***Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for Frank Herbert’s Dune novels and for the films Dune and Dune: Part Two.***
“For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.” – Matthew 24:24 (NIV)
“You underestimate the power of faith.”
Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) utters these words as a prescient warning to her father Emperor Shaddam (Christopher Walken) in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two (2024). Like the other major characters in the film, Princess Irulan thinks of religion primarily in terms of political power. So it comes as no great surprise that she readily agrees to the loveless marriage proposal of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) at the end of the film when she senses an opportunity for power as the new political structure takes shape before her eyes. In this film, as in Frank Herbert’s novels, religion functions as a tool to gain power.
. . . what is spectacularly missing from the film is the complexity of religion and humanity depicted by Frank Herbert in the novels.
Even more than his first Dune film (2021), Denis Villeneuve’s second film emphasizes the raw lust for power in the Dune world, thrusting political mechanizations into position as the primary motivating factor for all leaders with a religious following. The Bene Gesserit are really interested in working behind the scenes not so much for religious faith as for power in determining the fates of nations and empires and worlds. In the latter film, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) is almost demonically possessed with the desire for power. And while some of the Fremen might be true believers, they are ultimately dangerously-motivated jihadists whose leaders are only interested in power and are willing to manipulate their people’s beliefs for those ends. Even Paul’s brief resistance to the allure of power is little more than a quirk to work through. Where Villeneuve takes the most artistic license in his adaptation, however, is in the character of Chani (Zendaya). In Dune: Part Two, Chani realizes almost from the beginning that power is what everyone is seeking. Religion is only a smokescreen for the Nietzschean will to power that undergirds it all.
Karl Marx publicizes this perception of religion when he says, in David Papke’s translation, “Religion is the opium of the people. It is the sight of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions.” Religion is something that gives the naïve a reason to hope, a little heart and soul in an otherwise cruel world. It’s a crutch for those who cannot face the cold hard truth of the cold hard world. Villeneuve shows us the up-close of just such a world up in the scintillating sands of the magnificent desert planet of Arrakis.
With just a little artistic license, Villeneuve creates two beautifully choreographed standalone stories that nevertheless hold together to bring a stunning portrayal of the Dune world created by Frank Herbert in his 1965 novel Dune. K. B. Hoyle and Alisa Ruddell have aptly described Villeneuve’s first film as Paul’s coming-of-age story. As Ruddell points out, this allows the first film to be about “the loss of Paul’s innocence rather than the rise of a messiah.” And the rise of a messiah is indeed what we see in Dune: Part Two. Megan McCluskey characterizes the story plot of this film as the conclusion of Paul’s “[t]ransformation into revolutionary leader Muad’Dib, gaining control of not only the desert planet Arrakis but also the entirety of the universe of the galactic empire known as the Imperium in the process.” Thus, Villeneuve takes a lengthy novel and turns it into two stories—first, the growing to adulthood of a heroic figure and second, the culmination of the messianic temptations that overtake that hero.
But what is spectacularly missing from the film is the complexity of religion and humanity depicted by Frank Herbert in the novels. In the film, even the characters are less complex. By the end of Dune: Part Two, most of the characters we have come to know fit into “good” or “bad” categories. After watching the second film, my teenage daughter expressed her disappointment with the characters: “I thought Paul was going to be a good guy. And I thought I would like his mother. But she is creepy-evil! Only Chani is good in the end.”
While the film has to condense the novel, of course, reducing complex characters into good/bad caricatures reflects the same kind of lazy vilification or aggrandizement that occurs all too often in social media shaming rituals. This departure from Herbert’s careful development of complex characters with both good and evil characteristics at times leans toward a binary worldview that is not found in the novel. While there is some uncertainty about characters in the first film, the second film collapses them into easily-defined categories: Either the Bene Gesserit are good or evil. Lady Jessica and Chani are either good or evil. Paul is good or evil. This flattening applies not only to characterization but also to the reductionist treatment of religion in the film, and we end up with a severely constrained account of religion as the manipulative tool of power-mongering populations and individuals who want to control the fate of at least of their corner of the universe. There is little demonstration of genuine faith in such religion.
While such a representation of religion fits certain secularized contemporary accounts of human-made religions, it would be unfair to attribute this reductionist view to Herbert himself. Indeed, we would do well to observe that in Herbert’s novel, Princess Irulan does not warn her father of the power of faith. Instead, she witnesses the more comprehensive vision of the Bene Gesserit religious order even as she witnesses the downfall of her father’s secular power. In Irulan and Herbert’s other major sympathetic characters, we see people in search of truth regarding the religious premonitions and statements they encounter.
Flattening Characters and Religion
Herbert’s novels are a study in character development as well as world building. Under his pen, characters do not easily fall into good character/bad character dichotomies. This is especially true with his major sympathetic characters. In keeping with this complexification of character, Herbert’s heroes are especially susceptible to corruption. Herbert describes his “theory that superheroes are disastrous for humankind” and delineates one of the major themes of the novel: “Even if we find a real hero (whatever—or whoever—that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader.” By Herbert’s calculus, Paul is destined for corruption as well as greatness.
Paul Atreides begins without the hubris that is the downfall of so many heroic characters, as portrayed in the first film. But eventually he sees himself as the savior of the Fremen, as depicted in the second film. While I was hoping to see the progress of Paul’s internal transformation from well-meaning hero to self-seeking emperor, the change is very quick in Dune: Part Two. Blink, and you almost miss it. His goodness has suddenly evaporated, and he has gone to the dark side. Annakin Skywalker’s change into Darth Vader took much more time and produced much greater agony. The moral and spiritual dilemmas Paul experienced in the novel are largely reduced to calculations about how to use religious beliefs and psychospiritual abilities to serve his own vision of the common good—a vision that is wrapped up in his own rise to power.
Paul is not the only one who morphs prematurely into a “new” person in Dune: Part Two. The competing internal desires of Lady Jessica are underplayed as she becomes fixated on power and loses the motherly concern that sometimes put her at odds with power structures even on “her” side in Herbert’s novel. Her transformation into Reverend Mother is a quick shift: she becomes a more commanding but also a more menacing figure. In the film, she has no moral scruples about Paul’s rise to power as long as her own power is preserved in the process. Unlike the novel, in which her more cautious change mirrors her hesitations regarding the mixed motivations of the Bene Gesserit, the film simply pushes Lady Jessica and the Bene Gesserit unreservedly on the side of a self-absorbed religious institution. In the novel, Lady Jessica is not happy with her son’s grip on power and says as much to Chani.
The end of Dune: Part Two, however, changes the characters of Chani and Lady Jessica as they appear in Herbert’s novel. The two powerful women are going their own ways—Chani about to ride off in disgust away from Paul and Lady Jessica gloating over her attainment of centuries of witch-power. But the novel ends with them in a kind of partnership, both still caring deeply for Paul and gathered near him to aid in pulling back from his ill-conceived power trip. Like Lady Jessica before her, Chani has been passed over for an official marriage that is meant to reinforce a political dynasty. As the love partners of the two Atreides men (Paul and his father), Chani and Jessica do not wield the Atreides name because that is given to a political partner. The novel ends with a kind of alliance between the two, with Lady Jessica telling Chani, “Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives.”
The Danger of Human Messiahs
This flattening of characters and religion in the film does not, however, preclude it from sounding the same alarm that Herbert’s novel does. For the novel and film both clearly emphasize the danger and insufficiency of human messiahs. Here Villeneuve was squarely in line with Herbert’s vision. As Villeneuve himself notes, “When the book came out, [Herbert] was disappointed by how people perceived Paul Atreides.” And the disappointment was that Paul’s heroic stature was intended “as a warning . . . about a messianic figure.” And so it is worth slowing down to critique Paul’s character as Villeneuve does in Dune: Part Two.
Herbert and Villeneuve’s Dune films agree on this: Mere mortals cannot wield unchecked power or develop a “savior complex” without becoming corrupted in the process.
In the novel and the film, Paul ultimately accepts the messiah mantle prepared for him by the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen. For religions that believe in a messiah or are awaiting a messiah, these warnings are religious as well as political. Believing in a messiah potentially makes people more susceptible to abuses of religious language for political purposes. This is especially apparent when the messiah figure uses religion to gain power and self-aggrandizement.
Paul is referred to by several messianic terms, including the Arabic Mahdi (مهدي), which, according to the Muslim faith refers to a coming “messianic deliverer who will fill earth with justice and equity, restore true religion, and usher in a short golden age.” Besides the Abrahamic faiths, some Eastern religions also hold messianic beliefs. In some iterations of Hinduism, the incarnations of the god Vishnu are prophesied to culminate in a Messiah figure called Kalki. In Buddhism, Maitreya is the “Buddha of the future” whose birth is foretold as the birth of one who will teach enlightenment to the next age of humanity/godhood.
In both Christianity and Hinduism, the Messiah is said to be divine, thus potentially side-stepping one part of the criticism leveled by the Dune series. If the Messiah is an incorruptibly good divine figure rather than a mere human, this Messiah is exempt from the corrupting influence of power and a self-serving “savior complex” even if he is a savior. And a divine Messiah who gives up earthly power and does “not come to be served, but to serve” is not the kind of messiah Dune warns us about. Unlike Herbert, however, Villeneuve names The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which positions Jesus (for a while) as a human messiah, as one of his influences. Herbert does not weigh in on Christ as messiah—human or divine; instead, he consistently paints the danger of a human messiah as a temptation too great to take on without becoming a power-mongering danger to the world.
But Herbert and Villeneuve’s Dune films agree on this: Mere mortals cannot wield unchecked power or develop a “savior complex” without becoming corrupted in the process. Human history bears them out, with the Crusades being the most obvious example of the atrocious nature of using religion as an excuse for oppression and violence. And without giving away any spoilers for the novels (and likely films) that follow, it is clear from the title of Herbert’s sequel, Dune Messiah, that we should expect a continuation of this theme.
Christians today would do well to remember that when the aspirations of faith and power are mixed, we may be ripe for manipulation. Regardless of one’s agreement or disagreement with former President Trump’s policies, for example, it is not hard to see that the promise of power that Trump held out to Christians and others who were feeling overlooked by the political machines became a tool of manipulation. As Ruddell points out in her insightful essay on the lessons to be learned from Dune about charismatic leaders, Trump mirrors Paul Atreides in that “he has been able to wrap himself in the myth fabric’ of a segment of our society… and generate remarkable devotion to himself personally, above and beyond his platform or party.” Other leaders who use religion for political purposes attempt to do the same. When I was in the ex-soviet country of Belarus in 2017, for example, I saw President Lukashenko (also called “the last dictator of Europe“) make a show of attending the Easter services at an Orthodox Church—a political calculation to appeal to believers and even nonbelievers who are cultural adherents to the church. And so we see the temptation of political leaders (regardless of their own faith or lack thereof) to use people of faith for their own political purposes.
Mining Religion for What It’s Worth
In Brian Herbert’s afterword, the younger Herbert sheds light on some of his father’s religious experiences, beginning with his Irish Catholic aunts trying “to force Catholicism on him.” Not surprisingly, the younger Herbert associates these aunts with the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. But I think Brian Herbert is right to say that “the Dune universe is a spiritual melting pot . . . [of] Buddhism, Sufi Mysticism and other Islamic belief systems, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Hinduism.” Given his skepticism of human institutions, it is likely that Frank Herbert would toss out religious institutions as far as possible even as he searches their crevices for any hints of religious truth.
Herbert treats religion with more genuine interest than we find in Dune: Part Two. In an interview with Tim O’Reilly, Herbert stated:
What I’m saying in my books boils down to this: mine religion for what is good and avoid what is deleterious. Don’t condemn people who need it. Be very careful when that need becomes fanatical.
While Herbert is clearly wary about “fanatical” religion, what he does not say is whether he himself “needs” religion. But with his suggestion that there is good in religion that should be “mined,” Herbert leaves open the door for the possibility of religious truth behind the political masks. In the film version, Chani recognizes not only that fanatical religion exists but reduces all religion to fanatical activity. Villeneuve changes her character to make her one of the Fremen who do not really believe in the religion of the desert people, trying to highlight Paul’s ultimate status of anti-hero. But in so doing, he obscures Chani’s non-fanatical version of the Fremen faith in Herbert’s novel.
Paul—perhaps like his mother—believes himself to be partaking of a psychospiritual power rather than a supernatural power
Julia List notes that “while [Dune] critique[s] the institutions of religion and manipulation of the faithful by religious leaders,” it does “also recognize the validity of some religious experiences, with certain forms of mysticism involving the experience of pantheistic unity as genuine.” As Paul takes up the mantle of human messiah and seemingly reduces religion to manipulation, the narrator’s voice becomes increasingly critical of Paul. When Paul tells his mother that the Fremen have a simple religion, Lady Jessica demurs: “Nothing about religion is simple.” And while Chani is shown as a skeptic of the Fremen religion in the film, in the novel she leads Paul toward the religious beliefs the Fremen have gathered in the desert.
God of the Desert?
For those who have read the novels, the mixture of religious and ecological questions is evident. Giant sandworms and massive sandstorms intimate the presence of preternatural powers beyond the absolute control of humans. Just in case we missed the significance of these elements in his story, Herbert gives us an appendix about ecology and an appendix about religion at the end of Dune. And Villeneuve masterfully weaves together the ecological and political concerns of the novels in a spellbinding and beautifully choreographed set of films that nonetheless give short shrift to the religious elements.
So what does the desert have to do with faith? Whether we think of the “desert fathers and mothers” of Christianity or of the Hindu and Buddhist ascetics who sought spiritual wholeness in the desert or of Muhammad’s “visions in the desert,” it is no secret that the desert plays a role in many of the religions Herbert studied. Herbert himself suggests that the desert is a natural environment for religion:
During my studies of deserts, of course, and previous studies of religion, we all know that many religions began in a desert atmosphere, so I decided to put the two together because I don’t think that any one story should have any one thread. I build on a layer technique, and of course putting in religion and religious ideas, you can play one against the other.
In this statement, taken from his 1969 interview with Professor Willis McNelly of CalState Fullerton, Herbert explicitly described the desert setting of Arrakis as a religious environment. Playing religious ideas against ideas of the desert Arrakis provides the seedbed of religious thought that Herbert finds amenable to his novelistic purposes.
While various groups of people are mining the planet Arrakis for the spice melange, Herbert himself is mining the planet for what it might reveal about religion. Here we see a bit of a divergence in the film. Particularly in Dune: Part Two, religion seems little more than a Machiavellian smokescreen in the jostling for power by various individuals and peoples. Even if people of faith are motivated by the desire for freedom instead of power, that freedom cannot be achieved without power. And so while the Fremen have more true believers than the other religious groups, Paul easily manipulates their faith for his own purposes.
With Paul’s prescience and seemingly spiritual understanding of the world created by Frank Herbert, we might be excused for being surprised that Paul takes up the mantle of agnostic/atheist manipulator rather than becoming a believer himself. Julia List aptly observes, however, the reasons for Paul’s lack of belief. Paul—perhaps like his mother—believes himself to be partaking of a psychospiritual power rather than a supernatural power:
Paul Atreides of Dune, the Kwisatz Haderach created by the Bene Gesserit to see into the “unknown,” is endowed with prescient powers that are the result of genetic engineering and the ingestion of psychotropic drugs rather than visions from a divine source. He never comes to believe in the myths his Fremen followers build around him, remaining cynically detached from their devotion. At the same time, he does not discourage his followers from believing in his divinity.
In both the films and the novel, this kind of political manipulation of faith and people of faith is clearly evident. In Dune: Part Two, religion is almost synonymous with the will to power and so it makes sense that the characters would readily accept any explanation except a religious one. But the novel does not close off the religious possibilities of something supernatural happening even as it raises the psychological possibilities. In either case, however, we are given a picture of the universe as a place that repeatedly illustrates the stench of corruption that haunts the marriage of political power and religion.
Where Does This Leave Us?
Herbert does not seem sure what to do about the inexplicable elements that he describes in how the Bene Gesserit and Paul and others develop prescience, but the Jungian idea of a collective unconscious is on his mind as a potential psychological answer to the question. Herbert’s descriptions of the processes in the brains of Paul and Jessica and others certainly opens to that possibility. The psychological answer to the inexplicable may be seen in Jung’s description of the anima not as a soul but as “a natural archetype that satisfactorily sums up all the statements of the unconscious, of the primitive mind, of the history of language and religion.” Thus, the atavistic mind rather than the religious mind could be at the bottom of the inexplicable in Herbert’s world.
In his second appendix, titled “The Religion of Dune,” Herbert describes an attempt to create one religion out of the major religions that once existed (including Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and more). The Orange Catholic Bible combined and reinterpreted the essence of these religions. Many believers, however, rejected this approach to religion, and “it soon became apparent that the ancient superstitions and beliefs had not been absorbed by the new ecumenism.” But the ruling agnostics quickly found this ecumenical religion suitable to their purposes, and Herbert concludes with appendix with a relevant Bene Gesserit saying: “When religion and politics ride the same cart, when that cart is driven by a living holy man (baraka), nothing can stand in their path.”
For Christians, the human cry for salvation finds an answer in a Messiah who is both human and divine.
The Bene Gesserit are certainly aware of the power in joining religion and politics. But this awareness does not necessarily translate to an awareness of the truth of any greater power in the universe. For Herbert ends his third appendix, the “Report on Bene Gesserit Motives and Purposes,” with a telling statement about the Bene Gesserit. The events on Arrakis were not simply the result of their own manipulations: “one is led to the inescapable conclusion that the inefficient Bene Gesserit behavior in this affair was a product of an even higher plan of which they were completely unaware!” Herbert’s novel, unlike Villeneuve’s films, leaves open the possibility of supernatural powers at work in ways that are hidden to those who see only human-directed maneuvering at play.
In Dune, Herbert examines the pervasive philosophies of modern thinkers such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung alongside the age-old ideas of religious faith and rediscovered ecological secrets. What is the relationship between the spiritual and the natural, between the human and the non-human, between the earth and the rest of the universe, between the visible and the invisible?
Believers have other answers to offer: Rather than seeing human society as entirely postulated on a will to power, religion postulates that there is a power greater than humans to which we are all subject. Rather than seeing religion as the opium of the masses, the crutch on which ignorant people rely, religion may speak truth to power. Rather than assuming that psychology replaces spiritual understandings of the world, the spiritual and the psychological may shed light on each other without displacing each other at all. And certainly, a divine Messiah offers a different set of possibilities than one who is merely human. For Christians, the human cry for salvation finds an answer in a Messiah who is both human and divine.
While Villeneuve’s films gesture toward a secularized worldview that has been chastened and hardened by the rise of jihadist activities made more obvious since 9/11, the coming of the prequel television series this fall may add food for thought to the perennial questions raised by Frank Herbert’s novels. First titled Dune: The Sisterhood, the prequel has been renamed Dune: Prophecy, suggesting a broader scope of religious thought than the Bene Gesserit sisterhood alone. Perhaps the television series will be able to depict the complexity of Frank Herbert’s treatment of religion that has been lacking in the films we have seen thus far from Villeneuve. Who knows? We may even see a return of Villeneuve (who has no part in the Dune: Prophecy series) that investigates the religious claims with more rigor and attention to Herbert’s religious vision.
