The Problem With Dune: Part Two

I have questions about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two.

If the Fremen have lasers, why don’t they just shoot the sand harvesters and run away? Why don’t they use their sandworms until the last battle? Wouldn’t it make more sense to fight the other great houses on Arrakis itself, where they have sandworms, rather than board ships off-world to go off to war? If Paul (Timothée Chalamet) has to invade the galaxy at the end, why bother marrying the daughter of the emperor he just deposed? It didn’t pacify the other great houses. And why didn’t it? His threat to destroy the spice fields seems like a pretty good one. Did the emperor kill Paul’s dad, Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), because “he believed in the rule of the heart, but the heart is not meant to rule,” or just because the Reverend Mother (who seemed bummed about it) told him to? Is there any point to all the diplomatic subterfuge and maneuvering if literally everyone just does what the nearest Bene Gesserit tells them to do?

I suppose it’s normal that a movie based on a book will cut corners, imply rather than explain, and give you the gist, whereas a novelist has the space and time to spell things out. My complaint is not that Villeneuve’s Dune is confusing. Beneath all the genre trappings, the plot is a simple and direct revenge and coming-of-age narrative: House Lannister killed his dad, but our protagonist delays and plays Hamlet in the desert—and meets a girl, Chani (Zendaya)—before embracing his destiny, leading his new friends against their common oppressors, and avenging his father. It’s amazing that putting a novel that is 90 percent dialogue into the hands of a director who has said he doesn’t like dialogue works as well as it does, but it does work. These are good movies to watch while eating popcorn.

But I can’t help overthinking it. Why did Chani’s tears save Paul from the spice agony? If the Lisan al Gaib prophecy is Bene Gesserit–created bullshit, how does it so successfully predict things like that? How was Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) able to turn the war around just by using artillery? “Bombing the enemy’s base” seems like a pretty basic strategy; why didn’t Rabban Harkonnen (Dave Bautista) think of it when he was in charge? How many times can Paul get stabbed and not die?

Most of all, if the Kwisatz Haderach is “power the galaxy has never seen before,” and he has literally killed or forced into submission all his enemies, and also he has complete control over Arrakis, and if “he who controls spice controls power,” as the first lines of the movie tell us, then why does he need to do the big space jihad? The movie insists Paul has no options, and yet it seems as if he is holding literally all of the cards it is possible to hold.

Some of these questions have answers, especially if you consult the books. For example, I was confused why—after spending the whole movie avoiding the south and not drinking the water of life—Paul suddenly decided to do exactly that. It happens very abruptly! My best guess is that because Feyd-Rautha can also see the future—making his big strategic genius move of using artillery something Paul was unable to foresee—Paul decides he needs to upgrade if he’s going to win the war. But I’m thinking this only because the books explain that prescients are invisible to other prescients, such that the presence of another prescient (like Feyd-Rautha) might interrupt Paul’s ability to see the future. If you haven’t read the books, you’re likely to be as baffled by the suddenness of his heel turn as Chani is. You’re watching a movie in which Paul’s entire character is his determination not to go south and not to fulfill his destiny, then, suddenly, without real explanation, he does exactly those things.

But the real answer is that it ain’t, as a great film critic once put it, that kind of movie. The real answer is that things happen in Villeneuve’s Dunes because they look cool as hell and get your adrenaline pumping. These are movies, as Max Read correctly notes, about “sick shots of spaceships arriving on planets,” about cool knife fights, and about that Hans Zimmer sound that goes BWWAAAAAAAMMMMFFFF and rattles your bones.

I am, in other words, definitely overthinking it. The first movie opens by telling us that spice harvesting happens at night, to avoid the heat, but all the raids we see on spice harvesters happen during the day. The reason is because it looks cool. Why has the word jihad been removed from the movie—it appears 36 times in the first Dune novel—along with so much else that would remind you that Dune is about Muslims in space? That’s even easier: Someone decided they would make more money if they toned down the “Muslims in space” thing. Cool stuff happens; the mechanics of why and how, or of cause and necessary effect, are not Villeneuve’s focus. It’s cooler if Paul gets stabbed but doesn’t die. Feyd-Rautha’s choice to use artillery has to be genius to force Paul to upgrade his prescience; the other houses have to refuse to respect his ascension because otherwise, there’d be no need for the galactic space jihad that the whole movie has been circling around, and we need a big battle at the end because big, climactic battles are the kind of thing that happens in this kind of movie.

You know who liked to overthink things? Frank Herbert, the author of Dune. His books have often been described as impossible to adapt because there’s just way too much of them: too much plot, but also much too much explanation of the plot. Villeneuve shows us how to adapt Dune: You cut most of it, especially the explanations. How else are you going to turn a sprawling 800-page novel—to say nothing of the endless appendices and legacy sequels—into a couple hundred pages of double-spaced screenplay? The first third of the novel is dominated by the machinations of the Harkonnen and Atreides Mentats, and the proximate cause of the fall of House Atreides is a delicately seeded suspicion of Paul’s mother’s loyalty, which masks the existence of the real traitor. None of that is in the films. The Guild Navigators are gone. CHOAM is gone. Fenring is gone. The famous banquet scene is cut. Princess Irulan’s narrative role is barely gestured at, and Alia doesn’t even get born. Endless discussions of ecology and politics and economics are cut. To put it bluntly, Villeneuve cuts almost all of the things Herbert was thinking about when he wrote Dune. Frank Herbert wrote a novel of ideas, for which the story was just vehicle and scaffolding and the means to that end. Villeneuve gave us the beautiful box they came in.

For Herbert, the story began with ecology, what he called “the science of consequences”:

As a science of consequences and outcomes, an ecological understanding sees a world in which human agency is embedded in almost unknowably vast and complex systems of order; while small changes resonate unpredictably, the world-altering ambitions of the powerful will often crash on the rocks of a reality that’s larger and more difficult to control than our egos would like to believe. An ecological perspective clashes with the more conventional Great Man understanding of history, which would characterize entire eras by who happens to be king or president at the time. In this way, Herbert’s interest in ecology merged with his belief in the dangers of political messianism, and he wrote Dune to warn people about “great men,” along with modernity’s overweening confidence in its ability to transform the earth, along with every other thing he’d been reading and thinking about, from general semantics and psychedelic chemicals to decolonization, genetic engineering, sexual liberation, and artificial intelligence (and also how much he hated liberals and John F. Kennedy).

Herbert’s tendency to overthink things is why his Dune is such a dialogue-heavy, endlessly didactic brick of a novel, choking with “as we all know” info dumps, omniscient narration, and interior monologues. It’s a novel that explains everything. You can get to the end of Villeneuve’s five hours still not really understanding more than the basics of what the Bene Gesserit are, while Herbert explains them in the first chapter. Herbert soaks us in details, anything and everything from the delicate balance of galactic politics and economics to the way personal shields fill up with stale air because the heat of battle doesn’t allow the proper exchange of gases; the first half a dozen chapters are mostly just Paul—and the reader—being schooled in the novel’s world and the techniques of living in it.

But Herbert’s characters also overthink things. From the Bene Gesserit, to the Mentats, to the mind-expanding spice eaters on Arrakis, the galactic future superpower is comprehension and prediction; the novel’s plot is essentially a chess game between a variety of players trying to think more moves ahead than their opponents. Most conflicts come down to, and are resolved by, the information available to predict and understand different chains of causation of extrapolated effects. So much so, in fact, that it becomes oppressive, as Paul’s prescience narrows his sense of possibilities to a sharp and horrible point: The more clearly you can see the future, the less agency you have to actually choose in the present. The novel itself is a story already told, with each chapter opening with quotations from books Princess Irulan will write about Paul’s life, from the future in which the events of the novel have long since been decided. In this way, the novel trains you in hopelessness, the same way Paul comes of age with the discovery that the world, which seems so full of possibility when you are young, is actually a book already written and closed.

I’ve always found Dune to be kind of a bummer. It’s a very ’60s novel, responding to an era of idealistic upheaval and revolutionary turmoil, but Herbert was a middle-aged conservative who reacted in predictably reactionary terms. Republicans were still allowed to read books in the ’60s, and to believe in things like ecology. But one reason that fascists love Dune is that Herbert saw the world in hidebound ways, a stance that becomes increasingly clear as the books go on. (By Heretics of Dune, characters specifically muse on how much they hate liberals—and yes, Herbert uses that word.) The Fremen of Arrakis are Muslims less because of Herbert’s sympathy for the wretched of the earth and more because Muslims were fighting the Soviets, whom Herbert really hated. The villainous Baron Harkonnen is named Vladimir, for obvious reasons, and rendered homosexual because Herbert was a conventional homophobe. “Bene Gesserit” sounds like Jesuit in part because the idea that a charismatic aristocratic leader who promised to uplift the downtrodden might actually be a pawn of a conspiratorial religious order was literally a campaign issue when Herbert took a break from writing Dune to vote against the first Catholic president.

Herbert believed that progress was an illusion because he was an ideologically motivated reactionary who hated the New Deal, the welfare state, the Civil Rights Movement, and any political leader who promised to help the oppressed. He was interested in eugenics, wrote speeches for a Republican senator, and liked Nixon because Nixon’s corruption taught us to distrust political leaders; he also liked Ronald Reagan because, he said, Reagan “wants to restore the individual to his preeminent position in this society.” At the risk of extrapolating too precisely from what generally happens to conservatives of his generation, I suspect he’d have voted for Trump in 2016; I suspect he’d have preferred the guy who would drain the swamp and attack the deep state to the big government liberal from a political dynasty.

Herbert’s cynicism structures the movies as well: The progressive visions of the future that idealistic leaders sell to the foolish masses who follow them are just desert mirages; the only alternative to all the bad things happening, for Herbert, is other bad things happening. In Dune, the world is just a neo-feudalist Hobbesian nightmare without end, and there is no such thing as society. Paul’s prescience tells him that his family and everyone he loves will be killed—in an unbearably violent future world where humanity’s permanent condition makes Game of Thrones feel fun and lighthearted—unless he picks Option B, which is a giant galactic war killing 60 billion people, and in which terrible things also happen to him and his family. The dawning realization of the novel is that all the choices are bad, the world sucks to live in, and basically nothing ever gets better.

For me, Herbert’s saving grace is that he seemed to find his worldview’s dour insistence on futility as depressing as I do, and saw science fiction as an escape. The positions he expressed in interviews (or wrote in GOP speeches) were predictably reactionary, but his fiction can’t stop banging new ideas together to produce new and surprising results. If he was opposed to the idea of progress, of building a better world, his fiction couldn’t stop trying to imagine a golden way, and there was nothing he relished more than world building.

What kind of a world does Denis Villeneuve build? Herbert had so much to say about his times; what does Villeneuve have to say about ours? It’s not hard to imagine a Dune that would speak to climate change, right-wing populism, or the war in Israel/Palestine. Spice was an on-the-nose figure for Middle Eastern oil, and the Fremen have always been a figure for the colonized peoples of the greater Muslim world. A 2024 Herbert would surely have had things to say regarding the role of Israel in the maintenance of U.S. global hegemony, A.I., and everything else that our politics are about. They may have been terrible; he might have been obsessed with Hillary Clinton, and he might have warned about the woke deep state conspiracy to turn your children trans. Maybe he’d be a crypto guy; I feel confident that he’d have loved large language models. But his takes would have been scorching.

Villeneuve seems to be mainly saying, “Look, it’s Dune!” Officially, the big idea is that Paul is the villain of the piece, the latest iteration of the antihero, a figure with whom we’ve come to be extremely familiar. (Though I would observe that it has been decades since the sequel to George Lucas’ rip-off of Dune posed the once-provocative questions What if a good boy became a bad man? and What if we were the bad guys in the war in the Middle East?) Officially, Paul’s betrayal of Chani is emotionally gutting and demonstrates the callousness with which he has been using the Fremen to advance his own ambitions. But while TikTok is filled with tedious explanations of the correct interpretation—“You think Paul is the hero? You’re WRONG and here’s why”—this explanation is necessary because movie-Paul’s heel turn is really unconvincing. What, after all, has he done? He kills his Nazi-coded enemies—who murdered his family—then humbles the arrogant aristocracy in the form of the emperor and his retinue (while mercifully sparing their lives), before he magnificently sacrifices his own romantic happiness for the good of his loved ones. He allows the Fremen to jump on ships and attack the other Great Houses, which were already literally in the process of attacking Arrakis. He is a cool badass who does cool badass things, in a movie that’s cool and badass.

Moreover, the official explanation of Paul’s villainy is that it’s unavoidable: After drinking the water of life, Paul tells his mother that everything he is about to do is necessary and impossible to avoid—the “narrow path” he must navigate if they are to survive. In the books, his son will set humanity on the “Golden Path,” and if you haven’t read them, a few minutes on Wikipedia will give you a sense of how out-there Herbert goes. But even if movie-Paul is right and we accept it, I’m not sure what it could mean to say that Paul is the villain: Can one be a villain in a world where choice and freedom are illusions?

But maybe this is exactly the point. In the real world, paranoid fantasies are most often a means of justifying preemptive atrocities. “If we don’t kill them now, they’ll kill us later” is a staple of right-wing nationalist rhetoric because it lets you blame the victims for what they would have made you do to them if you hadn’t done it first. Reactionaries see themselves as reacting, always, to the aggression of the left. This is why they tell apocalyptic stories about BLM mobs, Biden’s willful dereliction of duty in the matter of border security, or the zombie wasteland that progressives have made of San Francisco: to create a permission structure for all kinds of actions that would normally be off-limits. If they say ludicrous things, then, or describe a reality that has no bearing on the actual world we live in, their lurid fantasies nevertheless serve a purpose. As the hosts of the Know Your Enemy podcast like to ask about conservative thinkers, “What are they giving themselves permission to do?”

If Villeneuve’s Paul is supposed to be a villain, then, it’s Villeneuve’s sympathy for what he does that interests me. In subsequent books, Herbert made Paul into a monster, a tyrannical despot who destroys those who follow him. Maybe Villeneuve will do that too, if they let him make Dune Messiah. But I’m not sure: At the end of the two films that he set out to make, the reality Villeneuve has created has given Paul pretty ironclad permission to secure the future of his people and children by killing billions of strangers (who made him do it, by attacking him first). It makes me wonder if that’s the fantasy we’re playing out here, one in which massively disproportionate preemptive warfare turns out to be justified. If Herbert was a reactionary of his times, is Villeneuve giving us a reactionary fantasy for ours, in which Bush was right to invade Iraq to remove the danger it might pose in the future, and “today’s terrorists are the children of the previous operation that you kept alive”?

(I’m probably just overthinking it.)