OPINION
Your opinion about the Dune story says more about you than it does about Dune. But I’m willing to take that risk.
Now that both parts of the movie based on the first book in the Dune universe have been released, we can see director Denis Villeneuve’s whole vision. I love the kind of movies Villeneuve makes, which is why he’s my favourite director.
His movies are about women. Specifically, they are about the different kinds of fear women experience while trying to live with the power of men.
Prisoners (2013) dealt with the fear that men might be faking their reliability. Enemy (2013) showed the fear that a woman may never tame a man’s sexuality. Sicario (2015) was about the fear that women will never understand why men fight. Arrival (2016) revealed that women fear not only that men speak a different language, but also that it may be impossible for the sexes to communicate.
Villeneuve’s Dune asks us to think about the fear that, no matter which role a woman chooses in her life, it is, at best, an illusion of power. When women fear being trapped by their own bodies, they reject the power of being a mother.
Dune was a natural story for Villeneuve. The entire story is about a secret cabal of women, the Bene Gesserit, who are trying to breed a “messiah” called the Kwisatz Haderach to assist them in unlocking their masculine soul so they can attain transcendence or power. Dune is a story about how women control everything, but most men will never see this because they refuse to accept that women are sentient beings.
The Bene Gesserit’s highly trained members act as advisors to all the Great Houses, even to the emperor. Its large-scale eugenics programme is pursued by subtly manipulating bloodlines for generations, using breeding sisters to “collect” the genes they require. But this effort is all for nought when the Kwisatz Haderach arrives a generation too early in the form of a man – Paul Atreides – rather than a female.
Even the book’s author, Frank Herbert, cannot quite decide if the main character is the Bene Gesserit or Paul. Because Paul is the result of the breeding programme, the female cabal remains in a sort of limbo. They both have a type of power but are never certain they can control Paul’s masculine drive to achieve his own destiny.
Villeneuve’s adaptation cuts important parts from Herbert’s story, but what remains in the movie is precisely what Villeneuve wanted to portray. Paul’s mother Jessica and his wife Chani are correctly portrayed as never being able to understand why Paul acts in the way he does. Both women know that the role Paul chooses is based on a myth which was created by the Bene Gesserit as a form of social control over the people of Arrakis (the desert planet of Dune).
Paul also knows the myth is a lie. Yet he still chooses to fulfil the prophecy because he realises that the path to power requires that he become the kind of person his subjects need him to be. Power is about taking responsibility and limiting one’s freedom simply because it is the right thing to do. The bafflement of Jessica and Chani is because the only time a woman feels the need to purposefully limit her choices is when she enters the role of being a mother.
So, not only is Paul the Kwisatz Haderach, making him more powerful than even the head of the Bene Gesserit, Paul is also not bound by his biology as a female Kwisatz Haderach would be. He has the specific kind of freedom that is denied to women which allows him to choose any role in life. The quintessential male privilege is freedom of choice, and this terrifies women because their own biology means they cannot have it.
This female fear emerged more clearly in the books than in Villeneuve’s adaptation, but it was still there. Dune depicts the very natural fear by women that they are little more than “playthings” for men, no matter their position in a man’s life. Abandonment is always a possibility, even for a queen.
In the final scene of the book, Paul promises to marry the emperor’s daughter but never to impregnate her. This was a strategic move to end the House Corrino imperial line as a mark of humiliation for the emperor. Paul also makes it clear that Chani will remain his concubine and wife, not one or the other. A state of limbo.
Here is the final paragraph, spoken by Jessica to Chani:
“See that princess standing there, so haughty and confident. They say she has pretensions of a literary nature. Let us hope she finds solace in such things; she’ll have little else.” A bitter laugh escaped Jessica. “Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine — history will call us wives.”
This final line reveals that Dune is not really a story about Paul. The main character is Jessica. And Jessica’s main antagonist is her own fear that she was nothing more than a concubine placed by the side of Duke Leto by the Bene Gesserit. She feels this vulnerability throughout the book.
She hates that her only claim to status is as the mother of Paul. For all her Bene Gesserit skills, Jessica is haunted by the possibility that Leto could dismiss her at any moment. Jessica can fall back on her mission to gain a sense of purpose, but this means nothing to her. Jessica is limited to either protecting her son or ensuring that he flourishes. Her position as a mother is the only agency she has. Yet she feels trapped.
Only through Paul can she gain any kind of redemption. Consider that her reaction to his accession to the imperial throne is to immediately be selfish and see it as a way to, finally, re-write history and become the wife of Duke Leto. She was the concubine who birthed Paul Atreides, god-emperor of the universe. Anyone would say this is an amazing life story. But motherhood is too “natural” for Jessica, so it didn’t count.
She thought being given the title (a man’s form of power) of wife to Duke Leto would make her powerful. This is why she tried to assuage Chani’s equal fear of becoming just another concubine to the most powerful man in the universe. Their fear of abandonment blinded them to the power of their biology.
A woman can attain the presidency, be called a queen, lead armies or found religions, but none of it “sticks,” none of it counts, because those are male areas of power. Men must become something, but women just are. The only thing that can ever diminish a woman is when she rejects the power of motherhood.
Most women refuse to see motherhood as a form of power. They think it pales in comparison to masculine forms of power. But let me spell it out for you.
Everyone has a mother. For the first ten years – the most formative years – mothers have a near monopoly influence over every child who has ever been born. Genghis Khan may have been the result of a rape, but even he had a mother. Julius Caesar had a mother. Adolf Hitler had a mother. Margaret Thatcher had a mother.
How a person turns out in adult life is largely decided by their inborn temperament and the influence of their mother. Mothers don’t raise children, they create adults. It is not hyperbole in the slightest to suggest that all success, failures, crimes and inventions can be laid ultimately at the feet of mothers. They are responsible for the choices and actions of all people. That is real power.
And yet billions of girls today are just like Jessica and Chani in that they imagine biological desires coded into them by natural selection are somehow shameful, embarrassing, devaluing, dirty, wrong and, perhaps, sinful. They have no idea about the power they could wield because their own mothers never told them.
Jessica’s mistake was to fear the power of her biology and choose instead the trappings of male power. The denouement of her story arc was to be happy with an objectively inferior role. Who cares what her title is? She did. She cared, a lot. All she ever wanted was to be called a wife. A title. And in the meantime, true power lay right under her nose.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
No, Jessica. Fear was not your problem. It was that you never really knew yourself.