paul atreides: hero, villain, or secret third thing (annoying)

a 2une post

I wasn’t planning on Duneposting, but I finally saw the second film and enjoyed it a lot! More of a vibes movie than a thoughts movie to be sure, but the vibes—as the kids say—were immaculate. The fight sequences were terrific, there was a sufficient amount of Worm, and the pacing was much improved compared to the first film (though it did feel like some connective tissue was missing here and there). Every time one of the Bene Gesserit witches showed up in a gigantic hat, I simply hooted and hollered, and as for the princess Irulan’s increasingly dramatic Joan-of-Arc-but-make-it-face-fashion-only: it was camp, it was inspired, it was nearly drag. The plot wrestled ably—if not quite successfully—with the original story’s orientalism and white savior problems, and made a good effort to solve for the endless gravitational vortex that is Paul Atreides.

Dune’s big problem is and has always been Paul. Nerds argue endlessly whether he’s a hero or a villain; if you zoom out from the story and view it in the abstract, it’s pretty clear that he’s an overpowered Marty Sue-type hero who becomes a villain. This is a very cool concept…in the abstract. Unfortunately, stories happen in the particular, and in the particular, Paul simply doesn’t work. Dune 2 tries hard to emphasize other characters as much as possible—Chani, Paul’s Fremen girlfriend; Jessica, his mother; Irulan, the princess he ends up marrying; and Feyd Rautha, his dark other/rival. But that’s another way of saying that everyone and everything is about Paul, existing in orbit around him.

This could still have worked, I think, if Paul weren’t the protagonist: if he were Dune's object, rather than its main subject. As it is, the narrative tries to have it too many ways with his character: Paul makes an early stab at trying to get the Fremen to believe he’s their messiah, before spending most of the rest of his screen time desperately trying to avoid triggering the future in which he becomes the Fremen’s messiah and launches a holy war that kills millions of people in the galaxy. His eventual inability to escape his fate is meant to evoke classical Greek tragedy—“House Atreides” being a deliberate echo of the House of Atreus—but his story is missing a key element of Greek tragedy, without which it lacks the necessary dramatic irony. The heroes of Greek tragedy are tragic—and dramatically ironic—because they try so hard to exercise their free will and moral agency. Oedipus doesn’t hear the prophecy about his future, try to avoid it for a bit, and then say “oh well looks I have no choice but to kill my dad and marry my mom.” He fulfills his fate in the process of trying to escape it. Paul Atreides, on the other hand, is backed into a situation engineered by the Bene Gesserit and other forces. He eventually surrenders to his destiny, drinking the worm poison that will turn him into a god-monster. He can’t really choose otherwise, since all other possibilities have been foreclosed for him: his fate is unavoidable, and once he gives into it, he’s no longer really human, and can’t turn away from his path.

The characters who are actually put in the role of the tragic protagonists, and do experience the appropriate amount of dramatic irony, are the Bene Gesserit. They’ve been trying to arrange galactic events for centuries to bring about a god-monster-emperor they can control; finally, they’ve created him and turns out they can’t control him. Basically, they’re Dr. Frankenstein and Paul is their monster. At the risk of a Hot Take, I think Dune—Villeneuve’s Dune, anyway—may be a feminist fable trapped inside an impenetrable chassis of Dudes Rock. The women—all the women—are the only characters with real agency. The Bene Gesserit arranged the fall of the house of Atreides, since they can apparently influence the current emperor to do whatever they want; they’re the ones who have bred and selected either Paul or Feyd Rautha to succeed him. Actually, one of Dune part 2’s big world-building mistakes is that it suggests the empire is gender-egalitarian; Princess Irulan, a Bene Gesserit pupil, is told she’ll make a great empress. But if women can openly rule in their own right, then there was never a reason to create a controllable monster to marry Irulan; in fact, we never get much of an explanation as to why the Bene Gesserit have been manipulating events to produce Paul and Feyd Rautha at all.¹ Women don’t need to act as the power behind the throne when they can just literally be the throne, just like there’s no need for a man to be the protagonist when the women characters are the planners and instigators of all meaningful events.

The last few minutes of Dune 2 seem to be setting up Chani, Paul’s now-ex girlfriend, as the real hero of the whole story arc—we’ll see how the next movie goes, but I like this idea in theory, though it may be too little too late. Dune’s other big problem is that it leans toward the grimdark (or more properly, it’s a grimdark ancestor) which means that heroism is probably already foreclosed as an imaginative possibility. And without heroism as an option, Paul’s fulfillment of his murderous prophetic visions was always going to be the lesser of two evils, which undercuts its tragic depths. Grimdark stories often set up a not-great society against a terrible one, and murderous anti-heroes against their psychopathic arch-nemeses; Paul may be a villain and the Fremen violent religious fanatics, but Feyd Rautha and the Harkonnens are the villains—they’re basically just demons.² The scenes set on the Harkonnen planet are starkly black and white, with high camp fascist aesthetics (identical hairless paper-white soldiers goosestepping down the road, gladiatorial battles, random murders, cannibalistic concubines). Even the Harkonnen’s fireworks are sickly splooges of ink rather than bursts of light. The whole thing looked fantastic. I do not care if Paul and the Fremen jihad that whole planet.

We aren’t shown much of Dune’s broader universe, but what we see doesn’t exactly look nice or happy. At the risk of another Hot Take—space jihad: is it really that bad? The Fremen are at least fun and likeable (Javier Bardem, who plays Paul’s prime hypeman, is a delight). And life for the average Harkonnen citizen can’t be that great. Is it better to be stabbed to death by the Fremen or devoured by Feyd Rautha’s cannibal girlfriends? Let them fight dot gif, anyway. Chani can pick up the pieces when it’s all over. (I know, make a woman do the cleanup, right? and she doesn’t even get to be the protagonist).

1. I think there’s more of an explanation in the books but it’s been a while since I’ve read them and also I don’t care.

2. “But Paul finds out he’s half Harkonnen!” yes, Paul is only half as bad as the Harkonnens, i.e. he is better, the lesser of two evils.