Power over Spice is power over all
This is the opening line of Dune: Part Two, spoken in the throat-singing ceremonial language of the fearsome Sardaukar warriors. It is also not true. Opening with a reference to spice, the mysterious substance which powers interstellar travel in the Dune Imperium and gives the Bene Gesserit sisters their psychic powers, the struggle over the control of which forms the foundation of the first arcs of the Dune story, is more than a bit of a misdirection. Spice is barely in the film at all. Yes, we see it in their food sometimes, we know it turns their eyes blue, we see it being mined, we see it in a translated form in the Water of Life, and there is one conversation where Paul considers reducing the spice fields to nuclear slag, but that is pretty much it. I know that sounds like a lot, but it’s an almost three-hour movie. Few, I suspect, would come away from the film saying that the central plot was the control of the lucrative spice production, though that is the story’s pretense. Taken on its own, power over spice is indeed power over all, as spice controls the flow of goods and people across the vast reaches of the Known Universe. But does the story itself support that isolated claim? Not really. The opening line of the film is simply wrong—or rather, it is not the point of the film.
Well, not wrong, as in director Denis Villeneuve made some error (*clutches pearls* I would never!). Rather, the speaker of the quote is wrong about what the story they’re in is about. The Sardaukar are the Emperor’s blades, the sworn legions of Shaddam IV who bring the Imperial boot down on whoever threatens the stability and profitability of his reign, and thus they speak from the perspective of the Imperium’s status quo. For them, dispelling Muad’Dib’s revolution on Arrakis is a matter of reasserting the Imperium’s ultimate power over spice production and, consequently, over the Known Universe. But Paul, who struck fear into the heart of the Imperium acting under the alias Muad’Dib, knows the truth, and in proving that initial statement about spice incorrect, points the way to the true meaning of the film. In Villeneuve’s Dune, power over all is secured by exerting power over a story. One might even say it is about exerting power over a religion, if there is indeed a difference between the two.
Before I get into all that, some disclaimers. First, I am hopelessly biased in favor of Villeneuve’s work. To me, his work is unparalleled. He’s my hero. I’ve seen Dune: Part Two in theaters twice already, and it would not take much to convince me to go a third time. Conversely, I am not biased in favor of the source material. It’s bad. I read Frank Herbert’s Dune in my early twenties, on a pirated ePub on my phone while waylaid in the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, and it left very little impression. Before the Villeneuve films, my exposure to the Dune universe came primarily through David Lynch’s 1984 Dune adaptation, which I love and will defend and I don’t care that you all hated it. There is also a complicated history of racism and orientalism in Dune, well-exemplified by the presentation of the Fremen as resoundingly/cartoonishly Arab and Muslim who are also violent jihadists—Frank’s word!—and the various adaptations’ (including Villeneuve’s) butchering of the Arabic loan words in the Chakobsa language spoken by almost every character. I am not the person best equipped to talk about that, but I know who is! It’s my friend and colleague Abdul Rahman Latif, author and scholar of Islam and one of the loveliest nerds I know—ask him what happened to the غ in Chakobsa. I will not talk much about the book, for these reasons, and also because it’s been years, it’s very long, I’m not going to read it again, and did I mention it was bad? This piece will focus on Villeneuve’s Dune, and the excuse I will make for that myopic reading is, I think, as justified as it is convenient. Villeneuve adapted the book in a broader sense than a simple translation between media forms. He changed it, unapologetically, to repair many of the moral sins of the original text. It is a different story, or a more pointed story, a story which is more narratively interesting and more politically biting. Sorry to the memory of Frank Herbert, but this is not your Dune anymore.
Okay, so it’s a story about stories and religion. Cool. What does that mean? What opportunities does Dune give us to explore what religion is? What storytelling is? What is Dune saying about both? Are these important lessons for us to learn?
Dune is a story about a lot of things, and some of those things involve the definition of religious categories we often take for granted—immanent and transcendent, sacred and profane, holy and worldly—and those categories’ relationship, or recursive definition of, “the real.”
Warner Bros. Pictures/Legendary Entertainment
These concepts lie right beneath one of the central tensions of the film—is Paul really some divine messiah? Is he the Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit’s super-being? Before I can discuss how the film answers that, I need to zoom out and talk about the religious context of the Imperium. For thousands of years, the strings of the empire have been quietly pulled by the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, an organization which has purposefully produced an air of mystery and otherworldliness through their psychic powers and strange abilities but which does not define itself as a religion. But to the viewer, the Bene Gesserit check all the boxes of a religion—they have robes, they have secrets, they have Reverend Mothers, they have rites and rituals which mark initiates and reaffirm their commitments, they have a special place in a story about the past and the future, sometimes they do stuff that looks like magic. You know, religion. Despite what it might look like, the Bene Gesserit have one overriding, entirely immanent goal—to produce, through genetic manipulation, a super-being, the Kwisatz Haderach, and through him usher in a new, advanced human species. The Bene Gesserit exist within an entirely immanent frame, a world of their own making, in which everything that has happened or will happen is the result of the exercise of their own agency and power. As far as I can tell, they are the only religious organization in town. That said, and this is really the one time I will gesture to the book with any certainty, it is implied that everyone else in the Imperium—meaning everyone who is a fully-recognized subject—finds holiness, in varying degrees, in the Orange Catholic Bible, a text which combines all the religious texts of Earth like some galactic Unitarian Universalism.
Those who are not fully subjects in the eyes of the Imperium, the indigenous populations of whatever planet is being encroached upon, all follow the same religion, the Panoplia Prophetica, just in different regional flavors. The Panoplia Prophetica is a creation of the Bene Gesserit, who, millennia before the events of Dune, spread a story of prophets and promised lands throughout the Known Universe so that a Bene Gesserit—or even better, the Kwisatz Haderach—could, if necessary, step in as the promised prophet and take control of the subjected planet. The Fremen religion, the prophecies of the expected messiah who will lead them to paradise, is one flavor of the Panoplia. This is the important part, and the part which Villeneuve hits us over the head with again and again—there is no truth to the Fremen religion, it is a story being used to control the population, and there is nothing transcendent about the sand worms or the promised messiah, the Lisan al-Gaib, the Voice from the Outer World.
Our plucky protagonist Paul lands face-first into the Panoplia Prophetica immediately upon arriving on Arrakis, with legions of Fremen acclaiming him Lisan al-Gaib as he walked off his spaceship next to his Bene Gesserit mother, Lady Jessica (and I also mean mother in a gay vernacular sense, see below). Paul continues to stumble into prophecy, probably by accident, by demonstrating in front of influential Fremen a unique understanding of their culture and way of life, one of the criteria in the prophecy of the Lisan al-Gaib. Though he seems reproachful of the Bene Gesserit’s tactics, he does not go out of his way, at this point, to refute the Fremen’s placement of him into their prophecies. The story of the second film is largely the story of Paul’s journey to accept this position and lead the Fremen as their promised leader. But remember Villeneuve bonking us on the head—there is no Lisan al-Gaib. There is no messiah sent by some unnamed supernatural force or diety, no prophecy, no promised land. To follow a messiah is to follow an immanent agenda, a human interest guised in the garb of transcendent inevitability. So we, the audience, know that Paul is not the Mahdi. But we do know that he is probably the Kwisatz Haderach, having fulfilled many of the Bene Gesserit’s criteria on that front as well, to the chagrin of the organization’s leadership. Unauthorized, his Bene Gesserit mother taught him the ways of the sisterhood’s psychic powers, taught him Chakobsa, the language the Bene Gesserit used to spread the Panoplia Prophetica, and he has been, at the outset of the first film, dreaming in visions of the future—all of which, by the way, explain why Paul so easily checks the boxes on the Lisan al-Gaib list. He knows their ways because he’s seen them in his dreams, he speaks their language because the Bene Gesserit speak Chakobsa, he comes from an outer world because, well, he just does.
So no to Lisan al-Gaib, yes to Kwisatz Haderach—why does that matter? Because each of those roles designate a certain ontology, the former a transcendent figure who is set apart from the rest of the material world through his proximity to the otherworldly, the latter just a guy who has been augmented and twisted into a super-being through deliberate genetic manipulation. That matters for us because it doesn’t matter to the Fremen. It has become a joke in the Twitter Dune world that every time Paul burped or said “how are you?” the Fremen leader Stilgar would shout “AS WRITTEN!” and lead everyone in prayer.
When Paul decided to drink the Water of Life and become the Kwisatz Haderach fully-formed, thus also fulfilling the prophecy of the Panoplia, he becomes the Mahdi, the one who points the way to paradise. It does not matter that drinking the Water of Life caused a physiological change in Paul that allowed him to see possible futures through a kind of super-computer brain (think Lucy, if you can stomach it). In fulfilling the prophecy, in playing out a part in a story, Paul ascended, even though we know he didn’t. Not really. But still, ascend he does. What Dune does here is exhibit how transcendence can be, perhaps is, the product of social work—discourse, practice, history, relationships, etc. The Fremen acclaim him Lisan al-Gaib, and Lisan al-Gaib he becomes. It does not matter that, for us, everything downstream of that is apophenia, or making meaningful connections between unrelated objects or phenomena, and confirmation bias, a misapprehension of genetic enhancement as divine being. Paul is the Lisan al-Gaib, period. This is the sacred in a real Durkheimian sense, something elevated above the profane through the workings of the social world (e.g. the passing of prophecy, Stilgar’s sermons, the rituals of the Water of Life), or through special moments of collective effervescence (e.g. when Paul rode Shai Hulud or proclaimed himself the Mahdi), in which the reality of transcendence is actually irrelevant.
Warner Bros. Pictures/Legendary Entertainment
Consequently, the film projects a message that I and other academics have been shouting from atop our ivory sietches—just because something is socially constructed does not mean it is not socially consequent!!! Think of how gender studies majors and millennial academics are lampooned as waif-y blue-hairs who wax pedantically about how doing the dishes is a social construct and therefore not something that they have to do. To say that gender or race or religion or science are constructed socially is not to say that those things are powerless or irrelevant by virtue of their constructed nature. Dune portrays this well—even knowing that Paul’s transcendence is socially constructed, no one could watch the film and say that his acclimation had no effect on the trajectory of the story. Dune instead points us to the critical power of social construction, in which a careful analysis of the phenomenon in question can direct us to those forces who perpetuate that construction and who stand to gain from its continued social presence—the Bene Gesserit, the Imperium, except not quite, not when the Lisan al-Gaib smushes their plans under a sand worm.
So, just because we know that at least one of the prophecies into which Paul places himself is bunk does not mean that his social power suddenly becomes stripped away and he stops being the Lisan al-Gaib. Chani tries her darnedest to get everyone off the messiah train, and she did not change a single mind—Paul was so transcendent, at that point, she couldn’t touch him, physically or metaphorically. Now we have to wrestle with the notion that transcendence itself, that which should be untouchable or immutable or permanent, which stands opposite the profane and the material, can be socially produced—often is socially produced. But pointing out that fact—like telling someone who speaks in tongues or who saw the Virgin Mary appearing in a water stain that their experiences and beliefs are defined by the social production of signs and dispositions which they associate with the transcendent—has absolutely no teeth to it. The “reality” of transcendence is just not that important.
And that is the relevant lesson I would extrapolate from Villeneuve’s Dune. And Herbert’s Dune, probably, but someone else is going to have to argue that. When we talk about religion, or when we define it or categorize it or experience it, we need to be wary of the extent to which we are privileging notions of transcendence inappropriately in our analysis. What is considered transcendent or sacred is not profaned by such an analysis—in fact, its sacredness is reaffirmed through the negation of the utility of the real as an evaluative criteria. Our questions turn from “is x thing transcendent in y religion, and is that designation of the former definitional of the latter?” to the more productive, “why is x thing transcendent in y social and historical context, and what can that designation tell us about the world in which x exists?”
If we stop hemming and hawing about whether or not Paul is ~*~really~*~ the Lisan al-Gaib, we open up a lot of our hemming and hawing time to devote to understanding what the social production of Paul’s transcendence can tell us about the world on and off the screen. Paul can’t just make a claim to transcendence without an immanent social structure to back him up, nor can he remain immanent once that social structure has identified him as transcendent. It is the social field which decides these things, which arbitrates between the sacred and the profane, irrespective of any discernible or objective reality to a transcendent or immanent ontology. So if the real is not a qualification which the social structure demands, then what is? What is Dune saying is the key to understanding religion, to enacting transformation, to exerting control? The story. The work of the social so often begins with the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, our past, our future. Power over the story is power over all. It is not the amassed legions of the Sardaukar who emerge victorious, it is not the blood-drenched Harkonnens once again ruling over Arrakis, but it is the Mahdi, the prophet of nothing, who stands poised to wage his holy war on the Known Universe, to whatever end. We actually don’t know what the goal of the holy war is, or what makes it holy exactly, but a holy war it remains, because that’s what the Panoplia said would happen. Paul was propelled there by the power of the story—not his story, nor the Fremen’s, but the Bene Gesserit’s, who sought to create a super-being they could control and failed. Dune reminds us that a shared story, a narrative at the foundation of culture, will always be more powerful than the transcendent, and that if we want to understand religion we must also understand that which authorizes and sustains its existence—the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, their authors, and their audiences.
The Geek Anthropologist 
