Eventually, the world gives up on everyone. The gurgling springs that gave rise to edible weeds, and then agriculture, and then civilization, have dried up. And we’re left to wander through the deserted infinity for our remaining years. We’ll elect a messianic tyrant. We’ll do whatever drugs we can cipher from the unknown calculus of the stars. We’ll look to other planets for the answer.
The premise of Dune: Part Two is that of a grim spectacle. It’s not unlike how Elon Musk sees his own future: The Chosen One destined to colonize other planets for a drug that makes you feel really, really good. We are in the depths of an unknown madness.
There’s a prevailing fatalism that is easily reached when you discuss the future with others. Everyone seems to agree that we have ruined this planet beyond repair. The politicians are doddering military rulers, senile game show hosts outwitting even the most profane despots in the movies of the most dystopic hellish futures. We’ve cleared the forests of their trees, filled the oceans with swirling hazards of plastic. We’ve ruined countless species into extinction, and sent the rest of the more resilient hardship-weathered kinds cowering in the lonesome paddocks of the frontier, pacing back and forth in a zoo somewhere, as we’ve cauterized the list of wild and beautiful beasts down to dogs and cats and cows, all registered and numbered, marching in line amongst the knee-deep filth we left for them to roll around in.
The richest of the billionaires want to start their interstellar exploration and colonization of other planets immediately. They all have their fortified bunkers here, on some island perhaps. (Mark Zuckerberg is building his massive bunker estate on Kauai. Peter Theil tried to build one in New Zealand. Bill Gates has lavish bunkers under every one of his houses.) They’re betting on the likelihood that one day an event will happen that will act as the catalyzing force behind the chain reaction, and we’ll all devolve into barbarity. We’ll start hunting each other, and eat each other’s legs greedily.
Dune: Part Two doesn’t even try to be subtle. It tells you from the moment the movie begins that it’s really about resource exploitation. Before anything else appears on the screen, we see the words: “Power over Spice is power over all.” So, for the rest of the movie, you’re left to ponder, what is the spice melange?
These enigmatic scintillating flecks of glitter mixed in amongst the rest of the useless sand. All the grandiose machinery helicoptered in, all the restless men organized into servile armies, the whole spacefaring ordeal to travel this far to this distant exoplanet, and collect this stuff so unimaginatively named “Spice.” Across endless undulating dunes, which hides the feigned and grotesque horrors of man-eating bugs, is a faint twinkle across the arid patina that is seductive enough to mobilize the surrounding universe.
Is Spice just analogous to oil? Just a simple fossil fuel extraction? Probably. But they sprinkle it in their food to make it taste better. It allows interstellar travel. It makes you live longer, protects against disease. It gives the Bene Gessserit order of religious elders a more shrewd clairvoyant literacy. It brings color to a colorless world. And it’s highly addictive. So perhaps the spice melange is more analogous to an opium, or a more Huxlian attitude of Soma, where all of society is fashioned around the drug. Whatever the case, the spice melange is analogous to our overall consumptive addiction. Our society is forged and edified by addicts. It doesn’t matter if it’s oil, or heroin, or sugar, or new shoes, or porn, or social media—the spice melange is permanent ubiquity of capital realism.
The only noticeable color in the movie is the eyes and the occasionally dyed clothing of the Fremen people, the desert tribes who have an abundant access to it. It’s not a black and white movie, but it may as well be. Their blue eyes have the same bitter symbolism as the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List. And that’s the thing with the Dune franchise—it’s a spectacle of a bleak infinity. It is very much the same message and plot of Avatar, but instead of the florid marvel of other kaleidoscopic plethora of alien species as a familiar enough rendering of our own, Dune is a grey universe filled with grey planets. The military-fervored capitals of the Arrakis empire is an almost exact rendering of Welthauptstadt Germania, Hitler’s model for Berlin’s renewal. This is what the world would look like if the Nazis won the war. This may as well be Starship Troopers—a universe conquered by Nazis, a planet conquered by bugs.
The question I was consumed by when watching the second Dune, was, who are the Fremen people supposed to be? Because it’s undeniable they are representative of some Middle Eastern resistance, a nascent mujahideen, banding together to take on the cruel military empire that is invading only to greedily snatch up all its sacred resources. After all, their skin is lightly pigmented, they wear linen shawls wrapped loosely around their faces so only their eyes are shown. The Fremen death commandos are called Fedaykin, which is derived from the Arabic word Fedayeen, meaning martyrs or military volunteers willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause. At one point in the movie, Paul Atreides (Chalamet) doesn’t travel south with the Fremen fundamentalists because of his visions that he will inadvertently cause a Holy War. When the Atreides invade the planet of Arrakis, or Dune, with their gargantuan spice-collecting combines, and military battalions, the Fedaykin defend their planet with what looks stunningly similar to the FIM-92 Stinger launcher, the infamous surface-to-air missile launcher provided to the mujahideen by the Americans during the Soviet-Afghan War, only to have to eventually face them decades later when we invaded. The Atreides are simply the over-equipped and self-impressed colonizing enemy—the United States, China, Israel, Britain in its day. It’s whoever you want it to be, whatever source of intrusion in your life that may as well bugger off.
And this is the American blockbuster of the season, if not the year. Dune is the new Star Wars of our generation. And we’re rooting for the blue-eyed scrappy desert underdogs. Frank Herbert wrote the first book in 1965. And the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, lasting there ten years, pithy compared to the American commitment to its own arabesque failure. So forget the Soviet-Afghan War. Could this so blatantly be an anti-American imperialism movie? Are we meant to cheer as these strange Bedouin nomads annihilate our military war machine?
The Bedouin apothegm, “I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger,” summarizes the familial bond within this enigmatic people, but also a deep underlying paranoia they held against all outsiders. The Bedouin were and still are a nomadic tribal people, built on family hierarchies, oftentimes traveling together as a goum—several families in their collected tents, fashioned methodically against the harsh desert conditions. The Bedouin are typically Muslim, traveling throughout sprawling regions of the Middle East, in sometimes enfeebled landscapes of rainless and wasted outlands, desperados of wherever the rain and wind whispers a force of greener progeny. Our stereotypes of these people exist as a quaint and quixotic hallmark notion, the stoics and wanderers out there in the desert, amongst the echoed past of extreme fecundity from which they came. After all, they were birthed from the abundance of the Fertile Crescent, the direct descendants of what wealth bubbled up out of the rivers and marshlands, cedar forests so thick light didn’t touch the ground. Everything from writing, farming, the wheel, and nascent forms of civilizations from this Mesopotamian geographic miracle. And for the more recent history of the Bedouins, they are left to scavenge amongst the wasted tarmac that was left behind. Their ancestors used up all the good soil, felled all the good trees, and left this enormous desert for them to fight over for the remainder of eternity.
If Dune: Part Two does anything well, it’s enshrining for the screen an allegory of our future: a barren infinity with nothing out there but some promising flecks of gold mixed in with the sprawling mountain ranges of useless sand. And we’re left to sift through the sandbox, like friendless idiots who scan the beaches with a metal detector, hoping to find a nickel, or a golden necklace, or an engagement ring that slipped off too soon. This is what Mark Fisher meant when, in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, he wrote, “It is easier to imagine an end to the world that an end to capitalism.” In movies about the end of the world, the few tribes of humans that remain are scavengers. They pick like vultures from the rotting slew of what’s left. But not simply to survive; they scavenge for excess. Because we are still greedy heathens, piling up bounties of useless stuff because of the derangement of its perceived value. Capitalist realism, as Fisher noted, is solidified by all of us; it is in all of us, like an embryonic vampire sucking at our insides. It dictates our attitudes and imaginations of what’s possible, on what fashions exist for us to live.
The imaginative quality of Dune is limited by what capitalist realism has commanded onto us. It’s reminiscent of what you see on the streets of any major US city: a homeless man, hobbling across the buckled sidewalk with his shopping cart, collects his orgy of things into a cruddy heap, soiled mattresses stained with a viscous goo, plastic tarps tattered under so much UV damage are strung together into fortresses of feigned privacy. Lamps with shattered bulbs, phones without charging cables, canoe paddles, stacks of single bicycle wheels, picture frames and concubines of marbled waste. They occupy themselves with picking through the trash bins of other peoples’ excrement. But then, are we so different? Are we so much better than all that? Consumerism is simply the respectable form of scavenging. The machinery of capitalism scavenges the Earth for what resources it has left, for what ore and oil can still be pulled from the depths below. It scavenges for the cheapest labor, and brings you the cheapest product, a spice melange that will siphon any good fortune left from your own personal worth.
Fisher noted that with the end of the Soviet Union, the ideological nemesis to capitalism died along with it. Capitalism was then free to spread like a predatory cancer, using us as unwitting hosts, weaving it into the fabric of our culture so thoroughly that there was no imaginative alternative. In this sense, Fukuyama was right about the end of history: as far as Capital is concerned, there wasn’t any other way. And as Debord or Baudrillard would remind us, none of this is possible without the accompanying spectacle.
Dune doesn’t have any of the imaginative grandeur that Avatar has, so instead, they rely on the audience to be salivating over the real-life celebrities. The young, hot talent—Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Zendaya, Anya Taylor-Joy, Austin Butler, Léa Seydoux—complete the list of the new generation of Hollywood celebrities, and their licentious gore culminating in garish throbs of our plebeian desire. We want them, and their symmetrical faces, their hermaphroditism bending like strange malevolent contusions, the quiescence of this fantasy we paid good money to see. We want them. We want to be them. We want their lurid innocence to cure us of our sin of plainness. Give us popcorn. Give us soda. Give us something pretty to look at.
Capital is a cannibalizing force, and in exchange we are given the beautiful spectacle, where we can then hoot and holler at the screen. Marx and Engels summarized the demonic force of Capital in their Manifesto, but it may as well have been a plot summary of the Dune franchise: “[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct brutal exploitation.” Watching Dune is watching direct brutal exploitation distracted by the religious fervor over one man. It’s remarkably poignant of the modern human condition, if not explicitly religious, the same messianic salvation found in political leaders.
Marx believed capitalism would eventually destroy itself by its incessant frenzy to consume the cheapest labor possible, driving a wider wedge between the rich and the poor, relegating the malaise of division, where eventually corporate profits would no longer be possible. He didn’t seem to factor in environmental collapse a great deal. When he famously wrote of capitalism’s “vampire-like” need to suck from the living labor to stay alive, he was mostly concerned with the physical expenditure of us humans. Climate instability, biodiversity loss, mass species die-offs, the acidification of oceans, plastics coursing through the arteries of every living thing, are relatively new horrors that make the self-destruction of capitalism that much more certain. The only difference is, now capital is in a mass murder-suicide pact with the entire world, trudging through the terraqueous horizons of desire to feed itself a little longer. Capital sees all flora and fauna as cogs in the machine, drabs of food to sustain it into the frontier’s hazy depths.
There is a place bobbing through the star-spangled blackness, where the wind howls like a monotony of tired wolves, where billows of pulverized garish stones sweep themselves into haphazard piles, where the sun bakes the earth like it resented it, like it was its least favorite rock in all the universe, a desert that mocks the relative fecundity of other deserts. A desert that is somehow even more deserted than it is dry. And only the tremors of a demonic subterranean sandworm excuse itself for a life-bearing planet. Maybe a desert mouse or two. Otherwise, it is unknown how these people feed themselves, or where they get their water from. The worm will expend a significant calorie deposit just for the sound of a footstep, tunneling through a tsunami of barren and unholy hazards of sand to get something to eat. Compared to its relative size, a human would provide a scant meal, probably not worth the calories spent. And so how did the worms get so fat? Their turds are what makes the spice melange.
The sci-fi genre is birthed from the realization that we have lost this world. The fundamentals of Frank Herbert’s story, of humans colonizing an exoplanet of a deserted and inhospitable hellscape, is not unlike Elon Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars, or Jeff Bezos’ self-aggrandizing tours into the shallows of outer space. And it’s not surprising. Only the richest of the billionaires can fully realize the end of capital on this one lonely miserable planet. We are forced to hear about Elon Musk’s ketamine addiction. Will he want to travel to new planets to find new splendorous drugs? Maybe this Elon Musk won’t get too, but perhaps the next will.
Dune works as an effective spectacle to our overarching fear of what the future holds. It identifies as an epic science fiction movie. But in truth, it is closer to an installment of the post-apocalyptic genre. It’s more like a very glamorized version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in that, here are these people left to scavenge amongst the waste of a dead planet. But instead of a nice boy and his father, our protagonists ride giant sandworms like cowboys. They holler for their boy-tyrant to save them. They eat magic turds. They wage war in the sand. This will all come true. After all, it’s prophecy.
Ha! I like the simplicity of Goss’s comment. Yeah, a little harsh, especially when you seem to be elevating Avatar above it, which is hard to justify when comparing the two sequels. That said, I understand this essay isn’t really about comparing the two movies; it’s more about the murder-suicide pact we’re in with late-stage capitalism. I agree we’re in trouble in that regard, and that Dune is reflecting this sad state of affairs, both overtly and inadvertently, but also, in a way, every Hollywood movie is doing that, well at least the inadvertent part. They’re all using beautiful, popular people with varying degrees of talent (always some talent to be fair), who we kind of wanna be, to star in films, so we’ll come see them! Poor Things was a work of art that I thought was pretty great, my favorite of the Oscar contenders, but it’s guilty of the same crime. The stars are held in a place above the rest of us: the silver screen, where dreams are made into coherent narratives, and then in various media forms being fabulous. It is gross but also old news. What to do? Can we be in capitalism but not if it? We gotta be, right? Are the Dune movies or the Avatars in it but not of it? Can they somehow be both, in and if Capitalism, yet also offering something beyond it? Yes!! Because they are stories, and stories can be transcendent, and also, the truth is often a paradox. Now then Guy, this is a long comment, I suppose. But still, I can’t come close to touching upon all the things you covered in your erudite, flustered, and beautifully written critique of Dune 2 and the thoughts it made you think. But maybe I’ll give it some more thought and write down a full-fledged response to continue the conversation. It should be said: I agree with much of your thesis, but damn! Can’t we just enjoy the occasional blockbuster film that doesn’t suck? PS - “Spice” is way better a name than “unobtanium.” I’ll leave it there. Thanks for sharing dude!
Little harsh on Dune2