THE WHITE SAVIOR WORLDBUILDING OF VILLENEUVE'S DUNE - WHY AVATAR DOES IT BETTER
This is the second in a series of reflections on the recent Dune films, picking up right where the last piece left off.
Understand I’m not advocating for white savior worldbuilding. Por favor —representation is not approbation. What I am trying to do is show how this reactionary type of worldbuilding functions, which is important knowledge for anyone who wishes not to reproduce the nonsense or, better yet, who wishes to worldbuild in a more subversive decolonial manner.
…But if we’re going to talk about Villeneuve’s non-worldbuilding in Dune we should acknowledge the Shai-hulud in the middle of the room: the utter lack of Dune, the planet, in Dune the movie. I mean, sure, Dune the planet — also known as Arrakis — dominates the visuals of Villeneuve’s films and a lot of the Tell, but from a worldbuilding perspective the planet barely registers at all, which is really wild considering the importance of Dune the planet to the novel Dune.
In the novel, the planet Dune plays a powerful dynamic role, inflecting almost every aspect of the narrative — language, character, plot. One might almost say the planet Arrakis functions like a planetary-scale Fifth Business, being “neither Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain” but a change agent who plays an important role in the hero’s adventure. One of the prime reasons that Dune is a landmark of worldbuilding is because with the planet, Herbert delivered a masterclass in how to make world matter to story in an emphatic and indelible matter.
To refresh: Unlike Caladan or Giedi Prime — the first worlds we encounter in the novel, the baseline normal worlds — Dune is an impossibly harsh, impossibly dangerous desert world, a super-charged Middle Eastern frontier analog that boasts a mysterious resource without which civilization would halt (sound familiar?). Dune is so extreme a world, its climate so destructive, that the planet has successfully resisted full-scale colonization. The Imperial extractors hunker in the shielded city of Arakeen and venture into the planet’s vicious deserts only to mine spice or oppress the elusive native fremen, who alone possess the know-how, toughness, and spirit to co-exist with their savage world. Dune is the science-fiction version of the White Man’s Grave taken to eleven.
With Dune the planet Herbert created a sophisticated, highly plausible, cognitively estranged secondary world with its own culture, its own language, its own radical ecology and deep mysteries, a world that in its fullness seemed to evoke, and possess, all the complexities of our real world.
And yet for of all its intricacies, Dune, like the best secondary worlds, is organized around a few clear principles — and it is these that any adaptation must sell to the audience in order to succeed as Dune.
Dune kills — Whether it’s the punishing heat, scarcity of water, the hideous corialis storms that can strip a person down to his bones — or a machine down its constitutive parts — the giant sandworms that attack any source-repetitive motion, be it footfall, mechanic or shield — or the fremen who zealously protect the world and its secret from outsiders — Dune is the fatal environment par excellence, where no settler type can long survive.
Dune regresses — As soon as Imperials set foot outside their reservations and into Dune proper, they come under assault from the planet’s extremities. The shields and vehicles that are so important to Imperials are useless in the desert, will quickly bring death by massive worm. Only by shedding their technology and adapting to fremen society — regressing materially (and advancing spiritually) — can outsiders survive on Dune.
Dune is the fremen — The best secondary worlds activate their imagined spaces through the characters and factions that embody those spaces. The fremen with their ferocious indigenized MENA society, and their intergenerational war to overthrow their colonial masters are literally the children of Dune.
Dune is power (secular) — The planet is the sole source of the most valuable substance in the Known Universe: the spice. Without spice, civilization grinds to a halt. Dune is also the home of the fremen, who are the Known Universe’s most formidable fighters, a potential force that conveniently no one has yet leveraged correctly (cue white savior).
Dune is power (spiritual) — There are levels here. First, to survive the planet requires a different conscious — communal, self-sacrificing, spiritual — that Imperials are normally incapable of manifesting. Second, Dune has the spice, which quickly re-races those exposed to it, can expand the mind / spirit of those with the mind / spirit to survive its terrible trials. Third, Dune is holy to the fremen; Dune (as we are told) was created by God to test the faithful and has all the essential apotheotic ingredients for awakening the messianic Kwisatz Haderach1.
But Dune the novel doesn’t just have interesting worldbuilding (interesting rules), it teaches its rules to readers elegantly and efficiently, by channeling this education through the point of view of its protagonist Paul Atreides. Paul arrives on Dune the planet as an outsider, same as the average reader arrives to Dune the novel. Paul’s initiation into and mastery of the planet’s mysteries becomes the readers’.
This is a time-tested technique that could have easily brought Dune the planet to Dune the movie.
But Villeneuve seems to have little interest in teaching the rules of Arrakis to his audience — whether he just didn’t care or didn’t grasp their importance I cannot say. Sure, he makes a few half-hearted gestures — we are beaten over the head with expository Tells about the planet’s features; Paul listens to the Known Universe’s version of a Wikipedia entry, catches a few info-dumps from secondary characters like Dr. Kynes or Duncan, but nothing coheres or is followed through. The planet’s importance to the galactic economy stays murky; the rules concerning the danger of shields and technology are only honored when convenient. We hear at the start of the first film that the oppressors mine spice in the cooler hours, racing against the deadly sunlight, but that’s never pursued again.
To understand how Villeneuve could have done Dune the planet right, one only has to look at a film that more or less copied all of Dune the novel’s best beats, a film that is more or less Dune in jungle drag.
I’m talking, of course, about James Cameron’s Avatar.