Dune: How Does It Hold Up In 2021?

I finished my first read of the Dune trilogy this week, a four-day binge spurred by the trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s coming film version. The movie looks visually compelling but emotionally empty. Is that the same for the book, I wondered? Is the trailer just weak sauce?

What I knew about Dune going in: a guy in high school considered it one of the greats. My brother, in a text last week, suggested that as a pillar of science fiction, I would not be wasting time if I went ahead and read it.

That’s it.

I have intentionally kept myself from fan blogs and reviews and think pieces, I have even refrained from skimming the Wikipedia page. One wondrous gift of books is their general refusal to permeate the world of memes. What do I know of Frank Herbert? Nothing. What do I know of Paul Leto aka Muad’Dib aka Kwisatz Haderach aka the Lisan Giab? Only what I myself have read from the primary source itself.

Per the title page, this book originally appeared in print in 1965, making it a 56-year-old piece of sci-fi. As to its original creative vision, I’m stunned the book is this old. You’d think many someones would have ripped Herbert off enough times by now that the world of Dune would feel dated.

Reader, it does not.

*Many, many spoilers to come.*

The planet of Arrakis is so fully realized, you shed a tear for *more ambitious* writers who lose track of their mythical landscapes and let them grow too large for this richness. I can see these shifting sand dunes, I can feel the parched landscape, I can even *weirdly* imagine what a stillsuit might feel like sucked up tight on the skin.

That’s before we even get to the sand worms, one of the creepiest/coolest extraterrestrial life forms ever put on the page. High fives for Herbert sagely choosing to keep the whole story pretty much contained to one landscape. Respect the talent.

The political intrigue is good, the most interesting dynamic being the unusual distrust that emerges between Paul/Muad’Dib/Kwisatz Haderich/Lisan-Giab (now on, just Paul) and his mother, the Lady Jessica. They absolutely should not trust each other, and you can’t help but worry/wonder: yeeks, is this gonna be some family on family violence?

Nope.

I think it’s a lost opportunity, frankly. Why introduce this tension if only to let it drift slowly into absolutely nothing?

It brings me to the second most disappointing aspect of the book: the way it ends, aka the trajectory of Paul’s character.

Maybe the concept of the antihero was still novel enough in 1965 that Paul presented a whole new (groovy) way of thinking about leading men. He wants to be good (sort of), he has extraordinary, even divine, talents and powers. He’s working to defeat the “bad guys” (and really, they’re quite bad), so we’re rooting for him.

And yet, consider. Pretty much the second he realizes he’s smarter than mom, she not only loses intellectual status points, but gets the boot right out of his heart. Paul turns cold toward her, and this emotional snap happens immediately. In the final showdown, when Paul learns his young son has been slaughtered, he registers it in a factual, detached manner, and moves right along kicking Harkonnen butt and maneuvering to unseat the emperor. We’re told he’ll later order drums made of his enemies’ skins.

Is the message here that to be great, one must cease to be human? Greatness requires a heart of dead-ass stone? Does this align with what we know of successful leaders from history (sadly, I’ll not pretend we can point to anyone who fits that “successful” bill in our current moment)?

Let’s go back to Lady Jessica, or as I like to think of her, Mama Witch. She’s the embodiment of the worst aspect of Dune, a sadly familiar weakness for ladies who like to read the world over.

That is, she fuses the two permitted types of women dreamed up by most sci-fi/fantasy writers:

The beautiful lover & the magical witch lady (who can be tempting, but may just as likely appear almost anti-sexual — an old and hideous crone. You know, like all the aging Bene Gesserit witch ladies).

You’d hardly know Lady Jessica and Paul are mother and son. Reread their scenes together. Maybe Herbert had mom issues (really jonesing for that Wikipedia page right now), but Herbert presents the stoic world of royal house decorum as encompassing a total ban on maternal affection.

Lady Jessica doesn’t think of herself as a witch, but she can do all kinds of tricky things (control other people with her voice, slow time to molecularly convert poison to fun party drug water). She’s described in multiple places as graceful and attractive, captivating. She exercises total control over her emotions, save a scene or two where we’re told offhand she’s been heard sobbing for her murdered h̶u̶s̶b̶a̶n̶d̶ life partner.

In other words, Lady Jessica is a highly trained intellect in a highly attractive body (you already know she’s tall, slender, and svelte), a woman with Promethean prowess and magical powers who may experience feelings we’re told about in passing, but who never lets said emotions break through her stoic control.

In other words, a stunning automaton.

The other main female character is Chani, who is genuinely interesting, and (therefore?) minimally included in the proceedings. Of course, she’s young and talented and seductive (Zendaya makes sense). Like Paul, she’ll lose her father, and like Paul, we’ll hear next to nothing about how this impacts her heart.

Their scenes together evoke genuine emotional depth, so Herbert gets a few points there —Paul and Chani are actual soul mates, and Chani is the one person to see Paul express real anguish over his life and what the future may bring.

But as I said earlier, Chani gets mostly sidelined in this story. Perhaps because she’s too true, too flesh-and-blood unpredictable like a real human, and Herbert can’t have that intruding on his nihilist vision.

***

Which brings us to the most disconcerting moment of the whole trilogy, when Paul gives up his quest to stop the prophetic vision he’s had of violent holy war erupting across the universe, and just suddenly accepts that it will.

We want to see Paul prevent the mass bloodshed or at least die trying.

Instead, he does an internal shrug and figures: if you can’t beat the violence, might as well join it.

Ride or die time turns into ride and kill time, and it just sucks.

Herbert is emphatic here that heroes and messiahs don’t exist. Reality wears you down, it’s kill or be killed, you’re *probably* less of a dick than the next guy, so justify what violence you must and get on with it.

Here’s Paul, the product of 90 generations of Bene Gesserit women scheming to select certain bloodlines for breeding (GROSS) to create a male superman who will do their bidding.

He blithely informs them he will not.

*Saving my thoughts on the “human” vs. “animal” distinction of the Bene Gesserit, the whole “race consciousness” terminology, and the “breeding” idea for another time, but… there’s a lot to say there.*

INSTEAD, Paul’s gonna do what he decides he can’t avoid, and that is: become the Emperor and let the Fremen of Arrakis rip into the general population of an untold number of planets in the family name of Atreides.

Paul staggers through deserts, hops astride a sand worm, drinks poison, risks his life to convince the Fremen that a new leader may be accepted without bloodshed, and on and on for hundreds of pages, all in the name of preventing genocide. He suffers to hone his ability to travel time, to glimpse the future, to see what no one else can for the sole purpose of finding an alternative course.

Poor Paul. In Herbert’s world, there is NO alternative course.

So… that was disappointing.

You wonder, why create these myths and legends, this tough but elegant Fremen society, this convergence of prophecy and statecraft that produces Paul, all the story threads woven so expertly to imply a future of peace and hope just to…

Just to say: Nah. Let’s have the violence instead.

All this considered, will I see the movie? I was leaning toward no until I read a snippet from a Villeneuve interview that made me think otherwise. Here’s what he said:

“There are so many things in the book that are so relevant and so prophetic but I felt that femininity should be up front. We needed to make sure that Lady Jessica is not an expensive extra.”

Curious, I thought, as I recalled the preview and how many times I saw Lady Jessica (maybe twice?) for a total of about 1.5 seconds in a three-minute trailer…

(Digression: the trailer alone already brings more humor to Dune than the whole book, to which I say: bravo. Herbert’s dearth of lighthearted moments of release is a major drag.)

Anyway, Lady Jessica is the only person in the whole story who could be described as a main character besides Paul. She’s there throughout the entire book, she’s integral to Paul’s destiny in a way no one else comes close. We hear more of her internal dialogue — by far — than anyone save Paul himself.

But if I’m reading between the lines right, Villeneuve seems quite… er… taken with Zendaya, and gushes about really writing her character into the films so she’s much more present than Chani is in the book. The mother character sidelined for the smokin’ young and rising superstar? Well..

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Anyway, I don’t buy this hard sell of the femininity of Dune. The “feminine” quality of giving is talked about, not shown.

And riddle me this: why is that so many male writers can imagine all manner of diverse landscapes, creatures, technology, political webs, wholly invented (and amazing!) modes of space travel, and whatnot, but when it comes to women and their role in society, their creative powers close and so we get in Herbert’s world the radical Fremen society operating with fully entrenched gender roles dating back to primitive times?

I’m curious to see how Villeneuve “updates” Herbert’s world of traditional feminine roles (look, we’ve always had femme fatales and Amazon warriors, a lady who can fight doesn’t really count for “progressive” if she’s still treated and referred to as concubine — which she is, in Villeneuve’s own words, as well as Herbert’s).

So, I think I will see the movie. And write some essay afterwards of similarly asinine length, an exercise that — if nothing else — provides a brief release from the hellscape of news and the current failings of our own institutions here in 2021 America.