Will Dune Wreck My Marriage?
Illustration: Sümeyra Yüce
Our first book Guide to Every City is now available from our online store!
What happens when you have a hard time understanding a story your spouse is in love with? How do you bring up your concerns about the Hollywood adaptation of half of a novel when he knows the six volumes of the series inside out? And what has the role of cultural critique got to do with my marriage?
Dune was playing on the silver screen, and these questions reappeared in my mind. It was right about when I saw the scene where new, benevolent colonizers of Arrakis, led by the Duke of House Atreides, negotiate with Stilgar. The latter is the chieftain of Fremen, the planet’s natives. Upon his entrance to the Duke’s court, Stilgar spits on the Duke’s desk, which is immediately received as a sign of disrespect by the ignorant military men. Luckily, Duncan Idaho of Atreides, who had been proudly carrying that name across the galaxy, is there. Duncan who had been living on the desert planet and learning the ways of the natives, immediately recognizes this behavior and teaches his Duke to reciprocate a spit with a spit. Apparently, because Arrakis is a desert planet, offering someone’s bodily moisture is a sign of respect.
Halfway into the film, I look at my husband in disbelief. My eyes are screaming silently, “How could they reproduce such a Eurocentric trope of representing the Other?” And he looks back, implying, “I promise, the story is more than this.” After 6 years together, we are beyond communicating with just looks. We are in a silent intellectual debate.
Dune occupies multiple places in the Western cultural spheres. The source novel for the 2021 film is the first instalment of a science fiction novel series consisting of six volumes written by Frank Herbert between 1966 and 1985. Herbert’s son continued writing in the same universe after his father’s death. Until Dennis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation, Dune had been an impossible movie to make. The revered filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky tried to make it in the 1970s but the production proved to be impossible. Jodorowsky’s labor, however, did not go completely to waste: Hollywood built on his creativity when it came up with Star Wars and many other science fiction classics. David Lynch made another failed Dune movie, which he later disowned due to limitations on his artistic licence by the producers. He simply couldn’t fit the complexity of the story into two hours. Until Villeneuve, the story was vast and unconquerable for Hollywood, much like the desert planet of Arrakis itself — hostile to outside forces. The recent Dune movie is the adaptation of the first half of the first novel.
Dune utilizes multiple problematic methods and tropes of the Western cultural sphere. Frank Herbert was heavily influenced by the Orientalist retellings of T.E. Lawrence’s life story, Lawrence of Arabia, which was released only three years before the first instalment of Dune, and is the quintessential Orientalist movie. It is a white savior story on the silver screen, full of misrepresentations about the Middle East. Herbert also liberally appropriated Arabic and other languages while naming people and concepts. He freely cherry picks Arabic words and adapts them to his space opera universe. Regardless of his intentions, he doesn’t treat language as something that evolves organically in a political context. Instead, language is reduced to a source of inspiration; something that peppers his narrative with spice, pardon the intertextual pun. In addition, Herbert gave into fatphobia and homophobia in describing his villains. The most evil character in the series, Baron of the House of Harkonnen, is fat and homosexual. These qualities are described in a way that cements his wickedness for the reader. Villeneuve’s adaptation leaves homosexuality out of the picture (for now, since the second instalment has just been approved by the producers) but the Baron’s physical qualities are visually catered to the audience as something to be disgusted by.
Couples disagree on many things, and sometimes they fight over them. My husband and I are not unlike any couple. Although we have similar backgrounds and professions (queer immigrants from India and Turkey who make their living by writing), we clash on so many occasions. Our tastes don’t always match, and we learned that it is okay early in the relationship. However, we also love sharing things we love with each other. My husband’s first gift to me was Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Left Hand of Darkness, after I told him how her story The Wife’s Story changed my life in high school. I dragged him to so many Lady Gaga events, such as her concerts or A Star Is Born on the first day it was released. We are navigating a long-term relationship with the understanding that spouses can have different tastes, but that doesn’t have to be a field of contention. Difference can also nurture individuals, opening them to narratives and styles that they are not naturally drawn to. So, when my husband was extremely excited about Dune’s new adaptation, I ran to the theatre with him to see it on the first day.
However, when Dune reproduced the spit scene of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls I was startled. As an optimist, I had always hoped that Hollywood was listening and taking notes when scholars were writing about the harm caused by inaccurate portrayals of non-European peoples in film and elsewhere. The spit scene woke me up from my dream, and this is not only a Dune reference. I tend to lose my critical grip when I am watching something visually stunning, so I usually watch it a second time to bring my critical lens. Until the spit scene, I realized I had chosen not to make a big deal out of the film's other mishaps in representing the Other. I chose not to be hung up on the fact that the natives of Arrakis were unreasonable, violent, and irrational. I chose not to see that the natives believed in a prophecy which was instigated by outside forces, that their beliefs were used against them by their colonizers, that their savior was a white man, and that they were visually and linguistically modeled after the West’s beloved Other, the Arabs. But that spit scene was a wake-up call.
My husband and I took a walk after the film ended. I knew my husband could not just love a white savior story told with Orientalist ornamentation. Not without a critical take. After all, during my PhD years, we discussed Eurocentrism, imperial interest in culture, hegemony. Because I would not shut up talking about my thesis, and he enjoyed challenging me, agreeing with me, and moving forward with me. So I started asking questions. I was tapping into his wide knowledge of the novel series in order to understand the Hollywood adaptation of the 1/12th of the whole story. He patiently answered all my questions, sometimes giving away secrets that are apparently revealed in third and even sixth volumes. Every time he explained the story he loved, he also acknowledged my hesitancy and my red flags. He was not defending his taste, he was defending a very long story that was going to be missing — sometimes crucial — details while being adapted to a film. The Q&A lasted an entire weekend. What I could gather from his answers, the gist of the whole story is that any savior, any hero, any character can spin in a story that takes six novels. The overarching theme of the whole series is that no one is safe from the power they hold. And this is precisely what he loved when he first read the novels at the age of fourteen. He also went back to this story throughout his life because it does not reveal its secrets all of a sudden. Herbert’s imperfections, in his eyes, took second place to the narrative’s slow-burning and steady commitment to criticize power in general. Orientalist ornamentation was an unfortunate element in his writing, and the story must not let Herbert off the hook completely. But the story can still tell us something about power, and we can sit together with a problematic narrative, and still learn from it.
I am convinced, not because he is the first reader of anything I write in English (Hi, love). I am convinced because as humans, we fall in love with some stories, and just like in love, lovers can grow in separate paces and depths. This doesn’t mean that our relationship with the cultural product has to end, and maybe it can go somewhere else, find life in another form. Of course, a cultural product is more limited in its growth than a human being, who lives and learns through many experiences. But in examples like Dune, where adaptations and a new generation of authors give a corpus of text new areas and opportunities to grow, a story loved and adored can also grow. For example, Villeneuve’s Dune made a progressive casting choice by casting Sharon Duncan-Brewster, a Black woman, as Dr. Liet-Kynes, who has been described as a white man in the novel. After all, Hollywood has a horrible track record of casting Black actors in strong, intelligent roles. But Dune version 2021 at least tries to contribute to correcting that. So why can Dune mature in some aspects and not so much in others? We are still lamenting the progressive turns that the adaptation didn’t take, debating how Part Two can do things a little bit more correctly.
On the other hand, the negotiation I have with my husband about a story he has loved since the age of 14 reminds me of our hesitancy in suggesting something we love to others. This McSweeny’s piece satirically narrates the anxiety-ridden process of picking a restaurant, for example. You recommend some place you love with the hope that your friends are going to enjoy it as much as you do, and then hearing, “Oh that restaurant you sent us to, it was horrible” can be really heartbreaking. There is a cloud of doubt over us that can scare us from suggesting things we love to others, even sometimes to people we love. I hate that cloud. I should be able to drag someone to something I like and explain why I do so if necessary. We need to give each other some slack, give room to breathe, negotiate. Cutting someone off for something they like without really questioning why is not going to allow differences to show us new things. We can be critical, but does it have to completely destroy anything we don’t like without questioning why? Is the perfectionism we demand from stories we watch ruining how we exchange information or experience things together?
Going back to the intergalactic scale of things, Dune is not a perfect story, but it is still going on, with big film studio backing, and an audience across the world expecting the second part. So, we need cultural critique for the sake of the story. We need to talk about Dune’s Orientalism, we need to talk about how harmful it can be despite the story being a long and slow-burning one. Natives emerging literally from the sand to kill colonizers can look poetic on the film screen, but such depiction also negates their humanity by relying on the visual and cultural repertoires of the colonizers across the world. In 2021, after scholars and cultural critics have repeatedly shown the ill effects of misrepresentation of the Other, the Dune: Part Two producers need to listen to the criticism and act upon it. If we are going to watch Dune as a starting point to question power, we need to see it dismantled in different ways.
Coming back to the smallest scale of human interactions, as a couple, we have new movie plans, too. Next, we are seeing House of Gucci, where Lady Gaga plays Patrizia Reggiani, who ordered the murder of her husband in a multi-million dollar family feud. This time, my dear, we will be there for the fashion and acting, not the story. But I am already reading up on some material in case you have questions.