The Way of the Desert
True to its source material, Villeneuve’s Dune pairs CGI spectacle with dreamlike uncertainty.
Review by Drea Jenkins and Charlie Clark
What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” asks Jesus. “A man clothed in soft raiment? behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.” The finery and sophistication that attend worldly power are worse than useless out there, says Jesus: don’t expect to find them. “A prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet.”
In the Hebrew imagination, the desert wanderings had been a 40-year purification from the corruptions learned at the fleshpots of Egypt. When such corruptions were rediscovered in their own royal courts and temple precincts, a return to those wanderings threatened—and beckoned—in the voices of the prophets. Out in the wilderness, far from the noise and bustle of human civilization, the still small voice might still be heard. Out in the desert, amidst the barren sands, we need only clear a few stones to make straight a highway for our God.
“God created Arrakis to train the faithful,” says Paul Muad’Dib, Duke of House Atreides, a prophet who has long since put off the soft raiment of his noble rank. “Arrakis—Dune—Desert Planet.” Like the Hebrew prophets of old, Paul has gone into the wilderness and returned with a message of strength regained through purity restored. But what sort of faith does the God who made Arrakis seek to train? What sort of sacrifices does He require?
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, which adapts the first half of Frank Herbert’s classic novel, is remarkable for keeping these questions in view. It’s not a “message movie” exactly. As the title card ahead of the film suggests, any message it bears will come like a beautiful, if violent, dream: oracular and undecidable. But in this age of bathetic, CGI-bloated spectacle, a movie with an idea in its head is a cool drink of water in a dry and weary land.
Not that it lacks its share of spectacle. This is a lovingly crafted adaptation with a deep respect for its source material. From the casting (yes, even Timotheeee), to the score, to the costuming, to the production design (yes, even the CGI), Dune is fearfully and wonderfully made. But from its opening monologue, which introduces us to Arrakis from the perspective of the indigenous Fremen, the spectacle is secondary to the prophecy.
The prophecy is of the liberation of the Fremen from the oppression of the Outworlders, colonizers like the Atreides, who kill the native people and pillage their planet for its precious natural resource, the spice. But life in the desert has shaped the Fremen—like rocks honed to sharp points by blown sand—into perfect conformity with a natural law of scarcity and survival. Their destiny is to rise up and overthrow the Outworlders, not just on Arrakis, but across the Known Universe.
To survive the desert, you must become a desert.
Paul’s father, Duke Leto Atreides, has some presentiment of this destiny. He envisions making an alliance with the Fremen. “On Caladan,” he says, “we’ve ruled by air power and sea power. On Arrakis, we need to cultivate desert power.” It is for Paul to discover that the desert power that Leto dreams of is not so easily harnessed. It is gained only by submission. One does not wield the desert, so much as one is wielded by it, becoming the instrument of a power greater than oneself.
This quietism is made explicit in a scene where Paul attempts to pilot an ornithopter (a dragonfly-like aircraft—very cool!) through a dust storm that threatens to pull the flying machine to pieces. He has a vision of the man who will soon initiate him into the Fremen way of life: “The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve but a reality to experience. A process cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join it. We must flow with it.” So Paul shuts down the ‘thopter’s engines, closes its wings, and allows the storm to carry them to relative safety. By ceasing to resist, they survive.
As advice for survival on Arrakis—a planetary waste where the only Maker is the mindless and all-consuming sandworm (“Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May he keep the world for His people.”), a god who can be summoned by a drumming piece of machinery and ridden like a hopped freight—“Join the flow” may be sound enough. But if Paul had read more of the Orange Catholic Bible so beloved of his mentor Gurney Halleck (“for they shall suck of the abundance of the seas, and of treasures hid in the sand”), he might have remembered that there are two sides to the desert.
“When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none,” says Jesus. In the Christian imagination, we may find in the desert our deliverance from the flesh and the world, only to find ourselves in the hands of the devil. It is to the desert that Jesus goes to be tempted. St. Anthony makes his home in the desert to drive out Satan and reclaim the wastes for his God. The Fremen “fight like demons,” says Duncan Idaho.
The way of the desert—the Fremen way—is to reduce a person’s worth to their strength and their body’s water. Weakness is a capital crime, the penalty literal liquidation. Ironically, the law of the desert—the law that strips us of the full dress of kings’ houses (ceremonial, not military) and clothes us in stillsuits—is the law of the jungle: kill or be killed. To survive the desert, you must become a desert. And Paul knows just what he will unleash by joining the flow: a “holy war spreading across the universe like unquenchable fire.”
Did Denis Villeneuve make Dune to train the faithful? Does he believe that our world—ravaged as it is by the legacy of colonization, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation—is best represented by a planetary desert? Is the true meaning of life “get tough or die”? Is our best hope to “move with the flow of the process”? How different to remember that behind the surface of scarcity and strife, life is not suffering and that faithfulness calls us to become gracious and loving in submission to a gracious and loving Maker.
Drea Jenkins is a software developer in Lebanon, NH. She graduated from Dartmouth in 2020 and loves to spend her free time reading, writing, praying in the middle of the night, and coding.
Charlie Clark is a writer and retractor. He lives in New Hampshire.
Dune was directed by Denis Villeneuve and is based upon the novel by Frank Herbert, first published in 1965. It was released by Warner Bros. Pictures on September 15, 2021, and can be seen in theaters or on HBO Max.
