Is The New Dune Movie Racist? Probably Not

 

    It's all in the title. But let me expand. 

    Disclaimer - I'm not a cultural expert. I'm a filmmaking engineer. I look at the final product and try to figure out how it was made. I try not to make assumptions without evidence. And I try to gauge things according to my current knowledge. There's no saying an opinion won't change. But there is the assurance that for now, I believe what I've said. Also I have a minor in Middle Eastern Studies

    Dune is the new blockbuster sci-fi movie from Warner Bros, likely to be the next big sci-fi series of the decade. It's got a good flow, a storied history, and fantastic talent. The film only came out a week ago, but it's likely to turn a profit and get a sequel, and likely form the complete trilogy needed to tell the hero's story. After decades of oblique reference, the grandaddy of sci-fi is finally coming to the masses. 

    But there's a question worth asking - is it kind of racist?

    The original book Dune was written in 1965 and was an extended metaphor for the oil struggles by the United States with Iraq. The desert planet is even called ARAKK-is. Hardly shy. The main body of the story is concerned with the hero befriending the desert natives and then assimilating and rallying them to help drive off the invaders of his adopted home, although the film doesn't really touch on that yet. There's a lot of made-up words from them. Lisan Al-Aqab. Muadib. Kul Wahad.  

    It's essentially the plot of the 2009 Avatar - already considered a little insensitive to Native Americans - crossed with Orientalism: the fetishization of Middle Eastern cultures. The truth is that most of these words are just Arabic words directly transliterated into English and then bastardized to mean something else. 

    I'm sure sixty years ago this whole world was totally alien and very exciting. But in the present day, where the world is more connected and Arabic is better-known, it doesn't seem so foreign. 

    Dune was groundbreaking because it had a deeply-thought-out world that explored religion, sociology, cultural development, and ecology in its stories. But in fact, it's not a very reality-based world. Like Lord of the Rings eternal Medieval Stasis, it's a terrible approximation of how worlds develop in real life. And unlike Lord of the Rings, which mostly used esoteric dead languages, Dune uses very current and well-known languages currently spoken by billions. Seeing it reproduced on the big screen today feels like a throwback to ignorant yesteryears, where Americans were so willing to deify foreign lands as hotbeds of adventure and thus slightly dehumanize them. Is it good that this film is doing this? 

Well, it doesn't matter, because it's out anyway, and I don't think protesting in this article would work. But more importantly, it's okay, because the film DOESN'T really do this. Or at least, does what it can to avoid it. 

Does the Dune movie unintentionally inherit a kind of Orientalist history? Yes. But does it come at it in an Orientalist kind of way? It tries not to.

Let me explain. 

The krogan of Mass Effect are a take on Orcs, derived from the background of the Australian cane toad, with the art of ancient Egypt, and the history of Imperial Japan

There's a secret to not fetishizing a real-life culture when inventing a fictional one. The thematic purpose of a fictional culture is to make us think about real-life culture, and the shape of a story inevitably invites making opinions. This can lead to you making judgements of a real-life culture that it doesn't deserve. To avoid that, a writer draw strong influence from several cultures, so there's no one strong source to heap your judgement on. 

    For example, the Fire Nation from Avatar: The Last Airbender draw strong comparisons to Imperial Japan. But their buildings also draw strong influence from Thai architecture, and they look more Anglo-Asian than straight Japanese. Their signature firebending martial arts are also very Chinese kung fu, so it's not just one or two countries, it's several. In another example, the space-faring turians of the Mass Effect videogames have a Roman-like culture, but their religious beliefs are like Shintoism, and they themselves look like pterodactyls. They're not just Space Romans! By utilizing a mix of influences, you create a fictional race that's impossible to summarize as "Space X". 

    That's not what Dune the book was. It was very transparent copy-pasting of bits of Arab, Persian, and Turkish culture, with the Fremen especially seeming Bedouin or other desert-dwelling groups. But Dune the movie has managed to sidestep that with interesting presentation, and especially, casting. 

    The outfits aren't the same. They resemble space jumpsuits combined with surgical masks more than anything, instead of the burkas and scarves we're used to seeing in Middle East imagery. The Fremen are racially diverse. Most of the Fremen we see are dark-skinned, alongside one or two swarthy ones. The implication is that the Fremen aren't a one-to-one analogy for the olive-skinned Bedouin; they're diverse and - like real life - a one-to-one analogy doesn't make sense. Finally, they've kept the foreign terms to a minimum. The ones I mentioned above are the only ones present. No one's throwing around the word for "teacher" and saying it means "mouse." And the pay-off of all this? The Fremen don't really look like Arabs. Metatextually Arab-inspired? Definitely. They still live in the desert and cover their heads. But from this French-Canadian filmmaker - with French-American, Swedish, Guatemalan, African-American, and Spanish leads - we've gotten a film with the international scope to not turn the Middle East into a playground for our fantasies.

    There's time to see where it'll end up. It's sure to get a sequel, and there's no saying they won't end up mess it up then. But for now, this is an encouraging first look. The Dune movie was meant to be a teaser for the next one. But if the sequel is just going to be more of the same, then I'm excited.