Dune: Part Two — The Story of How to Be a Colonizer
Photo by Jeremy Cai on Unsplash
Denis Villeneuve's Dune series is based on the 1965 book by Frank Herbert of the same name. It's about a neo-feudal society that has regressed away from automation after a war against machines in the distant past called the Butlerian Jihad.
Human-powered computation is now a necessary component for every aspect of life, including, most importantly for this space opera, faster-than-light travel. A substance known as "spice" gives the Spacing Guild's almost machine-like Navigators temporal prescience so that they can do the calculations necessary to make FTL work, and it can only be found in the desert world of Arrakis.
Dune involves the royal houses of this feudal society as they attempt to wrest control of Arrakis from its lethal environment, the native population, and each other. Our main protagonist is Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), whose family is assigned stewardship of Arrakis by the Emperor, only for most of them to be betrayed and executed by the evil House Harkonnen. By the end of the first film, Paul Atreides and his mother, Lady Jessica of Atreides (Rebecca Ferguson), are forced into hiding in the desert amongst the native Fremen.
Dune: Part Two involves Paul's comeback, as he teams up with the Fremen to win what he has lost. Yet underneath this fairly traditional tale of a disgraced noble winning back his title, is a horrifying story about how to colonize others. This domination is done through violence, yes, but more importantly, the message of Dune is how colonizers convince the colonized to control themselves.
How colonizers control
Upon initially watching Dune: Part Two, one could be forgiven for thinking this is a modern Lawrence of Arabia (1962) where a white colonizer masters a native people's ways and then organizes them against their oppressors better than they can (referred to sometimes as the "Mighty Whitey” trope). This is what some have criticized the original Dune book for. As Noah Berlatsky wrote in The Escapist in 2019 about both David Lynch's 1984 movie and the original book more broadly:
“… in Dune, as in other Mighty Whitey stories, there’s a bit more going on. Paul’s whiteness makes him an object of worship for the Fremen. But his time with them also gives him access to his full prophetic abilities, ultimately allowing him to defeat the Emperor and become the effective ruler of the universe…
…Paul’s divinity and power comes from his ability to capitalize on the resources and pain of others. On the surface, Mighty Whitey characters are superior because of their whiteness. But dig a little deeper, and their powers are borrowed or, more accurately, stolen. They are godlike because they’ve appropriated the labor and wealth of others. Paul claims to be wracked with guilt because he sees a future in which he leads the Fremen in a path of bloody destruction across the universe. But really the guilt is for his present glory, built on blood and a deceit that the story won’t, and can’t, quite acknowledge.”
And yet, director Denis Villeneuve's retelling doesn't take that direction (at least not totally). Dune: Part Two isn't a decolonization story at all, despite what the initial first half of the film and its freedom-fighting antics might suggest. It's not even really a colonizer wish-fulfillment fantasy, as the original book most certainly was, but a film about how colonizers use ideology to conquer people.
This fact is shown most prominently via a mystical prophecy the Atreides family has used — specifically Paul's mother, Lady Jessica, and the forces she represents — to indoctrinate the native Fremen. Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit (a pseudo-religious order of all women who have the power to manipulate people with their voices).
They are the closest this series gets to true villains, and for a long time, they have been planting the idea amongst the Fremen that a stranger who fits the description of Paul will come to lead them as their mythical Mahdi ("the Fremen's savior") or Lisan al Gaib ("the One who will save Arrakis"). Multiple characters state over and over again that this prophecy is a fabrication being used to control the Fremen. As one character says: "If you want to control people, tell them a messiah will come, then they will wait for centuries."
Religion has been one of the primary tools of colonization. We don't even have to stray from our own world to understand this fact. It's a sentiment that should be familiar to anyone who has studied Christianity, whose recent history is that of imperial powers spreading this religion to others as a method of control. From the role of Christian missionaries in usurping the Kingdom of Hawaii to State Boarding Schools in Canada and the United States used to strip native people of their culture and language, Christianity did not spread naturally around the globe but was perpetuated by force. As written in the Emory Scholarly blog on Christianity's role in African colonization:
“Essentially Christianity was a guise by which Western governments justified the exploitation and conquest of African nations….Denouncing the religious practices of Africans as witchcraft and heathenism, European nations sought to convert, and then exploit the indigenous peoples of Africa.”
The use of religion in Dune is a prelude to conquest, and it's a bloodless conquest at that. The Bene Gesserit have refined their violence, moving away from swords and other direct weapons that they leave to the realm of men, and focusing instead on the spoken word. Their Voice, magic enhanced by spice (and consequently stolen from the people of Arrakis), has been weaponized to control the actions of anyone they choose. Resistors don't need to be killed by the Bene Gesserit—they merely need to be commanded to worship, as Chani (Zendaya) is, when she is forced via the power of Jessia's Voice to give Paul Atreides her tears to fulfill some arcane prophecy.
Yet, it's not just force alone that makes such indoctrination so insidious. Colonizers cannot be everywhere all the time unless you choose to let a version of them inside your mind, and that requires a far more subtle touch of persuasion and charity.
There is a very telling line halfway through Dune: Part Two, where Lady Jessica, who has now become a Reverend Mother for the Fremen, telegraphs to the viewer how she will sway the less dogmatic North, and it has everything to do with pinpointing vulnerable people in Fremen society. She says: "Convert the non-believers one by one. Start with the weaker ones. The vulnerable ones. The ones who fear us."
Courting vulnerable populations is one of the first things a rising group will do when it tries to gain power, and religion almost always plays a part in this. If we are being cynical, it is the reason why Christianity has so many orphanages and hospitals. In anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow's book The Dawn of Everything, they discussed how the legitimacy of many monarchs might be directly linked to claims of looking after the "weak." As they write:
“It is possible to detect something of this logic in almost all historically documented royal courts, which invariably attracted those considered freakish or detached. There seems to have been no region of the world, from China to the Andes, where courtly societies did not have such obviously distinctive individuals; and few monarchs who did not also claim to be the protectors of widows and orphans.”
First, as Reverend Mother Jessica of Atreides says, you go after the weak and vulnerable.
The colonizer's choice
Paul feels conflicted by his mother's machinations. For most of the film, he does not want to go to the more religious South because he feels he will be swept up in the messianic image that she has cultivated for him. The Fremen in the North are depicted as being more egalitarian than the feudalism of his world, and he wants to hang on to that image— what earlier, more racist text would have referred to as "going native."
Paul sees clearly that the entire mythology built around him is a lie. He knows that the mystical powers that he possesses are not divine but a predictive power combining genetic engineering (i.e., eugenics) and spices' unique temporal properties.
Yet this truth does not matter, even when it’s said out loud by him. When he tells a group of dogmatic Fremen, led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem), that he is neither a messiah nor interested in ruling them, that makes them believe he is "humble" and even more worthy of his role. Unlike past Mighty Whitey texts, it's the indoctrination around Paul, not anything unique about Paul himself, that makes him such a force to be reckoned with.
However, these forces are not ones Paul has much control over. His insurgency in the North ends catastrophically when his hit-and-run tactics push House Harkonnen to launch a strike against Fremen strongholds, killing thousands and forcing the entire population to migrate to the safer, more extremist South — the one outcome he wanted the least. He may be the mythologized head of this new messianic movement, but he isn't a God. He is not able to control the tides of history any more than anyone else can — he can merely ride them out.
In truth, the only thing he can decide in the film is whether to embrace the role of colonizer or let another noble take his place. Paul is oblivious to this fact, but we, as the viewers, know that the Bene Gesserit have been training another royal, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), a member of House Harkonnen, to take on Paul's role if he does not succeed in coming to power. They are always playing "games within games" and have no problem leaning on the Harkonnens — the previous stewards of Arrakis who almost succeeded in exterminating House Atreides — as long as they can be controlled.
It should be noted that the Harkonnens are a hyperviolent, imperial power. They are also subtextually coded to be White Supremacists.
There is one scene in a massive stadium where, at the center, Feyd-Rautha is killing people for his birthday, and the viewer is treated to throngs upon throngs of enraptured white people cheering on this man's brutality (it's not subtle). Feyd-Rautha is depicted as being the pinnacle of his people's white supremacist rage. He does not just kill men and women in anger but carves them up to consume, giving the parts he does not want to his cannibalistic harem.
For the Bene Gesserit, there is no difference between Feyd-Rautha and Paul Atreides, and as the movie progresses, we start to understand why. While Feyd-Rautha ruling the Empire would be truly awful, we come to understand that Paul will be no better.
He starts to bend under his messianic role, browbeating the Fremen into following him into battle and embracing his newly discovered Harkonnen roots to better take control of the imperial throne. "We must be Harkonnens," he tells his mother coldly. In seconds, any sympathy built up for him is erased.
Ultimately, he pushes the Fremen into a Holy War across the galaxy, distorting their somewhat egalitarian culture into a theocracy that gives them "freedom" from oppressors as long as they are willing to be tools for this white colonizer's bid for power.
An imperial conclusion
There is no good outcome in Dune, either in part one or two. It is a deeply cynical text in which Paul Atreides realizes that in order to "win," he has to fight fire with fire and out-colonize the colonizers. He declares himself emperor, taking the war of all-against-all on Arrakis and thrusting it onto the galaxy.
If there is one major criticism of these films, it's not that they are white saviorist texts—this latest outing is a thorough rejection of that perspective—but that they are texts that do not see a way past colonization. It is the air Paul Atreides breaths, and its dominance is seen as inevitable, even if its players shift ever so slightly. The Fremen were occupied, and now, under the orders of a new white overlord, they shall occupy the galaxy, but the Bene Gesserit and even the dominance of royal intrigue will not change (at least if the book Dune Messiah is any indication).
Denis Villeneuve has indicated that he is interested in continuing the story, and based on this movie's success, he most likely will get that chance.
The temptation of spectacle might push him to embrace the very Mighty Whitey trope he rejected, but maybe he will continue to toe the line and deconstruct Empire again. Perhaps we might even get a glimpse beyond it — only the spice can tell us for sure.