The Dune We Deserve

Make way for brotherhood. Make way for man.

Brotherhood was the name of a colony in Kitsap County, Washington. In 1898, a journalist named Cyrus Field Willard, enthralled by a utopian novel he’d read, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, purchased some land on Burley Creek by Puget Sound and got busy. In nearby Skagit County, the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth had already established a socialist commune called Equality the previous year. The Brotherhood people imagined that soon Washington state would turn socialist and soon after that, America. With that pleasant prospect in mind, they built their commune in a large circle and made their living fishing, chopping wood, and rolling cigars.

The first lesson Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. learned, then, was that some folks took their faith very, very seriously. His aunts, fervent Catholics, gave him another variation on the same theme.

And then came the dog.

It was an enormous Alaskan malamute. Having spotted the toddler, the animal lunged at him with mauling on the mind. The boy jumped back, and the beast’s tether was too short to allow it to reach its prey. But looking into the dog’s slavering maw, young Frank learned another lesson he’d never forget: Nature is real, indifferent to your feelings, and, often, out to get you.

Even if you know none of these biographical details—and leave it to us obsessive nerds to comb the childhoods of our idols for any premonitions of greatness—you’d have no trouble surmising them by reading the novel that Herbert, hardened by a few more decades of life, eventually delivered. Faith, nature, and realness ooze from every page of Dune, making it not only a literary masterpiece but also a test of sorts to anyone contemplating it seriously, which, presumably, includes the Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, whose Dune: Part Two just hit theaters.

What sort of test? For that, let us turn to the Dune universe itself. Early on in the book—and, if you’re in that kind of mood, in Villeneuve’s Dune, the 2021 release that captured roughly half of Herbert’s book, leaving the other half for this year’s installment—its young hero faces a similar ordeal. He’s Paul Atreides, the young and handsome son of one of the galaxy’s poshest royal bloodlines. As the story begins, he’s visited by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the she-pope of the Bene Gesserit, a shadowy order of women who run the world behind the scenes. Curious about the contents of the boy’s character, she holds a poisoned needle to his neck and presents him with a plain looking box, ordering him to place his hand inside. When he does, he feels indescribable pain—as if, Herbert tells us, maybe with that hungry hound still in mind, someone was peeling off his skin and reducing his bones to crumbs.

To overcome his ordeal and save his life, Paul recites an old Bene Gesserit mantra which has since become one of Dune’s most quoted passages. “I must not fear,” he tells himself. “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Now imagine you’re a filmmaker charged with bringing this scene to life. Sure, you can instruct your young star—in this case, the cherubic Timothée Chalamet—to contort his face from impossibly handsome to merely very good looking, and crosscut these contortions with images of sand and fire while having someone whisper ominously in the background as Hans Zimmer drowns all else in some melodic Middle Eastern ululation.

But that would be an affectation, not a revelation, which is a distinction that Villeneuve’s predecessors—his is the third attempt to film Dune—understood perfectly well. First came the inimitable Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-born son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who made his name with delightfully surreal art house hits like El Topo. “I wanted to make something sacred,” he said of his vision of Dune, “a film that gives LSD hallucinations without taking LSD, to change the young minds of all the world.” And if you’re out to change young minds, you might as well change a few lines in the book, too, ending it not with the transformation of young Paul into the Muadib, a prophet who would lead his people, a desert tribe called the Fremen, into jihad—Herbert borrowed the Arabic word, as it fit his vision of a bloody holy war perfectly—but with Paul’s death and the transformation of the desert into a beautiful forest with rainbows and light and joy, “a world illuminated,” Jodorowsky explained, “which crosses the galaxy, which leaves it, which gives it light—which is consciousness—to all the universe.”

It’s all perfectly idiotic, of course. It’s also completely sincere, which is why Jodorowsky’s Dune remains a cult hit despite having never been made. Spending millions before shooting one single second of film—including granting Salvador Dali a salary of $100,000 per hour, and indulging Mick Jagger’s similarly extravagant demands—Jodorowsky eventually abandoned the project. It didn’t matter much: The artists he trained, including the sublime and terrifying H.R. Giger, fed off his vision and were inspired by the way he, like Herbert, took faith and nature at their word. Nothing about Jodorowsky’s doomed Dune was metaphoric, allegoric, linear, or commonsensical. His was a world of visions and transcendence, and of violence that didn’t need to be fetishized to be understood and digested. It simply existed, like that hungry dog in Herbert’s backyard.

Picking up Jodorowsky’s mantle, David Lynch failed, spectacularly, at converting Dune from book to film. His trial, released in 1984, is wonderfully incoherent, which earned him Siskel and Ebert’s “biggest disappointment of the year” award but also Frank Herbert’s praise. The author realized better than anyone how resistant his ideas were to the sublime simplicity of the silver screen, and applauded Lynch for tossing story and structure aside to make room for pure feeling.

It was into this troubled and hopeless history that Villeneuve gingerly sauntered, armed with an uneven filmography that included some chestnuts (Sicario) and some bloodless bores (Blade Runner 2049). A perennial critical favorite, Villeneueve makes the sort of films that folks who took semiotics classes in grad school are apt to love: just beautiful enough, just engaging enough, not too difficult to follow and yet a little aloof in a way that suggests that if you only thought about them a bit harder, you’d break on through and plunge into new depths of meaning. He is not a maniacal guru, like Jodorowsky, or a daring visionary, like Lynch. He is Canadian.

It was tempting, then, to forgive Villeneuve Dune the first. A poutine of a film, it was mushy and lumpy but overall savory, with a lot of exposition being delivered gamely by a superb cast and shot with style and care. But that film was also a promissory note, a guarantee that soon the director will deliver on what we’d all come to Dune to see: the battles, the giant sandworms that roam the desert planet of Arrakis, the rise of the Muadib. In part two, Villeneuve did the best he could to deliver. And that’s precisely the problem.

Walk into Dune: Part Two without having watched its predecessor or read the book, and you’ll be … just fine. Villeneueve masterfully adapts the story to make perfect sense, delivering characters whose motivations are clear, whose relationships are architecturally streamlined, and whose story arc is kinetic. In the world of Dune, alas, that’s a death sentence, because faith is rarely as simple or as straightforward as Villeneuve’s shiny manifestations.

Without burdening casual readers with the intricacies of a very complicated plot, two immediate examples come to mind. The first is the Reverend Mother. In Herbert’s imagination, the order she leads, the Bene Gesserit, is an extraterrestrial take on the Catholic Church. Though Herbert firmly rejected the religious zeal of his devoutly Catholic aunts, he imbibed much of the insight that comes from embracing religious people not as specimens to be studied but as relatives to be loved and understood. Like the Church, the Bene Gesserit coexist with a faltering and sinful empire, and like the Church, too, they must generate the earthly circumstances to keep their spiritual yearnings viable. The result is an order of extraordinary women, sometimes cruel but deeply faithful, true believers whose pursuit is of prophecy; power is merely a means to an end.

Such purity, of heart if not of deed, cannot, of course, exist in a culture that hates religion as much as ours, which is why the Bene Gesserit, in Villeneuve’s telling, become monomaniacal witches interested solely in peddling political influence. Whereas the book’s Reverend Mother delivers profound and uneasy one-liners like “hope clouds observation,” the movie’s version looks and sounds like she wandered off the set of Game of Thrones, a power-hungry sadist who takes pleasure in lording it over the simpletons who do not possess her cunning, connections, or resources.

An even more blatant departure is Chani, the female Fremen warrior who becomes Paul’s concubine. In the book, she’s fiercely loyal, not so much to her man as to the spiritual promise he represents. She stands there and watches, uneasily, as Paul makes plans to marry the daughter of another gilded imperial family in an attempt to stave off galactic war. But this is 2024, and no vision of female agency is permitted unless it goes full Beyonce and asserts its independence, repeatedly and in the most obvious, performative ways.

Portrayed by the terrific Zendaya, Villeneuve’s Chani may as well be wearing a “smash the patriarchy” T-shirt: She quarrels with Paul endlessly, doubts his religious revelations, and is generally a downer. In one notable but inevitable-seeming departure from the novel, she wastes not a second after his proposal to another woman before dashing off, hopping on a sandworm, and riding away to freedom and independence.

Who, after all, in 2024, can imagine a world in which anyone believes in any cause higher than girl power? Who can conceive of a moral order predicated on anything other than the dictates of intersectionality? Not Villeneuve, which means that his Dune: Part Two, as splendid as some of its details are to contemplate, is as completely and utterly sterile as any new luxury hotel in Dubai.

Without instilling in his characters the realness of belief—that is to say, without allowing his Fremen to be Fremen, not modern, solipsistic creatures that yowl about the future being female—what the director of our latest Dune has given us is the digital equivalent of a sandstorm: awesome while it lasts, then wiped away without a trace. Even nature has been sliced into metaphor: Those sandworms, so menacing in Herbert’s novel, have, in Villeneuve’s telling, been so thoroughly tamed as to be nothing more than toothy Ubers, summoned for a ride with the click of a button, more convenient than terrifying.

What do you get when you rob faith of its magic and meaning and reduce it to metaphor? First, a very boring film. And second, license to make the film mean just about anything you want. The consistently craven New Yorker even managed to review the film as a metaphor for Israeli aggression post-Oct. 7. “The movie,” cackled the world’s once-greatest magazine, now the upscale prose equivalent of Kamala Harris, “pitting Fremen fundamentalists against a genocidal oppressor, can scarcely hope to escape the horror of recent headlines.” Actually, as The New Yorker knew back when it was run by much smarter and more soulful men and women, great works of art can escape the headlines with ease, because they are committed to big ideas, not slick and comforting conventions. They make us uncomfortable, as Frank Herbert’s book did when it ended with the Muadib realizing that his followers were about to shed much blood and plunge the universe into decades of violence. Villeneuve ends his with Chalamet triumphant. The goodies have defeated the baddies. The damsel rescued herself, of course. Nothing more to see here, folks. Not a stick of furniture is out of place.

One day, inshallah, we’ll get the Dune film adaptation we deserve, a Dune that takes faith seriously and isn’t afraid to go a little gross and a little crazy trying to understand how and why we humans believe the things we believe. But as long as our pop cultural industries remain in the hands of men and women drained of all serious religious and moral imagination and intention, we’re better off with books.