Dune

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0:00:04.3 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:05.8 Natalie Dowzicky: And I’m Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:09.0 Landry Ayres: From the oblong spaceships of Arrival, across the dusty landscapes of Sicario, to the towering pyramids of Blade Runner 2049, all of Denis Villeneuve’s work has led us to this moment. While the expectations are high, we must not fear, for fear is the mind-​killer. Joining us to discuss the long awaited 2021 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, our director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Emerging Technologies, Matthew Feeney.

0:00:43.9 Matthew Feeney: Hi there.

0:00:45.6 Landry Ayres: And policy analyst from Washington DC and Dune super fan, Caleb Watney.

0:00:51.1 Caleb Watney: Thanks for having me, happy to discuss.

0:00:53.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Alright so, as Landry hinted at, there was so much anxiety and expectations over the release of this film. I’m gonna be completely honest, I had… And this was intentional, I had no clue what this story was about. I knew that the… I knew these stories existed, I knew there were a lot of books, I knew the books were very long. I had no idea other than that, which made it a great experience to watch. But I’m curious, I think we should put out markers in the sand and I wanna know, Caleb and Matthew, did this film live up to the expectations?

0:01:33.9 Caleb Watney: I would say definitely. It definitely lived up to the expectation with the sort of big caveat that this is only half the story. I think if… I don’t know that the marketing material was particularly clear that this is only the first half of the story, and so, I do know some people who just went into it, expecting it to be the full tale of Dune and then sort of looking at the run time and being like, “Huh, there’s no way we’re gonna be able to get through the rest of the material,” right? But yeah, I would say for the first half of what it was trying to achieve, it really, I think, surpassed my expectations, and I had very high expectations going in.

0:02:06.2 Matthew Feeney: Yes, I agree with that. It’s difficult to approach something like this when you’ve been a fan of the books for so long because listeners should keep in mind that now I think the whole Dune franchise encompasses almost 30 books, more than two dozen. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, wrote six originals, and this is a movie of half of the first book. So you’re in a situation where people like me who read the book when they were young certainly had high expectations. The 1984 film, which was the first on screen attempt at an adaptation, I really just don’t think does justice to the source material. The sci-​fi mini-​series I think did a slightly better job, but my overwhelming feeling watching this film was that it just got Dune, the feel of it, in a way that past adaptations just haven’t.

0:03:00.7 Landry Ayres: I was struck in particular by the devotion to the source material that Villeneuve brought to it, because it has historically been considered, if not extremely hard to film, sometimes impossible to film or put to tape or something like that. But Villeneuve actually did a very very good job without… I wouldn’t say without sacrificing anything because there are so, so many things that are contained in the source material that you simply just could not capture in the narrative frame of Dune. So much of the significance and the stakes of the story are things that are in appendices or the sort of pre-​chapter segments that are told through Princess Irulan speaking moments and things like that. But, there weren’t any distinct changes, I felt, that he made where he was like, “I need to completely remove or alter something in order to make this fit the form that I want to prevent,” and that’s something that I think is really good, because when you look at another sort of famous attempt at adapting this film, which actually did not come to fruition, and in doing so, paved the way for science fiction as a genre in film, we can look at Jodorowsky’s Dune.

0:04:32.6 Landry Ayres: He, in particular, is famous for being very particular with his vision. He brought in a lot of artists to sort of bring in their own flare, but he very much wanted it to be his Dune, his story. The story was gonna be slightly altered from Herbert, and it had his weird El Topo sort of flare to everything. And I thought of that specifically because there’s a line that the Baron Harkonnen says, after the Reverend Mother has left the Cone of Silence, which as far as I know, when I looked it up, does not exist in the book. He says, “Arrakis is Arrakis, the desert takes the weak. My Arrakis, my Dune.” And it was sort of this… It sort of plays with the idea that this greed-​fueled person is taking Dune and making it what he wants to be, harvesting the spice, which we know to be the real money-​maker here, and using it for his ends. While Villeneuve and consequently House Atreides are portrayed as someone who is respecting the resources that are already there and trying to cultivate a relationship with the people who love it, while still bringing his own type of rulership to it.

0:06:04.3 Caleb Watney: I think it’s a good comp actually, and I was really excited when I saw that Villeneuve was the director. I had just finished watching, I think, Blade Runner 2049 when I saw the news, and it just seemed like a really perfect choice in that so much of what people loved about the original Dune was less the character arc or even the plot. Like, in some ways, those things feel a little bit cliched, not because they were at the time but because so many other things that build on top of of it, but I think the thing that’s really kind of stuck around over time has been the world-​building and just the atmosphere. It feels like you’re dropped into this alien world and you really have to pick up all these new terms and all these things as you’re making your way through the first 100 pages or so.

0:06:44.9 Caleb Watney: And so, yeah, getting that atmosphere I think was the single most important thing. I was afraid of getting messed up with a new Dune movie and Villeneuve, that’s just like what he’s so good at. You watch Blade Runner 2049, you watch Arrival, and you’re just like… Some people, I think, can maybe rightly criticize his characterization of how deep are the emotional relationships that he hasn’t set in these previous movies. But if there’s one thing he can get right, it’s a sense of world-​building and atmosphere and also very wide pan-​shots of giant spaceships arriving and taking off, which is half the appeal here.

0:07:22.7 Matthew Feeney: I think that’s right, because I had a similar feeling. I remember walking out of Blade Runner 2049 and feeling pretty reassured as a Dune fan. I will say, I mean, something that I was very interested in going into it is thinking about the betrayal of the setting, because I mean, crucially, especially the first book and I think the film, it’s not the case that I think the setting is a character. I think that’s a little too simplistic. But the novel really is about change, like how much people can influence their environment, how much choice they really have in their lives, there’s a lot of hinting at Paul’s prescience, right? Especially when he’s surround… When he gets into the spice, the impact that this crucial substance has on his mind. But those people who know this story of the series more broadly know, I think, that Herbert wrote the series in large parts to emphasize the theme of change, and he was motivated to write the novel while covering sand dunes in Oregon for I think some kind of environmental newspaper article or something. He… And so for Herbert, the setting is crucial and when you hear Baron Harkonnen say, “My Dune,” I hope the audience comes away with a sense of his arrogance, right? That change is easy and control is easy.

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0:08:46.7 Landry Ayres: I’m curious what you thought, Natalie, because I believe, as far as I know, the other three of us have all read the novel, if not much more of the series, but you came in, like you said, you came in blind to this. What were you expecting? What did you get? And was there anything that you felt was missing or done particularly well?

0:09:08.2 Natalie Dowzicky: So they’re all bucket into two different parts. I think my impression going away as it being entertaining, I thought the movie was very entertaining as well as a masterpiece, like art-​wise. And I think it did, especially afterwards, learning how much more to the Dune universe there is, I think it did a particularly good job of not being too heavy-​handed and explaining like where things are, who’s related to who, there was a lot more nuance, which I appreciated. We didn’t have… There was some narration, which I guess we can talk about later, that the narration in the movie is done by a different character than the books. And I think, kind of the holes for me, and I was literally just about to say this was… So we’re set in the future, and I would love an explanation how the future looks so vastly different than other future movies, it looks very Mad Max-​y, right? Like desert and like, I’m…

0:10:19.7 Natalie Dowzicky: And I’m also thinking that’s a factor of the time period in which this book was written, and we’ve talked about this on the show before about how science fiction reflects the current pessimism or optimism in which the time period it’s written in. And also another big thing, I don’t know if I was the only one sitting there wondering why they didn’t have computers or wondering why they didn’t have guns. I was like, “Why are we… Why are there swords that have shields with all these cool technologies, but then we lost something that our current world has?” So those are… I don’t know if those are necessarily plot holes but more so like me questioning how we got here. You know what I mean?

0:11:03.2 Landry Ayres: I can answer one of those questions, Natalie, and it’s that swords are just way cooler. I think that’s pretty much the answer is that…

0:11:11.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Look, I was ready for them to pop out a lightsaber like I was like… [laughter]

[overlapping conversation]

0:11:14.3 Landry Ayres: Yeah, I think Herbert basically has… He comes from this sort of melding of high fantasy and science fiction and sort of pulp novels that was going on when he was writing it at the time. And he wasn’t alone in that. That was the sort of common trend and the sort of kinetic shields that they all wear that sort of mimic the… And sort of would… Basically, the way the shields function is that if you would be shot with a bullet, it can create enough kinetic energy to match what the bullet would do and block it off because of high velocity, you’re gonna have a high reaction. But with a sword, it’s moving slower and so the shield doesn’t work as well. But it’s really just a narrative conceit to make it so that you guys… You can have sword fights, which are just inherently cooler and I will die on this hill.

[laughter]

0:12:06.3 Matthew Feeney: Well, I think that’s right. There’s a big sense in which Herbert’s trying to draw the audience into something that may be familiar to fantasy readers, right? It’s set in the future, but there are dukes and there are barons and there’s an emperor, and there are witches and there’s… Religion plays a massive role here. A lot of people might think of this as kind of jarring, right? That you’re reading something about science fiction but this, it might as well be about, I don’t know, medieval France or something. But… I mean, to one of Natalie’s questions, this isn’t explained in the movie but I don’t think it suffers because of it, but Dune is set about, I think, 10,000 years after a massive war called the Butlerian Jihad where the humans beat the machines. And there is imperial… A ban across the empire on thinking machines and the, I think it’s called the Orange Catholic Bible prohibits the building of machines in the image of a human mind. As a technology policy analyst, you sort of twinge at this and think, “Ah, you know,”…

0:13:15.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Right. [chuckle]

0:13:15.1 Matthew Feeney: “I don’t know if pocket calculators are really that bad.” [chuckle] But it does give rise to the Mentats and I think one of the interesting parts of the film was just sort of dropping the audience into this with the eyes rolling backwards to do quick calculations, and I guess the audience is supposed to just pick up on it. There are…

0:13:36.0 Natalie Dowzicky: I did not pick up on that.

0:13:36.5 Matthew Feeney: Right. There’s…

0:13:36.6 Natalie Dowzicky: I just learned that. [chuckle]

0:13:38.6 Matthew Feeney: Sure. So, there’s the characters with the lip tattoos, the Mentats, who are bred as human computers function… Play an important role in the universe. And I think what we have to keep in mind is also something I think Natalie mentioned earlier is the setting or the time in which Herbert wrote the book. This is, I think, only a few years after the Asimov Foundation series, which are asking similar kind of questions, right? Which is talking about how do you govern a massive galactic empire? What kind of institutions fail? What do you do with people who know the future or have good ideas about what it will look like? And yeah, Dune and Foundation come to very different answers to those kinds of questions.

0:14:27.4 Caleb Watney: Yeah, just to expand on the Butlerian Jihad point. I think it’s one, interesting as kind of a storytelling convention that there’s a lot of sci-​fi writers who wanna tell stories about the far future, but if you allow like super intelligent AI to become a major part of your story, it just like, it’s A, so much harder to predict what the world looks like 10, 20, 30000 years in the future when you’ve had advanced AI. There’s something grounding about a story that you can tell where humans are the primary actors and if everything was happening on microseconds as various AIs were clashing with each other, like that might make a less compelling narrative. And so, it’s interesting to me that a lot of AI, or a lot of science-​fiction writers, when they’re trying to tell stories about the far future, end up either as like post-​apocalyptic and so there’s no computers because of that reason, or there’s some convention like the Butlerian Jihad where AIs have sort of been ridding it out of the story because it’s just, I think inherently a pretty hard technological force to write about because it is this sort of like all-​consuming thing if it really does become super intelligent in some sense.

0:15:31.9 Caleb Watney: The other interesting thing is that, in some sense is very… It’s coming out at like a good time, I feel like AI safety within certain sects of the scholarly community has become a bigger and bigger issue over the last five to 10 years. There’s more very serious concern by very serious people about long-​run concerns about AI alignment and so, I think it’s sort of interesting to have this 1960s adaptation and sort of warning in some sense in the background about AI and super intelligence run amok and then… It’s coming out at an interesting time, I guess, as those concerns are becoming greater.

0:16:08.8 Matthew Feeney: I do… I think that’s very well put and I hope that the lack of the machines in the film doesn’t put a traditional sci-​fi audience off. One of the things that I think… There are a couple of things, if you’ve read the book, that are notable by that absence. So as Landry mentioned, something… There’s no mention of Princess Irulan, you never see the emperor, and I think one of the early film adaptations, the 1984 film really suffered because it stuck too closely to the book where it opens with Princess Irulan sort of narrating, and then it also does the voice. And something that… Or the voices in people’s heads. So, if you read the book you’ll notice there’s a lot of personal narration from the characters and Lynch, in the movie, decides, “You know what will be great? We’ll just do a voice over,” and it’s just awful and it doesn’t really work well. But there are other things… I thought it was odd that we never got a good look at the navigators, which in… Again, I don’t know if Villeneuve just didn’t wanna freak out a new audience too much, but you have to envision a giant canister full of space gas with navigators who’ve been mutated into looking kind of like fish, and their job is to fold space.

0:17:28.8 Matthew Feeney: Yeah, I mean, it’s all maybe dropping people in the deep end a little bit. Although I do think in… When there’s that scene on Caladan where the representatives from the empire come down and there are these people with the helmets that’s filled with orange gas and you can sort of see the blue eyes, and I guess they’re supposed to be the navigators but then the representatives says, “No, they’re representatives from the Spacing Guild,” so I’m looking forward to if these go ahead to see what Villeneuve does eventually do with the navigators. But we’ll see.

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0:18:01.4 Natalie Dowzicky: I do have a spice question. So, is there, in the book, is there any more context as to why spice becomes like the end all be all for natural resources?

0:18:13.0 Landry Ayres: Well, basically, I mean, in a very very summed up sense, what Feeney has just said is basically it. The navigators of the Spacing Guild. So, the people that maintain and run interstellar travel, which is hugely important because now human populations live all throughout the universe and galaxy, not just on Earth. And because of this huge diaspora that has formed and populated all these different planets, they have to get from place to place efficiently and safely and space is really scary and really dangerous still.

0:18:50.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:18:52.3 Landry Ayres: And so, spice itself, they don’t explain this but it’s hinted at, like Feeney was saying, where you get the sort of prescience and it acts almost like a drug and it’s a religious symbol. Basically, you can… Spoilers for anyone who is not wanting to figure out exactly how spice works, you can basically see the future and throughout time if you ingest enough spice. So they… In a lot of adaptations, it’s considered that they like fold space, but I think in the book, it basically… Throughout the series, I think towards the sort of later portions, it’s explained that they basically… It just gives them the ability to see far enough into the future in space travel that they can safely navigate ships to and from planets. It’s like, “Oh, we’re gonna hit a neutron star here, we’re gonna hit a black hole if we go this way.” So the Spacing Guild navigators take this spice that is only found on Arrakis, and basically are… They help make sure that this interstellar empire actually function and work together.

0:20:03.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay, so in the movie, I was thinking that it served as… They’re shoveling spice into a space ship and that’s how they got somewhere.

0:20:13.3 Caleb Watney: Like… Like coal you put into the steam thing…

[laughter]

0:20:14.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah…

0:20:17.0 Matthew Feeney: Yeah, it does… Which is a shame ’cause… I’ll give something to the Lynch film and the sci-​fi mini series do show the navigators and these orange spice-​filled canisters. I think Landry’s last explanation does raise a question of interested libertarians, which is, Okay, so we have a resource that is essential to civilization and without it, we’re really screwed, and it is only found in one place, and the next thing just doesn’t make sense from a sort of political economy point of view which is, So what we should do is we should have a hereditary emperor just decide that a particular family get a monopoly on this and we just hope it works out. It seems like a really inefficient way to do it, but again, it’s… I don’t wanna take it too seriously, it’s a sci-​fi novel, but the sort of policy analyst in my head, alarm bells ring when you think this really seems like a terrible way to efficiently distribute this essential resource.

0:21:19.8 Caleb Watney: One thing I’ve always wondered, and again, a bit of a minor spoiler, but it’s sort of revealed in the second half of the first book that the spice is produced by the sand worms, and so I’ve always wondered if you were to take the sand worms onto… Presumably there are other planets that have deserts on them, you know, to transport some of these little baby sand worms into another desert, could you then double or triple or quadruple spice production on many other planets…

0:21:46.2 Matthew Feeney: There is one of the novels… I don’t… If it’s Frank Herbert or his son, but they basically nip that in the bud by saying, yeah, they tried it, it just doesn’t work. Which is an easy out I suppose, but no, that is the natural thing you would think, which is, Well, what’s so special about Arrakis, and the answer is it’s Arrakis.

0:22:06.7 Landry Ayres: Which is interesting because there is the idea that intervention in ecology is something that can, through long-​term sort of scale with deep time thinking, can actually create real change, which is what we get just a taste of in the film when we see the plants all growing in the [0:22:30.1] ____ that Dr. Kynes passes by that Duncan finds. And once again, a spoiler, you basically understand that over thousands of years, the Fremen, through various manipulations of their religion by the Bene Gesserit who say that a path has been laid, have done all of these things to basically ensure that if they can get, I think it’s 3% of dune with free-​flowing water, that in I think 300 years, it can create a self-​sustaining ecosystem that will produce water and turn the planet into something that has rivers and oceans and things like that. Which does raise a lot of questions about a lot of things that we’ve learned about ecology, whether that’s actually the best thing for the planet, but I am not a plant-​ologist, so I can’t vouch for that, but it does sort of raise interesting questions about justifications for human interventions and engineering benevolent climate change.

0:23:36.7 Caleb Watney: It’s also interesting because the Fremen clearly have this religious sense of fervor or respect for the sand worms, but in also their very religious quest to remake the planet, that would inadvertently end up killing a lot of the sand worms and maybe they don’t quite realize that, but yeah, there’s sort of attention in these dual religious feelings they have of reverence for the sand worms, but then also this idealistic, Edenistic vision of what they can turn the planet into.

0:24:07.3 Matthew Feeney: Yeah, a big tension in this ambition is water is poisonous to sand worms and… Yeah, I guess it was a minor spoiler, but the liquid that sand worms expel when they die seems to be a good source for the mother of all trips, and it’s something that can accelerate I suppose psychic abilities… Something that I left the film with was this appreciation for how much effort went into this book that I’ve loved since I first read it, but I also worry that so much of this just seems so unconventional to most sci-​fi audiences that there won’t be enough juice for sequels or anything else, because we should keep in mind, there’s enough source material here to make Lord Of The Rings look like a 20 minute episode of something, right? But I just don’t know if the studio… The numbers are good so far, and I’m sure they’ll green-​light the sequel, but whether this will actually spark a revolution in Dune appreciation, I don’t know, I just still think it just remains very alien to what I think a lot of people expect from science fiction.

0:25:24.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, and I think one of the parts we haven’t hit on as much, and is a little bit alien to, I would say, a more so general modern audiences is like the Bene Gesserit and their form of religion, and which was super interesting to me ’cause again, didn’t… I had no context that this was part of the film. So it’s an organized religion, but not in the way that we conceive of religion today, and then I also, throughout the film, was… I think I got this right, that they’ve been taking thousands of years to carefully breed the correct people in order to get a super hero essentially, which just sounds like Paul is the result of eugenics kind of… And I don’t know, I don’t know if I…

0:26:15.8 Matthew Feeney: I mean, explicitly, yeah.

0:26:17.0 Caleb Watney: Yeah.

0:26:17.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay [laughter]

0:26:17.6 Caleb Watney: Yup.

0:26:19.7 Landry Ayres: Yeah.

0:26:20.0 Natalie Dowzicky: So, I mean, I also thought it was interesting because it was like, it’s obviously a women-​only organization or religion, but their superhero being has to be a male.

0:26:34.7 Matthew Feeney: Well, the important thing I think, and again, not really explained in the movie, but Bene Gesserit have this ability to tap into what’s referred to as genetic memory, but it’s only matrilineal, so they don’t have input from the father. And an important plot… And this was actually mentioned in the movie, an important element of the plot is that Jessica was supposed to give Duke Leto a daughter, and that daughter was supposed to marry a Harkonnen, and the product of that union was supposed to be the Kwisatz Haderach, this superhuman that you’ve mentioned. But yeah, Jessica falls in love with the Duke and Duke really wants a boy so Jessica gives him Paul, who becomes the main character of the novel. And you can see in the film that the Bene Gesserit and the Reverend Mother especially is very concerned that Jessica’s been teaching Paul the voice and a lot of these Bene Gesserit skills because the Kwisatz Haderach is supposed to be raised in a pretty controlled environment, not let loose on the universe. And I think I should probably shut up there ’cause there’s a pretty significant spoiler if I keep on talking. [chuckle]

0:27:51.1 Matthew Feeney: But yes, no, it is very interesting though, this religious element of it. Religion is a huge part of the film and one of my favorite scenes which I wasn’t expecting is when they arrive on Arrakis, when the Atreides arrived on Arrakis, there’s all of these Fremans calling out to Paul because they recognize him as a messiah that’s been promised by centuries of Bene Gesserit trying to manipulate local cultures into expecting him. And again, the sort of policy analyst in me thinks, I don’t know, religion’s like a really hard thing to plan that well, that you can really guide people into thinking that. But again, it might just be something you just have to swallow as potentially somewhat unrealistic, but I think makes for a great plot element.

0:28:35.2 Caleb Watney: In so far as the Bene Gesserit are able to do it specifically, it does seem like a lot of their powers or ability as a guild is in human manipulation, right? The voice is very much like this. Almost very well-​timed, like a lot of it is about the direct pitch at which you’re talking at and how that affects their physiology or something. So I think, if any guild or subset of the universe was gonna be able to very deliberately and intentionally plant new religious fervor, it would have to be a group that has this deep understanding of human psychology like the Bene Gesserit do.

0:29:07.9 Landry Ayres: Yeah, and the Bene Gesserit specifically as this sort of religious order that… I don’t know if this is true, but their name always reminded me, like it was sort of a bastardization of Jesuits, so it’s sort of this all-​female, wise religious order that is functioning throughout the universe. But the thing that always stuck out to me is that they are extremely important and respected but also not trusted.

0:29:33.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:29:35.4 Landry Ayres: So they’re considered and they’re called witches but they are… It is a status symbol to have a sister of the Bene Gesserit in your household. So that’s why Lady Jessica is the main concubine that is with Duke Leto and why the Reverend Mother is allowed and they have such sway with the Emperor and things like that. And it’s because they have that ability to command people but also to sense truth through things that they can… Sort of, when they interact with people in interpersonal ways that they can sort of sense when people are being dishonest and almost read body language and tone of voice while also manipulating their own and recognizing something that they call ‘petite betrayals’, ways that you give yourself away and let things slide. And the Bene Gesserit can sort of pounce on that and manipulate it in order to achieve their end.

0:30:32.0 Landry Ayres: And this myth of Lisan al Gaib is tied up in those abilities that you find out later on. And that scene that you mentioned, Matthew, was really interesting because it’s mentioned in the book by Princess Irulan in passing but we don’t actually see it happen, I don’t think. It’s sort of like they reflect on it as if… They say like, “And they landed on Arrakis,” and then the next scene is them inside and they referenced the people calling out to Paul but I don’t know if we actually see it happen. But when they describe it, they don’t… In the book, they say, “Lisan al Gaib” but they say the people actually called out “Mahdi”, M-A-H-D-I, which is a interesting…

0:31:23.7 Landry Ayres: I don’t remember exactly what it means but I think it’s derived from an Arabic word or is an Arabic word. But it’s actually, I think, a reference to the Mahdi Uprising, which happened in Sudan, South Sudan, in the 1880s, which was this revolution that tried to occur where the South Sudanese Islamic community tried to overthrow these colonial oppressors at the time. And so, I wonder if them pointing and saying “Mahdi” is less about them trying to recognize the prophecy that they’ve been foretold of this savior and if it’s much more a political calling out that’s saying, this person, not necessarily being a religious savior, but being a political person who would help them overthrow the yoke of their oppressors, of the new ones who have arrived to sort of keep them under their boot that they’ve been living under with the Harkonnens and now, what they see as House Atreides.

0:32:24.7 Matthew Feeney: Yes. Something that… The discussion of Bene Gesserit reminded me that I… I think when I first read the novel, I was discussing it with my father who teaches Latin, and he seemed to think Bene Gesserit means something in Latin, like translated into something like ‘He will manage well’ or ‘carry well’, ‘behave well’, or something like that, which is kind of a hint. But Herbert’s interest in language extends far beyond Latin. I mean, Arabic is clearly a massive influence but also ancient Greek, you know, Atreides, Atreus is not exactly subtle. There are ton of plays on language. But also again, things that are… This is the first time… The things that are left out are really crucial, I thought it was amazing that we went an entire almost three hours of a Dune movie and the words “Muad’Dib” were not mentioned once. There’s kind of a hint at it with the little, the sand mouse that hops up and cleans… Wipes the dew from its ears. I guess it’s kind of like an Easter egg for the people who have read the book, but it is amazing that the main character of the novel is not really mentioned in the first movie in that way.

0:33:35.5 Caleb Watney: One interesting thing when I reflect on major differences between the book and the movie is maybe the inversion of what’s shown and not told. So, in the movie, they don’t tell you about the Mentats like they do in the book. They just sort of drop you in it, they have the little lip tattoo and their eyes roll back in their head. It’s like sort of a fun Easter egg for the people that have read the book, but they’re not gonna over-​explain and I think that’s probably a good choice. And they do that a few other times as well. But in the book, some of the things that they really expand on that are very explicit in the movie is some of the interesting political intrigue behind the scenes. It’s… In the book, you have this whole subplot of who is the traitor within the House of Atreides and the Harkonnens are playing different sides off of each other, they get the Mentat Thufir Hawat to think that it’s Jessica. And in the movie, it’s just like, “Oh, okay, I guess it was the doctor,” and they don’t really go into too much more detail beyond that.

0:34:37.9 Caleb Watney: And it probably makes sense, it was already two and a half hours for the first half of the film, they couldn’t have done a… I mean, it maybe would have been a little bit excessive to do an additional 30-​minute subplot of who is the traitor, but I thought that was interesting. Another thing that has a lot more ambiguity in the novels that is much more explicit in the book is the fact that the Emperor is backing the Harkonnens and the way in which he’s backing it. I think the Atreides in the book, there’s just much more uncertainty of what is the Emperor’s role in this, how is he playing it, what are the Emperor’s goals, and I think in the movie, it’s just much more straightforward that he hates the Atreides because he’s too popular amongst the great houses, he’s gonna send the Sardaukar. And so, yeah, I thought that inversion of what is shown versus told in the book versus the movie was an interesting flip.

[music]

0:35:28.7 Landry Ayres: I can’t help but watch this movie specifically because of when it was released in a post-​Afghanistan-​conflict context. So, even though this was planned to be released prior to the formal withdrawal, I think I saw it a week or so… Because where I live, it came out a little bit earlier, so I was able to see it in theatres just a couple weeks earlier. So, the withdrawal had, I think, just been announced maybe a week before I went to go see it and I think there’s a lot of readings that sort of take this context into mind where it’s… And a lot of it is just like, “The spice is oil,” and “America’s coming in to be Imperialist,” and it becomes very very reductive. And while the book itself is not perfect and there is a lot of very heavy-​handed colonialism and some sort of like good colonizer characters there, and a misunderstood and complex but still coded as white savior trope, I do think it’s really interesting to view this story in a post-​Afghanistan lens.

0:36:47.6 Landry Ayres: And did that come into anyone else’s mind when they were watching it, like specifically for me, when they land on Arrakis for the first time and they’re remarking about the heat of the planet and how it’s going to kill them all and all the people are getting up and sort of pointing at the planes, I just could not stop myself from thinking about that. And does that add anything to it for you?

0:37:10.7 Matthew Feeney: It’s interesting you had that thought. I didn’t, but it might just be ’cause my exposure to the film goes back way before us leaving Afghanistan. However, I think, while watching the trailer, I remember thinking, “Oh no, people who don’t know the story are gonna view this as a white people go to a desert to tame the natives sort of story,” and I was scared that there would be that kind of cringe associated with it. However, there is a good part of the film where I think some of those fears are somewhat alleviated, which again, minor spoilers here for the movie, but Paul wins a duel with a Freman who is challenging Stilgar basically, and afterwards, Jessica is calling on the Freman to help them get off world, either to go back to Caladan to regroup. But Paul, at that moment, says, “No, we’re part of this world right here. We are a part of Arrakis now, we’re not really from Caladan anymore.”

0:38:17.8 Matthew Feeney: And that’s not really the approach that America and the Coalition took when they went to Afghanistan. The goal was not to become Afghans, and to embody ourselves into the world. And of course, the whole rest of the book is about Paul changing in a number of ways but most crucially becoming a leader among the Fremen and fighting the Harkonnen. But certainly, I think if you watch the first film with no context whatsoever and you’re not paying close attention, I think you could be forgiven for coming to that sort of conclusion if you came in with certain predispositions, but I don’t think it’s the right way to view the movie.

0:39:00.8 Caleb Watney: I think that’s right. I think it’s also interesting to kind of view a lot of the Duke Leto’s statements as he’s coming into Arrakis, like when he is accepting the charge to take ownership of Arrakis, he sort of says, confidently, “We will bring peace to Arrakis,” and it’s very ironic. If you are familiar with the books or you know what’s going to happen, in fact, he ushers in this whole new era of war, and so I think the deep irony and almost lamp-​shading of some of those contexts, I think, downplays the good colonizer narrative ’cause for as good motivations as Leto came in with, he ultimately does not achieve any of his goals and is really, I think, taken advantage of.

0:39:43.5 Matthew Feeney: And keep in mind, that’s all very well said… There’s a moment in the film were Stilgar, the leader of the Fremen, comes in and expresses that the Harkonnen were barbarians and treated the Fremen really poorly, and Leto says, “Look, I’m different. I’m gonna treat you differently,” and Stilgar even then still says, “Look, just leave us alone. Like you can come and harvest the spice, and you can take it off world, just leave us alone.” And so I think it seems like that really, I do think, shatter any analogy between the American intervention in Afghanistan and what the Atreides are doing on Arrakis. And I think the filmmaker’s hands are somewhat tied here. There are certain changes you can make. Okay, so I thought a very interesting change that I think worked well was, for example, making Dr. Kynes a woman, I think worked really well, and that was fine. But there are physical descriptions of the place and of the people that are difficult for the filmmaker to exert if they’re trying to avoid these kind of analyses. It is a film set in a desert, and the people who are native to that region are going to adapt in desert ways in their costume and other such things. So there’s only so much I think filmmakers can do there.

0:41:00.3 Caleb Watney: It’s interesting though that both, I think, the book and the movie end up having this very sort of like, you could almost call Islamophillic atmosphere and aesthetic. I mean, in some sense, the deep message of the book is that actually the Fremen are by far the best fighters in the entire universe, and unless you’re extremely careful, they’re going to just take over everything because that’s how bad ass they are in some sense, and… Yeah, the movie definitely, I guess you couldn’t say in some sense they are not currently in control and maybe they need new leadership and maybe there’s some colonist white savior narratives there, but the inherent strength of the people is what Leto originally comes to the planet for. And I guess that was another difference maybe between the book and the movie, the book makes much more clear that Leto really recognizes the strength of the emperors and the Sardaukar, these elite warriors that have grown up in this harsh environment on Salusa Secundus and that nobody in the Imperium is quite put together, the potential of the Fremen on this desert planet to potentially challenge the emperor, it’s sort of implicit, but it’s not quite as explicit as in the book.

0:42:10.7 Natalie Dowzicky: And I would just add on this topic, I think I was a little concerned when in the opening 10 minutes, you have… Zendaya has the narration in the beginning, and as she ends it with, “Who will be our new oppressors?” And I had already seen the trailer for the movie, and I obviously knew that Timothée Chalamet was in it, and I knew he played a big role, and I was a little bit concerned that it was gonna turn into either a white savior or kind of not be as nuanced, and I think there was a lot more nuance to the film then some… Some reviews I was reading yesterday in preparation for this were just kind of boiling it down to white savior, which I think is not necessarily fair to the film, because I think there’s a lot more nuance. And also I picked up very early on that no one was necessarily going to Arrakis to help the Fremen, if that makes sense. It was all about spice and about taking over that resource, and the Fremen were also there, but it was never… At least the way I saw, it was never that House Atreides was going in order to help the Fremen From The Harkonnen…

0:43:24.9 Matthew Feeney: Right.

0:43:25.0 Natalie Dowzicky: You know what I mean? It wasn’t like… There wasn’t like that paternal, or there wasn’t that heavy-​handed like, “They need us in order to succeed on their planet.”

0:43:36.5 Landry Ayres: Right. I think you could… And I think people have made the argument a lot that sure, and that’s what we said, going to Afghanistan or Iraq or something, but really that it was about resource manipulation and the truth of that is obviously much more tenuous than that take would sort of lend itself to. And I think it’s interesting that… I think the… Where the movie falls into the white savior trope is not even necessarily with Paul, while it kind of is coded like that in this first part, I think to really see if it falls into that trap, which I’m not saying that it will, it takes the second half to really sort of button that shut.

0:44:24.2 Landry Ayres: Because really what Paul sees in his sort of prescience and his visions is what he calls his terrible purpose, he doesn’t go in blindly thinking like, “I’m gonna save all these people, I’m gonna become a leader and do all of this stuff.” He knows that terrible things are gonna have to occur, and that maybe perhaps, in the future, through years and years of bloodshed, maybe something will happen and he’ll be able to help the Fremen, but it is not… It is not as cut and dry as the white savior trope label tends to get bandied around about. And I do see a lot of that in the initial reactions, but I’m hoping that the second film addresses it in a pretty more direct way, but also that people sense the nuance that is in the novel that is not perfect in the way that it treats, like Caleb said, this sort of Islamophillic, which can be taken with a grain of sand, is both honorable but also kind of fetishized if it’s taken in the wrong way. But I am very interested to see where that goes.

0:45:33.2 Matthew Feeney: It’s crucial to see how… Well, it’s crucial for the second film to finish off the first book.

0:45:38.3 Landry Ayres: Yes.

0:45:39.5 Matthew Feeney: How they treat Paul’s visions of the future and how he reacts to it all. And something that listeners who are interested in the books might be interested in is, Paul is not the main character of Dune, right? It’s not really about Paul and the second book, which is probably the worst of the original six… Like, you kinda have to read… ‘Cause this is all sort of taking Paul down a notch, right, and trying to emphasize his role in the whole thing. So I think it would be a disaster if the second film was just about Paul being unambiguous in the goal, just trying to seek revenge for his family and just barging in and killing a bunch of Harkonnen. That would be regrettable but I also don’t think it’s likely. I think Villeneuve and the writers have demonstrated their love of the original source material and their allegiance to it, so I’m not too worried about that.

0:46:35.5 Caleb Watney: I think Villeneuve has also said in some interviews that in his ideal world, he would be able to make this as a trilogy and have the story of Dune Messiah basically be the third one, which would be very interesting because it’s such an inversion really of the classic hero’s tale that happens over the course of the first one. And then, yeah, the second and the third books really sort of twist… You re-​interpret the events that happened in book one in a very different light, that still is like paying homage to it and still is important, but it’s very different than it appears based on what happens later in the book.

0:47:06.2 Landry Ayres: Yeah, I will say, I think it is a… I don’t know if it’s intentional, but it is a misleading marketing tactic. I don’t think this film was marketed in the best way. I don’t know if they let enough people know that it was only going to be part one. But I also don’t know if people would be as interested if they knew it was only going to be part one, ’cause I think a lot of people will be like, “Oh, it’s another bloated Lord of the Rings,” which granted, it’s of that scale and it’s that good and Lord of the Rings is awesome, so it should be a trilogy, I think. But I don’t know if audiences would react to it knowing that that’s what they were getting into. But there’s a trade-​off there that goes along where, as soon as Dune Part One flashes up on the screen, a lot of people went, “Oh! Okay,” and then it drops you in a certain spot with so many unanswered questions at the end of this film that I’m interested to see where that goes.

0:48:03.3 Caleb Watney: I view the marketing of the film instrumentally in so far as it gets me the completed Dune movie that I want…

0:48:11.0 Landry Ayres: A hundred percent.

0:48:11.8 Caleb Watney: It is good and I will abide by some minor misdirection to get me there.

0:48:16.4 Landry Ayres: Oh yes. Oh, oh yeah, I understand it, I just, I need it to happen.

0:48:22.8 Natalie Dowzicky: I was just gonna say, I’ve seen so many funny memes and GIFs about when people found out it just was part one, and then they were like, “And now we have to wait six years for part two,” or something ridiculous like that. [laughter]

0:48:35.0 Matthew Feeney: Well, keep an eye on the… Keep an eye on Amazon book sales of Dune, because if this film does…

0:48:39.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh, true!

0:48:41.3 Matthew Feeney: If this film does prompt a new interest in the books, people hopefully will realize, forget part one and part two, this is part… That’s one book of the original six and there’s a whole bunch more after that. If you’re a film studio looking at this, you might think, “Well, there’s enough source material here for many many films,” if you wanna go that far, but I think, given the initial takings from box office and HBO Max viewings, I think at least one more film seems a certainty. I agree that… I really don’t think you’ve done justice to at least the beginning of the story up until you’ve got, again, minor spoilers, but anyway, what happens after Dune would be a good place to get people because it’s a worthwhile… I think there aren’t enough stories these days about protagonists with this amount of complexity. And I know that sounds sort of snobbish and arrogant but it’s…

0:49:40.5 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s true though.

0:49:41.4 Matthew Feeney: Yeah, but it is nice to have a protagonist…

0:49:42.5 Landry Ayres: A hundred percent true.

0:49:43.8 Matthew Feeney: It’s nice to have a protagonist that takes hundreds and hundreds of pages to even develop really as a character, after having a destiny that has been thousands of years in the making. It would be nice to see that done correctly, but I guess we’ll see.

[music]

0:50:03.8 Caleb Watney: I wanted to go back just a little bit. We’ve mentioned a couple of times this comparison to Lord of the Rings, and I actually think that this Dune Part One is like… An underrated comp for it is The Fellowship of the Ring. So for a while they had the exact same Rotten Tomatoes score which is one interesting thing. I don’t know if it does now but at the time I took a Twitter screenshot, it was, so that’s what really matters.

[laughter]

0:50:26.0 Caleb Watney: But I would say even the genres of negative critiques are pretty similar, like a lot of people are saying like, “Oh, if anything, it’s like it’s too faithful to the book, it’s like too slow and plodding, they should’ve been more straightforward and gotten to the plot,” or they didn’t quite like where it left off the overhang of the story and “You should’ve re-​arranged differently” which are very similar to the kinds of critiques you got of The Fellowship of the Ring. It’s also similar in the sense that this is a story franchise that’s been tried to be made many many times with many prominent failures, and it almost… You needed a certain level of technological sophistication to be able to tell the story in the first place and that we’ve kinda finally gotten there both with early 2001, we were just getting good enough in CGI that you could make the armies look bigger than they actually were, and here and now, you can have these really awesome spaceship shots and everything. So, it is just interesting to me how many analogies or comparisons there are between the two films in terms of their critical reception, in terms of where they start the story and potentially leave it off, in terms of how many people had tried to tell the story and failed before it. So, I don’t know, I hope that they can finish off the Dune franchise as well as they did The Lord of the Rings one.

0:51:39.9 Landry Ayres: It’s a real shame that we never got a Ralph Bakshi animated adaptation of Dune ’cause I think it would have really just been the cherry on top of the cake. Add some songs, some weird matte painting backgrounds, a bunch of strange stuff going on, it would have been great. It honestly would have fit.

0:51:58.2 Matthew Feeney: Yeah, I think… I don’t know, I did a short Twitter thread after I saw the movie and I said, “Maybe… ” Caleb is probably right. It’s kinda like The Fellowship of the Ring but this is kind of like, if a studio had green-​lit a Lord of the Rings movie and Peter Jackson had just made a movie that got up to them, to the Hobbits meeting Aragon, and then it wasn’t clear if there were gonna be follow-​ups.

0:52:18.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Right. [chuckle]

0:52:19.3 Matthew Feeney: And the problem that… But then I think the analogy breaks down slightly because very early on in the Lord of the Rings, you know what the point of the story is. There is this ring and it’s not great and it should probably be destroyed, so we should destroy it. And will they succeed or not, is the tension of the story. But I think if someone like, I mean, maybe we could ask but, if someone like Natalie who has no context outside of the movie, you go up to them and say, “So, what’s Dune about?” I would forgive them for being… For hearing a lot of different answers at this point, because the movie, I think, leaves a lot of things open-​ended.

0:52:57.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, I have zero clue with the point, like where we’re headed next is. I thought it was entertaining and it was a good movie but like I… [chuckle]

0:53:04.2 Caleb Watney: It was about worms.

0:53:04.3 Landry Ayres: Even before we were watching it, I think that’s what I said, I think Natalie was like, “So what is this movie gonna be about?” And I was like, “Okay, there’s a sand that everybody smokes a ton of, and then there’s giant worms and space war.” And she was like, “Got it.”

0:53:21.8 Natalie Dowzicky: So, to me, it was like Game of Thrones meets Star Wars, without the dragons but insert the sand worms. [chuckle]

0:53:30.1 Matthew Feeney: But with no computers. Yes?

0:53:31.9 Natalie Dowzicky: And no computers.

0:53:33.6 Matthew Feeney: Right.

0:53:33.7 Landry Ayres: Game of Thrones, that famous computer-​filled world.

[laughter]

0:53:39.7 Caleb Watney: It’s funny, in some of the marketing material, I saw some of the trailers, they were including lines from… Snippets of reviews and I think one review said, “This is the next Star Wars or Lord of the Rings,” which is funny because Star Wars is of course very derivative of the original Dune.

0:53:53.5 Natalie Dowzicky: I was just gonna say, when it first started and they were talking about like the voice and he’s trying to command the water at the table, I was like, “This is just… He’s just a Jedi.” It’s like Jedi mind tricks coming in already, coming in hot.

0:54:07.1 Caleb Watney: I wonder where George Lucas got those ideas.

0:54:09.1 Matthew Feeney: Well, yeah, exactly.

0:54:10.7 Landry Ayres: And all of the designs for the Xenomorph in Alien are just cribbed from Giger’s designs for the Harkonnens in the Jodorowsky Dune. So, if you like Alien, you can thank Dune.

0:54:26.7 Natalie Dowzicky: [chuckle] All sci-​fi ever can be derived back to Dune.

0:54:29.1 Matthew Feeney: It’s probably, like modern sci-​fi, it’s Dune or Asimov because this came out pretty soon, I think, I need to… I’m probably gonna get the dates mixed up, but I think Dune came out after Foundation. And I threw into the notes that all of us have before we record these things that I do think it’s interesting that Apple TV’s Foundation came out only a few weeks before Dune came out, and they’re both very similar. And you can, and it might be a stretch, but Dune seems to be kind of, not an answer to Foundation but taking those kind of questions and turning the answer in a different kind of way because they are both trying to deal with the governance of vast empires and how that’s a struggle and what do you do with people who claim to either predict disaster or know the future. And Asimov seems to have much more faith in, I don’t know, academic institutions or scientists, people who rely on logic, and Herbert’s slightly more on the side of, “You know what? Religions are weird and people are unpredictable, and you have to account for the fact that people don’t always fulfill their destiny, or they don’t always behave as you think they will, and that can lead to governance issues of their own.”

0:55:54.5 Caleb Watney: So it’s interesting, because, I mean… I won’t get into any of the spoilers, but by the time you get to God Emperor of Dune, it is kind of like this Isaac Asimov like, how do you actually shorten the length of a Dark Age once you have a benevolent ruler who can potentially live for thousands of years, or be able to control things for thousands of years in advance. So, I agree. Dune Part One is kind of an interesting different answer than Asimov, but by the time you get to God Emperor, they actually look kind of similar.

0:56:20.0 Landry Ayres: And what if you can merge with worms and be a half-​worm half-​human king? You know?

0:56:26.7 Caleb Watney: Asimov never considered.

[music]

0:56:31.2 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod. That’s “Pop”, the letter “n”, “Locke” with an “e” like the philosopher, “Pod”. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We look forward to unraveling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres, and is co-​hosted by Natalie Dowzicky. We’re a project of Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web, at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.