I love the praise the Dune book series gets on here and on Chapo pod, and dig everything Denis V has done.
Before watching Lynch's Dune, I was hyped up expecting trade wars and discussions of imperialism and resource based economies, but the film didn't really care about that. Then the end kinda implies his godliness and Jihad is a good thing?
Am I missing something? I wan to jump on the hype train!
Dune the book is pretty much the first work of environmentalist and anti-imperialist sci-fi that got really popular, and it's worth praising just for that.
Also an early example of Mighty Whitey / White Savior tropes, but it's similar to Lawrence of Arabia in that it takes pains to subvert those themes after having established them.
Haven't seen the Lynch movie but I love the book. Paul himself wants to do everything in his power to stop the Jihad. He laments losing his friend Stilgar, as now the latter only sees Paul as a God and not himself. It's pretty clear from the book that Paul does not think these are Good Things, but realizes whatever he tries they're going to happen anyway, so he just tries to move things in a way that are the best outcomes for the Fremen within the bounds of what he can do.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
I think Dune is actually a great example of that Marx quote above. There's nothing Paul can do to stop the Jihad or his own elevation to Divinity. They were already baked in. All he can do is go along with the tide.
Yes, the whole point of messiah is that Paul is trapped by the future that he sees and is not enough of a monster to follow through. Humanity is doomed to extinction outside the Golden path and it is his son who has the fortitude to take it.
Yeah I love how he rejects his historical role at the end and goes off into the desert to die. Pretty powerful stuff. Ugh I love his arc so much and the way it grafts onto climate change is spooky.
I mean Herbert grew up in a socialist commune and was your garden variety oregon lolbertarian settler when he grew up, so Idk that it's comparable to starship troopers. Star wars is probably a good comp
Are you talking about the book or the movie? Because Starship Troopers the book is very different from the movie. Based Paul Verhoeven turned it into a satire. To quote him "I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring … It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book."
Robert Heinlein was an odd bird. Dude seemed to oscillate between fash, libertarian, and kind of a hippy socialist.
spoiler
I thought it was that he deferred the grieving because he was still commanding and in the middle of a battle.
After everything wrapped up didn't he say something like "I can grieve now"?
Isn't that like book 4 though? I doubt any movies will ever get that far.
Ultimately, the book does frame jihad as something positive that brings new vitality to decaying civilization. I've never seen the Lynch film, but I'm getting the feeling that it's framing the ending as "yay, protagonist victory!" from your post.
It's rejuvenating in the same way that the similarly inevitable big worm creates the spice - jihad is what gives society its kick, according to Dune
I really like Lynch's Dune. The aesthetics are just perfect. The movie is a lot more about the aesthetics of the world, rather than the story.
I watched Lynch's Dune on a whim with a friend while I was halfway through reading the book. Great book, shit movie. I'm hopeful that Villeneuve can capture what makes the book so unique, but it's a monumental task to turn an internal political thriller into a Hollywood spectacle so we'll see.
I just watched the Lynch movie after reading the first dune book and though it was definitely a product of its time and didn't really capture the book, I still loved it as its own thing.
Really wish we'd gotten Jodorowsky's Dune instead. Imagining a world where that film was the first big scifi blockbuster instead of star wars always gets me.
I've only seen the 3-hour Spicediver edit but I really liked it (pirate bay has it). The first half felt like watching the book, the second half was noticeably rushed and would have been hard to follow if I hadn't read the book. Yeah it lacked a lot of the political stuff but I was still surprised how many of the major notes were covered.
