The below is to be read with the following caveats:
- I don’t like critics in general and I’m often far more judgmental of those who choose to talk about art than to make art themselves.
- Despite all of the below, I’m actually a big fan of making a logical argument for something to be in a work of art that actually isn’t intended by the artist. However, I feel that the critic absolutely fails to make that argument, in the process trying to make a bid for exclusivity in the work while claiming that others simply didn’t get it.
- Dune has SO MUCH ACTIVISM IN IT – and the movie adds greatly to this Terrible Purpose – it’s okay if it’s not about THIS!
Dune.
Arrakis.
Desert planet.
A fictional world so embedded in our culture that Microsoft Word’s spellcheck accepts it.
I think there’s a common misconception that we seek fandoms in which we see ourselves. That we’re drawn to Star Wars because we see ourselves as Rebels, and we’re drawn to Star Trek because we see ourselves as honourable, but adventure-bound explorers. A gay man drawn to Orphan Black or a loner artist who dresses in black and would totally kick ass if he was wronged and had to be avenged, being drawn to the Crow. I think it’s usually the other way around. We see what we WANT to be in our fandoms, and often-as-not adapt our narrative accordingly. We often see something that’s not there, and in obsessive fandom we bring and mould as much as we take and fit in. It’s inspirational, aspirational, but in our fandom, it’s generally fictional. Rarely are we seeing what the artist intended.
I know, I know – what the Hell is rob ranting about today?
Dune.
Arrakis…
DESERT PLANET!
Sierra Club put out an article (https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2024-1-spring/books/climate-fiction-and-dune-lost-adaptation) about how Denis Villeneuve had lost the ecological message of Dune in his new adaptation, and, with their platform of “protecting wild places and endangered species” it’s understandable why Sierra Club would focus on this. However, though Dune certainly is focused on ecology, and Frank Herbert, as a journalist certainly wrote articles about ecology and the use of it in global politics, his single sentence dedication hardly “establish[es] his environmental intent”. The author’s thoughts that Dune “examines what happens when humans try to bend nature to their will and, as Herbert wrote in his dedication, predicts the ramifications of abusing a land for its resources”, that it references “climate change” or that adaptations of Dune are missing the point if they don’t have a blatant, Avatar-esque activist bent, come across as being written by someone who barely (or perhaps didn’t) actually read that dedication, much less put forth the effort to actually read the “labyrinthine plot” of the whole “nearly 900-page tome”, described by the author as an “Olympian feat”.
To the people whose labors go beyond ideas into the realm of “real materials” – to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration.
Frank Herbert – dedication of Dune, 1965
Dune certainly takes place with a focus on the ecology of Dune. The Fremen must Live in careful balance with Arrakis, the Harkonnen and later Atreides interlopers Live in conflict with it, carving out hard-won technologically-hewn safe spaces for themselves. We could talk about colonialism and problematic Middle-Eastern portrayals and how they’ve been updated – but every element of the story takes into account water, and spice, just as it takes politics and religion and heightened mental awareness. Dune’s not on the side of Sierra Club. Terraforming is not preservation.
Dune is not a message of leaving wild spaces untouched.
The ecology of Dune is an inspiration, a backdrop, and a McGuffin rolled into one great sandy ball, but it’s not about global warming or pollution or the exhaustion of resources as the writer states. Villeneuve may have “connected his film to climate change, saying that the book is ‘a prediction of what will happen’” but that just makes it seem that Denis is more on the same page with Sierra Club than with Frank Herbert.
Sierra Club, and the “environmental movement” is eager to claim Dune for themselves, in their fandom, but they don’t read deeper than “save water” and “the spice is oil”. Humans have always fought for resources. It doesn’t have to be a greater metaphor. Indeed, in this case I think though the ecology of Dune is a PRESENCE, practically a CHARACTER in the book (just as it is in the movie), there’s not a greater ecological MESSAGE that Denis “struggled” and failed to bring to screen. Awareness isn’t a call to action. It’s the simplest sci-fi world-building premise: “what if”?
In this case, “what if there was no water in the world” – and… GO. Though hopefully one can learn about scarcity and respect for one’s environment through the lens of sci-fi, I don’t know that rebranding Dune as “cli-fi” comes across as anything other than a grab of exclusivity.
I guess I should probably stop introducing “Baliset” as a song about “Frank Herbert’s ecological sci-fi masterpiece”, no matter how it rolls off the tongue, and simply, in an action of spite against a silly webzine article that states “that deserts are rarely the setting for so-called environmental movies”, I need to do a couple of songs about George Miller’s ecological sci-fi masterpiece, Mad Max! A world legitimately dealing with the aftermath of human ecocide and oil scarcity, in the desert, unafraid of the beauty of the folly of man.
But I know I’m simply trying to see myself in movies about a guy with a fast car in post-Apocalyptic Australia with absolutely fantastic hair.
**armour-plates my Saturn to cosplay as a V8 Interceptor**
THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY ROB TALK.