In preparation for seeing Dune 2 in theaters, at the recommendation of approximately seven thousand people, I watched the first three-fifths of the first Dune film, slowly pretending to be increasingly absorbed with my phone despite nothing happening on my phone, before turning it off, apologizing to my girlfriend, and asking her whether she'd at least liked the meal. I think that, if I'd turned it off approximately twenty minutes earlier, I'd have escaped the whole experience feeling less agitated; something about waiting from the moment it was clear Denis Villeneuve was doing the whole Leto assassination sequence to the bit where Paul and Jessica are captive on the ornithopter moved me from "aghast" to "seeing red."

I don't like not liking things. I started seeing my first adult therapist after a fairly devastating break-up, one that came less than a year after the dissolution of a genuinely toxic and abusive relationship, and I still found myself focusing, within a matter of weeks, less on romance or sex or intimacy than on what happens when I don't like a thing that other people like. I am not a fun hater; I don't enjoy hating. I dislike the way that my dislike often registers to me as a kind of emotional betrayal, as if the people who made or did the thing that I dislike were specifically setting out to dismiss some of my most deeply-held beliefs. I hate how nasty my agitation tends to make me, how defensive and borderline-paranoid I get, how I somehow find myself in fight-or-flight mode in ways that make me feel legitimately deranged. I hate how I find myself wondering whether they're something wrong with me for not resonating with a piece of media that leaves other people feel like they've just seen the face of God. And I hate how acutely I can anticipate the reactions of other people, and how oddly terrified I am of their reactions—of the part where they try to unpack my dislike; of the part where they encourage me to just give it another try; where they reassure me that it actually gets better if you keep going; where they start to dismiss things about my tastes or thoughts or identity because a thing didn't do a thing for me; where I "have" to see the shock and bewilderment and injury on their faces when I finally express the thing I feel rather than just my careful interpretation of my own feelings.

I'm no stranger to having to interpret myself for others. Autistic peers of mine nod when I describe this part of myself, because "masking" is such a known autistic phenomenon, but that word never felt particularly right to me. What I do, more than anything, is translate myself, adapt myself, as if I were a particularly strange and off-putting science fiction novel who most people were convinced couldn't be successfully brought to the screen. Sure, when I was younger, there was that autistic-cliche experience of neither knowing how to comprehend other people's behaviors or how to put my own feelings into words... and it turned out that people weren't that difficult to understand, and expressing myself wasn't particularly difficult either, and the real struggle is just that I've got a tremendous amount of unformed, unchecked energy that refuses to make itself immediately convenient for me or anybody else. I've got jokes where jokes oughtn't be; I've got half an hour's worth of thoughts on things nobody wants to spend half an hour with; I can be mean and sharp and cutting and combine five different strains of thought into a single vicious quip; I can be frustrated or brooding or ebullient with theatricality and viscerality, and what's more, packing all of my feelings into a single burst of intense expression happens to be the most soothing, most natural way of exorcising my emotions. 

Many of these things, for many different reasons, prove to be Too Much for most people, and most of the time that's fine. I learned, early on, that it's my responsibility to be courteous to others. If I'm being self-aggrandizing and kind of obnoxious about it, I'll think to myself that I'm blessed to have a full gourmet kitchen's worth of Me in me, and shouldn't get all high-and-mighty when someone's just looking for a bowl of Cheerios. We could unpack that—is "courtesy" my rationalization of a lot of childhood trauma that taught me it wasn't safe to be openly myself? Or I rationalizing the other way around, and getting pissy at the AUDACITY of some people to find me boring or upsetting or inappropriate just because I'm being all of those things?—but honestly, we don't have to. I've gone down those roads, like a spice-addled Mentat computing possible futures. The important thing is that I fundamentally think we all translate ourselves for others, or at the very least we are all translated by others, and the only differences between us are whether we're aware that this happens and whether we care to handle that translation ourselves. 

And art and media serve a profound role in this "translation," for most of us. Take memes and emoji. Because text is such a cripplingly limited medium, because words are too abstract and too finicky to really serve most of us well, we construct scaffolding for our expressions with whatever tools we have on hand. Animated GIFs, recyclable meme templates, and specific cartoon faces that mean specific cartoon things all give us quick-and-easy ways to articulate parts of us that we otherwise couldn't. Likewise, our favorite emo band or Broadway musical helps us express our feelings that are so crazy intense!! Our favorite workplace sitcom lets us see that we are all, in our ways, staring into the camera whenever our silly coworkers (we are not the silly coworker) do that silly thing they do. Our favorite South Park episode provides us with a half-baked political analysis that we know is so, so true, because its conclusion is that we should do the thing we wanted to do anyway, i.e. sneer at other people's opinions and asking who the fuck cares.

If I had to differentiate between "media" and "art," here—though I don't—I'd say that media is part of the permeable membrane that allows us to share a sense of collective self, literally functioning as the medium for social exchange, whereas art reaches us in a way that makes us more aware of a part of ourselves. At times, art permits us to think and feel and perceive in ways that we didn't realize were either possible or allowed, often by bringing out something in us that was too ephemeral, or too rarely expressed or acknowledged, for us to trust. It is maddening to experience something, to see something, to feel something, without any recognition from society at large. It's the root of alienation, in many ways—to intuit that a part of you exists, but to receive no hint that such a part of you can exist, to the extent that you wonder whether you're losing your mind for thinking that it's there at all, and fear exactly what would happen, exactly what looks you would receive, if you tried to make that part of you known. Especially since, in its nascent and barely-understood state, you'd doubtless fumble your words as you tried to express it; people would misinterpret you, then insist to your face that their interpretation is truer than your interpretation of yourself; they would get impatient and irritated with your attempting to birth this strange little thing; and if you dared put any real feeling into it, that feeling would be very, very risky, because it might be the wrong feeling, it might be unwanted, it might even hurt people. Art is a missive from a stranger you never knew, a stranger you will likely never meet, possibly a stranger from another part of human history altogether, telling you that you are seen, loving you for who you are, and telling you that you're not wrong for daring to think that you exist, or that you matter, or those unplanted seeds within you could grow into something wonderful, something beautiful, something alive.

Depending on your relationship to it, the Mass-Media Event can either be heavenly or hellish. On the one hand, there's the concert where you hear words aimed directly at your soul... then look around to see a hundred thousand people all feeling the same way you do. On the other hand, there's the same mass gathering, only you're the only one disconnected, the only one not feeling it, as if society has concentrated as a whole to tell you once and for all that you do not belong. The joy on other people's faces feels like a whip to the face. They speak to you intimately, but they are speaking to someone who doesn't exist, and they are speaking as if that non-existent stranger has more of a right than you do to wear your own face. If you dare to admit that you don't feel the same connection in this moment that they do, they may feel betrayed and hurt. They may, in the name of love, attempt to explain to you that you do feel this connection, or that you ought to, or that your life won't be worth living if you don't devote it to making this connection happen. They might take your not feeling it as an attack on the fact that they do feel it, as if you're telling them that their feelings are the invalid ones for once. (And they might, secure in the numbers being on their side, form a posse to beat the shit out of you while they can still eradicate this enemy in their midst.)

This phenomenon isn't unique to media, and didn't start with media—and "mass media" wasn't really a thing until the last century or so anyway. But you can find it in religious communities, both mainstream and cultish; you can find it in nationalism, and in other political ideologies that lead to some cathartic sense of self. The stakes, if anything, have gotten smaller, which is probably a good thing, in the same way that the bloodthirstiness of football is probably preferable to the bloodthirstiness of war. In any event, it always makes me think of Don DeLillo's parable, in White Noise, of "the most photographed barn in America," where tourists visit a barn to take the same picture of the barn that everybody else has taken, and the experience is less of the barn than of the act of photographing it. There is the objective Thing, and then there is the subjective Experience, and then there is the mass assumption that the Experience is the Thing, that the Experience is in fact objective, that nobody could encounter this objective reality without having this subjective reaction. To use a medical term, there is syndactyly: the actual work and the reaction to the work fuse into one, becoming inseparable, until the reaction to the work becomes the work, and the work disappears, because the work could only have ever been whatever Thing engendered this Experience, and you're connecting not with something real but with something perceived, engaging not with an object but with all the other people who've engaged with it before you. You're engaging with a tradition, if you will, even if that tradition was only born moments ago. The actual event is a chalice of sorts, in that it holds its own reaction, shapes it, but is not, itself, it. God doesn't speak in-person at every prayer service—yet the function of the service is to share, with others, the experience and the agreement of having just heard God.

I can't begrudge people who, during any given Media Event, get to see the light. I've partaken in plenty myself—and they weren't just orgiastic, they were genuinely revelatory. I won't pretend like I've never been the enthusiast who gets a little too enthusiastic, just like I won't pretend that I haven't had lengthy gushy conversations with groups of people about things that we loved while one or two individuals shifted, uncomfortably, praying for anything else to take that conversation's place. And I am careful with who I introduce my most beloved artists to, because I know that I'm not just handing over a part of my soul when I do so—I'm also putting their soul in a place to be judged and potentially condemned. At times, I take this to somewhat silly places: I'm reticent about speaking the names of my two favorite bands out loud, because nothing is easier to casually peruse nowadays than a band's catalogue, and I don't want people to hear their names, get curious, and idly play a thing or two, half-listening as they do. Nothing that precious to me should be available on Spotify, for the same reason that your Tinder profile shouldn't mention the time you went down for a snack at midnight and caught your father fucking your dog.

There's a place for art and there's a place for media, and I think both are lovely in their ways, but the ongoing devaluation of art to media, and then of media to "content," continually disturbs me. About a decade ago, I started describing the kind of music I find agitating to listen to as "wallpaper:" the kind of thing that exists to exist, that fills a void that only exists because we decided that musiclessness is a kind of void, and that is a void because it's been purposefully drained of all the non-algorithmic meaning that music gets to have. I recently reread Lauren Oyler's essay about Helen DeWitt, which opens with Helen saying this...

...and I realize that she's describing the same subtle degradation, the same reduction of function to form, the same substitution of interior soul—whether of a work of art or of the person engaging with it—to externalized experience. Books become "literary events," if they're lucky. (Otherwise, they just become adaptations.) And the Event itself, as an ontological (sorry!) category, is a kind of reduction in and of itself: the replacement of something which speaks to people so deeply that it becomes an unexpected phenomenon, an accidental revolution, to something that's as predictable as weather patterns, to be emulated and replicated and otherwise engineered.

I have nothing against Events, and am a fan of both showmanship and the surprisingly-subtle art of working out just what will have legions of people up in arms; it just bothers me, more than a little, that our emphasis on Events is slowly eroding everything quieter, all those strange little moments of unexpected recognition, that made me such a reader when I was younger, because to this day books give me that sense of revelatory connection more reliably than any other medium possibly can. Not catharsis, not catalysis, but that almost-colorless sense of a seed finding itself planted in the soft, infinite earth.

Is any of this fair to put on Denis Villeneuve's shoulders? I could point out, facetiously, that the last director who opened himself to Dune was so moved by it that he abandoned science fiction forever and instead decided to create Blue Velvet. And you could point out, fairly, that I'm only pretending that that's facetious, and that I will go full-blown Fremen and start slitting throats the moment David Lynch tells me to. Because it really isn't a matter of what's fair. I'll say that there's a reason I avoided seeing the first Dune movie in theaters, and it's the same reason I avoided all of Villeneuve's other movies up to date, even as people were gushing about what a brilliant director of science fiction he is. And I'll say that one of my least favorite movies of all time was the original Blade Runner, the one Villeneuve liked so much he made a sequel to it, and I'll say that I disliked it for taking one of the strangest authors of science fiction ever devised and reducing it to cinematic sensationalism, no matter how "brilliantly" it managed to do so. You might go so far as to say that I was convinced I should never touch a work of science fiction by anybody who'd cite Blade Runner as a favorite without a handful of immediate disclaimers, and that I was also put off by the idea of someone adapting a Ted Chiang short story before that, or by the various ways that people told me Arrival in fact improved upon "Story of your Life."

I said, out loud, the day that I watched three-fifths of Dune, that I was probably an idiot for putting it on, and that I would probably wind up getting really agitated about its existence, and that I was putting myself at risk of getting actively mad at people who liked Dune. I said all those things... and then I listened to that little voice of either insecurity or doubt, the one which either keeps me from being a pompous ass or keeps me from trusting my own sense of well-being, and decided that I didn't want to obstinately miss a masterpiece based on one of my three favorite childhood works of science fiction, and

I mean

You don't have to see it this way. I saw enough of Dune to see all the things that people laud Villeneuve for. Given a choice between Villeneuve, Zack Snyder, and the MCU, I will take Villeneuve without hesitating, in the same way that I'd rather cough up blood than [COMPARATIVELY WORSE IMAGERY OMITTED]. I can say, mildly and breezily, that "it's not really my kind of thing!!!!" and leave it at that. Nobody really wants my other feelings, not even me. Nobody, least of all myself, likes how ugly those feelings get, and how trivial the thing that sparked them was.

Dune as a book series is infamously psychedelic. The third book out of six takes place thirty years after the original, and child star Paul Chalamet is a blind old man. The fourth book skips ahead ten thousand years; the fifth book skips ahead another ten thousand years after that. Each book gets progressively harder and weirder to read, and I loved that as a child; I haven't reread them all as an adult. It's the first book that has that "blockbuster" quality that led some critic, once, to call it "science fiction's Lord of the Rings," an epithet that's only true inasmuch as J. R. R. Tolkien was also way weirder than you can possibly commit to movie form. But The Lord of the Rings is a blockbuster that makes for a good blockbuster, because its narrative and its themes are grandiose and broad. Dune takes place almost entirely inside people's heads, like is explicitly a book about the insides of people's heads, which is why the Lynch Dune consists of nonstop voiceovers and virtually no adherence to the book's plot. The outside stuff looks and feels archetypal, in part because the plot consists of Paul intentionally exploiting cultural archetypes in order to overthrow an empire, but the archetypes aren't even an inversion so much as they're an outright deconstruction.

Frank Herberts saw politics, psychology, and psychedelia as more-or-less the same phenomenon; he saw ecology as a way of treating planets and people as synecdochical. The richness of Dune's fictitious empire and the richness of Dune's conspiracies and the richness of Dune's visions of how individual human minds might mutate and evolve are all one and the same; the action in Dune isn't a chess game, in which people exploit the pieces available to them, so much as it's a contest to see who most fully understands the labyrinths of the human psyche. The tragedy of Dune isn't just that Paul brings about a jihad in order to secure his place as emperor: it's that Paul sees this jihad as the single least bloody path forward, that he's capable of contending with the whole of human suffering for the first time in history, and that this essentially destroys him. And the tragedy as the series goes on is that Paul finds he's too cowardly to see his vision all the way through, because no matter how hard he tries he's just too human... and that his son, both figuratively and literally, isn't. 

I can't talk about Villeneuve's Dune because it doesn't exist. There's no Dune in it, not really, the way there's no Jesus in that one extremely white and famous painting of Jesus. People say that it's more about the visual evocation of Dune, but it wasn't that either. I was prepared to find the reveal of Baron Harkonnen thrilling, and took interest in the choice to compose him in Dutch angles without ever revealing the whole of his face, but—I don't know how to say this without feeling snide, but—is any single composition in a Dune movie ever going to compare to a single painting by Zdzisław Beksiński? Will anything in a movie that's got Dave Bautista in it ever feel as desolate, as grotesque, as alien, as one of Beksiński's evocations? Villeneuve has said in interviews that he hates the use of words in movies, and thinks that film should be sheer visual evocation rather than do something that you could do in plays... but you can easily turn that around and say that it's pointless to try and make film be visual in ways that will never rival great paintings. You'll never be able to film something as surreal as a Francis Bacon painting—you can only translate the experience of a Francis Bacon painting to a new medium.

(Renowned painter David Lynch, one of Bacon's biggest fans, taught me this. And Lynch's Dune, crude as it is, comes a lot closer to Beksińsky than what I saw of Villeneuve's ever did.)

It was the assassination of Leto that made me realize, instantly, that this movie hadn't been made for the sake of the Dune that I care about. Up until then, I hadn't quite been sure. I'd noticed certain irregularities, certain too-broad strokes, but I'm not sure Dune can be Dune without Hawat drunkenly calling Jessica a witch to her face, and I'm not sure that it can be Dune without the tense political dinner where Leto attempts to sniff out Harkonnen spies. The science-fiction spectacle that followed—space ships! exploding! in the air!!—felt like five minutes' worth of potential air sucked out into a great vacuum, and the phenomenal misread of the Harkonnen ornithopter situation cemented for me that I Should Not Be Watching This Movie, but the bigger issue is that the first half of Dune sets up the real warring forces that proceed to dominate Herbert's vision. Not the Atreides, not the Fremen, and certainly not the Harkonnens, but the different understandings of others that underlie the political players, the saboteurs, the psychological manipulators, the mental deductors, and the spiritual believers.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Villeneuve's handling of "the Voice." To misrepresent the Bene Gesserit as having mind-control superpowers doesn't just undermine the text of the original book, it actively posits the thing that the book's Bene Gesserit-haters superstitiously claim. The Bene Gesserit are manipulators, not only of psychology, but of sociology. They understand the ways that people are shaped by social phenomena, and manipulate circumstances, not by plumbing the depths of specific individuals, but by positioning themselves as fulcrums within specific social dynamics. In the one instance where Jessica uses the Voice on Hawat and makes him snap immediately to attention—the moment that is endlessly misinterpreted as "mind control"—Herbert stresses that the sudden shift in her voice is regal in nature. That is, she speaks to the part of Hawat that serves a Duke. He responds instantaneously, not to some deep-seated human need to submit, but to the social order he already belongs to. That's "the weirding way:" for Bene Gesserit to subvert societal expectation in ways that others don't think are possible, exploiting blind spots in their perception to make them follow habitual scripts that shouldn't be in play.

When Jessica and Paul escape the Harkonnens, it's not by brainwashing one into slitting the other's throat: it's by enacting a juvenile sequence of male possessiveness, convincing three soldiers to fight over a woman, and positioning Paul as a helpless child watching these soldiers do sadistic, erotic soldier-y things to his mother. It works because nobody recognizes it as implausible, because it is absolutely a social dynamic that could exist in that given place and time, and because the soldiers are too loose (too "animal") in their dedication to their own purpose to recognize their own malleability.

In other words, it's not just that Villeneuve's depiction is corny and stupid, although it absolutely is—even when he still had my trust, his early scene with Paul using the Voice on Jessica had me rolling my eyes. It's that to get the Voice wrong in this particular way is to misidentify the central tensions and conflicts in Dune, in which "animal vs human" has less to do with strength of will than with recognition of context. The animal gnaws off its own leg to escape a trap, not because it's weak, but because it recognizes only the immediacy of a situation; the human, as Mohiam says, stays in the trap not because of their willpower but because they recognize the trapper must return. Humans are defined by cunning, not by strength, and cunning is really just a byproduct of perception. The most powerful person in a situation is the one who perceives it the most clearly, which is how Dune's narrative of unplugging from social confines and its vision of The One led pretty directly to the philosophy of The Matrix. Dune, like The Matrix, throws in some neat kung fu to keep us interested, but—also like The Matrix—its interest is far more in what people are. Just as The Matrix's combat sequences are invariably showdowns between people with different perspectives on who they (and who others) are, Dune's climactic brawls have nothing to do with combat elegance and everything to do with different combatants' senses of self.

That ambassadorial dinner is one of the paradoxes of adapting Dune, I suspect: it's a multidimensional game of intrigue played mostly between factions we've never met before and will never meet again, and it doesn't affect the outcome of the narrative, because the Harkonnens and Corrinos are playing a broader game than Leto realizes. Leto is fucked, Leto has no way of getting unfucked, and while Leto realizes this on one level, he doesn't understand how or why he's fucked. (Paradoxically, the fact that he's aware of this is precisely why he knows he's doomed: he's a savvy enough player to know that unawareness is fatal.) The scene exists, not for the sake of palace intrigue, but to establish the nature of father and son: it's the central moment where we see Paul from Leto's eyes, and see Leto processing Paul's recognition of dynamics and Paul's approach to navigating them. Furthermore, it delineates the sociological game of the Bene Gesserit from the political game of the Empire.

Sociological manipulation involves people playing roles they don't realize they're playing, a premise that Herbert lifted directly from Asimov's Foundation. (The Bene Gesserit are essentially Asimov's Second Foundation with a women-under-patriarchal-rule twist. One of Herbert's strokes of genius was to recognize that the empathic and social awarenesses that define the Second Foundation would go hand-in-hand with describing how women have historically wielded power in chauvinist societies—and to see how similar the paranoia towards the Second Foundation was to the paranoia aimed at women whose social toolkits were unfamiliar to men, and therefore regarded with superstition.) In Asimov's psychohistory, the outcomes of cultural crises are only predictable if the general population doesn't know the predicted outcome; in Herbert's world, the Bene Gesserit can only use their "powers" to the extent that other people don't know what those powers are. When Jessica reveals her hand to Hawat, she intends it as an act of vulnerability, because it robs her of her power even as it displays it. (And the tragic irony is that, while Hawat on some level recognizes this moment of vulnerability for what it is, his supremely rational ass can't overcome that superstition, paranoia, and sexism.)

Politics, on the other hand, is a game played between people who all know the game they're playing. It's played with full acknowledgment that, essentially, the game exists but must not be acknowledged. Leto describes the act of walking into a trap knowing that it's a trap; politics, in Herbert's vision, works the same way. Dune's politicians operate with a level of awareness that keeps the items in the Bene Gesserit toolkit from working, in part because the rules of politics dictate that certain things must be said and done. There is to be no deviation from the script, no matter how clear it becomes that the script conceals horrors, because to deviate is to immediately forfeit. (At the ambassadorial dinner, Leto is still reeling over the assassination attempt on his son; he's tormented, not just by anger or grief, but by his awareness that he can't act on a single one of his feelings without guaranteeing a worse fate for them all.)

One of the clever sleights-of-hand in Herbert's writing is that we repeatedly see Paul from the eyes of other people: scenes are written more from other people's perspectives than from his. We get intimate senses of each of their worlds, one by one, and see how differently each perceives theirs; we also seeou them perceive Paul, and each finds themselves impressed by what they find. What they don't see, and can't see, is that Paul, by existing so satisfactorily in so many overlapping worlds, extends beyond any one of their senses of reality, which sets up the moment where he erupts into his first moment of uneasy prescience, calling himself a freak in front of his increasingly-panicked mother, before setting himself on a journey through an arid wasteland that reflects the comparative infertility of humans that aren't him.

Ultimately, Paul is a human navigator, able to spot potential outcomes that nobody else can; like his father, his fundamental powerlessness is political in nature. He can operate like a social fulcrum, as his mother taught him, as the Bene Gesserit are convinced is the key to creating ending human suffering, but he can't escape political reality, in which people will be people, and you can't convince them to be otherwise—all you can do is position yourself within their shifting sands, like the muad'dib from whom Paul takes his Fremen name. The saga of Dune as a whole is one in which different profound visions of humanity contend with one another; the thrill of Dune, for me, has always been that it pits different ideas of what "genius" might look like against each other, and investigates the fallacies of each and every one.

(There's a reason why the Emperor, in Dune, is barely present: his imperial might is defined by the implacable political reality of the universe, but in no other way can he be said to meaningfully exist. He's Paul's foil, in that he rules everything and therefore has no human potential; he rules because he is the ruler this present universe can imagine, and he can't be anything but that ruler without losing all of his power. Paul, on the other hand, represents an almost infinite potential, but realizes that the only way to replace Shaddam's empire with his own is by making the same fundamental sacrifice.)

Herbert's writing style gets criticized a great deal, but I've never been able to see his prose as bad. His vaguenesses always strike me as intentional; his longform delves into various thought processes don't feel like meaningless tangents, they feel like the novel. There's a reason why the Harkonnens are described in the vaguest and most elusive ways: their horrors matter less than the role they fulfill in Herbert's society, namely that they're the "human animals" who the Reverend Mother cautions Paul about. Whereas Leto feels trapped by politics, Baron Harkonnen is liberated by them: he is a clever and vicious political player precisely because he cares for nothing but his own gain. Feyd-Rautha is a borderline-parodic take on an "alpha male" archetype, flawless according to all societal definitions but utterly lacking in the feminine energies that Jessica cultivates in Paul. (Hence the farce at the end of the book, where Paul defeats Feyd by essentially bellowing that he won't cheat his way to victory and Feyd is so surprised by this, so taken aback by the reveal that Paul could have easily killed him and chose not to, that he accidentally lets Paul kill him anyway.) Piter de Vries, such an indelible character given how shockingly little space he takes up, isn't just an amoral schemer, he takes active delight in the transgressive cruelties of his brilliant strategies. It's important that the Harkonnens are extraordinarily intelligent, in the specific ways that they are, because Herbert's project is to repeatedly examine different visions of strong and brilliant people to underscore, not just their immorality, but their insufficiency.

And it's this, in the end, that defines the scope of Herbert's writing. The nightmare of humans as they are is contrasted with the dream of humans as they could be—and then Herbert takes those dreams, again and again, and shows how quickly they unravel, how insufficient they wind up being, how much horror they birth when taken to their extremes. Dune is about Paul recognizing the beauty of Fremen society, despite the arid world it comes from; it's also about how the Fremen undo their own society, as they dare to dream for something better. It isn't just that Paul unleashes a terrifying genocide—it's that, ten thousand years later, the Fremen have successfully made a temperate paradise out of Arrakis, and only Duncan Idaho and Leto II realize that this paradise is more barren than the original Arrakis was. It's depressing when a dream turns out to be impossible, but despair-inducing to realize that the dream, fully-realized, wasn't enough. In Dune, only one possible path has anything other than the most predictable possible end.

(This mimics the evolution of Foundation, in which successive visions of a future Empire gradually give way to visions of even less doomed ones. Asimov seemingly revisited his series only when he'd come up with a more ingenious solution to the question of human utopia. Herbert, in a somewhat-meta way, made his entire series about that inevitable series of revisions.)

How do you take that—any of that—and put it up on a screen? Maybe the pessimists were right to say that you can't. Maybe only a TV series could have a shot in hell of condensing Dune down. But I'd rather see an attempt, however futile, than see no attempt at all.

The elephant in the room, when considering a Dune adaptation, is Lawrence of Arabia, which was released three years before Dune's publication and is rightly considered one of the most visually spectacular films ever made. Lawrence, too, concerns itself with a very white man ingratiating himself with a very non-white society, coming to be seen as a military leader, and essentially prophesying his own downfall. (That man, perhaps-not-coincidentally, has the most piercing blue eyes ever committed to film.) Unlike Villeneuve's Dune, the movie's politics are intensely sophisticated, as is its consideration of how T. E. Lawrence's entanglement with the dual societies belongs to eventually guarantees his downfall. While it's a long movie—only an hour shorter than Dunes 1 and 2 combined!—it manages to tell a marvelously intricate story without sacrificing visual grandeur. And it does so using a cinematic technique called...

*checks notes*

..."good writing and direction that trusts its actors to deliver."

Obviously, I'm basing this off of an incomplete viewing of Villeneuve's work. But I'm also, at the same time, basing this off of ninety minutes' worth of movie. I watched the entire runtime of Cléo from 5 to 7's worth of Dune movie. By the time you watch ninety minutes of Lawrence of Arabia, you're in truly extraordinary territory. So I guess what I'm saying is that I trust you could convey something of Dune's genuine complexity in an actual movie because I've... watched other movies before, ever. Like, ones that are good. Ones that aren't Blade Runner, even. IDK.

What I'm criticizing here isn't Villeneuve's skill or talent or intelligence. He clearly has all three in spades. By his definition of a Dune movie, he clearly made about as good a Dune movie as it's possible to make (although the Voice shit was still unforgivably lame). For people who were comfortable with his definition of a Dune movie, I'm sure the experience was magical, even if I can't imagine it being quite as magical as Lawrence of Arabia, or Avatar 2: The Way of Water (2022). 

The thing I take issue with is his vision. I won't even say his ambitions, because he's clearly an ambitious guy: it's more a matter of where he's directing those ambitions, what ends he intends to realize. Ironically, there's a book about how important it is to have a powerful vision, about how no amount of skill or talent or intelligence will save you if your vision fails to go far enough, and about how it sometimes isn't enough to pull off the miracle of bringing fecundity to a previously-arid wasteland. I loved it a lot as a kid. I still love it, last I checked.

The other thing that bothers me, and this isn't Villeneuve's fault, is that we live in a day and age where epic science fiction movies can't be attempted unless they're going to be Events. It guarantees that the directors who rise to enough prominence to be allowed to attempt ambitious things are the ones who most Event-ify their own work. It makes adaptations increasingly appealing for movie studios, which is why there's also a Foundation TV series that I've been smart enough not to watch, and why, for some godforsaken reason, the future of queer cinema is apparently a filmed adaptation of the plot of The Last of Us.

We've replaced spirituality with fandoms, and the result is a decadent and stagnating empire that feels poised to be torn apart by a horde of bloodthirsty fanatics. The one person who can save us, perhaps, is a young man who once knowingly walked into a trap, had a messy and astonishing prescient vision, and has ever since walked a strange and meandering path towards humanity's salvation. A man who saw Paul Atreides, and dreamt instead of Dale Cooper. sorry i know this bit is stale as hell, sorry everybody, im so sorry

Leto II had a vision of humanity splintering off in so many directions that it could never again succumb to the stale decadence of sociological predictability. I guess that, in my way, I wish for the same thing, in the form of us either re-discovering Art beneath the decaying carcass of Media, Events, and Content, or at the very least generating enough Media that I don't have to be inundated with people talking about the same goddamn movie for a month and a half at a time. Or perhaps the sleeper will awaken, and I'll just finally stop spending time listening to strangers gab on the internet. Stranger things have happened.

Anyway, if any of this strikes you as wrong-footed, just keep in mind that I also can't stand the Howl's Moving Castle adaptation, for reasons involving similar deep emotional investments in Diana Wynne Jones. And that one was done by Hiyao Miyazaki, a director who makes Villeneuve look like a Zack Snyder porno by comparison. Nothing I say should ever be construed as meaningful, important, or correct. Have a lovely day.