VANILLA SPICE - OR DUNE: PROPHECY, EPISODE 1
To enter the Dune Universe is to enter a very weird space indeed. Beginning in 1965 Frank Herbert wrote a total of six Dune novels and this strange, often bewildering series tracks the millennium-spanning impact of a superhuman messiah on humanity. The Dune saga is many things: a scifi landmark; an extrapolation of a post-technology society; a white savior story that subverts savior myths (but not whiteness); one of the finest examples of worldbuilding ever put to paper; a meditation on machine society, on free will and on the ontological telos of humanity; and (especially in the first novel) a thinly-“veiled” post-colonial fable about the liberation struggles of a ferocious ecologically-minded Bedouin-adjacent people on a desert planet whose coveted resource (the life-extending mind-altering spice) powers the entire Universe.
To quote Herbert himself; “(Dune) was to be a story exploring the myth of the Messiah. It was to produce another view of a human-occupied planet as an energy machine. It was to penetrate the interlocked workings of politics and economics. It was to be an examination of absolute prediction and its pitfalls. It was to have an awareness drug in it and tell what could happen through dependence on such a substance…It was to be an ecological novel…”
All these things and more, clad in the Islamicized stillsuit of MENA language, culture, and society. For all his deficiencies Herbert was committed to his MENA-inflected future to a degree no present-day media conglomerates can countenance. Despite what the Villenueve films and the recent HBO series would have you believe, there are no crusades in Dune — only jihads. And there are no messiahs either — only the Madhi.
As most know: the first novel of the series, Dune, has been adapted to film twice: by David Lynch (notoriously) and by Denis Villeneuve (famously). Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune were adapted to television by John Harrison and Greg Yaitanes, and now we have Dune: Prophecy, a series set in the Dune Universe, but the first that is not directly based on any of Frank Herbert’s original hexalogy1. The new series takes place ten thousand years before Dune and focuses on the early days of the Bene Gesserit, the jesuitical sisterhood whose witch-like powers and endless manipulation of Empire and bloodlines would (in ten thousand years’ time) produce the Kwisatz Haderach messiah that would capture humanity and, in the process, throw the sisterhood onto its truthsaying asses.
Like the rest of the non-special critic types, I’ve only watched the first episode of Dune: Prophecy and one hopes the show finds its footing sooner rather than later. Right now, as a show, Dune: Prophecy is just ok — but like, barely ok. It's a show that embodies its name way too literally. The problem with prophecy, after all, no matter what the genre, is that it’s all tell, no show. And Dune: Prophecy is all tell — on speed or spice. The first twenty minutes are a firehose of worldbuilding blather, and everyone seems to be doing voice-over even when they’re talking to each other, telling us what we should think or know about this person or that faction, and because information is being prioritized over drama, very little of it sticks — not the info or the drama. There’s intrigue within the sisterhood, a marriage pact between House Richese and the Emperor’s daughter, a conspiracy involving the planet Dune and its precious spice production and an I-thought-you-were-dead warrior with the un-Dune-esque name of Desmond Hart. (I mean, seriously — Desmond Hart? From the Universe whose naming conventions brought us Thufir Hawat, Duncan Idaho, Liat Kynes, Princess Irulan, Shadout Mapes, Feyd-Rautha, Gaius Helen Mohiam and Stilgar.)
Like Hart’s name, all these going-ons are hardly compelling — no matter how seriously they take themselves — and they take themselves very seriously indeed —and definitely not addictive. Sure, strong acting, better set designs but at the narrative level no Spice at all.
And at the cinematic visual level?
I wasn’t expecting Villeneuve optical awesomeness, but I guess I was expecting something — the Dune Universe by definition is exotic-decadent-sumptuous, but Dune: Prophecy’s production is too square by half, reminiscent of the bland aesthetic proficiencies of Apple+’s Foundation with a dash of Aes Sedai from The Wheel of Time thrown in. For all the verbiage expended in the name of worldbuilding there ain’t a lot of visual worldbuilding on the screen. The sisterhood training sequences are the opposite of mystery and prowess, seem designed more to warm up elderly employees at a Japanese corporation than to prepare young disciples for jedi-nun-hood. Hard to believe that the Emperor of the Known Universe is actually the Emperor of the Known Universe when he seems to hold open door office hours around the clock, with nary a guard or adjunct in sight, easier to meet than the local crossing guard. Not to mention the first episode’s predictable racial politics: two of the few women of color with speaking roles are brutally murdered by our white female protagonist and our white male antagonist respectively. Just, you know, to move the plot along and make a point about our protagonist’s character.
If, as Andrea Matranga jokes, there’s no such thing as history — only current events in period costume — same can be said about over-familiar futures like this one.
Whether Dune: Prophecy improves as a series, the next five episodes will show — but for it to be a good Dune series would require the showrunners to have metabolized the spice of the original six novels and broken through, at the awareness spectrum level, to what makes Dune Dune, something I’m not seeing in the opening episode.
So what, in brief, makes Dune Dune?
I've touched on this before, but it's simple, really: its fucking weirdness — a weirdness, however, that cannot be truly compassed without grasping the Dune Universe’s core lore.
Quick recap: Eleven thousand years before Dune — the novels or the movie — humanity finds itself enslaved by its own thinking machines and wages a Jihad that ends the enslavement and outlaws thinking machines forever. Billions die in that apocalypse and out of those ashes a new technophobic creed is born: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human.”
Frank Herbert’s Dune novels don’t talk a lot about the Butlerian Jihad — they don’t have to. The entire hexalogy literally hums with the long-term consequences of humanity’s ancient war against — and fanatical proscription of — thinking machines.
Dune: Prophecy takes the opposite route — it tells about the Jihad quite a bit, which it lamely calls the Machine War — but doesn’t seem to grasp the consequences of such a profound eschaton.
After all, when a galactic-level civilization decides to abandon advance technology, alternatives must be devised, lest said galactic civilization collapse into utter ruination. As a result of the Butlerian Jihad, humanity spends thousands of years literally warping itself to replace the proscribed thinking machines. Human computers, called mentats, are created — along with the Spacing Guild Navigators whose narcotic-induced prescience allows them to guide starships safely between the stars — and of course there is the Bene Gesserit, depicted in its infancy in Dune: Prophecy, a powerful sisterhood that seeks to safeguard (read: dominate) mankind through the creation of higher-order consciousness, a eugenic messiah. All these different superhuman agencies (to name a few) are fueled by a rare species-altering prescience-inducing substance, the spice, that can only be mined on a shockingly dangerous planet called Dune, whose Bedouin-ish natives ain’t happy with the extractive Empire that dominates it.
In short, Dune is the future story of humanity’s technophobic mutant elites scheming against each other in order to achieve a God level of mutancy.
Dune, in a word, is an intragalactic fucking freakshow.
This is what makes Dune so fascinating — not only the bizarre fact that it’s a scifi universe shaped from aggressively anti-scifi materials or that its central conceit, its One Ring, is an addictive psychotropic entheogenic awareness-spectrum narcotic — what makes Dune truly Dune is that its version of humanity inhabits a drug-induced evolutionary uncanny valley — a grotesquery both familiar and monstrous, a diegetic melange that keeps a human reader on their toes, even the ones who haven’t cottoned to the extent of the freakiness.
Or, as Mr. Beaver put in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe: “… when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet."2
Dune is a freakshow universe and requires a freakshow sensibility ala Jodorowsky and this is where the recent adaptions have fallen super square. Villeneuve’s duology reserves the freakery for the evil House Harkonnen and Dune: Prophecy has shown us no freakery at all.
If Dune: Prophecy wishes to be good Dune it must snort much more mutational spice than it did in the opening episode. The shows need to talk less about the Machine War and dramatize more of how humanity has deformed itself in its attempt to keep both the enslaving thinking machines at bay and their own evolutionary star rising.
Without spice as diegetic and inspirational drug — you can’t have real Dune.
You can have Vanilla Dune, but that’s not really the paracausal high any of us are looking for.
Dune: Prophecy cribbed parts of Frank Herbert’s son Brian Herbert’s very lowrent Dune novels but seems not to be based on any of these either.
Saw this awesome quote in conjunction with uncanny valley here: https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1406/was-cs-lewis-referencing-the-uncanny-valley
I loved this - thank you!