Arrakis is a Trap

"what are you reading?" my psychatrist asks. 

im in a foul mood and respond by revealing the book to him

" the fran lebowitz reader. i think i know her"

"she's a comic" I say 

this launches into a diatribe about all the male comedians he's read stephen colbert, steve martin, and i wonder if my acting like an asshole has prompted this need for polite conversation, if he is somehow trying to accommodate the awkward staccato of my words. being rude to nice people, especially when you are paying them, might have its benefits. they feel bad, so they try harder to be nice to you. i wonder if this si the secret i have been missing my whole life, the reason i was never charasmatic in the ways i wanted to be - i was nice when i should have been an asshole 

for women it is a virtue similar to honesty to own your asshole tendencies. it saves time, helps elucidate the misogynist in the room so that you don't have to suffer the betrayal of polite conversation with a person of deplorable politics. My psych is chill I was just in a foul mood.  But he does read male comedians for fun which is annoying. 

I am in the movie theater, listless. My veins turned to iron. Its the depression. I should move back to California I think. We are watching the second part of Dune.

I read Dune before it was cool, in highschool, when I didn’t have any friends and I spent my summers reading science fiction. I love science fiction. 

See, I’m so cool that I read dune so long ago I forgot most of the plot. I can’t say how accurate the second movie is, although I did notice one major difference. 

In my opinion the main plot line of the first dune book is that Paul takes Chani as his concubine. That’s most of what I remember. That’s most of what I was anticipating from the movie. It’s all the romantic tension at least. 

But the movie changed that and that’s what I find most interesting. At the end of the movie Chani deserts Paul and flees - the movie ends with a snapshot of her looking very mad indeed. I think “This is a heroine I might actually be interested in” . I should have known you don’t cast Zendeya without giving her a proper character development. I can identify with her embittered rage towards the prophecy and Paul’s power hungry complacency. It is a feeling I am acutely familiar with, love struck on the wrong chord, without political rigor. Love without political rigor is bullshit. 

Movie Chani isn’t interested in love for the sake of love. She’s not willing to parse herself out to become controlled. Her personal rebellion against the Bene Gesserit and the plot of Dune itself is remarkable. A Black heroine taking her fate into her own hands, away from a white author and a white lover. It’s fucking brilliant and I don’t know why I didn’t see it coming. 

However, I don’t think the impact of this decision really hits if you haven’t read the book. If you read the book you understand how Chani is most definitely a side character without development. She’s just part of the prophecy. 

I have a lot of criticism of Dune even as I admire Frank Herbert. I admire his ambition and how big his vision was. I admire what he says about ecosystems and anarchy.  However, I don’t think he took into account his own political awareness as a white man enough in the writing of his series. Generally I think it would have been more appropriate if the religious symbolism of Dune stemmed from Christian instead of Muslim roots. In this way the the nuanced critique of Bene Gesserit colonial powers would be more reliable, as would the colonial violence of the Harkonnen. I do like how the film reveals that Paul is a Harkonnen. This helps deal with the issue that white people are white people are white people. That a colonizer is still a colonizer. At the end of the day Paul is acting very fucking colonizer. And Chani is the only one who sees it.