Editor's Note: Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) is a freelance writer in Chicago. The views expressed here are his own. Visit CNN for more opinions.
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Frank Herbert's “Dune” Novels struggled with their debt to colonial adventure literature. The books revel in swash and buckle and Mighty Whitey heroes drawn from the milieu of writers as diverse as Edgar Rice Burroughs, James Fenimore Cooper and H. Rider Haggard. But Herbert, writing in 1965, was also attuned to criticism of the colonialism of his time. Its hero, Paul Atreides, is full of doubts about his role as messianic leader and master of colonial conquest.
Noah Berlatsky
Noah Berlatsky
Denis Villeneuve's film adaptations, and particularly the recent Dune: Part Two, attempt to build on Herbert's anti-colonial leanings through subtle and not-so-subtle narrative tweaks. Villeneuve goes further than Herbert in questioning the foundations of colonial narratives. Ultimately, however, he is hampered by the same problems that undermined Herbert's more liberating impulses. It is difficult and perhaps even impossible to tell an anti-colonial story while centering the perspective, heroism and overall greatness of a colonial hero.
The first part of Dune (released in 2021) introduces us to Paul (Timothée Chalamet), heir to House Atreides, in a feudal future full of space travel and complicated conspiracies. (The distributor of “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two” shares a parent company with CNN, Warner Bros. Discovery.) Paul's father, Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), has been given control of the desert planet Arrakis. Arrakis is the only source of Melange, a psychedelic spice that gives space pilots the altered consciousness they need to travel between worlds. It's like LSD is petroleum or vice versa.
However, the gift of Arrakis is a trap; The Emperor (Christopher Walken) conspires with the former ruler of Arrakis, Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). They attack and destroy House Atreides on Arrakis, killing Leto in the process. Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) narrowly escape into the desert. There they meet the proud Fremen who live in the desert – and that's where “Dune: Part Two” begins.
In the second (very long) film, Paul enters into his foretold and foretold inheritance. Like many colonial heroes before him, from Tarzan to Natty Bumppo, Paul as a colonizer quickly proves himself to be a better Fremen than the Fremen themselves. He is a superior fighter and he knows the desert paths from prophetic dreams. When he rides the gigantic (phallic) desert worms, he is riding the largest of them all. The Fremen are portrayed as fierce, clever and great – but all of them Her awesomeness is absorbed by Paul, who appropriates her power and becomes even stronger. This is how colonialism (and colonial literature) works.
Herbert attempted to subvert or challenge these colonial tropes by making Paul himself feel really, really guilty. With his gift of prophecy, Paul was able to realize that he was destined to lead the Fremen in a jihad of conquest (in the film it was changed to “Holy War” to curb the Islamophobic connotations). He doesn't want to be a genocidal conqueror; He doesn't want to undermine Fremen culture for his own purposes.
The colonial ruler's despondency is not really an anti-colonial criticism. Villeneuve is smart enough to have figured this out. In the film, it's not just Paul who sees problems with his colonial power. His Fremen lover Chani (Zendaya) is also ambivalent.
Warner Bros. Pictures
Timothée Chalamet in “Dune: Part Two”
In the book, Chani largely supports Paul, with few reservations. In the film, however, she resolutely refuses to believe in Paul's prophetic destiny. She insists that the myth of the coming of the Messiah is a colonizer's ploy to make colonized people wait indefinitely for freedom. She wants Paul to join her as an equal rather than rule over the Fremen.
Giving one of the colonized the opportunity to express their anti-colonial feelings is an important change. But this does not necessarily result in an anti-colonial narrative. Paul's fate is more powerful than Chani's – and this fate is the real narrative of the film. Most viewers will want to see Paul get revenge on the (supervillain-like) Harkonnens; You're rooting for Paul to win the entire movie.
Chani's argument isn't with Paul or other Fremen, but with the plot itself and all its action movie and revenge narrative delights. The film, the audience, and even the characters know that the story is Paul's. Whether Chani is right or wrong is less important than the fact that Paul's story fits into the inevitable groove of the genre.
The film's failure to present an effective anti-colonial vision is particularly frustrating given that we are in a golden age of anti-colonial epics. NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, Tasha Suri's The Books of Ambha series, Benjanun Sriduangkaew's Her Pitiless Command trilogy, Tade Thompson's Wormwood trilogy and many other works from the last decade or so engage with colonialism with far more depth and insight than Herbert could ever have imagined.
The key to the success of Jemisin or Suri is that they give narrative priority to the experiences of people who are victims of colonialism, rather than celebrating the power, success and conflicted consciences of kings, rulers and colonizers. If Villeneuve or even Herbert had really questioned the logic of colonial power and colonial privileges, the hero of the story would have been a Fremen like Chani. And she would fight, not with Paul, but against him and his attempt to draw her into his dreams and prophecies.
However, few blockbuster films give colonized people narrative priority. As writer and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in his study of Vietnam War films, “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War,” “much of American artistic and cultural work is about the Vietnam War, even if it deals with anti-The American Criticism firmly and roughly places Americans at the center of the story.”
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It's not just Vietnam films either. The supposedly anti-colonial science fiction film “Avatar” centers around a colonizer who became a white savior. The Star Wars films may be on the side of the colonial resistance – but they ensure that the leaders of that resistance are predominantly white, as opposed to the Fremen (which have images and cultural elements from the Middle East or North Africa conjure and some of them) are (the language comes directly from Arabic) are not a direct analogue for actual colonized people.
This is not an accident or a slip. The refusal to see colonized people as a central part of their own stories is part of colonialism itself. Paul feels bad about being the chosen one; Herbert and Villeneuve seem to regret, to varying degrees, making Paul the chosen one. But ultimately Paul doesn't listen to Chani and neither does Villeneuve. “Dune: Part Two” is supposed to show us a fight for freedom on an exotic and distant planet. But it tells the same old story of power as ever.