Episode 69: Transcript

Episode: 69: Let’s Obsess Over the Politics of Dune

Transcription by Keffy

Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome Our Opinions Are Correct. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, the author of the upcoming young adult novel Victories Greater Than Death.

Annalee: [00:00:08] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of The Future of Another Timeline and the forthcoming book Four Lost Cities.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:15] Today we're going to be talking about Dune, one of the most important science fiction novels ever published. And also the inspiration for an upcoming movie directed by Denis Villeneuve. We've been very excited by the trailer. And we're so lucky today to be joined by Haris Durrani, the author of a novella called Technologies of the Self and also the author of a very thought provoking essay about Dune that came out recently. So let's not let fear kill our minds.

[00:00:44] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:11] So let's just start off by talking about what Dune is and why it's so important. Dune is a novel that was published in 1965, originally by, I think, a company that mostly published car repair manuals, and it went on to become a huge phenomenon and spawned a ton of sequels. And in fact, sequels are still being published today by the author's son, Brian Herbert. The original author, of course, being Frank Herbert. 

[00:01:35] And Dune is basically the story of a desert planet called Arrakis, which is mostly home to a nomadic people called the Fremen. Basically, it is the most important place in this Galactic Empire, because it's the source of the spice melange, which allows people to travel faster than light without using artificial intelligences because the spice allows them to kind of see the time stream and space time from this other perspective. I'm oversimplifying a little bit. And so whoever controls the spice, as we're told over and over again, in the book, controls the universe.

[00:02:09] Dune has been named many times as the greatest science fiction novel of all time. It's also something that people have argued about for years, because it's the story about a young hero named Paul Atreides, who travels to this desert planet Arrakis, loses everything, and then basically claws his way back to power by using the desert people and by becoming kind of their messiah. In fact, he's explicitly their messiah, as is spelled out in that book and in the later books.

[00:02:37] People sometimes say that this is a white savior story. Sometimes people say that it's kind of a parable for our relationship to oil and our wars over oil in the real world.

[00:02:46] Haris, what do you what do you think Frank Herbert actually meant to do when he was writing this book? Was he trying to create a satire of the hero's journey? Was he creating something that was going to critique this storyline? Or was he trying to talk about how we can save a place like Dune from exploitation?

Haris: [00:03:01] Yeah, that's a such a great question to start with. And it's also a really complicated question, because I think much of the debate around Dune is about what Herbert's intent was. Part of what makes Dune so fascinating and the reason it has such staying power, is the fact that we can have these debates so many years later. And that it's such an elusive text in trying to pin down what Herbert was getting at. But I think it is right to say that Herbert wanted Dune to be a satire. I don't know if he meant satire, in terms of sort of invoking humor, but to be akin to satire, and that he's portraying a trope. 

[00:03:41] I think he there was an interview somewhere where he says, I'm showing you the savior narrative and your complicity in it. And throughout the whole book, I mean, we can get into this further if you want to. But there's a really interesting question about to what degree that is in the text of the first book, or to what degree that reading of Herbert's intent you can only get from the later books, which sort of more explicitly undo the hero's journey that we get of Paul in book one.

Annalee: [00:04:07] Yeah, I mean, there's the hero's journey satire, of course, but then there's also, I think, especially in the first novel, which became the basis for one miniseries and one movie, it is making fun of the oil industry and energy industry more generally. I guess, making fun isn't the right phrase, because again, it's not funny, but it is satirizing them in that it's a super obvious allegory. You can't help but see that this is about oil when it's a desert planet and there's people there who are nomadic. And then Paul Atreides, the savior guy, he's royalty, and he comes in, he's this clear, upper class, wealthy elite, who kind of comes in, is going to live in his palace which is literally surrounded by a bubble and just kind of go out and like suck a bunch of spice out and send it back out into the spice economy that they have. There’s those two satires working right alongside each other. The satire of how we tell stories, but also just a social satire of how ridiculous the oil economy is, and how super obviously corrupt and super obviously unfair and unjust it is.

Charlie Jane: [00:05:23] Yeah. And actually, we've got a clip of Frank Herbert from an interview in 1977, talking about environmentalism and basically saying that he wants there to be a world for him to leave behind for his grandchildren.

Frank Herbert: [00:05:34] I say frequently, that I do not want to be put in the position, that I refuse to be put in the position of having to tell my grandchildren, and I have grandchildren. I'm sorry, there's no more world for you. We used it all up.

Charlie Jane: [00:05:45] How much is Dune self-consciously, an environmentalist parable? How much of it is about the dangers of trying to exploit natural resources at the expense of the habitability of the environment?

Haris: [00:05:59] Yeah, I think it definitely is. I think that's the hallmark of Dune is the environmental politics of it. And I think this also gets back to the question about oil, because it is very right. There is somewhere where Herbert says CHOAM, which is the nefarious corporation in Dune, he says CHOAM is OPEC. And so he is very much thinking about oil. But he also talks about how he started out looking at OPEC. He started looking to other kinds of resource problems. So he was looking at sand dunes in Oregon, he was looking at indigenous management of resources, both for Native Americans, but also he was looking at water scarcity among the quote unquote, “the black folk of the Kalahari.” And there are so many other analogies he's drawing, and all of them are about the environment in some way. And what is the intersection between savior narratives, the politics of the environment, and imperialism. 

[00:06:56] And what makes Dune so interesting is that he brings together these multiple analogies and influences yet at the same time, at least in my mind, doesn't really homogenize them into saying oh, all the oppressed people of the world can be sort of explored in this one way. But he's just taking all these analogies, and they're a really interesting, heterogeneous way to think about environmental racism as you just mentioned.

[00:07:21] Wshat's really interesting to think about is at the same time period, when he wrote the first book, that's a few years after that Garrett Hardin, an ecologist, published a very famous essay called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Basically, he went to India, saw the quote, unquote, “masses” and said, Oh, we shouldn't give them… America and Europe shouldn't give them aid because then they'll just be free riders, and then they'll overpopulate the world, and then we'll have resource scarcity and wars and so on. 

[00:07:48] But if you read Dune, I read it as very much critiquing that very idea. And talking about resources in a way that's much more sympathetic, if not empathetic, to the plight of oppressed peoples.

Charlie Jane: [00:08:00] Right, and another kind of key ingredient, in a lot of these stories and a lot of these dialogues around environmental racism and resource management is this concept of the noble savage. And in fact, the era of Dune is also the era of that famous TV commercial, which shows an indigenous person standing by the side of the road, a Native American, watching someone throw a beer can out of their car and the Native American cries as people pollute the environment. And it's sort of this idea that the noble savage is also kind of more in tune with the environment. And I feel like maybe Dune in some ways kind of questions, that idea, but also, it does play into it a little bit. The main thing we know about the Fremen is that they're very good at conserving water and that they're very good at living in harmony with their natural environment.

Annalee: [00:08:47] I feel like are they really in tune with their environment? Because isn't, I mean, not to give spoilers for this sprawling tale, but like, part of the goal of Paul Atreides, and part of what the Fremen really want is to change Dune back into a planet that has more diverse ecosystems, that has water on the surface, and that has plant life on the surface of the planet. And there's, part of the backstory that gets filled in some of the other novels is that the planet did use to be kind of earth like, and then through a variety of, I guess mismanagement, but also management to enhance spice production, it's been desertified. Anyway, the point is that, I wonder about that. Are they in tune with the environment? Or are they actually trying to change the environment? And how does that kind of put a wrinkle in our story or our allegory?

Haris: [00:09:44] Yeah, totally. I definitely agree. I mean, I think what you're hitting on there, to my mind, is the way in which I don't think the Fremen can be considered as sort of one essential entity. In the first book, but even more so in the Later books, they often differ among themselves about how to deal with their political problems, their philosophical problems, their environmental problems. So you have some Fremen who do want to terraform the planet but others who don't. It's also, I think, up for debate among readers of how much their plans to terraform sort of came indigenously from their own practices, and how much of it came from the Imperial ecologist Kynes.

[00:10:25] For me, when I think about it, I think the noble savage is very much part of the discourse, that the literary critic Edward Said called Orientalism, which was this idea that a sort of romanticized other usually a sexualized other, but also in general, an other who is homogenous and one entity. And acts in one sort of homogenous way, in the same way, one might say, Islam is one particular thing or Muslims are one particular thing. And what's so interesting about Dune is both the Fremen among themselves are heterogeneous. And then also the references you might think of as Islamic or Middle Eastern, or African, or some others, the so called anti-Imperial, non-Western term, are also scattered throughout the Dune universe. 

[00:11:14] But I think, to go back to the noble savage thing, the last thing I'll say that I think is the most interesting part of this question is to comment just on the word that the Fremen have for amen. The word that they have for amen is bi-lal kaifa, which in Dune speak, in Chakobsa, the Fremen language, which actually comes from a real language, it means “without how.” That actually doesn't come from Chakobsa in the real world, where it comes from Arabic, where it also means “without how” or “without modality,” and that specific term is that. And so you sort of reading that on its face, you would think, oh, that's an idea of the noble savage just sort of irrational savage who has a “without how.” Sort of no rational approach to something, but sort of the unknowability of the environment. But what's so interesting is that specific Arabic reference is a reference to a very particular esoteric position in Islamic theology, about the unknowability of God's attributes, and about a critique of natural law. So it's still sort of, about the irrationality of the savage, maybe. But it's also taking that idea of irrationality from the very complicated intellectual argument in Islamic thought. So it’s just really complicated when you try to break down what Herbert is trying to do here.

Annalee: [00:12:29] What does “without how” mean? What is the—I’m just not familiar with that idea.

Haris: [00:12:34] So basically, I'm going to try not to get too much into the weeds here. But basically, there's a theological debate over, for example, lines in the Qur’an where it describes, for example, God has a throne or a hand or something like that. And does that mean, God literally has a throne? Or is that to be taken metaphorically as representing something that's without how, that just you can't rationally explain because God is unknowable.

[00:13:02] So one school of thought were rationalists, the Mu’tazilites, and they believe in the rational idea that every text, the text has to be viewed as there actually is a throne somewhere. And then the Ash’arites, who said bi-lal kaifa, said, without how. Sort of throwing up your hands saying, this is a verse that's inscrutable, that we can really understand. 

[00:13:23] And they similarly had debates about natural law, where some scholars coming from the Aristotelian line of philosophy said that there are natural laws in the universe. And the Ash’arites said bi-lal kaifa, there is no natural law. Which is actually really interesting because the sequel to Dune, Dune Messiah has a lot of critiques in Paul’s spice visions of natural law. But I'll stop there, because it's a bit in the weeds.

Annalee: [00:13:44] Yeah, no, that isn’t in the weeds at all. It’s really key to understanding what is going on in these books and kind of where the references come from. And it is one of the central issues in Dune, right? Is sort of how are we going to tackle this kind of spiritual history that they've inherited, and then how that will be connected up with the science of their world, right? Like, how are they going to connect together these two sides of their civilizations? So, I think it's cool. I learned something, so I appreciate it.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:23] Well, no, I actually wanted to kind of shift things slightly and talk about how do we read Dune now in the 21st century. And in particular, two things come to mind. First of all, we've had two or three generations now of, as you put it in your essay, that everybody can read online, which we're going to link to in the show notes. We had two or three generations of white boys basically looking at this story as a wish fulfillment story about a dude who comes from a privileged background, and then becomes the savior and gets to become the most special ever, and that is—

Annalee: [00:14:56] By taking drugs. Don’t forget.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:58] By taking drugs. And that is a valid reading of the text. And one of the things that really jumps out at me reading Dune now is that they really lean into the idea that there's this magic that only women can do, like the Bene Gesserit, except for one special dude. And the one special dude who can do the magic that's usually only for women can do it better than anybody, including all of the women. And he's the most special.

[00:15:23] And I feel like that is a thing that comes up in other stories. I think Andre Norton has a thing like that. I think that there are hints of that in some of the Robert Jordan stories. But I think that it is this kind of fantasy of a man being so awesome that he can take ownership of this thing that's usually only for women, and he can make it his. 

[00:15:42] But then the other thing that's really happened since Dune, that was published and that cannot help shaping our reading of the story is that we've had multiple wars over oil at this point. And we've had this sort of Clash of Civilizations hypothesis that became hugely mainstream at the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. The idea that we were heading for a historic clash between the Judeo-Christian world on the one side and the Islamic world on the other and that this was going to be the great clash of our time. This was even before 9/11 that people were spreading this meme. It was sort of Francis Fukuyama and those kinds of people in the early 1990s. 

[00:16:19] So I guess I'm curious, both of you guys, I'd love to hear what you think. How does this change our reading of the text? How can we read it now without… can we see past these things? Should we let these things influence how we read the text?

Haris: [00:16:34] Yeah, I think the gender stuff in Dune is really problematic, and always bothers me a lot when I read it. Basically, the Bene Gesserit, I'm never sure how to pronounce half the words that are from Arabic. Although that actually does have an Arabic, some Arabic terms as origins as well. They're basically super powered Lady Macbeths. And he sort of writes them in that way. These sort of witches who are… the mentats are the men who are super rational, and they replace the robots, and then the Bene Gesserit are the sort of witch-like political manipulators. 

[00:17:10] I think one way I try to work around it in my own head, is to try to read it generously. Not to sort of be an apologist for Herbert, but just to try to spin out other meanings from the text just on its own. Like I think what's really, for me, when I reread Dune, what I found to be most striking, was that Lady Jessica, Paul's mother, has almost as much if not the same screen time as Paul. And she actually, to my mind, she's the most if not, more than more than Paul, the most interesting character of the novel. And she triggers so many of the key events that trigger off the whole series. 

[00:17:51] And I think another potential way to read it is the Kwisatz Haderach who's sort of that superpowered male, the exception to the female superpower norm. One way to read it, looking at Herbert’s interviews, is that the purpose of the Kwisatz Haderach wasn't to give this man this power, but rather for the Bene Gesserit to exercise power at a distance. 

[00:18:13] So in some ways, he doesn't really matter. And he's really just an instrument of the Bene Gesserit. And I think I have a whole weird take on how the Bene Gesserit are basically just white feminists, that they're—

Charlie Jane: [00:18:23] I love that.

Haris: [00:18:25] —asserting control over their bodies, which is this super feminist thing. But it's really just to exert Imperial control over these people on this planet? 

Annalee: [00:18:32] Yeah. They do it at ex—

Haris: [00:18:34] [Crosstalk] is not to like apologize for Herbert. It's definitely problematic. I’m just trying to be creative in the reading.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:38] They’re the Order of the [crosstalk].

Annalee: [00:18:40] Yeah. No, I love the idea that the Bene Gesserit are white feminists, and they're like, and all of this works, because we have all of these like oppressed indigenous people on planets who we can just go use and mobilize whenever we want. And in fact, that's what their long-term plan has been. How do you mobilize people by using by seeding their traditions with this idea of a messiah. So it becomes a perfect social control mechanism, which, white feminists love that. 

[00:19:11] I think I was really interested in what you were asking about whether sort of changing political relations between vaguely Middle Eastern nations and vaguely defined Western nations, how that affected Dune. And I think the answer to that has to come by looking at the retellings of the story, which is really, either later books, obviously, or looking at the films and miniseries. I don't have a ton to say about this, but I do think it's interesting that it wasn't until the new film that's coming out in 2022, now.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:52] 2021. 

Annalee: [00:19:53] 2021, late 2021 Sorry, my brain keeps pushing it back because I don't want to get too attached to it. That's, I think, the first movie that has had people of color playing roles of Fremen. Of course, in the David Lynch version, pretty much everyone is white, whitey white, like super white. They're all Midwesterners for some reason. And then in the miniseries, they're pretty much, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like the Fremen are all pretty much white.

Charlie Jane: [00:20:24] Oh, yeah, they're very white.

Annalee: [00:20:25] And they're not even, I feel like that. I feel like the way they're cast, they're supposed to look sort of Mediterranean. They have dark hair. Like space Italians or something.

Charlie Jane: [00:20:35] I feel like Chani is sort of… it's ambiguous. I mean, in the 2000 Sci-Fi version, it's a little ambiguous.

Annalee: [00:20:41] But I do think that there, it's clear that, at least in terms of casting and how it would look to people that there was this effort to kind of disavow any kind of obvious connection. Even though it's clearly allegorically about resource mining in the Middle East. As you said, I mean, these are movies and stories, mostly created by white guys, and disavowal is one of the greatest weapons of white supremacy and colonialism. So it makes sense that you would see this repeated effort, at least in terms of casting, to disavow that there might be any connection to any sort of real world political relationships, even while these characters are using words borrowed from Arabic and using ideas borrowed from Islam.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:27] Yeah, well, and of course, there's always also a very long and shameful tradition in in mass media, movies and TV, of casting white people to play people of color. And this has been going on for basically as long as we've had cameras, of course,

Annalee: [00:21:42] But I would say also part of the nice arsenal of disavowal weapons.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:46] Right.

Annalee: [00:21:48] White washing is another great strategy for that.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:50] Slightly shifting the topic, but when I think about how our reading of Dune has changed since 1965, in the last like almost 60 years, or 55 years, I guess. I kind of think about Judge Dredd a little bit because Judge Dredd is another thing that starts out as like a satire of the police state and this kind of super tough macho police image. And people embraced it, a ton of people want it to be Judge Dredd. They admire Judge Dredd. They love Judge Dredd. And over time, Judge Dredd sort of lost some of its sheen of irony and the later Judge Dredd adaptations, but also later Judge Dredd comics, I feel lean into the idea that you're supposed to admire Judge Dredd rather than thinking he's problematic. 

[00:22:32] And at the same time, in the real world, obviously, the police were becoming more like Judge Dredd in real life. And I feel like something similar might have happened to Dune where so many people admired Paul unironically, that over time, it's harder to see, Paul the way he actually is in the book. As kind of a problematic figure who we're supposed to think needs to be critiqued.

Annalee: [00:22:53] Yeah, I wonder if you guys could talk a little bit more about the different… How is Paul portrayed in the books? Because I feel like he's compared to dictators and he's not as sympathetic in the books. But yeah, there's this sort of transformation of his character into something admirable, even though even in the movies, he's always giving these speeches that to my ears now sound just like he's saying, make America great again. It’s like, make Dune great. Let us crush our enemies. And it's like that seems like an unhealthy message. I don’t know. A little toxic. 

Charlie Jane: [00:23:33] Yeah, so actually, we're gonna take a really quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the different adaptations of Dune and how they change things from the books, and how they each interpret the character of Paul and the whole world differently.

[00:23:44] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops. 

Charlie Jane: [00:23:57] So reading Dune now, the thing that really jumps out at me is that Frank Herbert does something which no novelist would do now, or very few novelists would do now, which is, he has scenes where multiple people are in a scene together, and he will share… he gives us thought balloons. He'll be like, Paul is in the scene with the Great Mother or whatever and we get like an italicized thing of Paul thinks, “This is really scary. I don't know what I'm going to do.”

[00:24:21] And then the great mother does something and we get her thought balloon. And she's like thinking, “Oh, gosh, this dude is awesome.” Basically, we get different thought balloons in the same scene. It's not even that we jump from POV to POV. It's just that, or that the narrator kind of tells us what people are thinking, we actually get italicized thought captions for multiple characters in the scene. And it's interesting that Lynch makes this huge effort in his movie to kind of convey that. Which looks kind of embarrassingly clunky now.

[00:24:51] The only way you get any subtext in the Lynch Dune is by having these voiceovers as people kind of stare at the camera. You get to hear their thoughts and it feels like Lynch is kind of groping his way towards showing people's internal monologue without actually giving them any kind of nuance on the screen. Which I think is interesting. And it's, I guess that's a roundabout way of saying that in the book, Paul has a huge internal monologue full of self-doubt, but also full of trying to puzzle things out and figure things out. And when you put them on screen, it's really hard to convey that. It's really hard to show that. And in fact, the version of Paul in both, I think, the Lynch version, and the Sci-Fi miniseries from 2000 is a little bit of a swaggering dick. I don't know, what do you guys think?

Haris: [00:25:38] Yeah, I mean, I think I noticed that when I rewatched the 1984 Dune this summer, in preparation for the film, which is now delayed a year. But I thought it was really admirable that they at least tried to do, with the voiceovers, the internal monologue. But it just feels awkward. It sort of makes the book very difficult to film, in my mind. But yeah, and I i do agree that Paul does come off as as a dick. I think, especially in the miniseries. 

[00:26:08] But I think what I still appreciated about the Lynch Dune is that it captured, because it was David Lynch, it was very weird and dark and strange. And so even though it did have all those elements of the savior narrative, it didn't feel like a comfortable film to watch. And I think for that reason, I sort of liked that it captured that weirdness and darkness that is at the heart of Dune. It's not like Star Wars, where you have this scrappy farm boy who becomes the savior of the galaxy, because he's descended from whoever has the genetic strand of whatever it is they call it. 

Annalee: [00:26:42] The midichlorians.

Haris: [00:26:43] The midichlorians. Yes. Whereas the 2000 miniseries, it almost felt… I liked it better in the sense that it's trying to be super accurate. And so because of that, even if they think they're telling a savior story, in some instances, they also are stuck with the strict dialogue and scenes. But on the other hand, it did feel at times, I don't know just kind of too normal for Dune, especially the first miniseries, I think.

Annalee: [00:27:14] Yeah, I definitely agree that the Lynch version is creepy and dark and haunting. And I love a lot of the visuals in it, which is important because Dune is about landscapes. And it's about enormous worms, and you kind of want that weird, giant, visual impact. I got the feeling. I mean, I've always felt like in all of the versions, except for maybe in the novel, that Paul is kind of… He's kind of one dimensional and annoying, because all he ever does is sort of talk about how he has this weighty destiny to fulfill. And then once in a while, he'll think about how he's gonna go hump a Fremen chick or whatever. And that's part of his great destiny is that he gets to hump this chick who he won't marry. And it's like, okay, you know, I got it. But I… Like I said, it’s a fantasy about being a teenage guy who takes drugs and becomes super powerful and gets a really hot girlfriend gets to ride on a giant worm. All of that stuff is exactly what I wanted when I was in high school. 

[00:28:24] But I think, as a grown up, or as someone coming back to the story, what I'm much more interested in are the politics. And I think that, at least in the first miniseries, we at least got to understand a little bit more about how the psychological warfare that the Bene Gesserit have been waging across the galaxy, and how they've been manipulating people like the Fremen into accepting their authority. How environmental racism really works. How do you get people to buy into the destruction of their own environment? And that stuff, to me… we don't really see much of that at all in the David Lynch version, but we do get to see it in the miniseries and of course, we see it… I haven't read all of the books so I don't know how far this goes. Tell me more. Like, about the books because I… did they do they get further into the politics or do we just continue with Paul's kind of evolution into a god? 

Haris: [00:29:24] Do you mean the books… not the Herbert, the Brian Herbert ones, the—

Annalee: [00:29:28] No, not the Brian... We're gonna set aside Brian Herbert. That’s for a separate show. We're just gonna focus on the original books written by Frank Herbert.

Haris: [00:29:39] Yeah. What's especially interesting, if we're talking about the sequels to Dune by Frank Herbert, is the fact that John Campbell, who is sort of the proselytizer of the hero's journey, the superman, especially in Golden Age science fiction, rejected the sequel to Dune, Dune Messiah, because he felt like it was it was undoing his monomyth that he was shoving into the minds of young white boys in the mid-20th century. And Herbert’s intention was to undo that. And it's very interesting that in many interviews, he sort of has that logline which I think is a bit derogatory in a certain sense, that Margaret Atwood sometimes uses as well in her interviews. Of saying, I'm not writing science fiction. I mean, I don't really care where it is on the shelf, but I'm not really writing science fiction. I'm doing a camp version of it and criticizing it. 

[00:30:35] But I think, I mean, there's one way in which he disparaging the genre. But I think the other way to read that is that he's disparaging the politics underlying the tropes of the genre at the time. And so you see in the sequels that Paul becomes a sort of… He literally calls himself Hitler and Genghis Khan, and he sort of becomes this tyrant. And there's a lot more. It definitely gets far deeper into the politics and the terraforming. That would probably require another hour long conversation unto itself.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:05] Yeah. And actually, part of what I liked about the trailer for the upcoming Dune movie is that Timothée Chalamet, who I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, seems a little bit more tentative, a little bit more kind of like… He always, as an actor, always seems like he has a little bit more vulnerability in his performances. And he seems like he's going to bring that to Paul, like his version of Paul is a little bit more vulnerable. And in fact, we've got three clips of the same scene from the 1984 Dune, the 2000 Sci-Fi Dune miniseries, and the upcoming 2021 Dune. Of the scene where Paul sticks his hand into the box full of pain with a poison needle at his throat.

Dune ’84 Clip: [00:31:44] Put your right hand in the box.

What's in the box?

Pain.

Stop. Put your hand in the box.

I hold at your neck, a Gom Jabbar. This one kills only animals.

Are you suggesting the duke’s son is an animal?

Let us say I suggest you may be human. Your awareness may be powerful enough to control your instincts Your instinct will be to remove your hand from the box.

Dune ‘00 Clip: Put your hand inside and we’ll see.

What’s in it?

Pain. I hold the Gom Jabbar at your throat. Look, Atreides. Keep your hand in the box and live. Remove it and die.

Dune ’21 Clip: The test is simple. Remove your hand from the box and you die.

What’s in the box?

Pain.

Annalee: [00:33:06] What do you guys think is different between those three scenes? Because I… definitely there's some similarities. Obviously, it’s a key moment. Is this his origin story in all of these films?

Charlie Jane: [00:33:23] I feel like it's important that this is the first really big moment with Paul in all three versions, because it's how we see that he's badass. He can withstand this test that nobody else can withstand. And he can survive this horrible pain. And I feel like the Lynch version does a really good job of unpacking the thing from the book of this is to see if you're human or an animal. And basically, if you can overcome your instinct, and they really dwell on it in the Lynch Dune where they skip over a lot of other stuff. 

[00:33:55] And in the 2000 miniseries, he's just like, what is it? Oh, it's pain. Okay, and then he does meditation against fear. And he's just like, they don't really kind of get into it as much. And the Reverend Mother is a little bit more just kind of like creepy and weird about it and doesn't really explain. 

[00:34:11] And then it seems like the Timothée Chalamet version, the upcoming version, he's a lot more scared and a lot more tentative. And the needle at his throat is at his throat before he even gets told to put the hand in the box. It's like he's already kind of under duress a little bit more.

Annalee: [00:34:26] He's more vulnerable.

[00:34:28] Whereas the thing that stood out to me about the Lynch one was how, in the process of talking about are you a human or an animal, Paul manages to kind of discuss his aristocratic heritage, right? So we're reminded that he's an aristocrat, and he's a fancy pants, and that's not really foregrounded at all and the other two scenes.

Haris: [00:34:50] Right, although even n the 2020, or now 2021 trailer. I don't know if it was exactly in that clip, but around the clip you hear the Reverend Mother describing how his father has failed to gain political power and sort of the ongoing aristocratic stuff that's going to happen. But what I liked about… I think it's, I agree that I think it's still different in the new version, in that there's a sense of dread. And it's not like some fancy pants, like you said, aristocratic, mumbo jumbo. But there's actually a sense of uncertainty there. It's not just this kid is gonna go and acquire power, it's, maybe he will acquire power, but at what cost? And it's especially telling to me, I have other critiques of maybe what this film will be. But it's telling me that Villeneuve has compared Paul's character to Corleone from the Godfather, and that Villeneuve has read all the sequels as a kid. So he knows that it's a critique of, it's not just the hero's journey. But I will see how that plays out.

Annalee: [00:35:53] Maybe, in the final minutes of the episode, we can turn to what we're hoping for and what we know about the 2021 movie. Haris, you were saying that you are excited about the idea that this could be a mob boss kind of Paul Atreides. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Haris: [00:36:12] Sure. No, I mean, the only way I'm excited about it is in the sense that, the fact that Villeneuve spoke about Paul in that way suggests that he is cognizant that this isn't just the hero's journey. And even if you listen, this is super in the weeds analysis. But even if you listen to the the song that he plays from, I think it's from Pink Floyd. 

Annalee: [00:36:35] Yes, it is a from Pink Floyd. 

Haris: [00:36:37] It’s not a happy. It sounds kind of happy, not happy, but sort of militant and joyous. But also there's this underlying uncertain undercurrent. And Villeneuve, sort of what I did to prepare for the film was I watched all his previous films. And what's really interesting is the way in which he plays with this sort of distance between the music he uses in a film, and what's actually happening in a scene to sort of disturb or subvert the reader’s sense of certainty. Which is exactly to my mind what Herbert is doing throughout the Dune books. He says, I'm giving you the hero's narrative, and then subverting it, and so I’m showing your complicity in it.

[00:37:17] So Villeneuve’s first, he's done other films, but his first major film, which is one of my favorite films of all time, is called Incendies. It's about the Lebanese Civil War. It's based on a play by a Lebanese-Canadian playwright, but it's done completely fictionally. So I think Villeneuve, even though they filmed it in various areas, in Jordan and elsewhere, he intentionally put camels in certain scenes to indicate that it actually didn't take place in Lebanon. Because he wants to, he says he wants to create an imaginary political space in which to talk about real violence and drama. Which is, in many ways, exactly what Dune is doing. In the very first scene of that film, he uses the Radiohead song intentionally to disturb, he says, to disturb the western gaze. Because he felt if he gave some sort of traditional Middle Eastern music, it would feel like you were getting an authoritative peek at what was happening. And that very much is what Dune is doing. 

[00:38:13] So I have other problems, I think, that the total, or almost total lack of Middle Eastern for African actors in the film. But in terms of what Villeneuve is doing with the story, I'm cautious but hopeful.

Annalee: [00:38:27] What you’re saying about the use of Radiohead sounds like also it's kind of anti-orientalist as well. It’s trying to say like, no, this isn't just some story being brought to you in this nice, tidy package showing that all people in the Middle East are the same. And they all listen to this one kind of music. And somehow they never figured out that there was other kinds of music on the internet or whatever. And so yeah, I think like Dark Side of the Moon, which is the song that's used in the trailer ,is also it's a little bit different, just because it kind of that album came out around the time when Dune mania was that like a frenzy. It's like early ‘70s. So I feel like it's also evoking the time that the books were popular.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:11] Yeah, one thing that gives me some hope for the upcoming Dune movie is that I know that they're only filming the first half of the book. Which, the one way in which the Sci-Fi miniseries is superior to the Lynch miniseries is that it does have the ability to slow down and kind of  dwell on the nuances and the political kind of subterfuges that are going on. And there are moments where Paul and Jessica get to talk about how they're consciously exploiting the legends among the Fremen that the Bene Gesserit had planted there. And I think that, as you said earlier, Jessica's in a lot of ways, the most interesting character in the book and she really doesn't get much to do in the Lynch version. And she's kind of just there. Whereas in the miniseries, she does get a lot more agency and I'm hoping in the movie that also Jessica gets to kind of step up be more of a driving force.

Haris: [00:40:03] Yeah, I really hope so as well. I know Villeneuve said that's what he wants to do. I think it's really interesting to me that Villeneuve, in an interview somewhere, said that he wants to explore Herbert's, quote unquote, “exploration of masculine and feminine power,” which to me is both the most problematic part of Dune, or one of the most problematic parts of Dune. But also, I'm really interested to see how he interprets around all those problems. And this is definitely one of those. 

[00:40:32]  One other way I think, that I am hoping to explore further is Chani’s role and Harah, as well, who becomes this weird sort of customary wife to Paul. Because I think a one big critique of Dune and the adaptations is just the lack of intersectionality. But I think having sort of a brown or Black woman have a lot of power and agency in the story would be really cool. And I think Chani really gets short shrift throughout the Dune novels and I'd love to see Zendaya take the reins.

Annalee: [00:41:06]  Yeah, no, I'm excited about that, too. I've always, as I kind of hinted at earlier, when I was snarking, about how he gets a hot Fremen chick. I mean, that, in the novel, and especially in the movies and miniseries, she's represented as just like his prize, basically. He gets to have the weirding weapons and he gets to have a girlfriend and he gets a big worm. And it's just kind of like all the presents that you get because you're leading this resistance. And so having her actually be a person, and also just giving us, if Villeneuve does end up giving us much more of that political backstory. What an interesting film, I just love the idea of a weird-ass sci fi film set on another world that's principally about political maneuvering and resource extraction. To me, sthat's really exciting. And I think it can be really gripping and a really good thriller. I mean, I think that kind of foregrounding the political issues, gives them a really big opportunity. So hopefully, Villeneuve took that opportunity and we're going to be back in a year gushing about how this is finally the Dune that we wanted.

Charlie Jane: [00:42:25] I sure hope so. Thank you so much for joining us, Haris Where can people find you online?

Haris: [00:42:29] You can find me at @Hdernity on Twitter. Thank you. 

Charlie Jane: [00:42:34] Nice. And thank you so much to everybody for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. We really appreciate your support. If you want to support us more, we have a patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And you can follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. You can find us wherever podcasts are found and please, please, please leave a review if you like our podcast. And please subscribe and tell your friends.

[00:42:58] And we're super grateful to our astounding and heroic audio producer Veronica Simonetti and Chris Palmer, for the music. And once again to you for listening. Thank you so much. We'll be back in two weeks.

Annalee: [00:43:08] Bye!

Charlie Jane: [00:43:08] Bye!

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