Does Denis Villaneuve Understand the Women of Dune?

Wives, concubines, sons, and what's missing in Dune: Part 2

Photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash

SPOILERS FOR DUNE, DUNE PART ONE, and DUNE PART TWO below

So I saw Dune: Part 2.

And I feel a little let down.

A lot of this is recency bias. Dune: Part 2 is nearly three hours long and most of the movie is absolutely great. It clips along and feels crowd-pleasing with its action, spectacle, and dynamic performances. It’s less alienating and cold than Dune: Part 1 (which I frankly missed a little bit) with its gigantic, frigid space ships and thundering, harrowing score. There’s more time for personal interplay and conversation. The performances are uniformly outstanding, with Timothée Chalamet doing his career-best work as Paul. There’s a lot to praise with striking visuals (a scene with soldiers “climbing” a rock by floating eerily up its side in the first ten minutes is sure to get you strapped in), solid performances, rich themes, and big questions.

And then there’s the last forty minutes. Which is why I left the theater feeling distinctly cranky.

It looks to me like Dune: Part 2 has been largely written in its back half to avoid the problem of filming Alia, who is the daughter of Lady Jessica and Duke Leto born with an adult’s understanding and abilities owing to a rite that Jessica underwent while pregnant with her. Instead of having the visually difficult image of a toddler who is an adult, Alia is kept off screen except for a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo with Alia as an adult. While Alia is three years old at the end of the novel Dune (and is the one who actually kills the Baron!), in Dune: Part 2 Jessica is still pregnant with her. This means that the events of the story no longer take place in three years. They take place in less than nine months – Jessica became pregnant very close to the fall of the house of Atreides, and is hugely pregnant with Alia at the end of the movie. 

But this creates issues while it solves them. On one hand we never have to see Alia as a baby, but on the other this means that Paul has been a Fremen for basically two semesters of college. This makes his rise to messiah and commander of the Fremen seem a little sillier – the Fremen come across as a little excitable, though of course the movie emphasizes that the Fremen belief in the Lisan al-Gaib is an old, old belief that came from another enslaving world just as much as Paul himself did. But much more importantly, the short timeline significantly relativizes the importance of Paul’s relationship with Chani. 

Chani and Paul in the book are functionally married, though their marriage is not recognized by the larger imperial law they live in. They also have a son, Leto II. When Leto II is two years old, he is massacred by Sardukar troops, on the same day that his father Paul takes the throne from the emperor and on the day that his mother is demoted from wife to concubine. 

That is not how the movie goes. In the movie, Chani and Paul have a romantic and sexual relationship but there is no sense that this is something other than an exclusive romantic relationship. Likewise, rather than being demoted, Chani seems as though she more or less breaks up with Paul at the end – storming out after his proposal and riding a worm into the sunset. 

This is arguably effective if the goal is to use Chani as more or less an audience proxy. Throughout the movie, Chani has been the voice of disgust for Paul’s messianic rise. She knows the prophecy isn’t real, and she resents the Fremen who believe in a religion that has been used to enslave and colonize them. Ultimately, after seeing Paul take the throne and the Atreides prepare for war using Fremen soldiers, Chani can no longer contain her disapproval and can no longer stand by Paul. Instead of standing by him and accepting her place, Chani walks away and catches a worm back home. 

But this isn’t Chani in the book. And I think it’s actually a mistake. In the book, Chani doesn’t have the option of walking away, because colonization isn’t that easy. Chani is meaningfully subject to power – she was the wife of Muad’dib and now she’s the concubine of the emperor. Her ability to just walk away is severely curtailed by the social and political forces around her. No one gets to just opt out of colonization. Secondly, Chani is subject to the emotional and spiritual burden of loving one of her colonizers. Like all the women of Dune, Chani is defined by a complicated mix of what she wants and commitments to her competing loyalties to her people and her family. Chani loves her husband. Chani loved her son. Chani loves her people. Whether she likes it or not, Chani does love the man who has completely upended her life and co-opted her people into a grand revenge scheme and power play. As in our world, women do not always just walk away from the men who hurt them – not because they are weak but because life is sad and painful and we can’t always choose who we love. Even if Chani had the power to just say no, it’s not clear that she would. 

What makes Dune, Dune is the fact that it is not just a story about a failed and tragic messiah. It’s about the even darker notes around him – the way people struggle in an unjust system to get and preserve power. It’s about colonization – the empire of Arrakis, the Bene Gesserit of native religious orders. It’s about gender and sexuality – the way in which marriages and reproduction are arranged, required, commanded, and co-opted for political ends. And it’s about how people who are marginalized or liminal in these systems try to create a path for themselves, and the ways in which systems of power ultimately cannot contain them. These themes are largely expressed through the women of Dune, and that’s why the women in this story matter. 

I want to do a quick run through of how I read the end of the book Dune, and why I think it’s ultimately more compelling than the end of Dune: Part 2. I’ll be looking at this through the perspective of the women of Dune, and how they reflect the themes of marginalization and power in the text.

Irulan, Jessica, Chani 

Irulan is the daughter of the Padasah Emperor. We don’t actually meet Irulan until the tail end of the book, but her fingers are all over the text. Irulan is a historian and writer, and her many historical works are excerpted throughout the text. Irulan introduces every chapter of the novel, setting the stage for the chapter with a few quotes from one of her writings. It is only at the end of the book that we find out why exactly Irulan has dedicated so much time to Arrakis historical scholarship – she is the wife of Paul Atreides, who becomes the emperor over her father, and Paul marries her to legitimize this claim to the throne. 

Jessica is Paul’s mother. Jessica is the mother of the heir to the house of Atreides – in Dune, sons of concubines are considered legitimate and treated as heirs. This gives Jessica, as a concubine and not a wife, some level of standing in her family. But at the same time, Jessica never attains the secure status of “wife.” Despite the deep love between her and her partner Duke Leto, Leto never marries Jessica because of the political utility of remaining single. He retains the right to marry another woman if it would be politically expedient. Jessica, who is an unacknowledged bastard of House Harkonnen, is not politically useful to marry. Jessica, throughout the book, feels envy towards Bene Gesserit women who are actually married – particularly Margot Fenring, who is the wife of Count Fenring. She resents the instability of her relationship and the possibility that the man who is functionally her husband could just marry someone else. 

Then there’s Chani. Chani is a Fremen woman who enters into a romantic relationship with Paul. Chani has status in her own community that is not acknowledged off of Arrakis – she is the daughter of Liet Kynes, who was a leader among the Fremen people. Chani and Paul’s relationship is treated as binding by most of the characters in the book – much to Jessica’s chagrin. It begins when Paul mistakenly stumbles into a courtship ritual with Chani by giving her some of his water to carry, which begins the process of the community acknowledging Chani and Paul as a couple. This is not diminished by Paul’s attachment to Harah, Jamis’s war widow. The Fremen are polygynous. Paul and Chani live together, share water, share a tent, and share a child. They are functionally married in the eyes of the Fremen.

So this brings us to the end of the book. By the time Chani, Jessica, and Paul all arrive to confront the emperor, Chani and Paul’s son has just been killed. Chani is grieving bitterly for her son. She is crying, which people on Arrakis usually try to avoid because they can’t afford to lose the water. Paul cannot attend to her given the needs of the moment, though. He promises her other sons (471) and returns to the business of securing the throne.

Which, in eight more pages, is demanding the daughter of the emperor as wife to secure his claim to the throne. While Chani, who has just come from her son’s corpse, is standing right there. Chani offers to step aside, but Paul insists that he will never leave her (479). Paul insists this multiple times at the end of the book (488), even as Jessica, now the Queen Mother, calls Chani the Royal Concubine and asks after her title. Chani asks for no royal title, even begs to not get one (499). Paul tries to reassure her that his marriage to Irulan is nothing to him – the marriage must be made for formality’s sake but swears to never have a child with her. Chani is doubtful, but Jessica, who until now has not particularly liked Chani, reassures her. 

And then Jessica gives the most important line of the book, which, was, for some honking reason, not in the movie:

See that princess standing there, so haughty and confident. They say she has pretentions of a literary nature. Let us hope she finds solace in such things; she’ll have little else… 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 concubine – history will call us wives.

These are the last lines of the book.

Now, let’s review. To this point, Irulan has been known to the audience as a historian. She writes the literary and historical interludes in every chapter. In the last paragraph, Jessica all but takes the pen out of her hand and snaps it in half. Irulan’s interludes are not the definitive historical record, they are the “pretentions” that Irulan has instead of what Jessica and Chani have – meaning, purpose, family, connection, drive. Irulan does not get to decide what history is. The people do. And the people are more like Chani and Jessica than they are like Irulan.

And yet, Chani has been grievously and profoundly injured by all that has preceded. Chani’s victory – that it is her story, and that she is the true wife – feels like a Pyrrhic victory. Chani has lost everything that matters to her – her son, and her claim on her husband. Chani is a victim of the imperial jockeying for power. This becomes even clearer in the next book when the reproductive war between Paul’s wife and concubine ultimately destroys Chani’s body. After the death of Chani’s son, Irulan surreptitiously gives Chani contraceptives to prevent her from conceiving, so that Irulan can have the heir. Chani eventually realizes this and takes steps to conceive anyway, but the drugs that the empress gave her have irreparably damaged her health. She has a traumatic pregnancy with twins and dies after giving birth to them. Chani’s planet is a site of colonial power struggles. Her family, in which her position is not secured because of the political needs of her partner, is a site of colonial power struggles. And ultimately, Chani’s body itself is a site of colonial power struggles. The imperial power system that wracked her planet finally destroys Chani physically over Irulan’s desire to control her reproduction – and this after Irulan’s father killed Chani’s son. While this will probably all be on-screen in Dune: Messiah (forthcoming), as it stands in the films so far we are left wondering how Chani will end up back in this situation. In the movie, it seems that Chani is content to walk away from Paul, and simply can if she wishes to. In the book, Chani’s desire and ability to walk away from Paul is already hamstrung. Chani can no more walk away from Paul than she can walk away from Arrakis. She is part of the tragedy.

This is part of why it’s particularly interesting that Jessica is the one who comforts Chani after Chani’s partner marries another woman. Jessica and Chani’s relationship has been largely frosty throughout the book. Jessica seems to think of Chani in the diminutive, dehumanizing ways that colonizers usually think about indigenous people – that she’s wild, almost savage, not good enough for her son. And yet Jessica is finally able to see Chani with sympathetic eyes when Chani suffers the same fate as Jessica. Chani is a victim of imperial violence against indigenous people, but Chani and Jessica are both victims of the gendered violence of the imperial system. They cannot have the relationships they want because of the power games of gender and power. 

This is why Jessica’s final lines of the book are so important. They urge the reader to reconsider what has gone before. They take the focus off of the empire and put it back on the women – this is not Irulan’s story, and Irulan does not have the right to tell it. Irulan is not the “wife,” Jessica and Chani are. History will remember them, not her. By emphasizing Jessica’s comforting of Chani, they turn the attention from Paul’s climb to power to the grief that is left in his wake – Chani and the nightmare her life has become. It tells us that this is the essential story – not who has the throne, but what is done to get it. And this breaks Jessica out of her previous inability to see Chani as a person and fully human – Jessica is like Chani in their shared tragedy and grief. 

Instead of this, in the movie we have Jessica eagerly telling Alia that the Holy War is on, and Chani riding a worm away from Paul into the sunset. 

So I have to ask. Does Denis Villaneuve remember Chani as a wife?

I don’t think he does. Chani’s tragedy and centrality has simply been replaced by Chani’s disapproval. She is here to comment on Paul, more or less like Irulan is. Her story is no longer the tragedy that deserves to be remembered as truer than Irulan’s. It is the supporting voice that tells us how to think about Paul – that we are supposed to be skeptical of him. 

But where is Chani’s story? Where are her feelings, and her wants? Where is the power that oppresses her, both internally and externally? 

And for that matter, where is Jessica’s? If Chani becomes a Paul gainsayer, Jessica becomes a Paul booster. Why, in the last minutes of the movie, does she need Reverend Mother Mohaim, of all people, to remind her this will all end in tears? Jessica’s story has already ended in tears – her grandson (who’s not in the movie) is dead, her children will die tragically, and the love of her life, who never married her, is gone. Jessica in the book proudly claims her place at the center of history, but in the movie she seems to be fine with the side. 

While the movie does a fine job establishing the core tragedy of Paul’s story and the danger of messianism, the destruction around him as told through the stories of the women in his life seems to be off to the side. There’s time to correct this in the already-announced Dune Messiah movie. But as it stands, this movie makes Chani and Jessica feel forgotten – over Herbert’s demand we remember them.