Dune 2021

Although the Harkonnens openly embody malicious characteristics, also the chronotope inhabited by the supposed heroes of the story (house Atreides, with a name that evokes the Homeric and Greek mythological tradition) share some elements of a gothic/horror aesthetics. First of all, although Caladan features a more pleasant ecology made of green hills, harmonious seaside sceneries, and elegant titanic halls and spaceships reminiscent of brutalist architecture, such environments are always covered in a crepuscular light (three). 

As we can see, the film exhibits a conflictual tension; its symphonic audiovisual structure constantly dialogues with a disenchanted and ‘cold’ look at the same iconography and moral hierarchy displayed, and this opposition engenders both a persistent critical ambiguity and an eerie mood.  When referring to ‘The Eerie’ I am very much inspired by the insightful distinction provided by Mark Fisher separating this intricate tension from ‘The Weird’. The latter indicates an unfamiliar presence within familiar or known contexts, which produces a disturbing sense of displacement, threat, and chaos. Following Fisher, such affective and conceptual disorientation is the multifaceted feeling that dominates Lynch’s cinema and characterises his Dune, which displays a world of abject inconsistencies, of unsettling and morbid associations. Just by looking at the Baron of Lynch’s version (Kenneth McMillan), covered in pustules, receiving constant surgical management or torturing young men -with quite explicit sexual innuendos-, we may have an idea of such unsettling dynamics (six). 

The Eerie, on the other hand, is connected with the pervasive presence of an absence (or absence of a presence), that is with an unfilled lack in experiential spaces that produces a more subtle, but pervasive failed recognition or misrecognition. Indeed, in the first half of Villeneuve’s Dune, instead of experiencing ‘the weird presence of something that does not belong’ we are constantly witnessing the eerie hollowing out of the very notion of belonging. Heroic figures are either spectral presences or mundane elements, thus contributing to the critical assessment of the storyworld as one in which a sense of greatness and solidity has been irremediably lost (seven) (or was always illusory and flawed), thus leaving out nothing more than mere simulacra of an assumed majesty. 

 Likewise, his psychic abilities, as his swordsmanship, are the product of Jessica’s (Paul’s mentor and co-protagonist of the film) decision to train him in the ways of the Bene Gesserit: a prestigious order of witches she belongs to, who can predict the future, control minds, and manipulate reproduction. At the end of the Gom Jabbar test -a mortal challenge through which Paul needs to resist extreme mental pain inflicted by the Revered Mother of the same order (Charlotte Rampling) (eight) - the main character is surprisingly saluted as one of the important actors in the political battlefield because of his mother’s lineage. It is Jessica’s choice, against her caste’s doctrine, of engineering the coming of an unbeatable leader, capable of bringing peace to the tormented galaxy, that has allowed Paul to wield a power usually forbidden to males. 

Therefore, his ascension to a new status is not displayed as a heroic revelation. On the arrival on Arrakis, huge crowds welcome Paul as a messiah sent to finally liberate the planet from its oppression (nine). This sequence features also some of the most enigmatic shots of the film, with the display of groups of people dressed in ways that simulate Bedouin/Tuareg clothing, cheering at the sight of Paul and Jessica. Of course, these images seem to evoke a classical white-saviour trope, with an external western hero coming to the welcomed rescue of a dominated people and offering a more humane colonial governance. However, as we learn right after these moments, the acclaim was nothing more than a routine performance ‘they see what they have been told to see’. 

Doubts about Paul’s status come, very significantly, from his same visions. Paul argues that Duncan could be saved if he had been there with him at the moment of his killing; later, however, we see that his death is exactly motivated by Paul’s presence and by the ultimate sacrifice of the warrior in his defence. Paul sees himself both kissed and stabbed by Chani in the same prediction. Notwithstanding these anomalies and contradictions, we could infer that all these images, dreams, and visions seem to indicate moments of passage and transitions: the death and rebirth of Paul together with an admission allowed through sacrifice all hint at the acceptance of entering into a new dimension and embracing this journey (ten). 

What remains evident is the moral ambiguity of events that are rarely framed as clearly positive or destructive changes and, consequently, our impossibility of relying on Paul’s understanding of his visions, mostly motivated by contingent desires and needs of the character. Paul is an unreliable narrator. To stress this point, one of the final images of the film is Paul’s close up in chiaroscuro with a smug smile that shows the so-far undecided lost kid in an arrogant and confident pose. Whether Paul has decided to accept his ‘planned’ destiny and election, and feels ready to carry out revenge and war in the name of a higher purpose entitled to him, or has differently put together the signs of his visions, this is something we cannot conjecture upon with certainty. Viewers can only rely on the troubled gaze of Jessica -the final close up of the film is on her looking with concern at her son and at possible events with a knowledge that is forbidden to them (eleven).

 The desert exists probably as one of the most important tropes in modern literature, condensing and stressing, in different ways, tensions and anxieties of modernity. This happens because the desert gives a body to the problems arising with the advent of capitalist structures and social relations; it features both the challenge to its taxonomy and organisation of reality, since it exists without clear enclosures, indicators of ownership, and urbanised conglomerations and, for these reasons, it appears as the open space to conquer and reterritorialise also because of its hidden riches and resources to accumulate. It is a labyrinth, the existentialist topos of meditation, loneliness, and radical interrogation, where subjectivity is put to test and lost. The openness of the desert, its apparent and imaginary lack of sedentary communities, or of a harmonic nature can simply exist as the double of a civilised and more ‘rational’ world (twelve).

 In this way, we can place and configure binary metaphysical oppositions between an ordered reality with its cultured population and a more brutal/natural one with its nomadic tribes. In fact, it could be possible to argue that the desert, or desert islands, are imagined as isolated and void spaces only to allow continental and colonial formations to rise and negatively define themselves, where, on the other hand, these ‘strange’ spaces always exist as populated rich and interconnected ecologies (thirteen).