Screw You Guys, I Root For Muad'Dib
It's Book Week! My very lame pretense for posting this during Book Week is that the Dune series is a book series, despite the fact that I'm clearly reacting to the recent movie. Sue me. Some spoilers follow.
Let me say off the bat that I'm sure someone else has already written a piece like this. But let me say: yes, in the Dune universe I root for Paul Atreides, Muad’Dib, Usul, the Kwisatz Haderach, Lisan al-Gaib. Yes! I do! And I know it won't end well. I don't care! I root for him and I don't feel bad about it. Get your revenge, Paul! Use the Voice, king! Fuck the Harkonnens! Fuck the Emperor! Fuck the Great Houses! Seize your destiny!
The success and popularity of Dune 2 has delighted me. This is primarily because it's a good movie, an actual movie, not like most recent tentpole studio films, which tend to be more of movie-like substances. The care, the attention to detail, every element so meticulous, so loving… the feeling of conscious effort and craft suffuse the whole thing. The cast is excellent and everyone in it is doing the most they can with every frame they're on the screen. The balance been scale and intimacy is just right. The costuming and visual effects are stunning. It's not a perfect movie; the last 40 minutes has a “too many climaxes” problem, and I think the big showdown with Austin Butler should have been left for the next installment. (As it stands both of these movies end with somewhat-deflating knife fights.) But this is bravura, you've-got-to-see-it-in-a-theater popular filmmaking. I'm delighted that something so deeply weird has become so popular, so meme-worthy. And Timothee Chalamet, who I haven't generally thought very much of, is excellent, compulsively watchable and charismatic.
And therein lies the problem!
All of this attention has brought robust discussion with it. And central to the discussion has been a point about the movie's themes and characterization, a point that wallpapers social media: you're not supposed to root for Paul. In addition to being a direct statement on imperialism and insurgency and stealing resources from indigenous peoples - some people refer to these elements as allegorical, but they're not, they're direct text - the entire Dune series was Frank Herbert’s warning about messianism. He was, among other things, dramatizing the way that people fall for phony messiahs and false prophets, showing how this human tendency has destructive consequences. And that too is text, not subtext: the Fremen believe that Paul Atreides is the messiah, the Lisan al-Gaib, only because the shadowy cabal that is the Bene Gesserit have seeded the galaxy with invented messiah stories as an open-ended tool for control. Paul and his mother are knowingly manipulating the Fremen for their own selfish ends; Dune 2 is the story of Bene Gesserit tactics working to perfection. And there's all sorts of hints and portents that this is leading to disaster, including Paul’s own visions. It's also the case that, from a metatextual point of view, all of this shields the films from a very common political critique, the “white savior” complaint. And, you know… yeah. Absolutely. Herbert was very direct about what Paul’s story is really about, and these constant warnings about liking the movie wrong are correct, if a little annoying.
BUT FUCK IT, I RIDE WITH MUAD’DIB
I like Paul, I want revenge against the Harkonnens for what happened to the House Atreides, I find Javier Bardem’s true-believer character to be funny and charming, the love story between Paul and Channi is moving and complex, I love seeing the Emperor get some comeuppance, Jessica Atreides is a relentless badass, I want the Fremen to rise up on behalf of all oppressed peoples everywhere, and while Paul may not be the Lisan al-Gaib, I definitely believe he's the Kwisatz Haderach, for some probably-deluded reason. Yeah, I know this doesn't make much sense if you follow the various pieces and how they're moving on the board. Don't care!
On a serious note - if Paul and his movement aren't seductive, if the audience doesn't feel the pull to romanticize them, then there's no movie. It's like Fight Club, another story that gets aggressively explained a lot - driven, to be fair, by misinterpretation from both fans and critics alike. It's true that Tyler Durden is not a figure to be consciously admired, let alone emulated. (Please do not emulate him.) But he has to be cool. If he's not seductive, if there's no sense that we want to be like him, then there's no stakes and no lessons; there's nothing to be gained by holding up a figure that we all admit is wrong and bad, in that kind of story. The audience’s internal battle drives both the message and the drama, and creators can only hope that they come to the right conclusion. I think with Dune 2 they overwhelmingly have.
Not me, though, I'll follow Muad'Dib anywhere. Paul and his rebel army are cool as fuck. He shall be Padishah. Ya hya chouhada.
I have mixed feelings about Dune 2, but it does a lot of great things, so I'll limit myself to one complaint: it doesn't do a good enough job of conveying Paul's prescience.
Speculative visions are a dime a dozen in movies, usually substituting for the interior monologues that books use to communicate internal doubt and conflict. One of the most interesting things about Dune, though, is that Paul's visions aren't speculative: they are absolutely what's going to happen *. Not "if I fuck this up, billions will die", but "I am choosing to cause the death of billions", which puts a rather fine point on the story. I wish DV has figured out a way to do that, perhaps by featuring visions of things that happen later in the story, then replaying them, frame-for-frame.
* To be more precise, I've always thought that Paul's ability to see the future was really the ability to see exactly how to make a possible future come to pass.
Reminds me of the Luc Moullet take that “On fascism, only the point of view of someone who has been tempted is of any interest”
Something missing from lots of contemporary popular criticism is recognition that the purpose of depicting odious behaviour isn’t always to endorse or condemn, but often to investigate why such behaviour could ever be attractive.