I have written about Denis Villeneuve for some years now, remarking that no other director is given so much money to waste on beautiful spectacles. This might do us honor. Villeneuve is the favored artist of the digital/AI era (Blade Runner 2049 could be a computer game) and yet he cannot make his studios a profit on his blockbusters. Everyone knows his movies are better than Marvel, but they somehow fail to win over enough of the audience, even with the full support of major studio advertising and devoted fans on social media.

I’ve tried to explain this problem in my review of Villeneuve’s first Dune movie (2021), in comparison with David Lynch’s 1984 version. Dune: Part Two exacerbates the problems I remarked on in the first movie: Villeneuve set out to save Frank Herbert’s story from his fans. Herbert was an atheist who dabbled in religion for the purpose of dispelling its power, doing the work of scientific materialism in prose, but perhaps also in order to use that power for secular purposes. Yet his novel shows much better than the movie the corruption to which rationalist institutions that control human nature are vulnerable. Since the nineteenth century, atheist interest in religion’s power has been fashionable, and it’s nowhere as obvious as in Nietzsche’s beautiful writings, which seem to have had an enormous influence on artists, including Herbert. Herbert wrote for adults who share his conflicted liberalism, but his fans are almost invariably spirited young men who have no use for atheist propaganda and instead want a hero to believe in. Like Herbert, Villeneuve seems to be looking forward to a third movie that completely betrays them where Paul turns tyrant. It’s an interesting use of “tough love” for the soft, therapeutic crowd.

Villeneuve’s solution to the problem was to abandon the plausibility of the motives and action (which Lynch’s flawed Dune nonetheless provided), which would have extolled the virtues of the aristocratic Paul Atreides and led us to cheer his every success on the path to imperial grandeur. Instead, Dune was all about the mood of the twenty-first-century American boy, which is dark and despondent. The story does lend itself to such treatment inasmuch as Paul loses his father, Duke Leto, and is left with his mother, Lady Jessica—what’s more modern than fatherlessness? This seems to have guided the casting of Timothée Chalamet, who looks weak and vacillating even by current Hollywood standards, in a role that called for someone even more imposing than Prince Hal.

Fundamentalism

Dune: Part Two creates much more obvious difficulties, because now the young Paul must earn the trust of desert warriors, as opposed to the college liberals Chalamet resembles, and lead them into a battle where the alternative to victory is extermination. We need not get into the entire drama in the American media, colleges, and elites about Palestine, and I’d rather not hear what actors can say on social media about serious matters. But Villeneuve’s artistic intentions are at odds with the storytelling of Dune, which is structured as the transformation of necessity (the Fremen way of life in the desert, where water is so precious that the dead are drained of theirs before burial and weeping is the rarest thing) into political virtue (generalship). Thus, Paul’s becoming a man is the same thing as his becoming a leader of men, and eventually Emperor.

Villeneuve’s solution is to separate the Fremen into two types, departing from Herbert’s story. One type is epitomized by Paul’s lover Chani, apparently a college liberal of the twenty-first century, i.e. a skeptical atheist and feminist. These Northern Fremen are closer to the cities, less completely under the empire of the desert, and they are destroyed by the Harkonnen, Paul and the Fremen’s enemies. This forces everyone to live in the deep desert and therefore into the world of fundamentalism. It’s striking that this added complication to the story simply rehearses the history of theologico-political disputes among American Protestants in the twentieth century, especially the collapse of the Main Line churches and the rise of evangelicals.

Once in the South, Paul becomes a prophet and installs a new kind of rule among the desert warriors, overcoming their tribal pettiness with a vision of control of the planet, that is, political freedom. This project transforms everyone, starting with his mother, Lady Jessica, who turns from a whimpering delicate thing into a mystical priestess of a religious cult that is as powerful as it is, she thinks, based on lies. Drugs and superpowers are involved which seems to be the liberal reduction of prophecy to chemistry. Religion in the hands of liberal atheists somehow becomes deadly precisely because it is despised.

Paul becomes a Fremen when he rides the sandworm. This was Herbert’s choice of an image of the irrational, the Freudian id, itself the taming of Nietzsche’s pointing to the chaotic violence at the origin of all life—since each organism is much hungrier than it is knowledgeable—and raising it to the principle that cruel strife is the fundamental phenomenon, the character of existence. Sandworms are attracted by rhythm, i.e. rationality, and destroy everything to which they are attracted. Yet they are the source of life, in a sense, because they make the psychotropic “spice” that gives people on Dune power, and they are involved in the religion practiced exclusively by priestesses like Paul’s mother, which leads to understanding piety as the ecstasy of death.

This religion is the core of the doctrine of war that Paul expounds and it is why both Herbert and Villeneuve fail to persuade their fans to join a peaceable atheism. Herbert turned to the propaganda of science to biology, and Villeneuve turned to beautiful cinematography and a mood of fatedness in order to take control of the story they’re telling. Invariably, they fail, because everyone attracted by the story notices that in Dune, to choose life is to choose war. They are prompted to make that choice by their very dissatisfaction with a liberalism that is inimical to manliness and which preaches a sterile feminism instead.

Heroism

If all of this psychological complexity were not bad enough for the movie, there is the simple moral reality of the divide between Atreides and Harkonnen to doom Villeneuve. The Atreides are beautiful and noble, they are natural leaders with a capacity to sacrifice for their people and a vision of a just world that leads them to rise above anything petty and thus inspire the loyalty of all who are not irredeemably corrupt. They are statues of ancient heroes come to life. If beauty were power, they would win. The Harkonnen are futuristic, trans-humanist technological beasts given to every cruelty and depravity, who make a hell of everything they conquer, and are therefore as terrifying as they are repugnant. But they are also very clever, even capable of subtlety, of every deception. Does it surprise then that Paul’s war on the Harkonnen is what the audience loves, to the point that they’re willing to put up with all of the liberal nonsense?

Dune is a story of heaven and hell. The Empire will either be run by Harkonnen or by Atreides, depending on which controls the planet Dune. In short, the Fremen Jihad through the universe is the moral thing to do. The only way out of the exploitation liberals fear is a religious revival! The manliness and obedience bred of hardship prove worthier than the sophisticated decadence of the city; a prophet in the desert proves more prudent than the administrators of technology. Paul puts the atheists to the sword in a chorus of approval and even rehearses the great American victory in WWII by using atomic weaponry. Had this been done with a bit of Lynch’s earnestness in his 1984 adaptation of the story, the movie would have been at least twice as popular and would have inspired artists, given the glamour of victory.

Perhaps the problem is that liberals in our time no longer ask the question concerning our foundations in full seriousness. The name Atreides is the name Homer gives to Agamemnon, who led the Achaeans to sack Troy, and whose subsequent tragedy we read in Aeschylus’s trilogy. Dune somehow mixes these two stories, the war of the end of heroism and the fall of a house that rules by divine right (Agamemnon bears the scepter of Zeus), but it seems to be mere decadence, i.e. a reference offered by a cultured person, not any reflection on what this might mean or what the origin of law, politics, and poetry is. Maybe a commitment to futurism and progress weakens the understanding of our artists, some of whom have heard of our tradition and others not, but all of whom seem too frail to confront the fundamental problems for themselves and for our benefit.

Villeneuve ends Dune: Part Two with another moralistic change to Herbert’s story, turning Paul’s lover Chani into a single childless female who dissents from Paul’s all too male victory and leaves, alone, riding into the desert on a sandworm. This surely is a progressive updating of Herbert’s own conclusion, where the women, wiser than in the movie, are also less revolutionary: “History will call us wives” is the somewhat ironic statement. The movie’s unhappy conclusion, however, completes Villeneuve’s sociological picture of our America at the cost of advancing the liberal propaganda effort to replace male protagonists with females. This moral unseriousness is typical of our artists. But it also shows an artistic weakness in Villeneuve which was visible in his pro-life feminist movie Arrival. He lacks the intellectual courage to follow his guesses about what’s wrong with our entertainment all the way to tragedy.

He has guessed that female is somehow deeper than male in our metaphysical dyad, as private goes deeper than public and the things of which we speak are more important than our speeches about them. But neither his preferred liberal audience nor his actual audience of men (the audience skewed 60-40 male, the opposite of college, but failed to attract boys) have helped him see his way to a solution to his storytelling problem. He is crippled, therefore, as an artist, replicating the American divide rather than understanding or overcoming it.