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