Dune, Part Two was brilliant. I've read somewhere that Denis Villeneuve dislikes dialogue in films and prefers to 'stick to the image' of visual storytelling. This iteration of Dune has certain scenes -- not to mention the musical score -- that stick to you and linger in the imagination long after watching. It's perhaps no surprise that, with respect to our cultural myth-making right now, Dune, a story about many things but perhaps most importantly for us an ecological one, is so prevalent. Despite what we think of Dune: Messiah (it has many critics), Herbert seemed to be moved, like Jung in his Red Book, to tell a story about the deconstruction of the hero. Charismatic figures are dangerous, yes, but the implicit statement here is also that religious imagination, the blue flame of the imaginal - like the blue of the Fremen's eyes - is never to be underestimated, and is never something that anyone (not even the Bene Gesserit) can presume to have ultimate control over.
Dune does not have something as literal as an ecological 'message,' rather it is an irruption of what Bruce Clarke in his book Gaian Systems calls the planetary imaginary. The most important character in Dune is Dune itself, Arrakis. Dune is a mirror for our own Gaian reality. This character is an ecological, singular-yet-plural, ‘super-organism.’ Dune’s realism is a Gaian realism: it is comprehended in the relationality of worm and world, the Maker and its people in relation.
And again perhaps it is no surprise that the 'planetary imaginary’ and ecological thinking in the story is inextricably linked with a new mutation of time and prescience. The past and the future are revealed to be a marvelously rhizomic, shifting interrelationship. The world is relational. Time is relational. This is where the future mutation - the integral mutation - draws its power. Desert power is Gaian veracity. Desert power is time freedom.
What I’m Reading
I’ve gotten on a Frank Herbert kick again and picked up Children of Dune where I left off many years ago now. I’d also highly recommend The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune From Cult Novels to Visionary Scifi Movies by Ryan Britt for an entertaining and historical overview of the novel and its fascinating impact on cultural imagination.
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