What Dune Part 2 Says About Heroism

Scroll through YouTube with ‘Dune Part Two’ in the search bar and you’ll see videos like “Dune Part Two Changed My Life,” “Dune Part 2 is a Monumental Achievement,” “Dune 2 Will Change the Sci-Fi genre FOREVER,” and so on. It’s impressive to the point where I don’t know if there’s been a film in the last ten years so thoroughly analyzed and praised as Villeneuve’s Dune. Which begs the question: why? Why are people obsessed with this movie?

Again, the list of answers I could give in response to this question is impressive. If you’ve seen the film in theaters, you don’t need me to tell you about Greig Fraser’s sublime cinematography, Hans Zimmer’s epic score, or Timothee Chalamet’s metamorphosis into an astonishingly believable Muad ‘dib. So instead, I’m going to write a little bit about a topic I find indicative of what draws us to stories in the first place. I’m going to write about spirituality in Dune.

Because when people rave about the visuals, the sound, the score, the acting, what they are really praising is the experience of sitting down in a theater and experiencing a complete immersion in a world where we’re able to connect to human strengths and failings in a way that shifts the way we see the world. Great camera work and performances serve that immersion by making everything more believable. 

I’ve read YouTube comments saying how seeing this movie in IMAX was a ‘religious experience.’

You could chalk that up to the high immersion factor or just pure fangirling, but I think there’s something deeper going on here, something comparable to watching a majestic sunset or an incoming tsunami. 

Dune grapples with truths that are both beautiful and destructive. Is Paul Atreides the hero or the villain? A messiah or a tyrant? The books do answer these questions, but I think this dichotomy of beauty and destruction battling it out inside Paul’s character arc is what makes the film resonate with so many people, myself included. To see if this idea has any weight, I want to explore the validity of a hero.

The Obligatory Archetype Discussion

In Dune, while Paul might be the protagonist, he is not the hero. In fact, you could conceive of him as the villain since he actively works against the Fremen’s best interests. The Greek root of the word ‘hero’ means “to protect and to serve,” and in the tradition of Joseph Campbell, means to transform from one state of being into a richer, more mature state through a series of trials. Frank Herbert, Dune’s author, does not give Paul the dignity of reaching that final mature state.

Like Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels, Paul has a downward character trajectory. Both characters are believed to be the Chosen One of their respective stories, destined to have a certain kind of control over their universe. Both are influenced by powerful individuals who have ulterior motives (Palpatine in Star Wars and Lady Jessica in Dune) and both ultimately bring suffering upon themselves, their loved ones, and their environment at large.

 What’s interesting to note here is that Revenge of the Sith is frequently cited as people’s favorite of the Star Wars prequels. What’s going on here? Do we just enjoy watching our heroes burst into flames (literally and metaphorically)? 

I think the reason we appreciate movies like Dune and Revenge of the Sith is the same reason for the appeal of gritty superhero movies and shocking celebrity scandals: it exposes the universality of human fallibility, even among those we put on a pedestal. Yes, superheroes can be corrupt, and yes, O.J. Simpson can commit murder. No human being is perfect, all have fallen short. We expect our entertainment and news cycles to reflect that reality.

And yet the world looks for a savior anyway. Because we all need a savior. We all need someone to put our hope in, to regard as higher than the rest so that we can follow him without fear of being led astray. Someone to lead us to paradise.

On Whose Authority?

As a Christian, I believe we have been given a savior in the form of Jesus Christ. Paradise awaits anyone who believes that Jesus died on the cross for our sins and rose again on the third day. But just because others might not believe, doesn’t mean they aren’t still looking for someone or something to rescue them from some part of themselves or the world they don’t like. It can be a doctor, a political figure, a celebrity, or a hobby. Or, if you’re a Fremen fundamentalist, it can be the son of a duke who can summon grandfather sandworms and survive drinking worm pee. Everyone puts something in the highest place.

Unlike Jesus, whose authority comes from God the Father, Paul gains his authority directly from the people (although I suppose one could say indirectly from the Bene Gesserit, who manufactured the prophecy in the first place). So, I would say rather than the hero of the story, Paul is the celebrity, the charismatic leader who takes advantage of the authority given to him to serve his own purposes.

In an interview series with Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell, known for his book on mythic archetypes, said: “One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero is that one lives solely for the self while the other acts to redeem society.” The key ingredient missing from the celebrity that is so apparent in the hero is sacrifice. Campbell’s own definition of a hero is practically a redefinition of sacrifice: “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”

Let’s compare the Jews in the Bible to the Fremen for a second. Both peoples wanted deliverance, the Jews from the Romans, and the Fremen from any oppressive regime on Arrakis. Both peoples were introduced to a messianic figure. What’s interesting is that Paul only accepts his role as the Lisan al Gaib after Stilgar and Lady Jessica push it on him, while Jesus always proclaimed to be the son of God. Again, it’s the people who initially give their leaders their power. Just look at any major twentieth-century dictator. The German people elected Hitler to be their chancellor in 1933 because of his promises to restore Germany’s honor and prosperity.

Jesus was given the same opportunity to seize earthly power. The Jews praised Jesus’ name as he passed through the streets of Jerusalem because they believed he was going to deliver them from the Romans. It wasn’t just the common people that expected this. When the chief priests and the elders come to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane with armed guards, Peter reacts violently and cuts off the ear of one of the servants of the high priest. After Jesus heals the ear he tells the crowd, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come with swords and clubs?” (Luke 22:52, ESV). Jesus came to earth to redeem society in the truest sense–not from external oppression but internal.

Knowledge of Good and Evil

Dune is an excellent example of what happens when we expect too much from our heroes or rather expect the wrong thing. The reality of sin makes us dependent on a savior.  If that person is not Christ, we will look to mankind to save us from whatever trap we find ourselves in. We become the Israelites in 1 Samuel 8:6: “Give us a king to lead us.” How often in history have we failed to heed the LORD’s reply? “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots” (1 Samuel 8:11).

I’m not saying that all political leaders are doomed to turn into power-hungry dictators. For every Stalin, there is a Lincoln. But there is a difference between following and worshiping. To worship means to honor someone or something as the subject of the highest importance. Hero worship is a real thing and is an action that should be reserved for God only.

Just as God freed the Israelites from bondage in Exodus, Jesus freed all humanity from the bondage of sin, so that, as it says in Exodus 8:1, we may serve Him in the wilderness. One sacrifice begets another. How often do we sacrifice for the wrong person? How many chariots have we run in front of, only in the end to “cry out for relief from the king you have chosen?” (1 Samuel 8:18).

We expect the hero to be our savior when we fail to make the Savior our hero. And if we’re not careful, we become like the Fremen–cheering on a cause that will lead to our destruction.

Okay. To go back to the beginning of this hopefully coherent train of thought, I mentioned the YouTube comments that describe this movie as a religious experience. Why might movie-goers, probably not religious themselves, describe a theater experience in that way? 

I said that Dune resonates with people because of the dichotomy of beauty and destruction playing out in the film. You have beautiful desert sunsets paired with flashes of a future in flames. You have Paul and Chani sandwalking together as equals, and then Paul and Chani torn apart at the end of the film. And internally you have Paul’s conflicting desires to be the honorable duke his father was and take revenge on the people that murdered his family. You have the unwilling hero morphing into a villain, the messiah the people expect being corrupted into the tyrant they don’t.

On either side of each extreme, Paul has a chance to create or destroy: to create a loving relationship, a respected community, or destroy that relationship and manipulate and wreck that community. The capacity to create or destroy is inside all of us. It’s the biblical knowledge of good from evil that allows us to make the right choice. And when our tendency is to see ourselves as the hero of our own story, that choice becomes extremely relevant. We want to see what works and what doesn’t when it comes to preserving what we love and destroying what we hate. Dune is an excellent keyhole into a world where the protagonist is, for a while at least, just as curious as we are.