Dune is back, because Hollywood can only remake and re-adapt: Paul is not a "white savior" because his is the villain.

 It is time, once again, for a persistent grumble.  The screen industry does nothing but remake and adapt, and in the case of Dune, Hollywood is remaking an adaptation, which is the ouroboros of laziness.  Of course, any complaint cannot have real weight.  There are more books than anyone can read in a lifetime, many of which are great, and even for those of the visual persuasion, so much has been produced that you could spend hours, days, weeks, months and years consuming that which has been produced, including multiple versions of Dune and a speculative documentary about what a different director would have done had he been the one to adapt Dune because the snake finished eating its tail, vomited itself out, the universe of self-referentialism collapsed and for fuck's sake, if you want to make a movie, make a new movie, this is part of why I have not seen a new movie in years.  Yet Dune has value for me, not because it is the greatest book ever written, nor the greatest science fiction book ever written, but it was my point of entry into good science fiction, the first science fiction book I loved, from which I then went to Foundation and the rest of the classics, then Ender's Game, then came cyberpunk and Neuromancer and I was hooked for life.  But Dune was first.  It had its flaws, to be sure, but they have already been picked to death.  To discuss any older work in the "social justice" era, though, is to get bogged down in identitarianism, and so the remade adaptation of Dune is getting us wrapped up in such critiques.  Here we go with the white savior thing.

Let's get a real critique out of the way first.  The Bene Gesserit are scheming witches, and they follow from the crass gender stereotypes of the era in which the books were written.  It's still icky.  They are not all interchangeable.  Lady Jessica is quite different from Gaius Helen Mohiam, who is very different from Irulan.  Yet, they are scheming witches, eugenics is icky, and reading the Bene Gesserit in 2024 through a more modern lens will mean that you either a) accept that you are reading a book older than middle-aged me and recognize progress, or b) get angry.  I choose (a) and you don't get to make me choose (b).  It's still icky and misogynistic.  I'll get more angry at the last book in Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy, because I dig the modern world, but that doesn't mean I don't see Herbert's old-timey misogyny.

Yet the thing getting a lot of the science fiction/social justice Venn diagram overlap up-in-arms at the moment is the white savior narrative, and my response is this: read the books.  Plural.

Paul Atreides is, to some degree, Lawrence of Arabia, and that one?  Sure, white savior, but Dune is far more complex.  First, who are the Fremen?  They are the descendants of the Zensunni wanderers.  The term is a neologism constructed from Zen and Sunni.  In the distant future, a religion is formed by combining elements of Buddhism and Islam, the followers wind up nomadic, and eventually settle on Arrakis.  That's the Fremen.  Free men, freed from slavery.  Get it?  There is a lot of back story.  Anyway, since the melange is found on Arrakis, where the Fremen settled, oops, you have a combination of mining contracts and imperial oversight that fucks them over, and yes, this is very obviously a metaphor for oil and Bedouins, and such.

Enter the Atreides family.  Does the name sound familiar?  As in, Homeric?  They are, in fact, descendants of Agamemnon.  One may note the social construction of race and the Greeks.  Greeks, and other Southern Europeans were not considered white for a period of time.  Then, there was a crackpot notion that the modern Greeks where not the descendants of the Hellenistic Greeks because the Hellenistic Greeks produced such minds as Pythagoras, Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, Archimedes and Athens left such a legacy when its population was no greater than 10,000 at its height, but the modern Greeks looked, to 19th Century Brits, like filthy, backwards, darker-skinned lesser types.  Really, there was a crackpot pseudo-scientific theory that this meant modern Greeks weren't descendants of the Hellenistic Greeks.  Racist and insane?  Yes, but a lot of history is the Venn diagram overlap of racist and insane.

Anyway, point being, the question of the whiteness of the Greeks has, historically, been a question, and Paul Atreides is Greek, descended from Agamemnon, and everything.  If you read the books, you even meet Agamemnon, because Lady Jessica drinks the water of life on Arrakis, while pregnant with Alia, which turns Alia into "abomination."  That means she becomes fully conscious in the womb, gaining all of the knowledge and memories of all of her ancestors.

You're thinking, wouldn't that make her absolutely batshit crazy?

Yes.  Yes, it would.  And she is absolutely batshit crazy, and psychopathically evil.  At various points, she has conversations with the memory of Agamemnon, but worse, Baron Harkonen, who is her grandpappy.  You know who you really don't want whispering in your ear, telling you what to do?  Baron Vladimir Harkonen.

Yes, Alia is batshit crazy, and psychopathically evil, and this is why.  Alia is abomination.

Kill it.  Kill it with fire.

But back to Paul.  Paul shows up playing messiah to the Fremen, and for the sake of our 2024 American definition of whiteness, let's call him white, and the Fremen CoPs.  That's the abbreviation, right?

Here's the problem with saying that Paul is the white savior.  He is not a savior, he's the goddamned bad guy.  OK, sure, when the Harkonens are around, and the Padishah Emperor and so many other shitbags, you're asking, how bad can he be, and isn't he better, and yadda yadda yadda, but no, actually, the whole point is that Paul is the villain.  Book 1 is the origin story of a villain so horrible that his rise necessitates an even worse villain to fix the disaster he creates.  That even worse villain, maybe kinda fixing his mess is his son, Leto II, God Emperor.  Or maybe Leto is the disaster he creates.  Take your pick.

So what happens?  Paul starts a... "jihad."  Yeah, that word.  Holy war.  No, not an internal, personal struggle, that's bullshit.  Massive war, death on a scale you cannot even begin to fathom.  The thing is that it mostly takes place off-page.  You read about Paul rising to power within the Fremen, the internal struggles in the Imperium, and various power struggles, but you are essentially just told of the scale of death, so readers may not even appreciate it, but put Paul on the scale of the worst mass murderers in history.

He does, then, put the Fremen in power on Arrakis, so in a sense, he is their messiah, right?

No.  Keep reading.  He runs a corrupt and oppressive government, facing internal rebellion, the Fremen of old realize that by turning Arrakis from desert to wet planet, he destroys not only the ecosystem, but their entire culture and way of life, wrecking essentially everything.  This will kill the sandworms, endanger the melange, and all for what?  And it gets worse.  One of the assassination plots burns out Paul's eyes, and he refuses mechanical eyes, using his prescience instead.  He winds up locking everyone into predestination, effectively taking away everyone's free will, and there is some mysterious enemy out beyond the bounds of what anyone can see, and holy fuck, Paul is the absolute worst.  Eventually, he has to walk off into the desert, ostensibly to die, becoming a mysterious/anonymous crazy preacher, while his son, Leto II becomes God Emperor after covering himself with larval sandworm things, and Leto puts humanity on the "Golden Path," which begins with a millennia-running system of totalitarian oppression, all to undo the damage Paul started, and is it really necessary?  We do not know, because Leto is fucking crazy, but we do know that Paul is not the goddamned hero if you actually read the books.  He is the villain.  I am far from the only person to notice that Anakin Skywalker is supposed to be what Paul Atreides is.  There's a prophesy about him being a savior, he is absurdly powerful, but actually, he goes the wrong way, and he turns the universe to shit because he goes to the dark side and he's actually the villain.

Paul is as much a white savior as Anakin Skywalker because it's the same story, just written first, and yes, George Lucas was ripping off Dune in so many ways, but he wasn't as good as Frank Herbert, obviously.  My point, though, is enough of this "white savior" bullshit.  Right now, you get virtue-signaling points for making the accusation, but it is not true.

The story is so much better, and more interesting than that.  You are simply accustomed to the protagonist being the hero, particularly when faced with a clearly villainous opponent, but sometimes that's not the world, and it isn't the universe in Dune.

Calibration matters.  The problem is that there are now positive incentives for mis-calibration.  There are incentives for false-positives in the detection of __-ism, for the sake of virtue-signaling.  No, you just need recalibration.

Roy Buchanan, "The Messiah Will Come Again," from Austin City Limits.  The studio version is on his self-titled album.  This is probably his signature tune.  Many would say that Jeff Beck was the greatest guitarist ever, but Jeff said that Roy was the greatest ever.