Dune Part 2: wow, that Paul is a bad dude
Where the hero literally says ‘We’re the bad guys now’ and people do not see him as any less heroic. Superb movie, though.
Superdupermega Spoilers from this point forward. That’s more of a warning than those Harkonnen soldiers got.
If Dune Part 1 was about the fall of the House Atreides, Dune Part 2 is not about its revival, but about the corruption of its remains. The movie is not exactly subtle about this, but as a society it’s hard for us to see a pretty white boy with affluenza and not go ‘oh, look at the tragic things that befell him, I’m sure his genocide is justified’. So I’m not going to review the movie much beyond saying it is great and lovingly crafted with great attention to detail. I’m not even going to draw too many comparisons to the books, because there are enough substantial deviations from it in both plot and background to make the film its own thing — even if the book’s shadow occasionally looms over a weird plot point. But no, instead I’m going to make my little analysis about the many, many ways the audience is told how manipulative and dismissive the remaining Atreides are towards the Fremen and how at the end Paul renounces everything his father stood for. Yay.
Bring out yer dead
One of the first images we see in Dune Part 2 is a pile of corpses being incinerated by Harkonnen soldiers. It is meant to show the horror of their regime and the callousness with which they treat life, and is contrasted with the way the Fremen treat the dead two scenes later. While they are not at all merciful towards the defeated Harkonnen soldiers, the Fremen strip and drain each corpse and give them a burial in a worm’s mouth. The Fremen’s own dead, we are shown later, are ritualistically drained, their water added to the huge amount they have collected over the centuries in the hopes of transforming Dune into a green paradise. A far cry from throwing everybody on a pile and burning them.
At the end of the movie, after massacring the Imperial and Harkonnen forces using nuclear weapons (uhm, bad) and using the sacred and venerated sandworms as warbeasts (at the very least irreverent), we are shown once again what the Fremen do with the dead: they throw them on a pile and incinerate them, the image nigh identical to the opening shot with the Harkonnen.
But maybe that was an accident? Maybe Paul and Jessica had noble intentions but were corrupted by the path they were forced upon? Ha, fuck no, those two deliberatly chose their path and schemed their way to the top. Paul may have the occasional touch of regret, but it never truly manifests.
Plans, tricks and atomics
The movie makes it very clear how calculated the Atreides takeover of the Fremen is. As they are first led to Siege Tabr, they notice that beneath all the hostility and distrust, there are also the seeds of a Bene Gesserit prophecy. Next scene: Paul and Jessica plan their takeover during lunch, saying quite literally ‘We have to convert the non-believers if we want this to work’, those non-believers personified by sweet, mistrustful Chani. That she is eventually hoodwinked by Paul’s baby blues is not truly her failing, since both he and his mother are both sociopaths trained in manipulation. But more on that later. Jessica also reminds Paul that his father didn’t believe in revenge, but Paul wants to be top dog and top dogs only believe in the law of the jungle.
The scenes after formulating their ‘convert the non-believer’ plan(‘Convert them?’ — ‘To radioactive vapor!’) are Jessica taking the water of life and ‘miraculously’ surviving. During the rite, Paul is outside with the others, collecting information on the power relations between the different groups, and on the non-believers’ beliefs. Those are basically ‘By the Fremen, for the Fremen’. When Jessica is brought outside and Stilgar, main Paul fanboy, claims it to be a miracle, Paul counters him. It’s not a miracle, he says, just a technique available to advanced Bene Gesserit. Not magic, just training. Oh, and he’s not the messiah, he adds, he’s a very naughty bo- uhm, he just wants a chance to prove himself as a fighter. This mollyfies sweet and not mistrustful enough Chani a bit. He doesn’t seem all bad, all of a sudden.
To make it extra clear, a short scene is added at the end of the exchange, with Stilgar extolling Paul’s humbleness. ‘His denial at being the messiah can only mean he is the messiah!’ That sort of thing. To drive home once again that the believers are already in the bag. Everything they do is to convert the non-believers.
Farewell, daddy dearest
The Bene Gesserit’s specialty is power, and specifically politics. They don’t focus on the blade or strategies of war, but on the human psyche and tactics of subterfuge and manipulation. And while Paul may not be on the level of his mother, they are both wolves in the sheep’s pen when it comes to social politics. Even sweet Chani, her mind no doubt clouded by Paul’s crooked smile and simulated earnestness, can’t do much more than occasionally frown as she realizes too late that these outsiders are doing exactly what she feared, even as they boldly deny what they’re doing while they’re doing it.
At a certain point Paul is talking to his dead father (ie. himself) on a dune at night. He removes the Atreides signet ring from his finger, telling his father ‘I’ve found my way’. And, like the Romantic-pilled idiots we all are, we tend to interpret this as Paul accepting his place among the Fremen and giving up his legacy and his birthright. Especially when he manages to gaslight Chani into kissing him moments later. Young love is bound to be the most powerful force in the universe, right? WRONG!
Paul doesn’t mean his ‘I’ve found my way’ in a bohemian twenty-something way, the way he showed his doubts to his father on their last talk on Caladan in the previous movie. Oh, no, this boy means his path to power is now clear, his doubts erased, his moral qualms expertly squashed. He is not his father, as he will make abundantly clear, and he has no intention to honor him beyond a bit of lip service. No, he removes his ring and his Atreides identity only to bind the non-believers firmly to him, not only by bumping uglies with sweet, misled Chani as one of the non-believers leading figures, but also in the tried and true methode of simply becoming their celebrated general. If it’s good enough for Ceasar …
By the time he takes control, he is a war hero to the non-believers and a prophet to the believers, expertly assisted with the latter by Jessica who had been whipping up the masses from her convenient position of high priestess. Nobody even bats an eye when this shouty little boy plasters his colonial Atreides identity all over the once proud Fremen. Well, nobody but Chani. But at least everybody still has the same goal of liberating Dune, right? R-right?
True colors shining through
When Paul drinks the Water of Life and learns to see the future and the past (skipping over the weird ‘Desert Spring tears’ scene, aka ‘the final desecration of Chani’), he also learns that his mother is the Baron Harkonnen’s daughter, making Paul himself his archnemesis’ grandchild. But instead of that triggering feelings of rebellion or nihilism, as would be logical when you find out your entire society is an illusion put in place by the people in charge to obscure the actual flows of power, Paul’s reaction takes a slightly different direction: he turns away from his father, and from the morals and ethics that Leto tried to impose upon his son and his people. Like a bourgeois university student with nothing but theory in his head (I couldn’t help but think of Chalamet’s Zeffirelli character in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch), the moral relativism of it all leads him straight towards the darkest conclusion: there is no difference between Atreides and Harkonnen, except the narrative surrounding it. He quite literally says something along the lines of* ‘We will be the Harkonnen’, in case there was any doubt.
Paul puts his ring back on and declares that Dune is now Atreides land. In fact, everything is Atreides land! But the Fremen will be better off as Atreides, Paul tells them, and Dune will become a green paradise. Look, I might be reaching here, but I feel that very few things in this movie are accidental. So when the new Atreides banners do not contain any green, while the original ones his father flew did, that feels suspicious. Paul tells Stilgar he has seen the Fremen dream, this green paradise. But we actually see Paul’s prophetic dreams and there was no green, there was a dune and an ocean, an unimaginable mass of notoriously undrinkable water. So, yeah, I’m prepared to believe that Paul is lying about this and has little care for their promised land, if he saw it in the future at all. Needs must, and there is a holy war to wage and a slaughter of millions to enact. Plants and prophecies can wait.
Better a concubine in hell than a wife in heaven
Paul wins in the end. He wins against the Harkonnen, but he also wins against the emperor and, it is implied, against the entire system. That makes it easy to mistake him for the hero, I suppose. That’s how these things usually work. So, just in case it wasn’t clear, Paul renounces his father again. ‘Your father was weak,’ the emperor tells him, ‘he believed in the rules of the heart. But the heart is not made for ruling.’ And Paul doesn’t hesitate to distance himself from his father once more, unceremoniously demanding a marriage to the emperor’s daughter, dumping sweet, fuming Chani without even including her in the conversation. In a clear deviation from the book, Paul doesn’t inform Chani beforehand to convince her to become his concubine, as his mother was to his father. Earlier in the movie, Jessica is equally cold about the whole thing, reminding Paul that he should keep himself available for a strategic marriage, with little consideration for her son’s emotions, nor for her own. Leto’s memory is a tool to be used, nothing more.
So, yeah. There’s more, of course. Like the casual danger close use of nuclear weapons. Or the way Jessica schemes like a Disney villain, rubbing her hands together and whispering to herself that they will ‘target the weak ones’. But the biggest giveaway is still that he was cruel to Zendaya. Who does that?! Oh, and genocide. Bad.
* Look, I only saw it twice and the first time there was someone next to me who really wanted to kiss me, a feeling I reciprocated. And while Dune Part 2 is good, no movie is thàt good.
