[The latest film adaptation of Dune, Frank Herbert’s cult sci-fi
novel series, is out next month. With its often-reactionary mix of
political cynicism, ecological catastrophism, and lurid orientalism,
it remains oddly attractive to left-wing audiences]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT DRAWS US TO THE REACTIONARY DARKNESS OF DUNE?  
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Chris DIte
August 27, 2021
Jacobin
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_ The latest film adaptation of Dune, Frank Herbert’s cult sci-fi
novel series, is out next month. With its often-reactionary mix of
political cynicism, ecological catastrophism, and lurid orientalism,
it remains oddly attractive to left-wing audiences _

Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve's 2021
adaptation of Dune., (Chiabella James/Warner Bros. Pictures)

 

The new adaptation [[link removed]] of
Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction hit novel _Dune_ looms ever
closer. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s hyped film is due to
hit screens next month. Anxious about attracting cinema audiences, the
film’s distributor is desperately trying to pitch it
as Marvel-esque
[[link removed]],
while the novel’s legions of fans are waging a spiritual struggle
online to defend the franchise’s “high political art”
credentials.

_Dune_ is a psychedelic, epic, and immersive exploration of power
struggles and social control. It’s also often ham-fisted and
politically hazy. It’s not too hard to see how the novel became
wildly popular through word of mouth in the mid-1960s. It borrows
madly from almost every major religion, with an obsessive emphasis on
mystical, transcendental inner experience.

Its plot centers around vicious imperial struggles for market share
and violent liberation struggles. For _Dune’s_ original
counterculture adherents — many simultaneously taking wild new
drugs, romanticizing Algerian and Vietnamese independence movements,
and reading accessible new translations of the _Upanishads_
[[link removed]] and _Dao de Jing_
[[link removed]] —
it must have seemed wonderfully prescient.

That the franchise has remained consistently popular ever since — if
ill-served by previous cinematic adaptations — suggests something in
it still resonates. Whether that something is political cynicism,
white savior mythology, consumerist syncretism, ecological
catastrophism, lurid orientalism, or some combination of all of these
and more depends on who you talk to.

“Governments Lie”

Author Frank Herbert’s grandparents and parents were part of the
Eugene Debs-era cooperative socialist movement. Herbert himself,
however, rejected this collectivist politics in favor of a macho and
conservative individualism. In his thirties, he worked for a series of
Republican politicians and candidates and became increasingly
anti-government.

After its publication, _Dune_ nonetheless became popular among a set
of leftish student hippies, but Herbert himself was never part of nor
related to this layer. For example, one of his influences while
writing the novel was S. I. Hayakawa
[[link removed]], a semantics
academic. California Governor Ronald Reagan specifically appointed
Hayakawa President of San Francisco State University to break a
strike
[[link removed]] led
by the Third World Liberation Front, the Black Student Union, and the
American Federation of Teachers.

Hayakawa and Herbert got along well, and Herbert was invited to help
weaken the strike by conducting writing seminars in 1968. He readily
agreed.

Herbert rejected collectivist politics in favor of a macho and
conservative individualism.

After the success of _Dune_, he worked as a Vietnam War correspondent
for the _Seattle Post-Intelligencer_. Despite his open opposition to
the war, Herbert was a vocal supporter of Richard Nixon. This wasn’t
as counterintuitive as it may sound: Herbert’s main political
conviction was that “governments lie.” He perversely argued that
the president’s crimes were helpful in that they would convince
Americans to trust government less.

Herbert may have been against the Vietnam War, but he was no friend of
anti-colonial liberation struggles. He was preoccupied
[[link removed]] with
Native American culture and suffering, but even this was filtered
through what his family called his self-conception as a “great white
expert.”

After the publication of _Dune,_ this morphed into a Quentin
Tarantino-like fixation on the idea of an Indian avenger that his
Quileute friends tried to persuade him was a white concoction and had
little connection to their culture. In Herbert’s mind, this
Indigenous angel of vengeance was less about radical equality and more
a divine judgement on the decadence of white government and society.

Herbert was also frighteningly homophobic, equating homosexuality with
violence and the collapse of society. He lectured
[[link removed]] his
son Brian about how “repressed homosexual energy” could be
harnessed by armies for murderous purposes. In an unpublished epic
poem Herbert wrote that

Homosexuals,

Bureaucrats

And bullyboys

Increase before

Each fall into darkness.

Hints of all these views are evident throughout the _Dune_ novels.
Almost all the series’ collectives are delusional, its political
saviors great villains in disguise, its indigenous peoples a divine
punishment for cartoonish white homosexual elites. But the tone is
also slippery. While some characters are ludicrously didactic, their
lessons often resist neat ideological categorization beyond a
suspicion of government.

A Fanbase Divided

_Dune_’s contemporary fanbase is infamously diehard. A real
rogues’ gallery is smitten with the novel, though they fixate on
different aspects.

Elon Musk
[[link removed]] tweets
quotes from it alongside pictures of his SpaceX rockets, no doubt
taken with the idea of a future where ordinary people pledge
allegiance to great, rich men and their enterprises. His increasingly
conservative
[[link removed]] partner
Grimes released a concept album based on the novel (it’s all
oriental sampling, mystical feminine wiles, and vague allusions to a
larger whole).

To get some clarity, sometimes a frightening ride through the
worldview of someone you’d never want to see in charge is just the
ticket.

Fascist Richard Spencer
[[link removed]] publicly
searches for _Dune’s_ hidden messages of race war encouragement.
Libertarian edgelord Tim Ferris is clearly drawn
[[link removed]] to
its depiction of government.

Many soft liberals love it, too. Stephen Colbert
[[link removed]] is
enamored, involved in promotional efforts for the film and admits to
having fantasized about being Paul Atreides as a
teenager. Biden-inauguration chanteuse
[[link removed]] Lady
Gaga clearly digs the Bene Gesserit, referencing the novel’s
infamous Gom Jabbar test in one of her music videos.

_Dune_ has an often reactionary voice, but the novel also casts a
strange spell: an open-minded (if not determinedly _revolutionary_)
audience has always found it enticing and, frankly, pretty fun. It’s
a guilty pleasure for the more radical left, and there’s no shame in
that. Nobody longs for a return to a hackneyed, bland socialist
realism. Reactionary genre fiction can be just as enlightening —
though certainly not in the way its authors intend.

Frank Herbert might have wanted us to look upon his works and despair
of humanity, but he’s long gone. To get some clarity, sometimes a
frightening ride through the worldview of someone you’d never want
to see in charge is just the ticket.

A still from Villeneuve’s upcoming film adaptation of Dune. (Warner
Bros)

For example, it’s not only fun to experience the apocalypse through
Selma Lagerloff’s supernatural horror _The Miracles of Antichrist_
[[link removed]],
in which the False Prophet is a socialist. It also provides insight
into how the nineteenth-century capitalist right understood the
landscape of growing class conflict.

Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op (penned just after his early stint
as a strikebreaking Pinkerton agent) lets us swagger through the
fantasy self-image of a capitalist gun-for-hire without — hopefully
— succumbing to the same delusion. Herbert’s book does something
similar for the cynical worldview of the conservatives who would go on
to build neoliberalism.

“Courage and Ethics”

For his part, director Denis Villeneuve has endeavored to spin the
film’s
[[link removed]] contemporary
relevance as largely ecological. He argues, as many fans have, that
Dune is

about how humans need to earn our destiny in order to change the
world, and it’s a kind of call for action for us to change things,
specifically for the youth … we need to change our ways of living.
We will need to change our way of dealing with nature and the world,
and that takes a lot of courage and ethics. And I think _Dune_ is a
call for that.

Villeneuve’s ecological pitch is a useful talking point, considering
that _Dune’s_ protagonist ultimately answers this call by
implementing a galaxy-spanning imperial fascism that kills billions
and enslaves many more.

As the far-right slowly becomes more savvy
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incorporating the climate catastrophe into its worldview and practical
politics, the question of how convincingly the Left answers this call
for change is _the_ “what is to be done
[[link removed]]”
of our time. Frank Herbert, for all his faults, was adamant that
messianism, fascism, and imperialism were _not_ the right response
to environmental disaster. On that, at least, most of us can agree.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Dite is a teacher and union member.

 

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