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By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
There are three great novels that I read as an early adolescent that I would take to a desert island if I ever needed to be set up for decades of rereading: The “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “Watership Down” and “Dune.” I’ve written more in the past on J.R.R. Tolkien’s work and even on Richard Adams’s great rabbit epic than on Frank Herbert’s magnum opus. So I can’t let the occasion of “Dune: Part Two” and its imperial command of the box office pass without some kind of comment.
Two comments, to be precise. The first is about the story’s contemporary resonance. You can find plenty of other takes on the specific way that Denis Villeneuve’s movies deal with Herbert’s depiction of colonialism, resource wars, Islam-coded religious fundamentalism and a white savior figure who might also be a world-historical villain.
What’s getting less attention, and what I want to highlight, is the larger civilizational dynamic that the book sets up, and how it speaks to our own moment. In particular, it speaks to the ways that the developed world today feels stuck in a loop of decadence and disappointment and sterile repetition, from which (some) people look upward and outward in search of hope — seeking it in the promise of artificial intelligence, in genetic engineering and the dream of “transhumanism,” or in a new age of spaceflight or a revival of religion.
“Dune” the novel, somewhat more clearly than its adaptation, presents a galaxy-spanning society that has wrestled with each of these possibilities and made very concrete choices, such that its civilization is defined by how it embraces, rejects or adapts to each of the forms of dynamism I’ve just listed.
Space travel, obviously, has been the engine of this civilization’s development and spread. A.I., on the other hand, has been invented, embraced and then explicitly rejected through the long-ago convulsion called the “Butlerian Jihad,” which establishes as a commandment: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
Transhumanism, meanwhile, has been rejected in some ways and embraced in others. In place of computers, Herbert’s galactic imperium has cultivated what we would consider superhuman mental powers, often via the use of mind-altering drugs — Google Gemini, absolutely not; psychedelics, maybe so. At the same time, the imperium’s powerful Bene Gesserit sisterhood has pursued a vast eugenic project, but one that’s hedged about with various taboos. When a Bene Gesserit reverend mother in “Dune Messiah” is offered the chance to continue her eugenic work via artificial insemination rather than arranged pairings of men and women, she recoils from the idea, since “no word or deed could imply that men might be bred on the level of animals.” Selective mating, yes; cloning and I.V.F., maybe not.
Finally, religion has flourished in this spacefaring future via a kind of syncretistic creativity: The novel’s main scripture, the Orange Catholic Bible, is the kind of ecumenical holy book that probably seemed a bit more plausible in the 1960s, when “Dune” first appeared, than it does today, and the religions of the future are mostly remixes of Old Earth faiths, complete with names like “Zensunni,” “Navachristianity” and “Buddislam.”
So you can see “Dune” as presenting a civilization that has achieved galactic takeoff while working through, in weird but recognizable ways, our own cultural-technological debates. But then Herbert further portrays his far-future world as having fallen into decadence itself, with a stable but cruel order based on corporate feudalism, religious manipulation and other interlocking exploitations.
And here some of the debates around the movie adaptation, about whether the main character, Paul Atreides, is a liberator or an oppressor, a hero or a villain, miss the harsher argument at work in the original story: Namely, that sometimes the only path out of a corrupt status quo involves convulsion and fanaticism and death. So the book’s Paul is both a hero and a villain, both a destroyer and a savior; he’s taking a terrible path that’s also the only plausible path for humanity to take. (And to readers of the later books: Yes, I know that eventually this path requires a long period of even deeper decadence under a human-sandworm hybrid god-emperor in order to prepare humanity for a new explosion of interstellar migration, and also to breed a line of human beings immune from prophecy and prescience … look, I’m not a nerd, you’re a nerd.)
Villeneuve’s new movie (mild spoilers ahead) tries to slip away from that dynamic by making Paul’s romance into more of a road not taken. His love interest, Chani, is presented as a kind of secular nationalist in contrast to the religious fundamentalists among her people, the desert-dwelling Fremen, and she wants Paul to join their cause without leading them into a galactic holy war. (In the novel, she doesn’t seem to have these kinds of qualms.) And the later Herbert books sometimes try to have their cake and eat it too, hinting that this period of fanaticism and dictatorship and messianic rule was necessary to liberate humanity from still worse, potentially species-ending forms of dictatorship and messianic control. The Great Man of History, but just this once and never again.
But in the original book — which is the only good book — you root for the Great Man, the bloody-handed messiah, because the order he’s up against deserves to fall. And even in the movie, that basic architecture is still in place: Paul’s main enemies, the Harkonnens, are portrayed as satanic totalitarians, and the only clear political alternatives are a galaxy misgoverned by cruel despots and a galaxy where he accepts his destiny and unleashes his jihad. Permanent decadence or bloody remaking — choose your poison wisely.
Then, speaking of decadence, my second comment on “Dune” is about what the franchise’s success, both artistic and commercial, means for the specific kind of decadence afflicting American cinema these days. In the late 1990s and very early 2000s, the last real cultural peak for the motion picture industry, it seemed like the breakthrough in computer-generated effects might be a great gift to cinematic artists, enabling a revival of the grand scale in filmmaking, the fulfillment of various genre possibilities (for sci-fi, the historical epic and more), and the adaptation of works considered heretofore unfilmable.
James Cameron’s “Titanic,” the original “Matrix,” Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” adaptation and Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” all belong to this period of possibility. But fairly quickly, the C.G.I. age tended toward mediocrity, as the ease of creating vast tableaux and supernatural goings-on encouraged creative laziness and corporate thrift, with green screens substituting for the vitality of real-world settings, and with sweeping vistas and special-effects battles that reliably — in so many Marvel movies, but not only them — had a cartoonish gloss, a fundamental unreality.
Villeneuve’s “Dune” movies are a successful attempt to reclaim that early creativity, not by abandoning C.G.I. but by blending it more fully with practical effects to create sci-fi worlds that are awesome and realistic all at once. (For some detail on how the director and his team pulled this off, I recommend Matt Zoller Seitz’s discussion, for Vulture, with the “Dune” cinematographer Greig Fraser, focusing on three action scenes in the sequel.)
Villeneuve is hardly alone in this kind of effort; Christopher Nolan has been there all along, George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” is another prime example of special-practical symbiosis, and I think you could place the intense physicality of “Top Gun: Maverick” in the same category. And since I’m referencing some of the most famous films and filmmakers of recent years, it’s fair to say that Hollywood should be able to see that this kind of ambition can really work, commercially as well as artistically; indeed, right now it’s the main thing keeping the theatrical experience afloat.
Unfortunately, it’s less clear if Hollywood knows this or can act on the knowledge, since the combination of last year’s writer’s strike and the deflation of the streaming bubble has left the movie pipeline relatively empty and the future unstable and uncertain. We can hope that Miller’s “Fury Road” prequel, “Furiosa,” will be a successful spectacle in the Nolan-Villeneuve mode, but beyond that, the rest of 2024 promises a run of predictable-seeming spinoffs and sequels, and Hollywood seems lashed to declining franchises without clear replacements on the way.
Can “Dune” itself be a new franchise to replace the creaking ones we have? That seems to be the likely plan: Villeneuve is promising to adapt “Dune Messiah” as the concluding volume of a movie trilogy, which would complete Paul Atreides’s story. And then there’s the long list of sequels, and beyond them the ever-larger universe of “Dune” novels co-written by one of Herbert’s sons.
Unfortunately, as noted above, the subsequent Herbert books can’t hold a candle to the original, and the less said about his son’s expanded universe the better. Even more unfortunately, “Dune Messiah” is one of the worst of the sequels; I forced myself to reread it before I wrote this newsletter, and it’s exactly as I remembered from prior attempts. The later books are bad in a more gonzo way (see, e.g., the aforementioned human-sandworm hybrid), but “Messiah” is just boring — an incredibly talky and pretentious exercise in which both the galactic and planetary scale of the original collapses into the claustrophobic confines of a single desert palace. There’s a bit of action at the end, a few set pieces that could work well on the screen, but if you just did a straight adaptation it would be like a super-weird stage play: “Paul Atreides Off Broadway,” closing after 10 performances.
Since Villeneuve is immensely talented and since he has said that he prefers set pieces to dialogue, I suspect he intends to rewrite the story considerably, and hopefully that will deliver something that improves on the original and makes his full adaptation a coherent work unto itself.
But after that, I think moviegoers would be better off if the story of the Atreides family were treated as complete. As in other mediums and genres, what Hollywood needs are stories that can be spiritual sequels, not just literal ones, to what Villeneuve has achieved.
Louise Perry on the divergent futures of the racial and sexual left.
Anna Della Subin on the anthropologist of enchantment.
Matt Yglesias on the decadence of blue America.
Tyler Cowen on the irrelevance of A.G.I.
Nathan Pinkoski on the cautious realism of the deep state.
David Schaengold on the architecture nobody wants.
— Sarah Zhang, “The Cystic Fibrosis Breakthrough That Changed Everything,” The Atlantic (March 7)
Trikafta corrects the misshapen protein that causes cystic fibrosis; this molecular tweak thins mucus in the lungs so it can be coughed up easily. In a matter of hours, patients who took it began to cough — and cough and cough and cough in what they later started calling the Purge. They hacked up at work, at home, in their car, in bed at night. It’s not that they were sick; if anything, it was the opposite: They were becoming well. In the days that followed, their lungs were cleansed of a tarlike mucus, and the small tasks of daily life that had been so difficult became unthinkingly easy. They ran up the stairs. They ran after their kids. They ran 10Ks. They ran marathons.
Cystic fibrosis once all but guaranteed an early death. When the disease was first identified, in the 1930s, most babies born with C.F. died in infancy. The next decades were a grind of incremental medical progress: A child born with C.F. in the ’50s could expect to live until age 5. In the ’70s, age 10. In the early 2000s, age 35. With Trikafta came a quantum leap. Today, those who begin taking the drug in early adolescence, a recent study projected, can expect to survive to age 82.5 — an essentially normal life span.
C.F. was one of the first diseases to be traced to a specific gene, and Trikafta is one of the first drugs designed for a specific, inherited mutation. It is not a cure, and it doesn’t work for all patients. But a substantial majority of the 40,000 Americans with C.F. have now lived through a miracle — a thrilling but disorienting miracle. Where they once prepared for death, they now have to prepare for life.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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