***Spoiler Alert: This text comprises spoilers for Frank Herbert’s Dune novels and for the movies Dune and Dune: Half Two.***
“For false messiahs and false prophets will seem and carry out nice indicators and wonders to deceive, if attainable, even the elect.” – Matthew 24:24 (NIV)
“You underestimate the facility of religion.”
Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) utters these phrases as a prescient warning to her father Emperor Shaddam (Christopher Walken) in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Half Two (2024). Like the opposite main characters within the movie, Princess Irulan thinks of faith primarily when it comes to political energy. So it comes as no nice shock that she readily agrees to the loveless marriage proposal of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) on the finish of the movie when she senses a possibility for energy as the brand new political construction takes form earlier than her eyes. On this movie, as in Frank Herbert’s novels, faith capabilities as a software to achieve energy.
. . . what’s spectacularly lacking from the movie is the complexity of faith and humanity depicted by Frank Herbert within the novels.
Much more than his first Dune movie (2021), Denis Villeneuve’s second movie emphasizes the uncooked lust for energy within the Dune world, thrusting political mechanizations into place as the first motivating issue for all leaders with a spiritual following. The Bene Gesserit are actually occupied with working behind the scenes not a lot for spiritual religion as for energy in figuring out the fates of countries and empires and worlds. Within the latter movie, Girl Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) is nearly demonically possessed with the will for energy. And whereas among the Fremen is likely to be true believers, they’re in the end dangerously-motivated jihadists whose leaders are solely occupied with energy and are prepared to govern their individuals’s beliefs for these ends. Even Paul’s transient resistance to the attract of energy is little greater than a quirk to work by. The place Villeneuve takes probably the most creative license in his adaptation, nevertheless, is within the character of Chani (Zendaya). In Dune: Half Two, Chani realizes virtually from the start that energy is what everyone seems to be searching for. Faith is barely a smokescreen for the Nietzschean will to energy that undergirds all of it.
Karl Marx publicizes this notion of faith when he says, in David Papke’s translation, “Faith is the opium of the individuals. It’s the sight of the oppressed creature, the center of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless situations.” Faith is one thing that offers the naïve a motive to hope, a little bit coronary heart and soul in an in any other case merciless world. It’s a crutch for many who can not face the chilly onerous reality of the chilly onerous world. Villeneuve exhibits us the up-close of simply such a world up within the scintillating sands of the magnificent desert planet of Arrakis.
With just a bit creative license, Villeneuve creates two fantastically choreographed standalone tales that nonetheless maintain collectively to deliver a shocking portrayal of the Dune world created by Frank Herbert in his 1965 novel Dune. Okay. B. Hoyle and Alisa Ruddell have aptly described Villeneuve’s first movie as Paul’s coming-of-age story. As Ruddell factors out, this permits the primary movie to be about “the lack of Paul’s innocence reasonably than the rise of a messiah.” And the rise of a messiah is certainly what we see in Dune: Half Two. Megan McCluskey characterizes the story plot of this movie because the conclusion of Paul’s “[t]ransformation into revolutionary chief Muad’Dib, gaining management of not solely the desert planet Arrakis but in addition everything of the universe of the galactic empire often called the Imperium within the course of.” Thus, Villeneuve takes a prolonged novel and turns it into two tales—first, the rising to maturity of a heroic determine and second, the fruits of the messianic temptations that overtake that hero.
However what’s spectacularly lacking from the movie is the complexity of faith and humanity depicted by Frank Herbert within the novels. Within the movie, even the characters are much less advanced. By the tip of Dune: Half Two, many of the characters we have now come to know match into “good” or “dangerous” classes. After watching the second movie, my teenage daughter expressed her disappointment with the characters: “I assumed Paul was going to be a great man. And I assumed I would love his mom. However she is creepy-evil! Solely Chani is sweet in the long run.”
Whereas the movie has to condense the novel, after all, lowering advanced characters into good/dangerous caricatures displays the identical type of lazy vilification or aggrandizement that happens all too typically in social media shaming rituals. This departure from Herbert’s cautious improvement of advanced characters with each good and evil traits at occasions leans towards a binary worldview that isn’t discovered within the novel. Whereas there’s some uncertainty about characters within the first movie, the second movie collapses them into easily-defined classes: Both the Bene Gesserit are good or evil. Girl Jessica and Chani are both good or evil. Paul is sweet or evil. This flattening applies not solely to characterization but in addition to the reductionist therapy of faith within the movie, and we find yourself with a severely constrained account of faith because the manipulative software of power-mongering populations and people who need to management the destiny of at the very least of their nook of the universe. There’s little demonstration of real religion in such faith.
Whereas such a illustration of faith matches sure secularized modern accounts of human-made religions, it might be unfair to attribute this reductionist view to Herbert himself. Certainly, we’d do effectively to watch that in Herbert’s novel, Princess Irulan doesn’t warn her father of the facility of religion. As a substitute, she witnesses the extra complete imaginative and prescient of the Bene Gesserit spiritual order at the same time as she witnesses the downfall of her father’s secular energy. In Irulan and Herbert’s different main sympathetic characters, we see individuals seeking reality relating to the spiritual premonitions and statements they encounter.
Flattening Characters and Faith
Herbert’s novels are a research in character improvement in addition to world constructing. Underneath his pen, characters don’t simply fall into good character/dangerous character dichotomies. That is very true together with his main sympathetic characters. Consistent with this complexification of character, Herbert’s heroes are particularly inclined to corruption. Herbert describes his “idea that superheroes are disastrous for humankind” and delineates one of many main themes of the novel: “Even when we discover a actual hero (no matter—or whoever—that could be), finally fallible mortals take over the facility construction that all the time comes into being round such a pacesetter.” By Herbert’s calculus, Paul is destined for corruption in addition to greatness.
Paul Atreides begins with out the hubris that’s the downfall of so many heroic characters, as portrayed within the first movie. However finally he sees himself because the savior of the Fremen, as depicted within the second movie. Whereas I hoped to see the progress of Paul’s inner transformation from well-meaning hero to self-seeking emperor, the change may be very fast in Dune: Half Two. Blink, and also you virtually miss it. His goodness has immediately evaporated, and he has gone to the darkish facet. Annakin Skywalker’s grow to be Darth Vader took way more time and produced a lot higher agony. The ethical and religious dilemmas Paul skilled within the novel are largely lowered to calculations about easy methods to use spiritual beliefs and psychospiritual skills to serve his personal imaginative and prescient of the widespread good—a imaginative and prescient that’s wrapped up in his personal rise to energy.
Paul is just not the one one who morphs prematurely right into a “new” individual in Dune: Half Two. The competing inner needs of Girl Jessica are underplayed as she turns into fixated on energy and loses the motherly concern that typically put her at odds with energy buildings even on “her” facet in Herbert’s novel. Her transformation into Reverend Mom is a fast shift: she turns into a extra commanding but in addition a extra menacing determine. Within the movie, she has no ethical scruples about Paul’s rise to energy so long as her personal energy is preserved within the course of. In contrast to the novel, wherein her extra cautious change mirrors her hesitations relating to the blended motivations of the Bene Gesserit, the movie merely pushes Girl Jessica and the Bene Gesserit unreservedly on the facet of a self-absorbed spiritual establishment. Within the novel, Girl Jessica is just not pleased together with her son’s grip on energy and says as a lot to Chani.
The tip of Dune: Half Two, nevertheless, modifications the characters of Chani and Girl Jessica as they seem in Herbert’s novel. The 2 highly effective girls are going their very own methods—Chani about to journey off in disgust away from Paul and Girl Jessica gloating over her attainment of centuries of witch-power. However the novel ends with them in a type of partnership, each nonetheless caring deeply for Paul and gathered close to him to assist in pulling again from his ill-conceived energy journey. Like Girl Jessica earlier than her, Chani has been handed over for an official marriage that’s meant to bolster a political dynasty. Because the love companions of the 2 Atreides males (Paul and his father), Chani and Jessica don’t wield the Atreides identify as a result of that’s given to a political companion. The novel ends with a type of alliance between the 2, with Girl Jessica telling Chani, “Suppose on it, Chani: that princess could have the identify, but she’ll dwell as lower than a concubine—by no means to know a second of tenderness from the person to whom she’s certain. Whereas we, Chani, we who carry the identify of concubine—historical past will name us wives.”
The Hazard of Human Messiahs
This flattening of characters and faith within the movie doesn’t, nevertheless, preclude it from sounding the identical alarm that Herbert’s novel does. For the novel and movie each clearly emphasize the hazard and insufficiency of human messiahs. Right here Villeneuve was squarely in step with Herbert’s imaginative and prescient. As Villeneuve himself notes, “When the e book got here out, [Herbert] was disillusioned by how individuals perceived Paul Atreides.” And the frustration was that Paul’s heroic stature was supposed “as a warning . . . a couple of messianic determine.” And so it’s price slowing all the way down to critique Paul’s character as Villeneuve does in Dune: Half Two.
Herbert and Villeneuve’s Dune movies agree on this: Mere mortals can not wield unchecked energy or develop a “savior advanced” with out turning into corrupted within the course of.
Within the novel and the movie, Paul in the end accepts the messiah mantle ready for him by the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen. For religions that imagine in a messiah or are awaiting a messiah, these warnings are spiritual in addition to political. Believing in a messiah probably makes individuals extra inclined to abuses of non secular language for political functions. That is particularly obvious when the messiah determine makes use of faith to achieve energy and self-aggrandizement.
Paul is referred to by a number of messianic phrases, together with the Arabic Mahdi (مهدي), which, based on the Muslim religion refers to a coming “messianic deliverer who will fill earth with justice and fairness, restore true faith, and usher in a brief golden age.” Moreover the Abrahamic faiths, some Jap religions additionally maintain messianic beliefs. In some iterations of Hinduism, the incarnations of the god Vishnu are prophesied to culminate in a Messiah determine known as Kalki. In Buddhism, Maitreya is the “Buddha of the long run” whose start is foretold because the start of 1 who will educate enlightenment to the following age of humanity/godhood.
In each Christianity and Hinduism, the Messiah is alleged to be divine, thus probably side-stepping one a part of the criticism leveled by the Dune collection. If the Messiah is an incorruptibly good divine determine reasonably than a mere human, this Messiah is exempt from the corrupting affect of energy and a self-serving “savior advanced” even when he’s a savior. And a divine Messiah who provides up earthly energy and does “not come to be served, however to serve” is just not the type of messiah Dune warns us about. In contrast to Herbert, nevertheless, Villeneuve names The Final Temptation of Christ (1988), which positions Jesus (for some time) as a human messiah, as one in every of his influences. Herbert doesn’t weigh in on Christ as messiah—human or divine; as an alternative, he persistently paints the hazard of a human messiah as a temptation too nice to tackle with out turning into a power-mongering hazard to the world.
However Herbert and Villeneuve’s Dune movies agree on this: Mere mortals can not wield unchecked energy or develop a “savior advanced” with out turning into corrupted within the course of. Human historical past bears them out, with the Crusades being the obvious instance of the atrocious nature of utilizing faith as an excuse for oppression and violence. And with out giving freely any spoilers for the novels (and certain movies) that comply with, it’s clear from the title of Herbert’s sequel, Dune Messiah, that we must always anticipate a continuation of this theme.
Christians right now would do effectively to keep in mind that when the aspirations of religion and energy are blended, we could also be ripe for manipulation. No matter one’s settlement or disagreement with former President Trump’s insurance policies, for instance, it isn’t onerous to see that the promise of energy that Trump held out to Christians and others who had been feeling missed by the political machines turned a software of manipulation. As Ruddell factors out in her insightful essay on the teachings to be discovered from Dune about charismatic leaders, Trump mirrors Paul Atreides in that “he has been in a position to wrap himself within the fable material’ of a phase of our society… and generate outstanding devotion to himself personally, above and past his platform or celebration.” Different leaders who use faith for political functions try and do the identical. Once I was within the ex-soviet nation of Belarus in 2017, for instance, I noticed President Lukashenko (additionally known as “the final dictator of Europe“) make a present of attending the Easter companies at an Orthodox Church—a political calculation to attraction to believers and even nonbelievers who’re cultural adherents to the church. And so we see the temptation of political leaders (no matter their very own religion or lack thereof) to make use of individuals of religion for their very own political functions.
Mining Faith for What It’s Value
In Brian Herbert’s afterword, the youthful Herbert sheds mild on a few of his father’s spiritual experiences, starting together with his Irish Catholic aunts attempting “to power Catholicism on him.” Not surprisingly, the youthful Herbert associates these aunts with the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. However I feel Brian Herbert is correct to say that “the Dune universe is a religious melting pot . . . [of] Buddhism, Sufi Mysticism and different Islamic perception programs, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Hinduism.” Given his skepticism of human establishments, it’s doubtless that Frank Herbert would toss out spiritual establishments so far as attainable at the same time as he searches their crevices for any hints of non secular reality.
Herbert treats faith with extra real curiosity than we discover in Dune: Half Two. In an interview with Tim O’Reilly, Herbert said:
What I’m saying in my books boils all the way down to this: mine faith for what is sweet and keep away from what’s deleterious. Don’t condemn individuals who want it. Be very cautious when that want turns into fanatical.
Whereas Herbert is clearly cautious about “fanatical” faith, what he doesn’t say is whether or not he himself “wants” faith. However together with his suggestion that there’s good in faith that needs to be “mined,” Herbert leaves open the door for the potential for spiritual reality behind the political masks. Within the movie model, Chani acknowledges not solely that fanatical faith exists however reduces all faith to fanatical exercise. Villeneuve modifications her character to make her one of many Fremen who do not likely imagine within the faith of the desert individuals, attempting to spotlight Paul’s final standing of anti-hero. However in so doing, he obscures Chani’s non-fanatical model of the Fremen religion in Herbert’s novel.
Paul—maybe like his mom—believes himself to be partaking of a psychospiritual energy reasonably than a supernatural energy
Julia Checklist notes that “whereas [Dune] critique[s] the establishments of faith and manipulation of the trustworthy by spiritual leaders,” it does “additionally acknowledge the validity of some spiritual experiences, with sure types of mysticism involving the expertise of pantheistic unity as real.” As Paul takes up the mantle of human messiah and seemingly reduces faith to manipulation, the narrator’s voice turns into more and more crucial of Paul. When Paul tells his mom that the Fremen have a easy faith, Girl Jessica demurs: “Nothing about faith is straightforward.” And whereas Chani is proven as a skeptic of the Fremen faith within the movie, within the novel she leads Paul towards the spiritual beliefs the Fremen have gathered within the desert.
God of the Desert?
For individuals who have learn the novels, the combination of non secular and ecological questions is clear. Big sandworms and big sandstorms intimate the presence of preternatural powers past absolutely the management of people. Simply in case we missed the importance of those components in his story, Herbert provides us an appendix about ecology and an appendix about faith on the finish of Dune. And Villeneuve masterfully weaves collectively the ecological and political issues of the novels in a spellbinding and fantastically choreographed set of movies that nonetheless give quick shrift to the spiritual components.
So what does the desert need to do with religion? Whether or not we consider the “desert fathers and moms” of Christianity or of the Hindu and Buddhist ascetics who sought religious wholeness within the desert or of Muhammad’s “visions within the desert,” it’s no secret that the desert performs a task in lots of the religions Herbert studied. Herbert himself means that the desert is a pure atmosphere for faith:
Throughout my research of deserts, after all, and former research of faith, everyone knows that many religions started in a desert environment, so I made a decision to place the 2 collectively as a result of I don’t assume that anybody story ought to have anybody thread. I construct on a layer approach, and naturally placing in faith and spiritual concepts, you’ll be able to play one in opposition to the opposite.
On this assertion, taken from his 1969 interview with Professor Willis McNelly of CalState Fullerton, Herbert explicitly described the desert setting of Arrakis as a spiritual atmosphere. Enjoying spiritual concepts in opposition to concepts of the desert Arrakis supplies the seedbed of non secular thought that Herbert finds amenable to his novelistic functions.
Whereas numerous teams of individuals are mining the planet Arrakis for the spice melange, Herbert himself is mining the planet for what it would reveal about faith. Right here we see a little bit of a divergence within the movie. Significantly in Dune: Half Two, faith appears little greater than a Machiavellian smokescreen within the jostling for energy by numerous people and peoples. Even when individuals of religion are motivated by the will for freedom as an alternative of energy, that freedom can’t be achieved with out energy. And so whereas the Fremen have extra true believers than the opposite spiritual teams, Paul simply manipulates their religion for his personal functions.
With Paul’s prescience and seemingly religious understanding of the world created by Frank Herbert, we is likely to be excused for being shocked that Paul takes up the mantle of agnostic/atheist manipulator reasonably than turning into a believer himself. Julia Checklist aptly observes, nevertheless, the explanations for Paul’s lack of perception. Paul—maybe like his mom—believes himself to be partaking of a psychospiritual energy reasonably than a supernatural energy:
Paul Atreides of Dune, the Kwisatz Haderach created by the Bene Gesserit to see into the “unknown,” is endowed with prescient powers which can be the results of genetic engineering and the ingestion of psychotropic medicine reasonably than visions from a divine supply. He by no means involves imagine within the myths his Fremen followers construct round him, remaining cynically indifferent from their devotion. On the identical time, he doesn’t discourage his followers from believing in his divinity.
In each the movies and the novel, this type of political manipulation of religion and other people of religion is clearly evident. In Dune: Half Two, faith is nearly synonymous with the need to energy and so it is sensible that the characters would readily settle for any rationalization besides a spiritual one. However the novel doesn’t shut off the spiritual potentialities of one thing supernatural occurring even because it raises the psychological potentialities. In both case, nevertheless, we’re given an image of the universe as a spot that repeatedly illustrates the stench of corruption that haunts the wedding of political energy and faith.
The place Does This Go away Us?
Herbert doesn’t appear certain what to do concerning the inexplicable components that he describes in how the Bene Gesserit and Paul and others develop prescience, however the Jungian thought of a collective unconscious is on his thoughts as a possible psychological reply to the query. Herbert’s descriptions of the processes within the brains of Paul and Jessica and others actually opens to that risk. The psychological reply to the inexplicable could also be seen in Jung’s description of the anima not as a soul however as “a pure archetype that satisfactorily sums up all of the statements of the unconscious, of the primitive thoughts, of the historical past of language and faith.” Thus, the atavistic thoughts reasonably than the spiritual thoughts may very well be on the backside of the inexplicable in Herbert’s world.
In his second appendix, titled “The Faith of Dune,” Herbert describes an try and create one faith out of the main religions that when existed (together with Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and extra). The Orange Catholic Bible mixed and reinterpreted the essence of those religions. Many believers, nevertheless, rejected this strategy to faith, and “it quickly turned obvious that the traditional superstitions and beliefs had not been absorbed by the brand new ecumenism.” However the ruling agnostics rapidly discovered this ecumenical faith appropriate to their functions, and Herbert concludes with appendix with a related Bene Gesserit saying: “When faith and politics journey the identical cart, when that cart is pushed by a dwelling holy man (baraka), nothing can stand of their path.”
For Christians, the human cry for salvation finds a solution in a Messiah who’s each human and divine.
The Bene Gesserit are actually conscious of the facility in becoming a member of faith and politics. However this consciousness doesn’t essentially translate to an consciousness of the reality of any higher energy within the universe. For Herbert ends his third appendix, the “Report on Bene Gesserit Motives and Functions,” with a telling assertion concerning the Bene Gesserit. The occasions on Arrakis weren’t merely the results of their very own manipulations: “one is led to the inescapable conclusion that the inefficient Bene Gesserit habits on this affair was a product of a good increased plan of which they had been utterly unaware!” Herbert’s novel, in contrast to Villeneuve’s movies, leaves open the potential for supernatural powers at work in methods which can be hidden to those that see solely human-directed maneuvering at play.
In Dune, Herbert examines the pervasive philosophies of recent thinkers similar to Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung alongside the age-old concepts of non secular religion and rediscovered ecological secrets and techniques. What’s the relationship between the religious and the pure, between the human and the non-human, between the earth and the remainder of the universe, between the seen and the invisible?
Believers produce other solutions to supply: Relatively than seeing human society as solely postulated on a will to energy, faith postulates that there’s a energy higher than people to which we’re all topic. Relatively than seeing faith because the opium of the lots, the crutch on which ignorant individuals rely, faith could communicate reality to energy. Relatively than assuming that psychology replaces religious understandings of the world, the religious and the psychological could make clear one another with out displacing one another in any respect. And definitely, a divine Messiah provides a special set of potentialities than one who’s merely human. For Christians, the human cry for salvation finds a solution in a Messiah who’s each human and divine.
Whereas Villeneuve’s movies gesture towards a secularized worldview that has been chastened and hardened by the rise of jihadist actions made extra apparent since 9/11, the approaching of the prequel tv collection this fall could add meals for thought to the perennial questions raised by Frank Herbert’s novels. First titled Dune: The Sisterhood, the prequel has been renamed Dune: Prophecy, suggesting a broader scope of non secular thought than the Bene Gesserit sisterhood alone. Maybe the tv collection will have the ability to depict the complexity of Frank Herbert’s therapy of faith that has been missing within the movies we have now seen thus removed from Villeneuve. Who is aware of? We could even see a return of Villeneuve (who has no half within the Dune: Prophecy collection) that investigates the spiritual claims with extra rigor and a spotlight to Herbert’s spiritual imaginative and prescient.
