Dune 2 and the Orientalist Cowboy for March 30
Oh, hello, there—
CW: N*zi imagery
I saw Dune 2 five days after Aaron Bushnell burned himself alive outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C.. Like so many other American viewers ensconced in suburbia’s false softness, I reveled in the tale of an imperialist force murdering an indigenous desert people en masse, ultimately pushing the beleaguered population to militarize out of necessity. The irony stung, but not hard enough for me to walk out. I slurped on cranberry mules delivered to my recliner by a barely bearded bartender. I smiled, I laughed, and I quelled my moral queasiness with bottom-shelf vodka.
Dune 2 is a brilliant movie. It's also a political nightmare. These facts, interlocked, are both jarring and symbiotic.
I. Dune-Iverse
Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune was first published in 1965 to limited fanfare. The sprawling, interstellar epic followed the rise of Paul Atreides, a young space-noble whose botched stewardship of a far-flung planet served as a Trojan horse for Herbert’s commentary on geopolitics. Herbert, who was by all accounts a super weird guy, couldn’t get Dune published to save his life. Twenty separate publishing houses passed on the project before an editor at Chilton, best known for its automotive repair manuals, took a chance on Dune, a risk for which he was swiftly canned.
In a vindicating twist, Dune went on to become the most-read book of all time in its genre, leaving twenty-odd sequels, countless copy-cats, and a miserable trickle of failed movie projects in its wake. Despite its stodgy prose, time transformed Dune from a drug-induced mistake into a science-fiction mainstay. Still, box-office glory evaded the series’ fandom. The concept had long been considered “unfilmable” (despite providing the entire framework for the Star Wars movies) due to its endless appendices and breathless world-building, inspiring auteurs like Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch and Ridley Scott to either abandon their attempts at adaptation or royally embarrass themselves in the adapting process.
So how did 2021’s Dune reboot distinguish itself as a slick success rather than a campy disaster?
Well, imperial fascism.
II. Space Cowboy
While critics praise Dune 2 for its points of distinction from the Marvel Universe, which faces mounting editorial backlash for its artless, hammy monopolization of the culture sector, the Dune movies owe much of their success to an under-discussed feature of the comic book blueprint—the substitution of lore for story. The concept of “lore” has been reduced to an overused buzzword in the online gaming circles in recent years, but its popularity belies an algorithmically bolstered interest in mythology over experiential conveyance in American mass media. Narrative storytelling works against the financial incentives of imperiled studio conglomerates, whose reliance on franchise sequels and cross-platform promotion necessitates a dismissive attitude towards third-act resolution or closed loops. This positionality works well for their intended viewer base, too, since 15 year old boys are socialized to hate feelings and brandish ever-accruing factoids with the obsessive focus of TV detectives.
Dune’s embrace of lore at the expense of story also helps explain its warm reception in white nationalist countercultures online. In a piece for the LA Review of Books in 2020, Jordan Carroll wrote, “Dune was initially received as a countercultural parable warning against ecological devastation and autocratic rule, but geek fascists see the novel as a blueprint for the future”, further arguing that Herbert’s übermensch interpolations and open parapsychological support of “race-consciousness” renders Dune’s fantastical critique something of a Schrodinger’s commentary. It wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that one of the reasons Dune has proven so difficult to adapt is because film framing is so uniquely ill-suited to narrative subversion. The camera’s scopophilic worship of Timothee Chalamet’s tiny vulpine features does little to sour movie-goers on his descent into genocidal mania. When Villeneuve stans emphasize that depiction is not glorification, they skip over the formal impossibility of deflating messianic coding in epic format. I’m hardly advocating for a puritanical or moralistic relationship to movie-making, here (I love bad things!), but do think it’s worth interrogating why a Lawrence of Arabia pastiche proves so compelling to a post-9/11 generation raised on anti-Islamophobia Buzzfeed infographics (hint: the alt-right hijacking of identity politics, that pesky algorithm everybody keeps talking about, Netanyahu, etc.)
The answer is slippery, but certainly has something to do with Walter Benjamin’s writing on film and fascist propaganda. According to Benjamin, the “aestheticization of politics'' is a key ingredient in fascism’s manipulation of the masses. In 1935, he wrote, “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves”, an idea further explored in Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, a Marxist axiomatic critique arguing that “authentic social life” has been replaced by its representation. Both of these ideas feel distinctly proto-internet to a reader in 2024, as they more or less predicted our current distraction economy, defined by drop-shipped tie-ins to viral-minded short form content and the ever-looming reality of artificial intelligence as a tool of persuasion.
There’s a rich critical backlog dedicated to fascist film-making, thanks to the indelible influence of Nazi actress and director Leni Riefenstahl, whose chilling 1935 work Triumph of the Will, a stylized documentation of a million-man Nazi rally, became the visual template for totalitarian optics on screen. Riefenstahl’s sweeping panoramic shots, distorted use of diegetic sound, and upward-tilting camera angles have come to comprise the bad-guy grammar of contemporary genre flicks—George Lucas’ stormtroopers, Peter Jackson’s Saruman army, and even David Yates’ dementors all owe their shared lexicon of evil to Riefenstahl’s Hilterian fandom. The Dune movies hit a ton of these beats, as well—Harkonnens are white, uniformed, and hairless, they bray and bark at vast outdoor rallies, they engage in brash displays of sexual violence and perversion (as Susan Sontag wrote in her 1974 essay “Fascinating Fascism”, “between fascism and sadomasochism there is a natural link”). But, as Youtube film critic Lindsay Ellis quipped of Darth Vader’s minions in her 2016 video Ideology of the First Order, these nationalistic sociopaths “may look like fascists, but…what do they actually believe in?”
Ellis goes on to explain that sartorial references to Nazism do not a coherent worldview make; I’d posit that the aesthicization of fascism, then, to riff on Benjamin, could be considered a distinctly neoliberal project not just in smug American self-aggrandizement, but plausible deniability. To the US soft power machine, Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” theory represents impossibly egalitarian opportunities for blame—to aestheticize fascism on screen, then, implies that Nazis weren’t made, but born, that their collective evil is some genetic accident rather than the result of a concerted “appeal to a frustrated middle class”, in Umberto Eco’s parlance. After all, Riefenstahl’s primary inspiration was Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffiths, the Ur-American fantasia that lionized both the racist logic and terroristic practices of the Ku Klux Klan.
In his 1988 essay “The Fascist Guns in the West”, J. Hoberman takes on the potentially fascist tenets of Reagan-era war blockbusters, with a special emphasis on the filmography of professional meat-head Sylvester Stallone. “There must be a way to describe the Manichean moral schema, vengeful patriotism, worship of the masculine torso, and rabid emotionalism of these recent Stallone vehicles”, he writes, going on to quote New York magazine critic David Denby’s assertion that the Schwarzeneggerification of cinema marked the “stirrings of an incipient fascism—a distinct American variant combining paranoia, military fantasy, and a style of individualism so extreme as to be pathological”. While Hoberman isn’t certain that fascism is exactly the right word to describe this phenomenon, he does draw a throughline from the “political wish-fulfillment” of the ‘50s Western to the post-Vietnam “disenfranchised” renegade archetype deployed by Chuck Norris and his ilk.
Villeneuve may be French-Canadian (gross), but Dune 2, with its Axis of Evil callbacks and fetish for othering brown bodies, is an American epoch through and through. It’s not difficult to extend Hoberman’s ontological arc from John Wayne to Rambo to Iron Man straight through to Paul Atreides, the twinky quintessence of bloated empire. I’m no film critic, (my favorite movie is Ratatouille, a children’s cartoon that literally demonizes petty crime) but I do feel comfortable calling Dune 2 an Imperial Western, content in its rhetorical abstraction from an intentionally fascist art ethos. The American Film Institute defines a Western as a story that embodies “the spirit, the struggle, and the demise of the new frontier”—inherent to its parable of glory is its dark ephemerality. Dune 2’s emphatic use of practical effects, minimal CGI, and the borderline racist coding of “Eastern” natives smacks of a trad-fantasy attempt to reclaim the mainstream movie industry, a flailing armament of a failing hegemonic structure, as ideological PR rather than a reflecting pool for our most anodyne collective desires.
III. I Said What I Said
In a 2022 essay for the “Munitions of the Mind” blog series at the University of Kent’s Centre for the History of War, Media and Society, PhD Candidate Haifa Mahabir, whose scholarship traces the origins of Israel’s “state of emergency” to the British Mandate for Palestine between 1917 and 1948, tries to move beyond what she terms a “lazy” Saidian orientialist critique of Dune into a reflection more fitting of its scope. “We are so caught up in our own navel-gazing, that critique fails precisely where Said fell short—in any meaningful analysis of material forces and consequence”, writes Mahabir. “What is more compelling than the cultural orientalism of Dune is to acknowledge Herbert’s own critique of imperial ambition and competition”.
Instead of focusing her argument on the blunt appropriations abounding throughout the Dune-iverse, Mahabir takes a more expansive read on Herbert’s project without condoning his or director Denis Villeneuve’s methods, specifically the film’s erasure of Arab actors and consultants. Her conclusion on the purposive thrust of this escapism falls in line with a recent re-appraisal of Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said’s primary critical contribution, Orientalism, in leftist circles.
Said first published Orientalism, the landmark post-structural takedown of the West’s “contemptuous” and othering depiction of Middle Eastern culture, in 1978, the year the Camp David Accords were signed in a bid to end the ongoing “dispute” amongst Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian military forces. Said borrows the word “Orientalism” from the 19th century art historical movement in which male British, French, and American painters portrayed romanticized landscapes of colonized locales like Constantinople and Cairo. The most enduring trope from this period is that of the Turkish Odalisque, the dreamy representation of pallid, curvaceous Ottoman harem women, or sex slaves, in contemporary parlance (plenty of murdered sex workers in Dune 2, by the way).
Said, despite being deemed a “Professor of Terror'' and a brash antagonist of the French academy by the ‘80s press, has come under fire in the years since his death in 2003 for the more milquetoast elements of his theoretical influence, like his paradoxically Eurocentric critique of, well, Eurocentrism (typically, when Hindu nationalists agree with your discourse, you might have missed a step). Still, it’s impossible to watch Dune free from Said’s reverberating voice—the Fremen of Arrakis speak pidgin Arabic, wear headscarves, bear tribal tattoos, and boast, for the most part, swarthy skin-tones. For those of us who are old enough to remember 9/11, the bold racial stereotyping of the Fremen feels eerily familiar to the entertainment ecosystem of the early thousands, where scary brown dudes with impenetrable accents indiscriminately murked blonde women and children in the “name of Allah” on primetime TV.
Herbert’s and Villeneuve’s portrayals of the Fremen, however, fall more closely in line with a “noble savage” trope endemic to Cold War Westerns than the one dimensional enemies of Reagan war romps—reductive, certainly, but not without sympathy. While many MENA cultural commenters have railed against Dune’s romanticization of colonial conquest in the press, and rightly so, (Ayan Artan called Dune 2 a “wasted opportunity…undermined by its own willful ignorance” for Digital Spy), just as many take a softer tact. As a white lady of inauspicious English origin, it’s not my place to make value judgements on the reactions of people whose marginalized identities hang in the balance of popular media, but I do find responses like Leila Latif’s, whose recent piece for Atmos explores Orientalist themes in the sequel, a telling testament to Dune 2’s prowess at the box office.
“To exactly transpose the Arrakis onto the Arabian Peninsula misses out on some of the rich complexity that influenced the Fremen”, writes Latif. “As he was writing, Herbert was influenced by both the opportunities and limitations of ecological science, researching attempts to turn the sandy deserts in Oregon into grasslands. He looked to the “advanced” Western approach and found it lacking, saying, “We tend to think that we can overcome nature by mathematical means; we accumulate enough data and we subdue it.” Latif’s sentiment mirrors Mahabir’s—Herbert’s ethical undertaking and resistance to direct Islamaphobia overshadows the clumsier elements of his science fiction project.
In Fredric Jameson’s 2005 book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (which I low-key barely understand), the theorist attempts to gauge the utility of science fiction’s vision of a utopian future. According to Jameson, science fiction’s potency comes from its ability to envision alternate social structures, refusing semiocapitalism "by forcing us to think the break itself". In a genre flooded with jingoistic intellectual properties and militarized spandex vigilantes, there’s something refreshing—nay, thrilling—about Dune 2’s insistence on itself as a discrete, closed network. Still, when Ayan Artan decries Villeneuve’s “missed opportunity” to use Dune 2 as a metaphor for the plight of Palestinians and Jordanians, I wonder if Artan is mistaking refusal for inability. Dune 2 may be transporting and sumptuous, but ultimately, its science fiction credentials seem cosmetic at best. If Dune 2 is indeed an imperial Western at heart, then, like all Westerns, it poses fewer questions than it answers. While it seeks to subvert the “white savior” narrative device on paper, Dune 2 delivers on necropolitical bombast American audiences rely upon to make themselves legible at citizen-consumers, a creative failure that retains its palatability.
IV. TikTok Killed The Movie Star
TikTok comment sections feverishly underscored the total dearth of chemistry amongst the core cast in press junkets for Dune 2, leading many fans to believe these shiny young celebrities didn’t really like each other all that much. I disagree, but I do think the internet’s fascination with their interpersonal dullness belies a cultural shift that's bigger than actor beef—the death of the film celebrity.
It's perfectly possible that the Dune 2 cast doesn’t get along, but a quick perusal of the interview footage tells a different story. These folks, like a lot of normatively beautiful people, just…aren't that funny. Austin Butler has the comic capacity of split pea soup. Timothee Chalamet seems enthusiastic, but dim. Zendaya appears increasingly dedicated to nullifying her god-given goofiness in service of her fashion-plate reputation. Florence Pugh is charming insofar as she is British, which may suffice for undercover Royalists and cloying Disney bisexuals, but isn’t enough for the Gen Z and Gen Alpha fans who have become accustomed to an influencer tier of diversion at the crest of the distraction economy. Daring to be boring and famous simultaneously is neither a rare nor criminal offense, but the combination bodes badly in the context of movie stardom's rampant obsolescence.
In a 2022 article for the Guardian titled Twilight of the A-list, critic Tom Shone calls the upper echelon of famous film actors “a shrinking paddock of ageing thoroughbreds”, pointing to a maelstrom of industry factors contributing to the everyday movie-goer’s growing disinterest in actor deification. He quotes at length the effortlessly dynamic Anthony Mackie, best known for playing Falcon in the Captain America Marvel franchise, who opined on the matter with biting frankness in a Twitter-viral clip. “Anthony Mackie isn’t a movie star; The Falcon is a movie star”, quipped Mackie. “ So, the evolution of the superhero has meant the death of the movie star.”
Whether or not the average joe believes that influencers belong on the red carpet is becoming steadily immaterial. Influencers have now achieved the ultimate end of what critic Ty Burr calls “celebrity socialism”, both outpacing and out-earning their script-saddled peers. No longer must the gatekeepers of the 2010s attempt to shoehorn Youtubers into the traditional media landscape with a shrug— late night show? VMA guest?—in 2024, dopamine captives are bored of yesteryear’s self-consciously dull and untouchable class of entertainers (see: the over-eager backlash to JLo’s ill-begotten vanity movie on Amazon).
Dune 2 plays like the last gasp of a dying breed; word on the street says that Chalamet was paid $3.3 million to reprise his role as Paul Atreides, a figure his early-aughts equivalents like DiCaprio and Pitt wouldn’t even consider for a cameo. The art of cinema may not be in crisis, but the industry sure is. Audiences have demonstrated that they still care about movies in a post-lockdown COVID-19 landscape (I loathed the whole Barbenheimer schtick, but it WAS the zeitgest for a minute there), but executives are struggling to keep apace with the evolving tastes of a curatorial proletariat with diminishing pocket money and a sophisticated nose for spin.
Dune 2 may very well be the last Blockbuster, and it’s imperial Western posture exploits that structural nostalgia with aplomb. To return to DeBord, the most fascinating feature of Dune 2 is not defined by presence, but by absence—Shai Halud has a hollow center, a sandy simulacrum of political ingress and narrative empathy. Chalamet isn’t playing Paul Atreides, he’s playing an actor playing Paul Atreides. Villeneuve hasn’t made a movie about American imperialism, he’s made a movie about a movie about a book about American imperialism. Each frame of the film operates not as a cultural semiotic, but a virtual avatar for another pool of images—reference free from allusion, lore cleaved from story.
Ultimately, it works because it doesn’t. I loved it, for whatever that’s worth.
Thank you for reading, sharing and subscribing.
Until next month!
-Baubo
This is easily your best work yet dearie 💙 so good!