Dune
When Denis Villeneuve’s first Dune movie came out, I criticized his storytelling, because although the images & the sound are calculated to put the more sensitive in something alike to a trance, those of us who follow stories & the actions of the characters could tell the feminization of the story is a betrayal:
Villeneuve never offers his audience one moment of joy, but tries to find a solemn, austere beauty in his vast, sometimes massive designs, to give a sense of an unredeemed, maybe even doomed world. The desert & the CGI alike seem alien to us, but there is no image of the home that alienation might point to. The only cheerful guy gets himself killed nobly, which only makes everyone else even more depressed. The only religious guy is gruff & keeps barking at people or putting knives to their throats. Maybe this is a movie about how close to suicidal the mood in America is right now.
Villeneuve wants to show us the effect of this cynicism on human beings who want to be good, so his protagonists act like trauma victims. This completely ruins the political intrigue he spends so much time building up. Villeneuve’s Duke is an idealist who tells his son Paul that he should just be himself &, if he doesn’t want to be a duke, that’s alright. People do talk this nonsense in our times, but it smacks of nihilism. Why is the duke endangering his life, family, & everything he holds dear if he doesn’t even know he will pass it on to his son?
Worse, it seems Villeneuve just told his actor that his defining feature is a glass jaw, formerly not an attractive quality in a fighter. Similarly, Paul’s mother spends most of the film cringing or trembling at the terrible suffering in store. This makes a mockery of the idea that she is an intelligent woman, more dangerous than anyone else in their court—to say nothing of the way this undermines the idea that she educated Paul to be incredibly powerful. Perhaps mothers are wracked by fear in this mad time of ours, but it makes no sense in the story. This caricature of morality is abandoned at the end, when she’s suddenly the most wonderful warrior you’ve ever seen. Paul himself is mopey & depressed, dreaming about having a girlfriend, a young woman who turns out to be manlier than he is. To look at him is to know, “he’s not gonna make it,” as they say on the internet.
You can find my essay over at L&L, it’s a comparison of the Villeneuve & Lynch movies. Now that we have an even more beautiful version of the same with Dune: Part Two, I reviewed it to complete my analysis of the great separation between the beauty of storytelling & the intelligence put into it, all in an attempt to “complicate” “hero’s journey” “narratives:”
Villeneuve set out to save Frank Herbert’s story from his fans. Herbert was an atheist who dabbled in religion for the purpose of dispelling its power, doing the work of scientific materialism in prose, but perhaps also in order to use that power for secular purposes. Yet his novel shows much better than the movie the corruption to which rationalist institutions that control human nature are vulnerable. Since the 19th c., atheist interest in religion’s power has been fashionable, & it’s nowhere as obvious as in Nietzsche’s beautiful writings, which had an enormous influence on artists, including Herbert. Herbert wrote for adults who share his conflicted liberalism, but his fans are almost invariably spirited young men who have no use for atheist propaganda & instead want a hero to believe in. Like Herbert, Villeneuve seems to be looking forward to a third movie that completely betrays them, where Paul turns tyrant. It’s an interesting use of “tough love” for the soft, therapeutic crowd.
Villeneuve’s solution to the problem was to abandon the plausibility of the motives & action, which would have extolled the virtues of the aristocratic Paul Atreides & led us to cheer his every success on the path to imperial grandeur. Instead, Dune was all about the mood of the 21st c. American boy, which is dark & despondent. The story does lend itself to such treatment inasmuch as Paul loses his father, Duke Leto, & is left with his mother, Lady Jessica—what’s more modern than fatherlessness? This seems to have guided the casting of Timothée Chalamet, who looks weak & vacillating even by current Hollywood standards, in a role that called for someone even more imposing than Prince Hal.
I point out where our art stands to its tragic inspiration (Atreides being Homer’s patronym for Agamemnon)—read the essay.
Let me close with some remarks about the novelist Frank Herbert, also for L&L. Dune is a story of technological rationality creating modernity:
Frank Herbert also imagined a founding in Dune, though he was a mild, mid-century liberal, curious about marvels scientific & occult, about West & East, & a bit of a hippie, truth to tell. He started out a journalist; it took him a long time to make a living writing, despite Dune’s amazing success. He seemed far less prophetic & far sillier back then, when Americans presumed their way of life was impossible to overthrow. Certainly, it could not be threatened by stories like Dune, which can be summarized thus: Boy starts galactic jihad to save decadent mankind from destruction, wins, eventually becomes emperor-prophet, & fathers a new god. Adults shook their heads at such ideas, but this was before Harry Potter became a multi-billion dollar industry.
Dune, moreover, is about re-founding an empire. Protagonist Paul Atreides starts out a duke’s son only to see feudal rivals invade & destroy his family’s new planet. Naturally, he wants revenge. He recruits as allies savage desert warriors who suffer under the same enemy, & gradually, he becomes their leader & prophet. He not only conquers his planetary enemies, but eventually overthrows the galactic empire through a savage willingness to threaten a kind of collective suicide & annihilation of the galaxy’s civilization. As founder, he must have a vision of the future of mankind & the knowledge required to set his empire to that purpose instead of decadence. Paul is what the liberal Herbert fears, an authoritarian charismatic leader, to borrow the frivolous language of that time; but he is also what Herbert wants everyone eventually to become, mini-emperors, each man his own prophet & ruler, fully realized individuals, so that no one can be exploited or spellbound. A race of gods is the only solution to the human problem.