok, that really doesn't match the books, but film is a different medium). The spice-coloured eyes are glowing blue.

Also, though Lynch's film misses the moral ambiguity, it works really well as a portrayal of the Dune story as the Fremen themselves might tell it thousands of years later. Paul is a supernatural hero who saves the universe and then instantly brings rain. He understood the power of words, which were literal sound guns! Jamis? Who is Jamis?

It's the same sort of selection and compression that means that our idea of what Moses or Buddha was like could be hilariously different from what a god's eye narrator would tell us.

I’m kinda with you on Lynch. What I love about the approach he took is that he never really lost sight of Dune as a very distant, very weird future and leaning into it hard. Even the telling parts and voice overs really push the point that this isn’t just like Earth. He fails more because of how stuck he was with the time frame. He only got one movie and had to cover a lot of ground and explain things to the audience at the same time. But I love it for the ambience and the ambition. I loved that he didn’t go straight for the obvious of making the Fremen into I-can’t-believe-they’re-not-Arabs and instead showed them having a unique culture that had echoes of Native American and Mongolian and high tech culture as well. The 2000 miniseries whiffed on exactly that count, and basically turned the Fremen into Muslims with really nothing unique.

So I have to ask, which do you think was better, David Lynch's Dune or the new ones?

Lynch, I suppose. It's pretty campy but I agree that its commitment to the foreignness of the Duniverse is appreciated.

I can honestly say I never picked up on the themes than Paul is a villain or a cautionary tale at all. That's all anyone seems to talk about now on the youtubes.

I don't think it's fair to call him a villain, and I don't think Herbert ever did so (though I could be wrong about that!). I seem to remember Herbert suggesting that Paul is an anti-hero, and that Dune Messiah was intended to bring that out a bit more clearly. Paul is solving some very big problems, but he's doing it by throwing a lot of bodies into the meat grinder of war. Far, far better to be ruled by Paul than by the Harkonnens! And yet. The brutality of nature is one of the biggest themes of the texts, along with the threat of predation. It's a deeply Darwinian story, and these days people are nervous about thinking too hard about Darwinism as it continues to apply to human evolution.

You know, I mentioned it before here, but to me the entire Dune franchise was about the human condition being stretched to a breaking point. About human shaped pegs being hammered into horrifyingly shaped holes not meant for them. But then again, it's been probably 15 years since I last read them. I should probably take them for a spin again.

That's my take too; it's in a random OCB quote: Thou shalt not mutilate the human soul.

A film adaptation of Alia would be difficult. Casting children is difficult enough, casting a child who is supposed to behave like Alia at the age of 2 or 3 seems impossible. I'm sure they did some exploratory casting to see if they could make it work. They would either need to age her up or age her down, and I think it makes sense to do the latter and I'm sure we'll see her in the next movie.

Agree on the brutality of the Harkonnens being understated, "casually kills underlings" is a trope I find pretty boring, demonstrate their brutality in other ways!

Paul is not a failed Messiah, he's a failed Übermensch in the Nietzschean sense. There's an important distinction and I do think Herbert was influenced by Nietzsche.

Paul is not a failed Messiah, he's a failed Übermensch in the Nietzschean sense. There's an important distinction and I do think Huber was influenced by Nietzsche.

I don't know. If anything, Paul succeeds at being the Übermensch, insofar as he eventually decides to act in accordance with his own desires, rather than in accordance with his visions. He refuses to become a slave to the survival of humanity. His apparent ability to see the Golden Path means that he knows someone has to become God Emperor. He decides to not do that. Leto II steps up to the task; to dedicate one's own vast superhuman lifespan to the good of mankind is Messianic, not Übermenschian.

Paul's humanitarian preoccupations drain his will-to-power, whereas in Nietzsche's conception those things are overcome by the Ubermensch. Leto II becomes that ultra-aristocratic figure who transcends morals and directs the evolution of mankind at his will. Paul embodies the humanitarian Messiah, Leto II is the ultra-aristocratic God Emperor.

Paul's humanitarian preoccupations drain his will-to-power, whereas in Nietzsche's conception those things are overcome by the Ubermensch. Leto II becomes that ultra-aristocratic figure who transcends morals and directs the evolution of mankind at his will. Paul embodies the humanitarian Messiah, Leto II is the ultra-aristocratic God Emperor.

Yeah, you've definitely got it exactly backward. Remember, the Übermensch is the "man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength." Paul is undoubtedly strong, but he is ultimately self-regarding; he doesn't want to be the one to save humanity, he doesn't want to pay the price, so--he doesn't. Leto II does direct the evolution of mankind "at his will," he doggedly (one might say "slavishly") pursues the Golden Path, which is not his choice but merely the product of perfect prescience. Leto II us ultimately unfree. Arguably this is also by choice, so you could argue that he is also a kind of Übermensch, and I'd maybe buy it. But to say Paul had "humanitarian preoccupations" seems like a mistake; Leto II was the one who framed his own death as a gift to his species.

Thanks for your analysis, but I think you got a bit schizo at the end trying to symbologically analyze the two houses. And the Agamemnon thing is frankly house mythology; history from our time is barely remembered in the year 10000. A huge chunk of the conflict in DUNE is a straightforward critique of imperialism in the Middle East over oil; CHOAM is OPEC.

Apollonian and Dionysian juxtapositions are a motif in theater going back to ancient Greece, i.e. per Wikipedia "the tragic hero of the drama, the main protagonist, struggles to make (Apollonian) order of his unjust and chaotic (Dionysian) fate, though he dies unfulfilled." You don't have to be schizo to see how this plays out in Dune. Paul's father Duke Leto is even named after the mother of Apollo. House Harkonnen is probably the single best scifi interpretation of the Dionysian out there.

And of course, Paul himself is related by blood to both houses.

CHOAM is barely in the movie, the resource-struggle takes a backseat to those themes.

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