Chris Foss Concept Art For Jodorowsky’s Dune

Gurney Halleck - The Warmaster / Smuggler

Well looks like I will eventually design every character. After reading Children, I loved Gurney’s character even more.

marie fenring ( au! sketch )

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follow on insta: serenlas

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"There were a couple of scenes [in Dune (2021)] that were all about the training technique. There was one scene that I was quite sad they cut away. There are physical training methods, where Jessica teaches Paul the art of fighting with the knives that he later uses on Jamis [the Fremen warrior played by Babs Olusanmokun]" - Rebecca Ferguson for The Hollywood Reporter

Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica and Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides photographed by Chiabella James on set of Dune (2021) | "The Art and Soul of Dune" and "Dune: Part One : The Photography"

Righteous Dune covers by Jim Tierney

Using them as iPhone backgrounds

paintings that remind me of marie fenring:

portrait of a young lady, charles sillem lidderdale // study for a hundred years ago, william quiller orcharson // henriette au grand chapeau, henri evenepoel // the little foot-page, eleanor fortescue brickdale

Emmi Rabban and Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, mother and son

Dune: House Harkonnen by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson | "Mother" by Tori Amos | Frederick Christiansen | Homeric Hymn to Demeter | A Viking Mother by Frank Stick (1929) | A Storm of Swords, George R. R. Martin | The Young King of the Black Isles by Maxfield Parrish (1906) | Dune by Frank Herbert

As the release of DUNE looms, I find myself thinking deep thoughts about the story again. When people who haven't read it ask me about it, I usually say something along the lines of, "It's an extremely important work in the sci-fi genre, on the level of Lord of the Rings for fantasy, amazing worldbuilding, but it's very dry and the author was a white man in the sixties." Well, it occurs to me that "white man in the sixties" can mean a lot of things, so let's talk more about what it means for Dune!

I see two common criticisms leveled at Dune. The charge of biological essentialism, and the charge of it being a white savior narrative. It is not a white savior narrative, and I'll explain why below. The charge of biological essentialism is accurate, and I'll go into that more as well.

Without getting too spoiler-heavy, the plot of Dune is that Paul Atreides, heir to Duke Leto Atreides, moves to the planet Arrakis when the Emperor awards the planet to House Atreides in fief complete. Basically, the universe in Dune is space feudalism, and House Atreides is one of many noble houses engaged in feudal government. When Paul shows up, the local, oppressed populace, the Fremen, think he's a foretold, prophesied "chosen one," here to lead them out of bondage. Then House Atreides gets betrayed and mostly destroyed, Paul goes into hiding with the locals, and eventually uses them to overthrow his enemies and take back the planet, as well as leveraging the planet's strategic importance and his control of it to place himself on the Emperor's throne.

So, on the surface, definitely white savior stuff. But even a slightly deeper reading, an analysis designed to actually interrogate the text and not just generate a pithy headline to garner outraged clicks, will tell us that this isn't accurate. For one, Paul is a chosen one, but he's not the Fremen's. He is the product of a millennia-long scheme by a shadowy cabal of mystics called the Bene Gesserit to breed a superhuman. We'll get into this more in the biological essentialism bit, but the Bene Gesserit have infiltrated all walks of life throughout the future. They have a branch called the Missionaria Protectiva, which sends operatives to primitive worlds in the guise of religious prophets and has them plant broadly-worded, easily exploitable prophecies and beliefs in local populations. Then, later, if another Bene Gesserit operative shows up and needs, say, an army of religious fanatics, they say the right words and present someone who fits the broad criteria and boom, you have a chosen one.

This is exactly what happens in the book. Paul's mother Jessica is a Bene Gesserit member, and when they go into hiding, she exploits the fact that a Manipulator of Religions has been on Arrakis to maneuver Paul into position as the Fremen's chosen one. Paul himself is trying to resist embracing the mantle, because he knows that if he leans fully into it the Fremen will go on a wild crusade across the universe and burn everything down in his name. At the end of the novel, he realizes that the jihad is inevitable, that there was no way at all to stop it - even if he had killed himself, he would have become a holy martyr. A certain Fremen character, dying out in the desert, hallucinates his father, who tells him, "No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero." This is Herbert telling us on the page, in a scene that matters very little to the overall plot, that Paul's very presence on this planet, his status as the Fremen savior, is a terrible tragedy. We are supposed to sympathize with Paul because all of his enemies are categorically worse than he is, but this is not a book about Good People Doing Good Things. Paul is an oppressor, a feudal duke, a tyrant. His story is a *warning.*

Now, where the book gets very sticky: the biological essentialism. I'll quote the OED here: "The belief that ‘human nature’, an individual's personality, or some specific quality (such as intelligence, creativity, homosexuality, masculinity, femininity, or a male propensity to aggression) is an innate and natural ‘essence’ (rather than a product of circumstances, upbringing, and culture)."

In Dune, men and women are biologically distinct on a fundamental, universal level. The aforementioned Bene Gesserit are an order of women. Using the spice (which must flow), they can look backward in their body's genetic memory along matrilineal lines, becoming essentially gestalt consciousnesses of thousands of people. One of their order's chief goals is to create the Kwisatz Haderach, a man who can look back in his body's memory in the same way, but can do so along both male and female lines. There is a scene in the book where Paul explains it - to summarize, in everyone there is a place that takes and a place that gives. Women can look into the giving place, but are terrified of the taking place. Paul, once he has reached apotheosis as the Kwisastz Haderach, can look into both places.

There's a lot of other hoo-hah about men and women having different dispositions - Duke Leto at one point asks Jessica how she can so easily set aside her concerns and distractions, and she says "It's a female thing." When Jessica becomes a Reverend Mother, looking back into her body's memory, she's pregnant with her daughter Alia. Alia also becomes a Reverend Mother in the same instant, before she's even born, and it's made explicit that if she had been a male embryo (because she is less than two months gestated at this point!) she would have died.

This is what people are talking about when they say that an author's world view shapes their work. Herbert was writing in the sixties. Biological sex and gender were not understood to be separate concepts. The Nazis had destroyed the vast majority of all scholarly research into transgender people, since most of it had been done at a university in Germany. Homosexuality was still illegal (reflected in the book's main antagonist, Baron Harkonnen, who is a homosexual pedophile, and in 'effeminacy' being a damning trait in male characters in the book). I'm not saying these things to excuse the fact that he wasn't progressive in his views. I'm saying this because his views and understanding of the world around him literally shape the laws of his universe. In Herbert's mind, men and women were fundamentally distinct, and so in the universe of Dune, they are.

I'm interested in seeing how the film addresses these issues - whether it chooses to just kind of ignore them and hope we don't notice, or if it's going to try to update these archaic notions for modern sensibilities. Dune is a seminal piece of worldbuilding - Herbert's realization of this universe, its eddies and flows of power, the way the entire society is structured around the consumption of spice, the understanding he demonstrated of the feudal system in his translation of it to a far-flung future, and indeed, I maintain, Herbert's multi-layered criticism of the white savior trope - it's all undermined by the fact that the structure of the world itself reflects unfortunate, backward, biological essentialist thinking that we as modern people can no longer engage in.

Anyway that was a very long ramble. If you actually read all this, you're a beautiful, patient soul. :v

kids grow up so fast 🤧

DUNE (2021) DIR. DENIS VILLENEUVE

Something I find interesting when viewing the two recent Dune movies as a whole is that initially, Paul is more than willing to use the prophecy and his visions for his own gain to convince Liet to help them, while Jessica whispers "careful!" at his side, and she later recommends they leave the planet entirely. But Paul decides they'll stay with the Fremen. Even at the beginning of Part 2, Paul is like "fuck yeah let's wage war on the Harkonnen" and Jessica is again counseling caution: "your father didn't believe in revenge." She goes through the Water of Life ceremony not because she wants to help Paul fulfill the prophecy but because she's forced to: do this or die. And even then, the old Reverend Mother had to use the Voice on her to get Jessica to drink.

That all changes when Jessica nearly dies during the ceremony. After that, Paul becomes more wary of embracing the prophecy, and she just throws herself into it. Paul nearly loses his mother (and his unborn sister) to a painful, agonizing poison - mere hours/days after losing his father and all their friends/allies to the Harkonnen slaughter - and decides it's not worth it. Meanwhile, Jessica gets a direct download of memories of millennia of oppression and goes "yeah let's burn everything to the ground."

It's an interesting, quick reversal at the beginning of the second movie, and it's great.

Ooh thank you for this great ask. I can always count on you for smart and thoughtful Jessica takes!

You make a really good observation about their reversal of positions--I had been struggling to figure out how Paul's line about "I must sway the non-believers" fit into his overall arc, but you are absolutely right that this feels like a continuation of how he talks to Liet. We're seeing the first stirrings of that little "maybe I am special" thought that later takes center stage.

For most of Part Two, Paul has several reliable counterweights pulling against that streak of arrogance and high-handedness that he's had from the beginning. Jessica almost dies drinking the Water of Life, which, like you point out, has got to make him think twice about encouraging people to believe in the prophecy. Then, he spends most of the movie surrounded by Chani and her friends and comrades, who seem the most skeptical of the prophecy and also aren't going to give his ego the time of day. And at the same time, he has an opportunity to pour his desire for revenge into collective political action that seems to be making a difference.

It's only when those countervailing forces start collapsing (the people who had started out as his equals are now becoming his followers; the Harkonnens attack Sietch Tabr and other civilian population centers, proving they are far from militarily defeated; Gurney shows up and immediately offers what seems like an easy solution to their problems that only Paul can access) that the little maybe I am special voice starts winning again.

As for Jessica, her journey doesn't get as much focus in the movie but it's also fascinating. She's a great character because she is so fucking smart at navigating power structures from what seems like an unenviable position. Did she have any choice about being sent to Caladan to become Leto's concubine? I am guessing she did not. But she sure figured out how to work that situation to her advantage. It happened that along the way she and Leto came to genuinely love and respect each other. But I'm sure she would still have figured out an angle even if that had not been the case.

In Part Two she starts out in a frankly quite terrifying position: she can undergo this unknown, dangerous ritual or die, and also possibly put Paul's safety at risk by raising doubt about whether he is the Lisan al-Gaib. But after she survives the Water of Life, she is launched into a powerful position in Fremen society and pretty quickly realizes she can use that to both protect Paul and get her revenge on the people who tried to kill her whole family. And unlike Paul, she is much more cognizant of the intergalactic power structures at work and aware that the Harkonnens themselves were a pawn in all this, so her target is the Bene Gesserit and the emperor.

I would have loved more time to explore Jessica's relationship to Fremen society and her POV in general. Because in some ways she becomes as Fremen as it's possible for her to be--she has access to thousands of years of memories of Fremen history and culture and politics; she becomes instantly fluent in the language and she is immersed in Fremen daily life in the sietch. (If there's one single thing I wanted more of, it was daily life in the sietch.) But she's still the same person she was, so she hasn't lost that ability to be ruthless and calculating and see people as forces to be manipulated. In Part One, her love for Paul and Leto provided an interesting counterweight to this that allowed us to see some moments of vulnerability from her (ie. she knows Paul has to undergo the Gom Jabbar test but she's terrified for him while it's happening). In Part Two she is so isolated for most of the movie (away from Paul; surrounded by followers who were never friends; I think we can all agree that talking to your unborn fetus doesn't really count) that we don't get a lot of these more unguarded moments from her. (I would have loved some Jessica/Stilgar action and it seems like the potential was very much set up for that, but I understand why they didn't have time.)

But in general I thought they did a great job of setting up this contradictory tension between Jessica and Paul, where they both want so desperately to protect each other and they both want revenge, but the way they each go about it ends up putting them in direct conflict with each other.