I can see how they got away with not saying any Arabic terms in the last movie, but come on, are they really gonna ret-con the whole vocabulary of the setting to avoid upsetting some cracker groypers?
lmao you have got to be kidding me
Villeneuve is a hack and a coward
I only watched the first part, but you can't see it and not see Lawrence of Arabia and the white saviourism of it. (I realise that everyone's said this, but really it hit me hard).
That’s kinda the point though, the Bene Gesserit seeded a messiah narrative a thousand years before Paul got there. Haven’t read all of dune, but hearing people talk about it, it seems like Herbert is deconstructing the whole ‘chosen one’ narrative. It’s supposed to be fucked up.
Exactly, and there's a strong chance he only planned on doing the first two books but people didn't get this point so he makes it much more overt in the third and fourth books
Yeah, the whole project is about "Maybe superheroes are kinda bad." < timestamped link to NBC interview with Frank Herbert
E) So happy my 5k comment was DUNEposting
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I haven't seen the new movie, but I feel like the book deliberately invoked this in the sense of "this is pretty fucked up, right?" Does the movie do it in that sense or like a "wow, what a hero!" way?
the first movie taken on its own could be seen that way but its setting up a second movie which leans more towards the former sense
That's totally fair and I think tracks pretty well with the book.
spoiler
It's foreshadowed, but it's not until he get's his Mentat powers in the desert that it becomes clear how Paul's basically manipulating the Fremen knowing that it'll destroy him and them.
the second part deals with that more explicitly from what I've been told (haven't seen it yet) even though the book didn't deal with it too much until the sequel
spoilerish
It comes back to bite paul and he "lives long enough to become the villain" so to speak: https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/dune-2-denis-villeneuve-interview-white-savior
I love how the series has all these beautiful Arabic-inspired words/names like Arrakis, Muad’dib, etc., and then Duncan Idaho. Duncan fucking Idaho.
They really liked it at the time due to their condition during the very first rehearsal. But - sadly - Duncan fucking Idaho was dropped from the song after the B-52s sobered up.
i mean there's also the people who would correctly point out the orientalist appropriation of random arab cultural elements
That's a shallow reading. Herbert engaged very seriously with Islamic philosophy and the dynamics of colonialism; nothing about it was random. A white guy borrowing any elements from another culture is not sufficient to demonstrate orientalism, especially when he so obviously takes the side of the Future Arabs against Future Honkeys.
Definitely. Herbert genuinely engages with west asian culture, and it's not a surprise. His source material were his own muslim friends' historical experience, and his readings of Islamic philosophy.
I think I'm gonna make a new handle offa yer joke there if that's ok
I need an alt and "Future Honkey" dovetails nicely with my love of bad puns and its proximity to gay space communism. Do you mind?
Is that fair tho..? All culture is bastardised in the Dune universe. Western or Eastern. It shows such a distant future that anything that seems familiar upon closer inspection is truly alien.
The Atreides are “Roman”, but they really are not right? The whole culture of Caladan for example is like a generic “utopian” bucolic Western European medieval vibe. It’s in itself a bastardisation of “western culture” no? Like an “occidentalist” view in a way.
But that’s not the point in Dune. It’s about how human culture shifts and absorbs itself over time. How marginal cultures become central, and central cultures become marginal. That’s how I saw it at least.
