In Dune, Arrakis Is Finally Far More Than The Center Of The Universe
Denis Villeneuve’s Adaptation Of The Sci Fi Epic Explores The Urgency Of Finding Our Identity Through Our Land
Tristan Young @talltristan
SPOILERS FOR DUNE COMING AT YA
Part way through Dune, on a planet called Geidi Prime, a stridently industrialized world of cacophonous and oppressive infrastructure in the vein of LV-426 from Aliens, a portentous exchange takes place between the film’s explicit and implicit antagonists. The scene is striking not only for the rhetorical insidiousness being schemed by the parties involved, nor the baroque and brutalist set design. It’s due to an accompanying creature, anonymously sulking in the background with little narrative import but is nevertheless absolutely nightmarish. An oil slicked alchemy of vertebrate and spider, like a hellish adaptation of the gimp from Pulp Fiction, the fluidity of its jerking movements evoking an uncanny valley type reaction and seems effectively endemic of the totalitarian nature of the planet. Its ominous and vivid depiction is also, in a way, emblematic of the larger universe of director Denis Villeneuve’s fastidious and dense interpretation of Frank Herbert’s genre defining novel. Contrast this with the David Lynch adaptation of the book in 1984 in which the strangest creature in the film was a pug. Lynch apparently had never seen the miniature dog before and thought it would look great in the film. If nothing else, this cinematic anecdote suggests how far we’ve come.
To be clear, in the Herbert novel, there is no mention of domesticated and blandly terrestrial dogs. What it does have is a whole lot of other weird stuff, with sufficiently strange names for it all. Set tens of thousands of years into the future, all of intergalactic travel is dependant on a substance colloquially called spice. A maguffin of an ingredient that makes faster than light travel possible, and therefore allows for a universe spanning colonial infrastructure, spice is found on exactly one single planet in all of the cosmos: Arrakis. A deathtrap of sand and heat, there would be little to recommend the planet, and yet its naturally occurring deposits of spice make it by far the most strategically important planet in the universe. Who controls Arrakis in many ways controls much of the universe. So when the emperor of said universe decries that the noble house Atreides family is to take over jurisdictional control of Arrakis from the vile and sinister Harkonnen regime, it’s a big deal. This is not lost on young Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet), heir to his family’s throne that will now sit upon Arrakis. Paul is conflicted about his place in his family and in the universe. The son of the altruistic and virtuous Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), but also son to Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), a member of cult like mystics the Bene Gesserit who have frightening and invasive powers, he is unsure of his commitment to either lineage. This is complicated by a prophetic relationship he develops with the indigenous (well as indigenous as one can get) inhabitants of Arrakis, the Fremen, and one young lady among them in particular named Chani (Zendeya). As the Harkonnens launch an assault on the Atreides family to retake Arrakis, the planet is thrown into chaos. Paul must decide where his loyalties, and future lies. The consequences of those decisions will eventually have universal repercussions. Lot’s going on! But no pugs.
The pug fiasco is just one of many aesthetic and tonal blunders that doomed the lynch adaptation to failure and resigned all cinematic prognosticators to the demoralizing conclusion that Dune was simply un-filmable. Too dense, too much lore, too many characters, too much everything. Its thematic and ideological overlays were a multiplexing and refracted web of ideas that while they may have had an indelible universality to them, were intimidatingly esoteric in their presentation. Event the first ten pages of the book throw a gauntlet of linguistically tangled terms and phrases that strain the logical boundaries of the English language. To translate this into something not just cinematically coherent, but palatable was determined to be an insurmountable task. Considerations for other attempts came and went (notably one by acclaimed film maker Alejandro Jodorowsky that had an appropriately insane cast). A mini series in the mid 2000s benefited from an expanded run time to exhume the dense lore with more clarity, but it lacked the budget to even suggest the portentous scale and grandeur of Dune.
And yet the announcement of a modern take on Dune was met not with scepticism this time, but rather cautious intrigue. Amidst the taxonomy of currently respected and acclaimed directors the myriad of opinions on the matter had coalesced into the hope that if anyone could properly make Dune, it was Villeneuve. To bring the universe of Dune to life, a director with not only robust science fiction acumen was necessary, but also one who was adept at extracting deeper understanding and meaning from the land in which a story occupies. This contemplative cinematic flare has been integral to many of Villeneuve’s projects. His film Enemy used a desaturated color palate and subtly stalking wide shots to transform an otherwise anodyne Toronto skyline into something unnervingly surreal. In his break out film Arrival, the bucolic and picturesque Montana countryside is almost literally bisected with a sense of monolithic anxiety. In Sicario, arguably one of the best films of the decade his contemplative yet epic shooting style is purposed towards maximal effect. In it he is able to extract a palpable and visceral sense of terror from simply depicting the North Mexican countryside and attendant urban sprawl. In what’s stylistically one of the best looking films maybe ever Villeneue’s Blade Runner 2049 marvels with its dystopian decay punctuated by the occasional strip of demonic neon glamor. Villeneuve can create a story simply from the land, and few other are as rich in opportunity to do so, literally and figuratively, as the desert world of Arrakis, more casually referred to by its inhabitants as Dune.
Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson)
Despite this serendipitous paring of story and storyteller, Dune does not always make it easy for one to appreciate it, perhaps even more so in what is usually the easier to digest format of film. Villeneuve’s approach to narratives is often deeply ponderous, cerebral, and even a touch insular. Couple this with the asymmetrical pacing that comes from the film only covering the first half of Herbert’s novel and you have a story that doesn’t flow as easily as one would hope. There’s really only one large-scale set piece, although it is spectacular. His integration of the offensive and defensive technologies of warfare makes for inventive and daunting assaults on one’s senses. On a smaller scale, deprived of his inexorable comfort with enormity, the movements can feel a little blocky. There is a lack of synchronicity between camera positioning and movement in the one on one combat scenes. Coupled with the narrative inclusion of blue hued force fields on combatants creates visually muddled encounters. That being said, another sequence of tracking medium shots canvasing an insurgent battlefield is striking its fluidity of movement and framing. However, a number of scenes before and after seem particularly laborious. It’s not so much that they are perfunctory exposition dumps (the expository moments are actually fairly unobtrusive), but rather there is often no linear or streamlined avenue to convey the sentiments or state of mind of characters. The workarounds to obviate the narrative faux paux of telling when you should be showing make for moments that struggle for momentum, or more problematically fail to distil any cinematic or thematic primacy. Dune sometimes misses opportunities to luxuriate in its world, instead it merely lingers.
From another perspective though, this feels like it is within the spirit of Herbert’s novel and when coupled with the inundating opulence of his wide shots of the desert, the marauding sandworms, or the stunningly minimalist take on interstellar spacecraft, it feels like an intentional and nuanced exploration of what this land is supposed to represent. Arrakis is a barren wasteland to colonial oppressors who see it as nothing more than a rock to be strip mined, and yet to the Fremen it’s a home in which they have achieved equilibrium with, and are genuinely receptive to and attuned to its immutable beauty. The first line in Villeneue’s adaptation comes from Chani, “My planet Arrakis is so beautiful when the sun is low. Rolling over the sands you can see spice in the air”. This is a drastic and vital shift in the paradigm in which the setting is considered. Long depicted or thought of as daunting backdrop to test Paul’s resolve and catalyze his incubating psychic talents, rarely has Arrakis been considered as something beautiful. This is a direct repudiation of the colonial instincts of the story, and considering the interrogation such hubris has earned in our real lives as of late, it’s refreshing to see this otherwise peripheral angle on Dune elevated.
The richness of the textures of Dune is largely dependent upon what, in the vast panoply of lore that exists in the novel, Villeneuve chooses to focus on. In this sense the film is a resounding success as it extrapolates in remarkable ways on just what religion, politics, and technology might look like, not a mere couple hundred years in the future, but ten thousand years. The general shunning of scientific advancements in the form of computers or AI hints just enough at a cataclysmic event in Dune’s history that is explored in the story’s literary appendices. Recreations of individuals known as mentants- conceptual hybrids of humans and computational faculties- or aviation technology that eschews industrial form factors in favour of skeuomorphic insect features all allude to intriguing implications as to just what exactly happened to these people. The intersection of politics, religion, and governance are subtly pernicious, with the ambient bureaucracies of background institutions proving more threatening in the long term than a garrison of Harkonnen soldiers. It’s here that Dune is at its most rhetorically fascinating. Ten Millennia in to the future, after the successful colonization of pretty much all existence, and humanity is once again organized into hierarchal fiefdoms with leaders of great houses in charge. The lineage is a mixture of nepotism and hereditary tradition, their grandeur often built on the backs of a disposable race, to borrow a parlance from another Villeneuve film. Such dogmatic and retrograde organizational structures suggest an iterative inevitability to the exploitation of our fellow human and our ecosystem even when the aperture is widened to the most macroscopic of dimensions. Within this context the idea of Paul being some kind of messiah, to disrupt this vulture capitalist empire is engaging.
Dune and Villeneuve do not present this possibility along the binary spectrum of good or bad, rather the messiah complex that is so prosaically broad in most cinema is complicated with religious and political propaganda in intriguing ways. The Bene Gesserit of which Paul’s mother Lady Jessica is a devout member are an all female order of mystics whose supernatural powers and insights are met with awe and fear across the universe. So respected and embedded within intergalactic political manoeuvrings, they even often steer the opinions and decision making process of the emperor himself. This colors the motivations of the emperor’s ‘gifting’ of Arrakis to the Atreides family, implying a stratagem of manipulations at play. The initial and cynical reading of the move is that the Emperor fears the Atreides’ growing relevancy and wants them to fail miserably on Arrakis, even going as far to back the Harkonnen’s coup; an alliance that the Bene Gesserit stealthily assisted in forming.
Why do this? It would appear to relate to the Bene Gesserit prophecy that one day a messiah, who they dub the Kwisatz Haderach will be born. The idea is this individual, the result of generations of genetic manipulation will be able to access all of the memories and futures of every male in the galaxy (it’s a weirdly gendered prophecy). Lady Jessica believes this Kwisatz Haderach could in fact be her son Paul. While the elders of the order are perturbed by the audacity of Jessica’s assumption, they nevertheless believe the possibility is worth further analysis and investigation. From this perspective one could surmise they Bene Gesserit orchestrated the Emperor’s relocation of the Atreides house to Arrakis for the sole purpose of ensuring its destruction, thus annexing Paul from any dynastic loyalty to his father’s bloodline so he could focus solely on his alleged destiny. Time will tell how this plays out in part 2 of Dune, but it certainly depicts the Bene Gesserit as harbingers of their own choke hold on the power structures of the universe. They seed planets with their own propaganda, curating religious fanaticism along parameters beneficial to their order. When Lady Jessica and Paul tour a city of Arrakis she notes with encouragement and alacrity how they are chanting for their eventual messiah to save them. Paul, in likely the most astute observation of the entire film notes they are only saying that because they have been told to. Conversely Duke Leto and his Atreides supplicants are generally depicted as far too naïve and trusting to navigate the political mechanizations they are ensnared in.
Dune systematically derides the different foundational sources of identity Paul can claim agency to, leaving him appropriately lost for much of the second act of the film. This dismantling of ego and id is well worn through Paul’s shifting anxieties and confidence, but it’s also an extension of the larger thematic nature of Villeneuve’s body of work. Regardless of subject matter, many of his films at their core are explorations of how identity is defined. Enemy is pretty on the nose with the literal duelling personas of Jake Gylenhall trying to determine who is who. Sicaro is a decent into the demoralizing nadir of tying one’s purpose in life to ideological fault lines that are far more mercurial and malleable than we’d like. Blade Runner 2049 is as explicit as one can get with its question of class warfare as a marker for identity and worth. These vectors of socioeconomic distinctions and the fragility of political association are just as present in Dune, once again depicting them as institutions that we tie our sense of identity to at our own peril. It’s here where the thematic beauty and eco optimism of the film shines. Identity need not be subservient to such abstractions, but rather to the land. It’s through our environment, our home, and our understanding not of its dangers but its potential that we will find the same in ourselves. Dune is celebrated for its genre defining tropes, a little ambiguous on its colonial interpretations, and a little too anachronistic in its white savoir proselytizing, which is to say there are a whole lot of angles and ideas to orient an adaptation upon. In our current age of eco fatalism, this was the right concept to focus on.
The story of Dune, and Paul’s evolution goes to some wild places especially in the succeeding books that widen the expanse of the story’s universe. His power and ascendancy becomes inevitability; the central question of the story revolves around whether or not that’s a good thing. It remains to be seen how this will be explored in part two of Villeneuve adaptation. What seems assured at this point is not only that Dune is in fact filmable, but now was a uniquely right time to do it. Our world is changing and our relationship with it needs to change commensurately. If we continue on our current path, looking at the earth merely as vessel for resource extraction and not an axiomatic anchor in our societal identity, we ourselves will become as unrecognizable as the not so subtly engorged villains of the film. There’s a German artist named Holy Herndon that once said, “the earth does not care for what we need, what we breathe; a frontier of green or a frontier of dust.” It’s us that must adapt. That’s worth remembering as Paul heads out into the desert, with a promise that this is only the beginning. Arrakis is a deathtrap, yes. It’s also beautiful, and it’s also home.