Sandworms and Us

Of Girlbosses and Repressions

We are awash in sandworms.

It seems it’s a tall order these days trying to get out of bed and making it to the coffee machine without already shaking at least one nematode out of your hair.

But not just worms: people now hear the words “Bene Gesserit,” “Muad’Dib,” and “Harkonnen” with alarming frequency, almost as often as they hear old standards like “Trump,” “Taylor Swift,” and “Housewives of [insert literally any American city here].”

Not that I’m complaining. I am a huge Dune fan, after all. The original books by Frank Herbert are near and dear to my heart. I read all six of them in an inspired reading binge in the mid-90s. I can hear about spice melange and the Kwisatz Haderach until the cows come home.

My apologies, then, if, in fact, you do not share with me this passion for Paul Atreides and the Fremen, and feel somewhat discomfited by my joining in on the deluge of unwanted Dune references, sandworms and all, into your daily diet.

Now, I may not be complaining about being awash in Dune, but I did recently complain about something related to the occasion for all of this Dune glorification in the media bloodstream, the release of Dune: Part Two, the latest of Canadian auteur Denis Villeneuve’s installments in his cinematic Dune makeover. I am happy to say it was turned into a piece that was published in Compact Magazine.

This was my first time writing for Compact, an incisive, heterodox online journal which I highly recommend subscribing to. The writing is universally top-notch and, where more mainstream outlets merely feed you uninterrogated dogma, Compact’s wide-ranging opinions and reviews make you think more deeply about the politics, movies, books and other current events passing through the more orthodox commentariat gaze.

All this to say I was really excited to debut over there with my take on Hollywood’s latest edition of the problem of its ideological reproduction regime.

I won’t get into the actual piece too much because I want to respect Compact’s paywall (I think right now a new subscription is $3 a month, just in case you might consider breaching the walls).

Rather, I want to explore some of the ideas that floated around in my head while I was writing the piece which ultimately made it into the journal.

In an nutshell, it’s the problem of Hollywood.

My piece had to do with the way the studio system mangles and destroys the authenticity of the written material that makes it to its desk. So I think it bears mentioning that, if we are ever to parse out the various causes for these bowdlerizations of scripts and stories, one thing that should never avoid scrutiny is the fact that the Hollywood studio system is the rough entertainment equivalent of multinational enterprises like BlackRock or Berkshire Hathaway. It should therefore be regarded as a megalith of neoliberal economic activity in the same way that we look at entities like Amazon, as an entity whose motives deserve the greatest suspicion.

There’s no surprise, then, that, in the latest Dune, we have once again been treated to a performance of Hollywood’s not-so-hidden function of kowtowing to mainstream progressive-liberal taste in the treatment of one of its main characters, Chani, the love interest of the protagonist Paul Atreides (of the aforementioned “Muad’Dib”).

In the Dune books, Chani is an elite warrior-princess belonging to a clan within the greater tribal civilizational network of the Fremen, a MENA-coded, desert-dwelling people that serve as the chief focal point for the first book.

Chani is an incredibly powerful, fierce, intelligent and strong-willed woman whose respect and adherence to tribal codes and traditional law is unwavering.

How could it be otherwise?

No Fremen would survive the brutality of their desert existence—what with sandstorms and sandworms afoot every minute of the day and no water—without a unified and strict adherence to these codes.

You already know where this is going.

Villeneuve, of quivering hands contemplating Twitter blowback, now goes back to the Chani of the patriarchal books and, for his Hollywood spectacle, “fixes” her, coming back with the unrecognizable Chani of his progressive-liberal movie.

On Planet Hollywood, Chani is still a warrior-princess, but she’s a warrior-princess who #Resists and refuses to bite off the patriarchal apple that Frank Herbert has given us in his original vision, which dates back all the way to the Stone Age in . . . 1965.

After Villeneuve’s makeover, Chani becomes a super-heroine version of her book form, complete with extra powers, such as third wave feminism and intersectional politics.

Though it independently clanged around in my head as I came out of the theater, it was my good friend Andre Daughtry, himself an even bigger Dune fan than I, with whom I discussed the new release, who dubbed her “Girlboss Chani.”

Girlboss Chani is a highly ahistorical, anachronistic portrait of an indigenous heroine living tens of thousands of years in the future, after numerous civilizational diasporas and apocalypses, who, unlike Herbert Chani of the books, has somehow managed to take a course on Enlightenment Theories of Liberal Democracy.

And it was Daughtry who helped me glean just how powerful are these production dynamics when it comes to this kind of ideological reproduction at scale.

Hollywood, like any corporation, he reminded me, is a monotheistic cult: there is only one God and His name is Bottom Line.

What this then means is that, when dealing with the multi-million-dollar budgets of commodities such as a Villeneuve flick, the incentive to hedge against the least amount of offense amongst its targeted consumer base acquires outsize proportion.

Arch capitalists that they are, studios hedge their bets and derisk at all costs.

If there’s even a smidgeon of a chance that a filmic portrait of Chani that contains a similar degree of nuance as was found in Herbert’s books—in the books, she is no trophy bride, no pushover and no domestic engineer, yet she is most certainly no “girlboss” either—might nonetheless offend a section of the consumer base because it was insufficiently “clear” on its feminist politics du jour, then We Have a Problem. This even if the “solution” contradicts the basic narrative fabric of the story world of Dune.

This is not to denigrate or even to critique whichever political sensibilities, feminist or otherwise, these studio heads are nervous about inflaming. It is merely to put things into context: wipe that romantic glimmer off your image of Hollywood’s supposed “advancement”—at the end of the day it’s all about the Benjamins.

Capitalists are like classically trained actors: give them a script and they will trick you into thinking they believe every line. But they just need a ticket-buying audience to show up and that’s literally the only thing passing through their brains: like any narcissist, they have no real principles, they just need results.

Of the legion reviews of Dune, I think this one might be my favorite. It covers an impressive degree of terrain with poise and intelligence and it also independently made the same point I made in my Compact piece.

What frustrated me even more about Villeneuve’s Chani is that there already is a clear precedent for a big studio auteur to have his nuanced feminist cake and eat it, too.

I’m thinking of the fabulously weird Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, who, in one of his recent offerings, successfully positioned feminism as the highest ideal amidst a politically regressive backdrop, all without calling attention to itself as mere propaganda.

No, I am not thinking of the overblown and decadent Poor Things, which I found lurid and, at times, actually insulting towards women, but his other, much more intelligent and disciplined feminist tract, The Favourite.

In The Favourite, an incandescent Olivia Colman plays Queen Anne of Great Britain, a royal stuck in the midst of the encroachments of greedy and controlling courtiers and handlers—all men—who spends the entire movie navigating her homosexual desire, pitting two female suitors against each other.

Unlike its 2023 followup, 2018’s The Favourite makes an incredibly strong case for the irreducibility of female desire and the inherent violence of patriarchal systems. It accomplishes this, not through ham-fisted displays of trendy and performative feminism, but through an adherence to a basic realism in its world building that reveals the contradictions in its own structures.

I believe The Favourite proves that filmmakers do have options when addressing these concerns. Dune: Part Two would have done well to take note of the elegant solution Lanthimos deployed, which included an adherence to the historical reality of the social relations of Queen Anne’s time in order to righteously advocate for feminist principles.

Instead, Villeneuve’s “solution” is surreal and bizarre (not in a good way).

His Chani is an unnerving presence in the movie, laden with the task of frowning at every single little exercise of personal autonomy on the part of Paul Atreides, just in case anyone in the audience might be seduced into believing that he really is The One. Fear not, unlettered masses, Hollywood is here to protect you from Bad Ideas™. We got you covered: Chani will hem and haw and Resist and Represent and also act like an anachronistic teenager who would be kicked off the team in real life in five seconds for all of the psychological undermining she gets away with in the movie’s ahistorical frame.

I really believe that, in thirty years time, Chani’s mic drop moment at the end, where she gets up while everyone else is praying and kneeling before Paul Muad’Dib, is going to unintentionally draw laughter from future audiences. In the same way that so many jumpings of the shark from the ‘80s draw laughter from us today.

It’s an example of what Freud and Jung called the “Return of the Repressed.” (For the present purposes, Jung’s version is more apt than Freud’s).

Jung believed that archetypes, these deep structures of our psyche, defined humanity’s early relationship with the gods. He insisted that, even though modernity has ended up killing off all of the gods, humanity is “still as much possessed of autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians.”^[1] According to Jung, these repressed deities, in modern, secular times, “return” as pathological formations, as symptoms, as phobias, obsessions and other types of neuroses.

Certainly, Villeneuve’s Dune is rife with these kinds of neuroses. Girlboss Chani is herself some type of a Return of the Repressed, a much less compelling, modernized version of the original archetype of Warrior-Princess.

Lanthimos’s The Favourite, on the other hand, is an example of a movie that tempers these pathologies. It evinces a respect for history, with its various civilizational structures, “good” and “bad,” as an inherently intuitive force.

The “Return of the Repressed” is very weak in Lanthimos’s movie, and this is a glorious thing. In keeping intact the archaic organizational structures that inhered during Queen Anne’s time, the odious patriarchy and hegemonic religiosity of the era, the filmmaker was able to position the modern feminist response, not as a reactionary impulse, but as an authentic melioration which presented the contemporaneous constraints on femininity with realism, while also preserving the Queen’s heroism.

Villeneuve’s Chani, on the other hand, did not fare so well.

A couple of other reviews which I think are worth considering—if you haven’t yet gotten tired of Dune reviews—is this one from IndieWire and also Ross Douhat’s great column here.

Enjoy.

^[1]C. G. Jung, “Commentary on ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower’"