The Broken Heart of ‘Dune: Part Two’
The Broken Heart of ‘Dune: Part Two’
How Zendaya’s Chani gives the story emotional weight that even the source material struggles to grasp.
[Spoilers ahead for Dune: Part Two]
Reading Frank Herbert’s Dune earlier this year, I was struck by the book’s theme of how these characters wish to exercise maximum control yet are still dwarfed by the history they inhabit. Every chapter starts with an excerpt from a historical record outlining events that have already come to pass even though we haven’t reached them in the narrative. An early chapter in the book outlines how the evil House Harkonnen will overthrow House Atreides, and the coup happens almost exactly as the Harkonnens planned it. Jessica and Paul Atreides talk repeatedly of their training to where they can control their slightest movements and command others with a perfectly modulated vocal tone. Eventually Paul gains the ability to see all possible futures. And yet in the end, they fall into the same patterns and structures of the larger world. They are not revolutionaries as much as they are an imperial power under a different banner.
This is a downer conclusion, especially since Paul’s motivation of avenging his father and working to avoid a galaxy-wide jihad are empathetic goals. What Paul wants and where he ends up show a young man who amasses great power and lacks the humility to let it go. In Herbert’s novel (and I should note here I haven’t read its sequel, Dune: Messiah), Paul attempts a compromise between his love and his political ambitions by saying he’ll marry the Emperor’s daughter Princess Irulan as a political maneuver, but his heart still belongs to Chani, the Fremen woman who helped to teach Paul the ways of her people and bore him a son. It’s a clumsy compromise that tries to position Paul as his father’s son since Duke Leto Atreides loved his Bene Gesserit concubine Jessica, but he did not marry her because he needed to keep his marriage options open for political power.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two wisely retools all this to far greater effect. I’ve been a little surprised when I see reviews calling Part Two cold and sterile, a criticism I would agree with for the first film, but not its sequel. The film firmly places its emotional weight on the relationship between Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya). While there are good beats between all the characters (Javier Bardem’s Stilgar gets some strong comic moments), all the emotions rest between wanting Paul and Chani to be together. She is literally the girl of his dreams.
To hammer home that this is not a story of triumph but a tragedy of people crushed beneath the wheels of history, there needs to be something more than “Paul shouldn’t have taken the throne, but he took the throne.” There needs to be a cost beyond the abstract of, “Aw, nuts. This guy is going to wage global jihad against the universe.” It’s one thing to intellectually understand Paul’s downfall, but in the span of a feature-length film, we need to feel why it matters, and that’s why building out Chani’s character here matters so much. She is not simply the love interest. She represents the core of Paul’s humanity, and an understanding that the fulfillment of any “prophecy” will only render the Fremen as resources in a larger conflict. Arrakis used to be a place where the great houses went to harvest spice. Now it will be a place where they harvest warriors.
That’s why the film doesn’t end on a shot of Paul. This is not a story of his victory. He may have defeated his enemies and taken the throne, but he has lost his soul in the process. The allure of power was too great and the forces of history too strong for him, so now he’s simply the new Emperor seeking to conquer other realms. He may have loads of superpowers and be the figure of prophecy, but none of that really matters because he’ll inflict the same death and pain as the Harkonnens (and eventually Paul learns that he’s a descendant of the Harkonnens, further emphasizing the flimsiness of any House allegiance). So how does your film have any impact if you finish it by saying your supposed hero is meaningless?
You zoom in on the meaning he lost, and that’s Chani. Zendaya is (as usual) outstanding in the role, and that’s no small task when you’re asking the audience, “Would you give up the universe for this person?” We can feel the way Paul is torn between wanting to get revenge against the Harkonnens and protect the Fremen, but he ultimately loses his true north when he loses sight of Chani. Rather than trusting her and making her his partner, he decides to leave her behind and fall into the realm of destiny. However you want to understand his choice, the outcome is the same, and it’s the look on Chani’s face that makes it all so heartbreaking.
While the book has the love story between Paul and Chani, it’s dwarfed against the backdrop of history (and, tellingly, Irulan’s histories give less attention to Chani than to other important figures in Paul’s life like Duke Leto and Lady Jessica). Perhaps for Herbert, he wanted the emotions to land by showing Chani set aside, but Villeneuve makes her a consistently active character, campaigning for herself and her people while trying to pull Paul away from crush of prophecy and destiny. Instead, she’s left with no choice but to walk away from it all. Her blue-within-blue eyes look out over a desert that is full of uncertainty, but at least she’s free.
Recommendations
Perhaps you’ve heard that the new MLB uniforms are awful. Nike (the designer) and Fanatics (the manufacturer) really put their heads together to come up with something everyone hates. However, it’s one thing to make uniforms that looks ugly. Ugly uniforms come and go, and while it’s not ideal, you can still play the game if the lettering on the back of the jersey is an eyesore.
What’s more of a concern, and as Molly Knight writes about in a newsletter from a couple weeks ago, the pants are see-through. It is kind of incredible that Nike and Fanatics are both companies worth millions if not billions of dollars, and no one thought, “Hey, let’s crank out a few mock-ups to make sure you can’t see genitalia.” Anyway, I don’t know what MLB is going to do, but I’m pretty sure we’re headed for an unfortunate rip or tear of some kind in a very public game.
What I’m Watching
This past weekend, I watched Teen Wolf for the first time, and while I won’t go so far as to call it a great film, I love that it feels no need to overexplain itself. Scott (Michael J. Fox) is a normal teenager until his werewolf gene emerges, and this makes him cool, popular, and good at basketball. That’s it! There’s no lore, no asking why it’s not connected to a full moon, or anything to really pull us away from the premise of “What if teen, but also wolf?” Like it’s a solid puberty metaphor, and also it lets us live in the fantasy of teens being incredibly accepting of someone who’s different. When Teen Wolf returned in the 2010s as an MTV series, I’m disappointed it was as a supernatural drama instead of, “The teen wolf plays lacrosse now.”
I also watched Ricky Stanicky, which arrives on Prime Video tomorrow. It’s a comedy about three lifelong friends (played by Zac Efron, Andrew Santino, and Jermaine Fowler) who made up a guy named “Ricky Stanicky” to get them out of trouble as kids, and as adults, to get them out of things they don’t want to do. When it seems like they’re perilously close to getting caught in their lie, they hire an actor named Rod (John Cena) to play Ricky. However, Rob’s life sucks, and when it’s time for him to go back to Atlantic City, he sticks around pretending to be Ricky, thus making life harder for the three friends.
This film is not very good outside of Cena, who continues to show he’s a comic ace that can fully commit to any bit. But the movie is interesting because it’s been in development hell for over a decade. The script first came on the scene in 2010, and that’s how this movie makes sense—it was trying to drift off the success of The Hangover, which opened in 2009. Except The Hangover wasn’t the start of a boom; it was the end of stories about immature guys who get in over their heads with their shenanigans, but learn important life lessons along the way. That trend started in the early 2000s with movies like Old School and Wedding Crashers. Watching Ricky Stanicky is a bizarre time capsule where most of the jokes aren’t that funny, the three friends just come off as immature and selfish, and the biggest question is why anyone would try to force this movie into existence now when the audience has largely moved on to other kinds of comedy. For director Peter Farrelly, perhaps this film makes him feel like he’s back in his element—making the raunchy, low-brow comedies like he used to with his brother Bobby (e.g. Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary). But for the audience, almost everything in Ricky Stanicky is painfully stale.
Finally, my wife and I started a rewatch of Silicon Valley, and I have incredibly mixed emotions about this show. I think the writing is still absolutely brilliant, and the tech industry has gotten no less ridiculous in the five years since the show wrapped. But I now have to carry certain burdens into the viewing like seeing that Christopher Evan Welch was creating an all-time great sitcom character with Peter Gregory, but he wouldn’t even get to see it because he passed away from lung cancer four months before the first season aired. There’s also T.J. Miller being so damn funny (he can get a laugh just by how he pronounces “Aviato”), but Miller is also a terrible person who allegedly assaulted an Uber driver, was accused of sexually assaulting a fellow student in college, and phoned in fake bomb threat on Amtrak. Also, Thomas Middleditch is kind of a creep who was groping women at Hollywood nightclub in October 2019. All this just makes it a little harder to laugh at characters like Erlich and Richard as clueless dorks.
What I’m Reading
I finished reading Invisible Man this weekend, and I can now see why it’s heralded as a masterpiece of literature, not only for how it explores race relations in America, but also the experimentation and beauty in Ellison’s prose. It was not an easy read by any stretch, but it was certainly a rewarding one.
In other reads:
Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion? By Joshua Hunt [The New York Times Magazine] – If you know me, you know I’m a total sucker for Criterion Collection discs. I’ve amassed 156 of them over the years, and every time there’s a 50% off sale, I rush to procure some new additions. This is a great article about the history of the company, and how their commitment to human curation has given them a cultural cache and importance that far exceeds other institutions and even much larger players such as Netflix. It’s difficult to be considered “the best” for decades, but Criterion has lost none of its esteem over the decades. Also, put me down as someone who think it’s great that two Michael Bay movies are in the collection, and that both films—The Rock and Armageddon—should be given the 4K treatment.
How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood? By Mark Harris [The New York Times] – I hold Harris in incredibly high esteem (I think all three of his film books are essential reading), and I think he’s got the right read on Hollywood facing an incredibly difficult year ahead. While there’s a fear that this could be the end of movies as we know it, I lean towards Harris’ optimistic view that movies are in a time of transition, not annihilation. However, the industry will need to change in a substantive way with what it’s producing rather than hoping a big weekend or two means they can go back to a pre-2020 mentality.
We Live in a Golden Age of Crybullyism by Adam Johnson [The Nation] – I frequently flash back to this South Park joke where Cartman, who is always bullying Kyle, gets hit by Kyle and immediately starts wailing and crying. I think about it a lot because we see it so often among the most powerful among us who abhor any kind of negative consequences to their actions, and then try to make themselves out as the traumatized party. “Crybullying” is a good term for it.
What I’m Hearing
The Avett Brothers dropped a new track, “Love of a Girl,” and I though it sounded just awful, which is pretty deflating because I love the sad folk tunes of their early albums as opposed to what sounds like Weezer with fewer instruments. So that sent me back to their 2020 album, The Third Gleam, and that’s the good stuff. The Avett Brothers can make whatever music they want, but I’m not particularly interested in whatever “Love of a Girl” is.
What I’m Playing
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is here! I started playing it the day of release, and I can already tell that this thing is going to be much bigger than Remake. Whether that’s to the game’s benefit or detriment remains to be seen, but in the few hours I’ve played so far, I’m enjoying myself.