Dune without the Middle East
Dennis Villeneuve’s sandy allegory ignores the cultural roots of Frank Herbert’s masterpiece
It is tempting to fall in love with Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune.
After all, there have been several attempts at bringing Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic to life, and of the most well-known two, one was a flop, and the other, spectacular as it would have been, was never greenlit.
It is tempting to celebrate this undertaking, if only for the simple fact that it was able to take off, soar, and, perhaps, land, albeit in a wildly different place than where the story does in the novels.
The trailer for Dune, as well as the movie itself, begins with Zendaya’s character, Chani, describing in a voice-over how her beautiful planet is ravaged by colonizers. It is made abundantly clear that this is the framework for how Villeneuve wishes to present Dune: as a sort of overarching, romantic commentary on (interstellar) colonialism, set 10,000 years into the future, delivered by a black actress. The colonialist take is further reinforced with Guatemalan actor Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto referring to the economic and military potential of the planet’s natives, the Fremen, as “desert power” with a glint in his eyes. Later in the film, we are introduced to Stilgar, the leader of the Fremen, played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem. Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson’s protagonist Lady Jessica has a Fremen staffer overseeing housekeeping operations in the palace, for lack of a better word, and this woman, Shadout Mapes, is played by British-Guyanese actress Golda Rosheuvel (whom you may recall from Bridgerton, where she played the Queen of England).
To be clear, the cast delivers the story with panache. The suspension of disbelief, so vital to universe-building, especially at this scale, is preserved beautifully. As far as acting goes, several performers deserve nominations, at the very least, starting with Rebecca Ferguson and Stellan Skarsgård.
The problem, if it can be referred to as such, lies in the cast being completely rooted in an Americanized idea of colonialism, because American education and culture is often dangerously myopic in its consideration of the world beyond the history of how America was built. The very concepts of colonization and slavery, for example, are almost exclusively tied to the Black American experience in popular Western imagination, because the ethnically indiscriminate slavery practices of the Roman and Ottoman Empires, among others, are simply not taught in North American schools to the same extent. As such, perhaps it isn’t surprising that Villeneuve opts to cast the colonized characters as predominantly of African, Carribean, and/or South American origins.
One of the perils of the popular term BIPOC, which stands for Black, Indigenous and People of Color, is the inherent suggestion that there is a monolithic umbrella under which all non-white people reside, defined in opposition to a monolithic whiteness. It is a binary proposition that ironically erases diversity on both sides. It also selfishly elevates Western colonialism after the discovery of America as the canonical colonialist period. As such, when subjects of representation, justice, reparations, or fairness are discussed, the acronym BIPOC represents an Americanized understanding of how the world must be divided and observed. This may lead some auteurs to consider characters conceived as Middle Eastern as interchangeable with any non-white actors when casting diversely.
When Dune was originally written in 1965, an American book about Arrakis, a desert planet where everyone was after the “spice” because it was the “most valuable substance in the known universe” and “a key component of interstellar navigation,” it wasn’t hard to recognize the thinly veiled criticism of American dependence on Middle Eastern oil. The parallels were strengthened by the iconography and cultural associations Frank Herbert imbued in the royal houses vying for control of the planet.
The noble and fair House Atreides, descended from ancient Greeks, were presented as the good guys. Known for their superior air force, with a red hawk as an emblem, which isn’t too far from the American repurposing of the Roman Eagle, the connection to the United States was glaringly obvious.
The cruel and brutal House Harkonnen, on the other hand, had been the previous caretakers of the planet. Led by Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, another thinly veiled reference, this time to Soviet Russia, their aspirations to reconquer Arrakis ran parallel to the Russian desire to expand into the Middle East. In fact, by introducing the two key factions with such overt symbolism, Frank Herbert all but pointed in the direction of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and given the region’s recent history, Afghanistan. It would be reasonable to consider the planet Arrakis as representative of the entire Middle East.
In an interview he gave in the 80s, Frank Herbert discussed the metaphors as they pertained to the desert planet, focusing on potable water (rather than the Spice) as a metaphor for oil due its scarcity.
Following this interview, he also explicitly mentioned that one of the key factions of the Dune universe, CHOAM (Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles), which oversaw all intergalactic trade as a private corporation under the control of the Padishah Emperor, was in fact, OPEC.
OPEC, in turn, is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and was founded by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in 1960, five years prior to the publication of Dune.
By excluding any meaningful mention or discussion of CHOAM from his version of Dune, Villeneuve axes the story’s most direct connection to the Middle East while brutally simplifying its politics. Perhaps this is to make Dune more palatable to a broader audience with shorter attention spans and a lack of historical context. Or perhaps, the political components and metaphors that ground Dune in the real, present day world, are expendable in Villeneuve’s mind.
When it becomes growingly evident that the movie is more or less divorced from the geopolitical critique of Frank Herbert and all the signifiers he imbued the story with, the casting becomes more problematic. Why are actors who play the natives of this colonized land, “diverse” and “native” strictly in the limited, contemporary American perception of colonialism? After all, the American outcry over Scarlett Johansson’s casting in Ghost in the Shell is all too fresh. It is also perhaps an unfortunate coincidence that an American film produced on the cusp of America’s military exit from Afghanistan should so blatantly erase the pivotal traces of the region from a story that was shaped around it.
So in this universe Frank Herbert created that is very much about the Middle East, that is rooted in the geopolitical, environmental, and religious conflicts of the region, that is brimming with Islamic references and Muslim culture, where oh where are the Middle Eastern actors in Dune?
Another moment particularly highlighted in the trailer, is Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides uttering “A crusade is coming,” which is comical considering that in the books, Frank Herbert refers to the incoming conflict as a Jihad. Crusades are about reclaiming the holy lands from Muslims. A Jihad is about converting people to Islam and killing all those who resist it. Although both are expansionary and conflict-driven, they are fundamentally different in ideology, goal, and execution. And saying Paul Atreides is about to embark upon a “crusade” doesn’t just whitewash the act. It shifts the cultural context and nuances of the story. Framing the conflict by using terminology that is more palatable for a Christian-centric audience, also absolves Paul of any possible villainy in the impending galaxy-wide conflict.
It is worth noting that Villeneuve preserves the Fremen language’s obvious Arabic roots, but given the complexity of inventing new languages in fiction, one wonders to what degree it was simply a matter of convenience to deign to let the desert people of Arrakis speak vaguely Arabic words.
What do you call something that has been rendered diverse by American standards of diversity but isn’t representative of the actual cultures, ethnicities, and concepts involved?
Villeneuve’s general disregard of Middle Eastern culture does not end with casting and narrative changes. It is omnipresent, embedded in every inch of his universe-building.
The Padishah Emperor Shaddam the 4th’s elite army, the Sardaukar, are bizarrely white and Nordic, despite the obvious cultural reference being the Ottoman Empire and its Janissary soldiers. They also arrive in dull-colored uninteresting spaceships and are clad in pristine white neoprene suits, a far cry from Herbert’s books that describe their traditional attire as gray or black, with gold trimming. Even the Harkonnen homeworld of Giedi Prime, which is intended to resemble an overly industrial Soviet Russia, gives Berghain vibes at its best. I would use the word vanilla, if it were interchangeable with concrete.
There is a pervasive lack of color and ornamentation throughout the film, which if you have ever seen a Persian rug, a Turkish bath, or a mosque, you would know is quite omnipresent in the Middle East. Not that Frank Herbert specifically talks about wall hangings, but the myriad of videogame adaptations and TV series that came in the past 40 years have at least made an attempt at introducing some aesthetic variety. While every director is certainly entitled to their aesthetic choices, Villeneuve’s commitment to neutral tones and largely minimalist set designs amplify his rejection of Middle Eastern culture.
Everything is doused in tones of what can only be described as shades of asphalt, a visual aesthetic unsurprising for Villeneuve who had previously traded Ridley Scott’s slick neon vistas in Blade Runner with fog and dust for Blade Runner: 2049. The checkered and bright-colored spaceships envisioned by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean Giraud Moebius, for their unfulfilled vision of Dune, are also traded with yet more shades of gunmetal gray and ash tones.
To be extremely clear, as a French-Turk who has never particularly felt national or ethnic allegiance to any country or group of peoples, I am not offended in the slightest. I do however believe that we need need to have a conversation about the selective American outrage when it comes to diversity and representation. Because if you are prepared to embrace Dune with is erasure of the Middle East today, you forego any and all future entitlement to racial or cultural outrage towards Hollywood.
As long as the audience is blissfully unaware of its geopolitical context and rampant erasure of several millenia of culture, politics, and symbolism, Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune is a wonder to behold.
