Representations of real cultures shouldn’t be used as ham-handed allegories, particularly when it’s an Anglo-American author using artifacts of a non-European culture not to represent that non-European culture but rather a culture made up to stand in for something exotic. It’s embarrassing and cringeworthy and possibly insulting.
I don’t want to “replace everything that is non white.” I want to remove coding of Arabs from characters who aren’t literally Arabs. If they were meant to literally be Arabs, then it would be different.
About to watch the big screen version after catching it on HBOmax a few moments after release. Loved it enough to want to spend $34 (with food) to watch the AVX/Atmos version (I assume a step down from Imax, also available in this theater, but not preferred by me), so here I am:
I’m so old I remember when advertisements before movies was controversial. In Atlanta, the film which broke the barrier was Murder On the Orient Express, back in 1974.
But I don’t think it applies to Dune. I see Dune as a positive and respectful portrayal of a non-white culture in a sci-fi setting using elements from real-world non-white cultures. We need more positive portrayals. We need more influences from non-white cultures.
FWIW, not every word in the vocabulary chapter is Arabic. “Murciélago” is Spanish, for instance. Whether good or cringe-inducing, it is explicitly written in the novel that the ancestors of the Fremen came from planets X, Y, and Z before settling Arrakis (not to mention all of humanity’s common roots on Earth, also there were other cultures on X, Y, and Z which they lived among), their religion based on Islam but also influenced by 10000 years of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Obeah, etc., and of course all the Bene Gesserit stuff. So, they are not quite real Arabs or Berbers but they are supposed to be future space Arabs in one sense, but not ones that have been completely culturally isolated either, seems like the only way to read it.
A film version, now, does not have the detailed appendices, so the viewer is going to see Arabic-speaking Muslim desert people without all of that backstory.
BTW am I the only one who found the substitution-cypher “Galach” alphabet texts amusing? They did not spend that much on linguists…
The Fremen are the worst aspects of a street gang crossed with the Mujahideen. They have combat to the death for routine matters, they think of themselves as the one true “right” people, they consider fighting as the only indicator of strength (or rightness), they’re closed-minded to anything different than “the way it is”, and worse of all, they’ll kill you for simply walking through their neighborhood.
It’s funny, I always got the impression that the people in Dune weren’t humans in the future, but more like Star Wars, where they’re portrayed by humans but they’re an unnamed species from a place far far away. Not sure where I got that impression, but I was surprised that this story was meant to be humanity in the far future.
I haven’t read the books, but picked up on a lot of the universe’s background through cultural osmosis. I’ve never read about the Orange Catholic Bible - and that would be a pretty specific tipoff if I had - but it’s not surprising to have similarly named things to human culture since human culture is familiar to the audience, I’d imagine you see a similar effect in Star Wars, for example.
I guess some of what seems like magical mysticism stuff like the powers of the Bene Gesserit suggest that it’s meant to be someone more fantastic than humanity. Maybe the books have an explanation for how that stuff is actually technologically based.
Dune is definitely humans in the far future. It all started on earth in the Dune universe.
Indeed, there are no aliens at all in the Dune universe beyond basic indigenous flora and fauna on a given planet…giant worms anyone? (in some of the extended writings there might be some hints there are other intelligent aliens but…(?)).
EDIT to add: Some places, like Tleilax, are humans which seem to be evolving apart from the rest of the galaxy and are kinda becoming their own thing. About as alien as anyone gets in Dune. The Bene Tleilax, also called Tleilaxu, are definitely weird.
I’m not a…Duner? - What is the term for a Dune geek? - but Frank Herbert was definitely writing in the “human potential” tradition of 60s/70s sci-fi and the New Age. A lot of the “magic” and “super-human” abilities in Dune are supposed to just be the result of humans realizing their full potential, through extreme training, indoctrination, and eugenics. Plus drugs. In-universe, and possibly the writer and the readers.
The events portrayed in the Dune series of books are meant to be the distant future of humans from Earth. And therefore…
They aren’t Arabs, in the sense that they have never set foot on Arabian soil. But they are most likely descended from an Arab culture which is why those terms have survived. That makes more sense than “we are on a desert planet so let’s use terms from an ancient culture that also lived in a desert”.
Here is a timeline taken from the Dune original book series.
That timeline spans 26,240 years, starting when humans begin to use faster than light space travel until the events of Chapterhouse: Dune, the last book in the original series written by Frank Herbert. What I don’t think is established is when humanity discovers FTL travel, so we can’t be sure exactly how far in the future the books take place relative to our own time period. But assume that FTL travel is discovered in the very near future, say 2025, then the events we see in the first Dune novel (and the most recent film) would be 21,191 years in the future, or the year 23,216 CE. That’s many thousands of years in the future. Who knows what our cultures might turn into so many years in the future? This is a fantastical speculation from Herbert about what that might look like.
Another thing mentioned about the Fremen in the novel, but not the film as far as I noticed, is that Fremen on Poritrin were raided and enslaved by the Empire and transported to Betelgeuse, Salusa Secundus, and other places including Arrakis, and not so long ago they do not still lament it during nightly prayers.
Paul, I think, compares himself to Genghis Khan and Hitler at some point in Dune Messiah. I’m not sure they know if those people were evil or good, but they know they killed a whole lot of people.
