On Dune, Eugenics, and the New Film

I first read Frank Herbert’s Dune when I was twelve and have re-read it several times in the fifty years since (yes, fifty. Oy). It is a hugely uneven novel, a mishmash of science fiction, mysticism, half-baked anthropology, and loony medievalism, and it has one of the worst concluding lines ever written (“While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives.”) Yet, somehow, it works. It has enough genuinely interesting ideas, and enough genuinely thrilling action scenes, to bring its discordant elements together into a compelling package. I loved the first installment of Denis de Villeneuve’s new film adaptation and was looking forward enormously to the second. For the most part, it is terrific. I’m not a fan of Timothée Chalamet, and cringed when, in part two, he ambled over to a group of “Fedaykin” warriors, his fluffy hair falling in front of his babyish face, and chirped “so what’cha doing, guys?” But generally, he is convincing enough in the role of Herbert’s hero, Paul Atreides (also known as Muad’dib, Usul, the Lisan al-Gaib, and the Kwisatz Haderach—it’s that kind of novel). The film only disappoints at the conclusion, which it rushes through and changes from the book, stripping out some of its most dramatic confrontations and memorable lines (“I’m sorry, grandfather, you’ve met the Atreides gom jabbar”). Denis de Villeneuve had a good reason for the alterations (more on this in a moment), but it comes at a cost.

It’s no surprise that Dune, originally published in 1965, continues to appeal. Among the novel’s major themes are ecology, artificial intelligence, mind-altering drugs, anti-colonialism, and jihad (a word the films carefully eschew in favor of “holy war”). Its vision of a universe in which numerous “great houses” jostle violently for supremacy is rather more relevant today than when Herbert was writing, at the height of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, the films have provoked a good share of political commentary, including a humorless scolding from a New Yorker writer for the “paucity of Arab actors in key Fremen roles.” Yes, all right, the Fremen (planet Dune’s desert-dwelling indigenous people) are partly based on Arabs (also partly on Native Americans) but… really? Dune takes place on a distant planet, twenty thousand years in the future.

But to my mind, one of the most interesting, and also one of the most sinister things about the novel has received relatively little attention in the new wave of Dune commentary: namely the centrality of eugenics to the universe Frank Herbert imagined. Denis de Villeneuve had the courage to confront this issue, but it does come at a cost.

In Dune, eugenics is closely related to artificial intelligence. The novel not only takes place 20,000 years in the future, but roughly 11,000 years after a galaxy-spanning holy war called the “Butlerian Jihad” has been waged against thinking machines. At its conclusion, humanity everywhere agrees to live by a new commandment: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” But how can a complex interstellar civilization possibly function without thinking machines? The solution Herbert posited was the development of radical mind-training techniques, with the aid of mind-altering drugs. For example, he invented a class of humans called Mentats, who perform complex calculations in their heads at blisteringly fast speeds. But the Dune universe contains many other groups capable of seemingly superhuman feats, including total control over their own bodies, and even the bodies of others through weirdly modulated speech patterns called the “Voice.” Another group—important to the novel but almost entirely absent from the films—consist of “navigators” capable of bending space with their minds, thereby making faster-than-light travel possible. And the female religious order called the “Bene Gesserit” devotes itself to the mentally enhanced study of politics.

Why the connection with eugenics? Well, if humans must perform the demanding tasks previously done by thinking machines, then the temptation arises not just to alter their brains with drugs, but to improve them through selective breeding. The plot of Dune revolves around a ninety-generation long secret breeding program run by the Bene Gesserit with the aim of producing an uber being: the so-called “Kwisatz Haderach” who can foresee the future, and whom they think they can control. But the program goes awry (spoiler alerts ahead). Paul Atreides, born to a mother who has disobeyed her instructions to bear a daughter, nonetheless becomes the Kwisatz Haderach. But then, Frankenstein style, he refuses to obey his creators. In one of the most dramatic scenes in the novel, he speaks to his followers while confronting the head of the Order. “She could wait,” he declares, “ninety generations for the proper combination of genes and environment to produce the one person their schemes require. She knows now the ninety generations have produced that person. Here I stand… but I… will never… do… her… bidding” (the new film omits the entire speech).

The inclusion of eugenics does make one element of the Dune universe more convincing. Herbert’s is yet another work of science fiction which imagines that complex, technologically advanced societies can be governed like early medieval Europe, complete with powerful hereditary emperors, princes, dukes and barons (no pope). In most works, this conceit is simply a shortcut allowing authors and directors to cleave closely to the demands of genre fiction. Especially in American genre fiction, plots generally avoid social complexity while treating heroes as self-sufficient masters of their fates, constrained only by heredity (nearly all American genre fiction is, when you come down to it, basically cowboy fiction). Star Wars, which features yet another floppy adolescent revealed to be the Chosen One, would not work quite so well if Luke Skywalker had to submit a transcript, standardized tests and three letters of recommendation to win admission to Jedi University. But Star Wars does not even try to justify its faux medievalism. Dune does. And it makes at least some sense that societies so deeply dependent on bloodlines and heredity for their technology might resort to the hereditary principle in politics as well.

Interestingly, Denis de Villeneuve himself has reacted against Herbert’s eugenics. In most respects, his films stick closely to the novel. But he makes one major change. In both, the hero Paul Atreides falls in love with a Fremen woman, Chani. In the novel, she remains by his side even as he reveals himself to be the Kwisatz Haderach and embraces the messianic destiny for which he has quite literally been bred (even accepting his marriage to the Emperor’s daughter—the subject of the dreadful concluding line quoted above). In de Villeneuve’s second film, she angrily rejects Paul, insisting that the Fremen should form a society of equals, not a messianic cult. The director has promised a third film, based at least in part on Herbert’s awful sequel to Dune, tellingly titled Dune Messiah, which presumably will pursue this conflict.

I sympathize with de Villeneuve. Dune’s eugenics was actually quite ugly (although not so ugly as its vicious homophobia). The problem is that everything in the novel builds towards the conclusion of Paul Atreides triumphantly mastering superhuman powers, taking satisfying revenge on the villains who had killed his father (yes, this is genre fiction), defying the Bene Gesserit “witches” who had hoped to control him, and taking the throne as Emperor of the known universe. By altering the plot, and using Chani to call the messianism into question, de Villeneuve has produced a film that is more satisfying from an ethical point of view. But it is a little less satisfying from a purely dramatic one.