THE FAILED WORLDBUILDING OF VILLENEUVE'S DUNE
I’ve been meaning to write about worldbuilding since I started this substack, and here finally is something on the worldbuilding in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune 1 and 2. If you ain’t watched the films or read Frank Herbert’s novel, please be warned: spoilers ahead.
Each year I teach a worldbuilding class — it’s a subject I’ve been obsessed with nearly all my life. Whether it’s because of the material or my students in general, the class tends to attract highly motivated, highly engaged students (to say the least) and our conversations about worldbuilding often continue long after the end of the course.
Recently a number of my former students have emailed me about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune I and II, wanting to hear how I rate the movies’ worldbuilding. It’s a logical ask. Frank Herbert’s Dune, after all, is one of the most influential SF novels ever written and also one of the finest examples of a fully-realized secondary world in any genre, eclipsed only by Lord of the Rings.
Sara Gwenllian-Jones describes worldbuilding best in her essay, “Virtual Reality and Cult Television”: In the fantastic genres of science-fiction, fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction, elaborate constructions of emphatically alternate realities are central narrative devices, meticulously imagined and described. In literature, the fantastic cosmologies of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hain universe, Gene Wolfe’s Urth, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth are not merely exotic backdrops to linear narrative events but vivid and dense semantic domains that saturate character, themes, action, and plot. In addition to furnishing atmosphere and the spatial dimensions that support the narrative, they also have dynamic functions, shaping characters’ experiences, inflecting plotlines, and supporting intricate networks of cross-connections through which narrative events resonate.
Worldbuilding is a vital component to most genre texts, whether we’re talking Game of Thrones or Marvel movies or Poldark — but in Dune (as in The Lord of the Rings) worldbuilding is the central character. The importance of worldbuilding to the success of these novels cannot be over-stated; the very magnificence of their secondary worlds, the genre-making inventiveness, is what made LOTR and Dune into the ur-texts of worldbuilding in the first place; they set the spice-mithril standard, and together these books have inspired imitators without number. Chances are if you’re doing serious worldbuilding you’re working to a certain degree with the tools that Tolkien and Herbert helped create.
Unlike LOTR, Dune’s worldbuilding is very baroque, simultaneously recognizable and intensely strange and estranging. This is not your abuela’s SF. This is a science fiction text without a trace of techno-fetishism or any of the usual artifacts of the genre (Admiral Adama would have loved Dune). Spaceships appear but only obliquely, and there are no fighter ships or space battles of any kind. Laser guns exist but are almost never used because they cause nuclear explosions when they intersect with the ubiquitous personal shields.
Yes, you read that right: in Dune when lasers hit shields, they trigger localized nuclear explosions, killing shooter and shot and everyone else in the vicinity.
Other similar wildnesses abound: a neomedieval society that is more MENA than Western, where Machiavellian schemes clamor alongside a truly conscious-blowing drug (that also happens to be a strategic resource) and a millennia-spanning witch-run project to breed a messiah. And we ain’t even talked about the Neo-Bedouin fremen with their spice orgies and worm-riding and their dreams of a deliverer, a Madhi, (a false narrative that was introjected into their society by the Bene Gesserit thousands of years earlier in preparation for the coming of their Kwisatz Haderach).
If you’ve read Dune, you know the novel is a lot of things, but beginner mode it is not. Dune is a fucking lot and all this wild-ass worldbuilding is why it has a reputation among film types for being challenging (or near impossible) to adapt. But that hasn't stopped folks from trying.
Herbert’s Dune has been adapted to screen before — most famously by David Lynch and again for TV by the SYFY channel. Both versions have their charms, but neither attempt was very successful — as a movie, tv series, or as Dune. For a Dune film to be both Dune and a bad-ass movie, the adapters must undergo their own version of the spice agony and figure out how to convert the book into a medium that doesn’t have the capacious worldbuilding affordances of a novel. (The adapters also have to figure out how to externalize the novel’s intense and subtle interiority — in Dune a lot of the drama happens inside people’s heads — but that’s the topic for another essay.)
Which brings us to Villeneuve’s Dune. This latest adaptation might be an overwhelming cinematic spectacle, the work of a directorial genius — but it’s not a particularly good Dune for the very reasons I listed above:
— it neither worldbuilds very well, fails to capture the primary features and conflicts and weirdness of the storyworld
— nor does it really figure out how to dramatize Paul’s inner struggle against his messianic destiny in a satisfying fashion.
Now please understand — I’m not writing a review of Dune or arguing about the overall merit of Villeneuve’s Dune. It’s clear that Villeneuve’s Dune has been resoundingly successful with audiences and critics alike — even as I write these words a third movie has been announced. After all, Dune the movie had a lot going for it — an amazing production team, a supremely talented director, an over-the-top soundtrack, and a cast with rizz like you wouldn’t believe: Timothy Chalomet, Zendaya, Javier Bardem, Francis Pugh, Christopher Walken, Anya Taylor-Joy. Dune also seems to have had the zeitgeist on its side.
What Villeneuve’s Dune doesn’t have, however, is what it needed the most if it wanted to be a good Dune movie. In fact, by looking at the worldbuilding in Dune we can see how another Dune adaptation might do Herbert’s towering creation right. At the very least I hope this discussion might be instructive for anyone interested more generally in worldbuilding.
2
To understand Dune we have to understand that Dune’s futuristic storyworld is defined by three interrelated novum. (Two of which I will discuss here.)
The first novum is a historical event called the Butlerian Jihad. The Butlerian Jihad occurs thousands of years before the action of Dune proper and is never fully described, and yet the Jihad’s influence on Dune is inescapable. The entire reason the Known Universe of Dune looks and acts the way it does springs from the violent changes produced by the Butlerian Jihad.
You see, once upon a time, long ago, human beings in the course of spreading themselves across the galaxy became too dependent on machines. (Stop me if you heard this one before.) Or, as the novel puts it: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
The nature of the enslavement is never explained but it must have been horrible as fuck because not only did human beings eventually revolt against the thinking machines and destroy all of them but the traumatized civilization that emerged from the Butlerian Jihad is one that absolutely forbids computers of any kind — or as the novel admonishes: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
In Dune this prohibition against thinking machines is nearly absolute. Only two worlds in the Dune universe (I think) continue to fuck around with “dangerous” technology but everyone else avoids thinking machines like their future depends on it. So absolute is the ban that no main character in the first three novels of the series ever conceives of contravening it.
Had the Butlerian Jihad struck a Victorian Era society, that might have been one thing — but the Jihad engulfed a highly advanced galactic civilization. Imagine what would happen if we suddenly destroyed all our computers — now imagine what that purging would do to a galactic-level society. In the ensuing apocalypse and the regression that followed, millions died, whole worlds perished, and galactic civilization nearly unraveled. Clearly, certain kinds of non-thinking machines survived the apocalypse — personal shields and las-guns and spaceships, for example — but due to the general bias against tech the societies of the Known Universe look more neo-medieval than science fictiony.
As you might imagine, in the wake of the Butlerian Jihad, work-arounds had to be developed in order to keep the Galactic Civilization from completely collapsing. The most obvious answer (for a SF text) was to develop special types of humans whose abilities would compensate for what was lost or forbidden. Like the Mentats with their impossible cognitive abilities. Like the Bene Gesserit witches with their uncanny mind-body conditioning and semi-precognitive abilities.
Like the Navigators, the one group that Villeneuve’s movie almost entirely elides.
In the Dune universe spaceships are capable of jumping space instantaneously between worlds. Problem is it takes an enormous amount of computing to accomplish these jumps. After the Butlerian Jihad, navigators are developed to replace the jump computers — but even at their best they are not capable of folding space safely or reliably. The mathematical complexity is beyond what even a specialized human mind can comprehend.
So things were looking bad for the Galactic Empire…until the spice was discovered on the desert planet Arrakis (aka Dune).
Spice is the Dune Universe’s second novum.
The spice is many things: it's a precious hard-to-harvest strategic commodity; it is a fuel that the Galactic Empire literally runs on (its starships cannot jump without spiced-out navigators); it is an addictive geriatric drug that extends life; and it is, more significantly of all, an awareness spectrum narcotic that enhances consciousness to superhuman levels. Spice alters the power balance of the Known Universe — is like the Force in a bottle — but a strange version of the Force. Through spice consumption the Bene Gesserit sisters gain near-supernatural powers (including the ability to communicate with all female ancestors) while the Spacing Guild uses extreme spice exposure to “evolve” Navigators whose precognitive powers allows them to safely and reliably navigate jumps.
The spice is the answer to the problem that the Butlerian Jihad creates when it takes out the thinking machines.
The spice “saves” Galactic civilization, but what it saves is a stagnant order without much room for change or advancement. A precarious order that staggers on because of a single resource.
In the Dune Universe everything depends on spice. Everything depends on the planet Arrakis.
He who controls the spice controls the universe (to quote the Lynch adaptation).
Power over spice is power over all (to quote Villeneuve’s).
Now, the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood with their infinity of minds takes a look at this precarious moribund state of affairs and decides — as power-hungry secret societies often do in speculative texts — to create a superhuman whose precognitive powers will transcend all these limitations, a nigh-omniscient superhuman who will “guide” humanity to the next stage of its maturity: the messianic Kwisatz Haderach: a being who would possess all the powers of a mentat, a Bene Gessirit Reverend mother, and a Guild Navigator combined. And through the Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit would seize the future…forever.
3
In the novel, Dune’s first two great novums — the ban against machines and the essentiality of spice — are omnipresent and naturalized. They are the bloodstream of the text in ways that defy easy dis-assembly or recapitulation.
This is the type of worldbuilding you can finesse in a book easily, but that is harder to render in a film.
Given that Hollywood films are ruthlessly time-constrained, I’m not surprised that Villeneuve did little with the first novum of the Butlerian Jihad and its long shadow. Easy enough to make the ban against thinking and complex machines a background fact without a lot of explication, which is more or less what Villeneuve does. We see the Dune staple of shields repelling fast projectiles and permitting slow ones. We see knives everywhere, but little by way of firearms. (One of the problems of the planet Arrakis is that shields attract the great worms, which is why we never see the fremen using them.)
Still, one could easily imagine an early scene where representatives from the one world that flouts the ban on complex machines, Ix, offer Duke Leto certain devices to help him in his imminent war with the Harkonnens, an offer the Duke violently rejects, much to his son’s confusion. Or to borrow a page from Game of Thrones (which is fair considering how many pages Martin borrowed from others), an early scene where the Duke, with Paul in attendance, sits in judgement of someone condemned for trading in illegal machines. A follow-up conversation between Leto, Paul, and Jessica could have deepened these characters and been a useful education for Paul — a good hard look at the ossification that he will soon be challenged to shatter utterly. (A similar conversation with Paul and his mentors, where Paul doesn’t understand why his father has to go to Arrakis, could also fortify the hide-bounded-ness of this choking-on-its-own protocol society, and Paul’s incipient resistance to it.)
While I would have preferred some overt sign of the first novum, the truth is the whole Butlerian Jihad angle could be sidelined, and Dune would still be Dune. But what no Dune adaption can fail to dramatize is the essentiality of the spice — not without compromising itself catastrophically. Dune — the book, its secondary world, its plot — is the spice. Dune at a narrative level is addicted to spice — without enough spice the whole affair will suffer total spice withdrawal.
This is where Villeneuve’s worldbuilding in Dune fails, and where Dune the film comes undone.
