Review – Dune I and Dune II
Watching Dune I there is an uncomfortable feeling of being fed a messiah story – irreverent to the real Messiah story, but perhaps with some analogy to Christ; or a science-fiction that takes disrespectfully from the true original, like so much of modern western culture, from Superman to Star Wars to The Matrix. These stories make a blueprint of the story that has defined western culture – of the greatest possible story – and while they might strike a few brief chords of reminiscence, they sully it. They make the superman of early 20th century futurism, or the Buddhist-dominated-hybrids set on other planets, and digitised. The past two decades of film and television has been awash with these ever more diluted saviour figures, secularised and pantheistic in the liberal Marvel worldview.
Dune I kept its cards close to its chest, perhaps deceptively so. The role of the quasi-religious characters was not fully revealed, only hinted at; the governing story-world rules were kept under wraps. There are filmmaking reasons for delaying the surprise of the storyline, but this toyed with salvific ideas too readily. The protagonist, Paul, seemed to be charting the course of Joseph Campbell’s mythic story tropes of the hero. He might discover his purpose as he faced challenges on his quest, and as he met the girl he saw in visions. I write this, having not read the original novel, and I wonder if the concubine Chani (not thought of as a concubine in the film) and the Hollywood storyline that so entwines romance, religious imagery, and destiny, also drives the narrative there.
These visions which build through the storyline are troubling. They seem to refer to Paul’s death, and some kind of resurrection – which never occurs, and only in the vaguest metaphorical sense. It plays loose with the holy.
In Dune II the actual nature of this story-world becomes increasingly clear. The internal-logic – which only holds together so long as you don’t think, and remain transfixed in only what the screen shows – paints an unpleasant picture.
This is a world, a universe, in which the strings are pulled, entirely, by the ‘Bene Gesserit’. Their religion is fake; they strive for power and use their advanced mental-psychic abilities to control and coerce, to implant their imagined prophecies in the masses and to direct events on global, multiple-global scales. And in this story-world, they can do it. Like Isaac Asimov – writing in the same mid-century era – Frank Herbert wrote a storyline built on the idea that human psychology could be so all-knowing and supreme in its assessments, calculations, and the strategies resulting, that the course of human history could be manipulated and charted. Here there seems to be the influence of Freudian psychoanalytical notions, that everything in a person can be explained by understanding their past – in Dune II this includes ancestors and lineage somehow; and there is likely some Marxist influence as well: a view of human beings as comprising impersonalised blocks, moveable on a materialist, predictable scheme of history.
It is worth thinking a moment about the worldview you have been immersed in for several hours; about the logic you have seen spelled out in action, cause and effect on screen, and which you have had to believe to some extent, in order to care about character and conclusion. Narrative, story-telling, and the appearance of reality – academics call ‘verisimiltude’ – is a potentially dangerous thing.
What these films do not do is present God’s real world and universe. God alone moves empires and royal houses. God alone moves individuals. The purposes are His.
Dune presents the belief that humans can control fate.
The religion in the movies is false. It is also based on psychedelic drugs. I was slow to see this, until reading that Frank Herbert tried magic mushrooms. The novels and movies are of the 1960’s era in this way too. The ‘spice’ that is mined from the sand of the planet Dune is made seem rather innocuous, as it floats in the air, flickers when it catches the light, and is inhaled without knowing. It is made to appear that Paul is not actually taking a drug. Similarly, when the film’s bright blue liquid poison is imbibed in a shamanic ritual by Paul’s mother, and later Paul – a liquid that has been sucked from a sand worm – it is called ‘the water of life’.
This is a story of a false messiah and a false religion, controlling empires, and all based on use of psychedelic drugs and the supremacy of human psychological potential to foresee and determine destiny.
It puts the human in control and has no room for the Lord God.