Literary Analysis

First things first, a confession. When I watched Dune: Part One for the first time in 2021, on my basement TV in the middle of a global pandemic, it left me cold. I’d read Frank Herbert’s famous novel years before, but it had been a while, and something about Dune’s refusal to hold its audience’s hand or rely on exposition dumps was off-putting.

But nevertheless, as the years passed, I found myself revisiting Dune more and more, especially on 4K Blu-ray. Something about its instantly distinctive visuals and art design, and concussive sound editing, was compelling in a way few other blockbusters could match. Scenes from the film are haunting, almost impressionistic: a giant sandworm engulfing a spice crawler on the desert world of Arrakis, water-drenched spaceships rising from the ocean planet of Caladan, armies of shielded soldiers climbing the steps of a stronghold, and so on.

Happily, Part Two is a sequel that largely delivers on its predecessor’s promise. This is a truly visceral cinematic experience that demands to be seen in theaters, built on a truly thought-provoking lattice of themes.

Part Two picks up with exiled protagonist Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) in the wilds of Arrakis, hiding out with the Islamic-inspired Fremen natives after the destruction of his family and House at the hands of the evil Harkonnen family. Alongside him are his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), a member of the Bene Gesserit quasi-monastic order; Fremen warrior Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who believes Paul to be the legendary Mahdi or Lisan al Gaib who will fulfill the Fremen’s messianic dreams; and love interest Chani (Zendaya), who simply wants a better future for her people.

Along with Stilgar and Chani, Paul learns the ways of the desert as Jessica spins her webs. Bluntly put, the faith of the Fremen is a carefully cultivated psyop, nurtured over time to till the earth for Paul’s coming. All the while, the Bene Gesserit have used decidedly less hallowed means to breed their chosen genetic scion—a scion who will emerge onto the Fremen stage to play his part at the appointed hour, and reshape the known universe. Paul knows this. So too, he knows that if he travels to the “fundamentalist” south of Arrakis, he will be welcomed as a god and a Fremen uprising will immediately follow. Forces will be set into motion that cannot be easily corralled. But, of course, fate—or something else—will have its way.

Technically speaking, it is hard to overstate just how good Part Two looks and sounds. Years of shoddy CGI blockbusters might’ve inured a lot of viewers to grand worldbuilding, but the scale and weightiness of the images onscreen here are staggering. A detour to the violent Harkonnen homeworld of Giedi Prime, illuminated by a black sun and shot in washed-out lighting, is mesmerizing, as is Paul’s first sandworm ride. As far as visual effects go, Part Two ranks with the like of Avatar and Lord of the Rings. That’s all backed up, of course, by fantastic audio work: in Dolby Cinema, the bass of thundering sandworms and explosions shakes the ground, and you feel the reverberations of machine gun fire in your chest. And Hans Zimmer’s work on the score is as good as anything in the original.

Thematically, of course, Dune is a story about religion and politics.  The Fremen are, essentially, desert mujahideen. They revere Paul as Mahdi—a title reserved, in Shia Islam, for a prophesied figure who will lead Muslims to govern the world. But is this a straight-up tale of religious fanaticism, in all its glories and horrors, or something else?

After all, there’s something profoundly strange about the “religion” that figures so prominently in Fremen culture and in the arc of this saga. Though there are a few passing references to “the hand of God,” and glimpses of salat-style daily prayers, this is a film that has basically nothing to say about divinity as such. When the Fremen pray, are they actually worshiping Paul, or perhaps the concept of him as Mahdi? Or are they praying to something else, something beyond Arrakis’s horizon?  Villeneuve suggests the former. Indeed, messianic expectation as such seems almost to exhaust the content of Fremen spirituality. The “paradise” Paul promises is no transcendent realm, but merely a utopian vision of Arrakis.

To be sure, Villeneuve is not valorizing Paul’s rise. Dread and awe, not exultation, accompany Paul’s eventual emergence from the sands. But the sheer oddness of the Fremen faith suggests that the nature of the story that is being told is something subtler than “the danger of religion in politics,” which a surface-level reading might suggest.

Consider the issue this way: what factors internal to Fremen culture might possibly lead a member of the Fremen to reject Paul’s claim to messiah-hood? Note that while Chani rejects Paul’s rise because she views his ascendance as a betrayal of egalitarian Fremen ideals, this judgment is formed on the basis of an ethical standard (her concept of Fremen nationalism, or planet-ism) independent of the theo-political order in which Paul ostensibly stands at the apex. Hence the question stands: how would an “ordinary” Fremen “fundamentalist” ever be able to see Paul as anything other than what he claims to be?

Here’s the problem. Only something like an anti-idolatry principle could make it thinkable, within the terms of Fremen culture, to ever call Paul’s crusade into theological question. Of course, it is just such a principle that characterizes the Abrahamic monotheisms from which Dune derives so much of its inspiration. But for a story that borrows so heavily from Islamic thought and culture, it feels odd that there is no corresponding principle of shirk, the heresy of associating finite beings with God qua God. Paul claims to be Mahdi, messiah, but is there no higher theological court of appeal, no higher standard against which his claims might be judged? In Villeneuve’s hands, Fremen life offers a curiously secularized portrayal of religion, a society structured by “religious”-looking cultic practices that have lost their inner logic.

As such, the Fremen “faith” collapses almost entirely into what modern scholars would simply call “ideology”—the domain of politics as power and violence. (Carl Schmitt, who famously argued that all modern political concepts are just theological ideas shorn of their transcendent moorings, would nod along approvingly.) At bottom, the Fremen await a figurehead who will organize and lead them to a better Arrakis, and a certain amount of ritualistic bowing and scraping just happens to come with the territory.

Maybe, for Herbert and Villeneuve, something like that is precisely the point. Maybe the charge is that “authentic” religion simply cannot exist—that its forms are always, everywhere, parasitic upon a more basic domain of “sociality” in which manipulation and information control are the order of the day. (That is the way of the Bene Gesserit.)

But still, even in the face of all this, there is something unexpected about Paul’s ultimate rise as Lisan al Gaib. When Paul finally comes into his own, Jessica looks as stunned as anyone else. A lurking question remains unanswered—that maybe, for all the Bene Gesserit’s meddling, there are larger forces at work here than those under human control. To be sure, the ambiguity of those forces—Providence or animal spirits or the primordial will to power—is profoundly unsettling, but they cannot be ruled out.

Part Two ends on just such an unsettling note. There is a terrible sort of glory in Paul’s ascension, and Villeneuve lets the audience feel it. When he roars “I will lead you to PARADISE!” something in the viewer’s soul responds.  And it is precisely that response that Villeneuve insists we question. There is a kind of political energy that only comes into its own when narrowed to a single sharp point, when concentrated in a single figure claiming to bend the arc of history and destiny to his will. It is, as Oliver O’Donovan would say, the essence of antichrist.

In the end, we realize as Paul’s Fremen army departs Arrakis for galactic battlefields unknown, what Paul describes as “holy war” can be only one of those things.