Fiction Addiction: "Dune" and the Narrative of Exceptionalism

 Fiction Addiction:  "Dune" and the Narrative of Exceptionalism
January 2022

I heard a radio host the other day say that he had not seen the movie "Dune". At the time, I felt like telling him, "Do watch it so you can discuss it, but don't pay for what will be inevitably dreadful."

Quoting myself from September 2020:
 " Frank Herbert was one of the most inventive and original writers of speculative fiction and Dune is a classic masterpiece that can still hold a reader's interest. I have never been without a copy on my bookshelf.

But it is important to keep the work in perspective: it is largely a fantasy that sets aside what we know of space, time, consciousness, the human brain, biology, and the fundamentals of information processing. It does this to present a time-proven bankable romantic fiction of social privilege, adventure, and warfare.  Nowhere does the book touch on how a future society would achieve the slightest measure of democractic social justice or a stable relationship with the carrying capacity of a planet."

To give Herbert credit, this complex book did put the important topics of neuropharmacology, genetic engineering, religious power, planetary ecology, and resource conflict in front of a lot of people.  But almost none of this makes into the movie.

The visuals are a new highwater mark in CGI fantasy realism: inhospitable planetary landscapes, supercolossal starships, vast inhuman architecture, impressively rendered aircraft, and detailed military costumes, like some dream by Albert Speer or Mussolini.

But compassion and humour? Almost absent. And the economics and technology and food science that would support "millions" living on a sea of sand and rock? Completely absent, at least from Part One. We'll see what Parts Two and Three bring.

I saw Dune the movie as the romanticization of competing elitisms, one built around greed and militarism, another around eugenics and conspiracy, and a third based in superstition and ritual violence. Or maybe the plot and the clever details imported from the book are just an excuse for what the fantasy industrial complex finds most profitable: armies fighting, individuals fighting, people dying, torture, knives and swords everywhere. PG-rated pornography for a global theatre audience numbed by lifetimes of on-screen violence.

But these serious criticisms are minor compared to really big question that Herbert and Villeneuve both evade in their quest for the epic paycheck: how can humanity survive another 10,000 years of civilization and come up with no better form of social organization than patriarchal hereditary dictatorship?

Dune: Take Two

I thought more deeply about the movie when I heard that CBC Q's Tom Power did an interview with Denis Villeneuve. I wrote Q with the 10,000 year question and went further, something like this.

"Herbert's Dune is full of interesting ideas, but at its heart are power fantasies that appeal to his primary reading audience, immature young adults. The move is true to that vision, as if Leni Riefenstahl made a recruiting film for the Taliban. Or as if a team of investors fed Americans back their own worst ideas, with some extra violence and knife fetishism."

I was correct about the message the movie was sending. In the Q interview Villeneuve explains that he loved the book as a teenager and made the movie PG for that reason. 

Teen power fantasies carried into adulthood are a guaranteed money-maker for industrial capitalism, driving whole business sectors, especially the entertainment industry. The huge downside is that the for-profit narrative of exceptionalism interferes with our emotional growth and maturity. Our extended childishness leaves many of us unsatisfied with our personal lives and unable to see a better future, a future different from the greed, the conspiracies, the militarism, the violence, and the cultishness of both the Dune universe and Herbert's 20th century.

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