Bi-Lal Kaifa for the Weirding Way: An Encomium of Denis Villeneuve’s Adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune

In other words, the music often does not sound as simple as it looks.

—Michael Nyman on holy minimalism

The allure that the weird and the eerie possess... has to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.

—Mark Fisher

Fig. 1.

Still image from Dune (dir. Villeneuve, 2021), screencap by the author.

It has often been my experience that performing film criticism of text-to-screen adaptations is treacherous. Whether spoken or not, the intensity of critique seems to depend on whether you, as the viewer, have read the source text. The adaptation’s status as adaptation only matters when it matters to you. So, on this matter let me say that this review is intended to stand as a support of what I feel is Denis Villeneuve’s successful 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 idiosynclassic Dune (may Shai-Hulud help me).

For those unfamiliar, Dune is Villeneuve’s adaptation of a text broadly recognized as the thematic and aesthetic antecedent of a wide swath of beloved science fiction/fantasy franchises, including, and perhaps most famously, George Lucas’s Galaxy Far Far Away, Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Ron Underwood’s Tremors (1990), Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) series, Mike Hodges’s Flash Gordon (1980), James Cameron’s Terminator (1984), Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997), and David Twohy’s Riddick (2000) franchise and others.

Dune takes place in a distant future in which the Duke Leto Atreides, a nobleman and leader of House Atreides, accepts steward-ship of a fief-planet, the dangerous and extremely valuable desert world Arrakis. This arid planet’s tactical, political, economic, ecological, and cultural importance comes down to it being the only known location of the most valuable substance in the universe, the “Spice Melange.” It is described as a cinnamon-like powder produced by giant sandworms native to the planet. Ingestion of the Spice accelerates levels of thought and extends human life. The Spice affords its users an often unreliable form of supernatural foresight. This in turn allows a type of psychonautical time-travel in both the abstract and the concrete—supernatural clairvoyance to see the potential paths of selves-to-be through temporal entropy, and/or being able to navigate the spaces-between-spaces, making interstellar travel possible.

Herbert’s entire diegesis revolves around Paul Atreides. He is the heir apparent of the duke and his partner, the Lady Jessica of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. The Bene Gesserit Sisterhood are a clandestine order of supernatural women who secretly control the history of universal affairs through rigorous genetic and political manipulation. Paul, a brilliant and gifted fifteen-year-old boy, is born into a seemingly transhistorical plot hatched and overseen by his mother’s secretive order that determines his entire being from genes to gentry in ways he can, at most, barely fathom.

While the Emperor of the Known Universe, the malevolent and jealous Shaddam IV, vies for power with the vicious House Harkonnen and the indomitable Sardaukar, shock troops who’ve sworn fealty to the Emperor, Paul and his mother seek to protect what is left of their House from the machinations of both powers. To do this, the pair seek an alliance with the mysterious and powerful blue-eyed inhabitants of Arrakis, the Fremen.

Now, in trying to develop a reading of the film, I thought of several potentially germane ways of going about it. I thought that I could talk about the Bene Gesserit and how when reading the text I thought of them as a type of embodied “dark energy”: present but only ever partially accounted for. I could have then tried to merge that hermeneutic with how well or poorly Villeneuve’s film expresses themes and concepts related to the Bene Gesserit as a type of “weak-strong force,” one whose presence and non-presence feels steeped in supernatural and political power, but...