Why I love Dune. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

9 - 11 minutes

It’s Friday, folks — the takes must flow.

But first the good news: Kyrsten Sinema officially dropping out of the Arizona senate race and setting up Ruben Gallego vs Kari Lake seems good. And Gallego himself is smartly tacking to the center. Common sense had some electoral wins in San Francisco. I guess people saw this coming, but it’s good that the government shutdown didn’t happen. The American Marten may be making a comeback to Pennsylvania, and in general, wild mammals have made a big comeback in developed countries.

We also got a cool update from Casey in the comments: Quick update on my effort to get a local Dem policy group going — I gave my little speech about red states eating our lunch and I got polite agreement. We have a good mix of Democratic generations — classic 60s boomers, soft spoken Gen X types, anti-Bush/Obama era millennials, and some gen Z BLM types.

First meeting, and the local Democratic Town Committee has given us some leeway to explore a policy that gets local Democrats elected (we're a reddish town in very blue CT). I pitched some ways we can frame up local leadership's reluctance to take full advantage of state funding programs to our political advantage and I pushed back against a framing focused on social justice/diversity since this town is 85%+ white and median non-college. But. Work to be done. Will circulate this column.

We love to hear from readers who are putting some of the principles we talk about on Slow Boring into practice!

Some recommended reading:

    Tim Lee on Claude 3, the first serious rival to ChatGPT

    Damon Linker on Glenn Greenwald.

    Rachel Cohen on how the anti-abortion movement plans to restrict birth control access.

And now, the main event: sandworms.

Scott Spitze: Why do you like Dune so much?

There’s a lot going on in Dune, but it’s largely an exploration of hero myths and “chosen one” narratives and an investigation of the temptations and dangers of messianic politics.

Or at least, that’s one major element. And as a guy who writes about politics for a living, it’s the part that’s most interesting to me, and conveniently, it’s also the point that the most recent film adaptations are most interested in — a non-obvious choice since you definitely could have made it much more of an ecological allegory.

But I find Frank Herbert’s exploration of the nature and purpose of political leadership truly fascinating. And one of the things that’s so impressive is that, as a book, it totally works as a hero narrative. On first read or in the right frame of mind, you can in fact just enjoy a rip-roaring hero’s journey with all the thrilling elements. Herbert himself became concerned that readers didn’t “get it” and wrote Dune Messiah in part to belabor the point. But I think this is a strength of the book. Game of Thrones keeps pounding you over the head with the message THIS IS A REVISIONIST ACCOUNT, to the point that it doesn’t actually convey anything about why hero fantasies are so seductive. Dune seduces you, to the point that the author worries it’s too seductive.

At the same time, I actually do think the book is clear on its own terms without the sequel.

It’s just that a lot of the clarity is introduced subtly via the epigraphs of Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh in the movie). In one of them she states that “respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.” In another, she displays clear awareness that the Fremen mythos of the Lisan al-Ghaib was deliberately planted by the Bene Gesserit — except that particular epigraph is described as “from ‘Analysis: The Arrakeen Crisis’ by the Princess Irulan [private circulation: B.G. file number AR-81088587].” In all of her other writings, Irulan projects herself as a true believer in Muad’Dib.

Perhaps most chilling of all is this epigraph, attributed to her book, A Child’s History of Muad’Dib: “‘Yueh! Yueh! Yueh!’ goes the refrain. ‘A million deaths were not enough for Yueh!’”

These are just random epigraphs with no elaboration as to what, exactly, these books are or what else they say. But it means that woven throughout the hero’s journey are little breadcrumbs about the character of the regime that results from Paul’s victory. Its key propagandists are deliberately suppressing material information about the origins and nature of its religious cult, and it seems to deliberately inspire unnervingly bloodthirsty behavior in children.

We’re happy for Paul that he gets his revenge, but did he accomplish anything here? Does he have a successful reform program for the empire? One of the sayings Irulan attributes to him is “people need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles,” which suggests an effort to excuse away bad outcomes.

There are lots of aspects of the book that you can poke fun at — Herbert must have been consuming a lot of mind-altering substances while writing it — but I think it’s a genuinely very sophisticated literary achievement interspersed with the wild mythos.

Dune is a notoriously challenging story to adapt as a film. Some of that is the technical problems, and some of it is the sheer quantity of the exposition. But I think the central challenge in many ways is that it’s not obvious how you’d replicate Herbert’s literary devices in a cinematic setting. The Lynch Dune doesn’t even try, making it a straightforward heroic story that plays like a takeoff of Star Wars.

Villeneuve does the opposite, subtly adjusting a lot of the story details to draw out the non-heroic themes.

He did that because he is very clearly a true Dune-head. He’s said in interviews that in light of what Herbert said about his motivation for writing Dune Messiah, he thinks his changes bring the films closer to Herbert’s intention. It’s also telling that Villeneuve clearly wants to adapt Dune Messiah. From listening to movie podcasts by people who haven’t read the book, their general presumption seems to be that the best chapter in this story involves a lot of cool exciting space battles. It does not! Without spoiling anything, Dune Messiah is a deliberate downer of a book without much thrills, specifically because Herbert was trying to put a stake through the heart of Paul’s heroism, even while somewhat redeeming him as a person.

Villeneuve is going in this direction because he has good taste, which you can see from all his pre-Dune movies. His Sicario / Arrival / Blade Runner 2049 run before starting Dune was amazing. His early smaller movies are great. People with good taste like Dune (this is part of the point of Jodorowski’s Dune, a fun documentary about an earlier failed effort to mount an adaptation of the book), which makes it a fun thing to be a fan of.

But I think what’s most impressive about the latest movie adaption is how the different parts move in sync.

Jon Spaights’ script adjusts the plot points to undercut the hero’s journey more directly in a world without Irulan’s epigrams. That means the inspirational misdirection has to come from somewhere else — specifically the visual effects team, which delivers so much razzle-dazzle that the story beats can unfold as needed. You really want Paul to ride that worm!

When I first read Dune, I thought it was an allegory about OPEC and the oil embargo. I think if you watched it today without any context or knowledge, it would seem like an allegory about Gaza. At one point in college, I described Dune as a science fiction version of 9/11 where the protagonist is Osama bin Laden. But, of course, Dune predates those events.

The reason it’s easy to mix up the timeline is that the specific historical reference points that Herbert was using — T.E. Lawrence (or Lawrence of Arabic) and the Algerian Revolution — were actually a good deal less messianic and weird than other things that happened later in the history of the Islamic world. This is because for Herbert, the Islamic reference points are pretty incidental. He goes out of his way to stipulate that the the religion is syncretic — Buddislam following the Orange Catholic Bible — and not specifically tied to a single Earth faith. The Bene Gesserit have a lot of Hindu and Jewish reference points; there’s a German element to the empire.

The political reference points for someone warning about the dangers of messiah figures in the mid-sixties would have been fascism and communism, with perhaps thoughts in the direction of the premature death of the young and inexplicably adored JFK. You see echoes of what Herbert was warning against in the Trump movement. Or you see in Barack Obama or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez people who choose to practice politics as a vocation and end up attracting backlash from within their own fandoms. Because deep down, on some level, people really do crave these heroic figures who will score knockout blows and sweep aside all obstacles. And I think it’s really important to see both how genuinely seductive and how nonsensical that vision is.