Rebecca Ferguson Modelling The Headpiece That Was Made For Her Costume As Lady Jessica For DUNE (2021)

DUNE (1984), dir. david lynch

Paul could have fallen on his knife at any time.

The books, and the most recent movies, present Paul's descent from 'somewhat innocent son of Atreides' to 'dark Messiah' as something he had no control over, to an extent--the power of the prophecies, of the Bene Gesserit manipulations, of the political forces at work, and of eventually the actions of specifically Jessica were just too powerful and too inescapable. It is presented as a tragedy, with all of the inescapability that entails. There is no choice.

But there is always a choice. There always has to be a choice. These machinations only work if they have the right tool. So what do you do when you want to escape being the figurehead, the spark that lights the fire that is the Jihad? You must take away that spark. Permanently.

But that's the thing, isn't it? The only way out was so drastic Paul would never have taken it. To fall on his knife would be to leave behind his mother and his growing sister and Chani, it would be to betray Stilgar, it would be to end the male line of House Atreides (remember how gender works in this world, remember how women cannot hold power outside of religion) and betray his father, it would be to give in to the Harkonnens.

But to fall on his sword would also be to deprive the machinations of the Bene Gesserit of their Kwisatz Haderach, the corrupted fundamentalist faith of the Fremen their Messiah, the looming Jihad its figurehead and focal point. Perhaps it wouldn't be enough, perhaps the focus would have simply shifted to Jessica or even Alia, gender roles notwithstanding, but it's still a powerful act, a powerful message to send--that one would rather die than act to cause death.

Or perhaps the route the galaxy would go without the Jihad would be worse in the long run. Perhaps the Fremen would stay an oppressed people; but I want to believe that Chani (specifically Chani in the recent movies) is correct, that the Fremen need no outside Messiah and would have freed themselves. That maybe the galaxy wouldn't get better, but it certainly wouldn't have gotten worse.

And isn't that awful? For a non-tragic ending to require such a tragic choice?

Let Paul and Chani fight each other in Dune Messiah. Let Paul start by trying to convince Chani to join him and then get angry when she refuses. Let them forget the memories of their love for just one moment, long enough to hurt each other.

Animatic of the opening scene from Jodorowsky's Dune (unmade)

Art: Moebius Directed: Alejandro Jodorowsky Year: mid 1970s As seen in 'Jodorowsky's Dune' (2013)

Tea cups and home decor for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. Via IG: keramiart

Sting as Feyd-Rautha - Dune (1984)

Alicia Witt as Alia Atreides in Dune (1984)

ALIA

My conclusion☝️🤓

As the release of DUNE looms, I find myself thinking deep thoughts about the story again. When people who haven't read it ask me about it, I usually say something along the lines of, "It's an extremely important work in the sci-fi genre, on the level of Lord of the Rings for fantasy, amazing worldbuilding, but it's very dry and the author was a white man in the sixties." Well, it occurs to me that "white man in the sixties" can mean a lot of things, so let's talk more about what it means for Dune!

I see two common criticisms leveled at Dune. The charge of biological essentialism, and the charge of it being a white savior narrative. It is not a white savior narrative, and I'll explain why below. The charge of biological essentialism is accurate, and I'll go into that more as well.

Without getting too spoiler-heavy, the plot of Dune is that Paul Atreides, heir to Duke Leto Atreides, moves to the planet Arrakis when the Emperor awards the planet to House Atreides in fief complete. Basically, the universe in Dune is space feudalism, and House Atreides is one of many noble houses engaged in feudal government. When Paul shows up, the local, oppressed populace, the Fremen, think he's a foretold, prophesied "chosen one," here to lead them out of bondage. Then House Atreides gets betrayed and mostly destroyed, Paul goes into hiding with the locals, and eventually uses them to overthrow his enemies and take back the planet, as well as leveraging the planet's strategic importance and his control of it to place himself on the Emperor's throne.

So, on the surface, definitely white savior stuff. But even a slightly deeper reading, an analysis designed to actually interrogate the text and not just generate a pithy headline to garner outraged clicks, will tell us that this isn't accurate. For one, Paul is a chosen one, but he's not the Fremen's. He is the product of a millennia-long scheme by a shadowy cabal of mystics called the Bene Gesserit to breed a superhuman. We'll get into this more in the biological essentialism bit, but the Bene Gesserit have infiltrated all walks of life throughout the future. They have a branch called the Missionaria Protectiva, which sends operatives to primitive worlds in the guise of religious prophets and has them plant broadly-worded, easily exploitable prophecies and beliefs in local populations. Then, later, if another Bene Gesserit operative shows up and needs, say, an army of religious fanatics, they say the right words and present someone who fits the broad criteria and boom, you have a chosen one.

This is exactly what happens in the book. Paul's mother Jessica is a Bene Gesserit member, and when they go into hiding, she exploits the fact that a Manipulator of Religions has been on Arrakis to maneuver Paul into position as the Fremen's chosen one. Paul himself is trying to resist embracing the mantle, because he knows that if he leans fully into it the Fremen will go on a wild crusade across the universe and burn everything down in his name. At the end of the novel, he realizes that the jihad is inevitable, that there was no way at all to stop it - even if he had killed himself, he would have become a holy martyr. A certain Fremen character, dying out in the desert, hallucinates his father, who tells him, "No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero." This is Herbert telling us on the page, in a scene that matters very little to the overall plot, that Paul's very presence on this planet, his status as the Fremen savior, is a terrible tragedy. We are supposed to sympathize with Paul because all of his enemies are categorically worse than he is, but this is not a book about Good People Doing Good Things. Paul is an oppressor, a feudal duke, a tyrant. His story is a *warning.*

Now, where the book gets very sticky: the biological essentialism. I'll quote the OED here: "The belief that ‘human nature’, an individual's personality, or some specific quality (such as intelligence, creativity, homosexuality, masculinity, femininity, or a male propensity to aggression) is an innate and natural ‘essence’ (rather than a product of circumstances, upbringing, and culture)."

In Dune, men and women are biologically distinct on a fundamental, universal level. The aforementioned Bene Gesserit are an order of women. Using the spice (which must flow), they can look backward in their body's genetic memory along matrilineal lines, becoming essentially gestalt consciousnesses of thousands of people. One of their order's chief goals is to create the Kwisatz Haderach, a man who can look back in his body's memory in the same way, but can do so along both male and female lines. There is a scene in the book where Paul explains it - to summarize, in everyone there is a place that takes and a place that gives. Women can look into the giving place, but are terrified of the taking place. Paul, once he has reached apotheosis as the Kwisastz Haderach, can look into both places.

There's a lot of other hoo-hah about men and women having different dispositions - Duke Leto at one point asks Jessica how she can so easily set aside her concerns and distractions, and she says "It's a female thing." When Jessica becomes a Reverend Mother, looking back into her body's memory, she's pregnant with her daughter Alia. Alia also becomes a Reverend Mother in the same instant, before she's even born, and it's made explicit that if she had been a male embryo (because she is less than two months gestated at this point!) she would have died.

This is what people are talking about when they say that an author's world view shapes their work. Herbert was writing in the sixties. Biological sex and gender were not understood to be separate concepts. The Nazis had destroyed the vast majority of all scholarly research into transgender people, since most of it had been done at a university in Germany. Homosexuality was still illegal (reflected in the book's main antagonist, Baron Harkonnen, who is a homosexual pedophile, and in 'effeminacy' being a damning trait in male characters in the book). I'm not saying these things to excuse the fact that he wasn't progressive in his views. I'm saying this because his views and understanding of the world around him literally shape the laws of his universe. In Herbert's mind, men and women were fundamentally distinct, and so in the universe of Dune, they are.

I'm interested in seeing how the film addresses these issues - whether it chooses to just kind of ignore them and hope we don't notice, or if it's going to try to update these archaic notions for modern sensibilities. Dune is a seminal piece of worldbuilding - Herbert's realization of this universe, its eddies and flows of power, the way the entire society is structured around the consumption of spice, the understanding he demonstrated of the feudal system in his translation of it to a far-flung future, and indeed, I maintain, Herbert's multi-layered criticism of the white savior trope - it's all undermined by the fact that the structure of the world itself reflects unfortunate, backward, biological essentialist thinking that we as modern people can no longer engage in.

Anyway that was a very long ramble. If you actually read all this, you're a beautiful, patient soul. :v